The lifter clawed itself into the sky, lightning crackling along its length. The ocean raced after it, an enormous glowing bulge swelling towards the ventral port. Its murky light brightened as Joel watched; blue intensifying to green, to yellow.

To white.

A hole opened in the Pacific. The sun rose in its center. Joel flung his hands in front of his eyes, saw the bones there silhouetted in orange flesh. The lifter spun like a kicked toy, rammed deep into the sky on a pillar of steam. Outside, the air screamed. The lifter screamed back, skidding.

But it didn't break.

Somehow, after endless seconds, the keel steadied. The readouts were still online; atmospheric disturbance, they said, almost eight kilometers away now, bearing one-twenty. Joel looked out the starboard port. Off in the distance, the glowing ocean was ponderously collapsing upon itself. Ring-shaped waves expanded past beneath his feet, racing to the horizon.

Back where they had started, cumulus grew into the sky like a soft gray beanstalk. From here, against the darkness, it looked almost peaceful.

"Clarke," he said, "we made it."

He turned in his chair. The rifter was curled into a fetal position against the bulkhead. She didn't move.

"Clarke?"

But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.

Unregistered contact, it complained.

Bearing 125x87 V1440 6V5.8m1sec-2 range 13000m

Collision imminent 12000m

11000m

10000m

Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.

"Ah, shit," Joel said.

Jericho

One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.

Not yet. Not yet. Soon.

She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied her any refuge in darkness.

Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.

That was where it would come from.

Oh God. If only there was another way.

It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it would've taken.

Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.