“Methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years. We can knock chunks of Antarctica into the sea every few years to moderate the methane levels. And if Hail Mary finds a solution, we just have to wait ten years for the methane to go away. You can’t do that with carbon dioxide.”

Stratt approached us. “Time?”

“Sixty seconds,” he said.

She nodded.

“So this solves everything?” I asked. “Can we just keep poking Antarctica for more methane to keep Earth’s temperature right?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a stopgap at best. Dumping this crap into our atmosphere will keep the warmth in the air, but the disruption to our ecosystem will still be massive. We’ll still have horrific and unpredictable weather, crop failures, and biome annihilation. But maybe, just maybe, it won’t be quite as bad as it would have been without the methane.”

I looked at Stratt and Leclerc standing side by side. Never in human history had so much raw authority and power been invested into so few people. These two people—just these two—were going to literally change the face of the world.

“I’m curious,” I say to Stratt. “Once we launch Hail Mary. What will you do then?”

“Me?” she said. “Doesn’t matter. Once the Hail Mary launches, my authority ends. I’ll probably be put on trial by a bunch of pissed-off governments for abuse of power. Might spend the rest of my life in jail.”

“I’ll be in the cell next to you,” said Leclerc.

“Are you at all concerned about that?”

She shrugged. “We all have to make sacrifices. If I have to be the world’s whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that’s my sacrifice to make.”

“You have a strange logic to you,” I said.

“Not really. When the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy. No moral dilemmas, no weighing what’s best for whom. Just a single-minded focus on getting this project working.”

“That’s what I tell myself,” Leclerc said. “Three… two… one… detonation.”

Nothing happened. The coastline remained as it was. No explosion. No flash. Not even a pop.

He looked at his tablet. “The nukes have detonated. The shockwave should be here in ten minutes or so. It’ll just sound like distant thunder, though.”

He looked down at the carrier deck.

Stratt put her hand on his shoulder. “You did what you had to do. We’re all doing what we have to do.”

He buried his face in his hands and cried.

Rocky and I talk about biology for hours. Both of us are intensely interested in how the other’s body works. We’d be pretty lame scientists if we weren’t.

Eridian physiology is, frankly, amazing.