There was no way out of the blast radius, but Hollis was determined to dodge the pellets. She turned Alvin sharply, pitching over twenty-two degrees. Jonathan grabbed a handhold and squinted through a viewport, but for human eyes there was only blackness outside. He snatched a pad with his free hand and called for a visual on the nearest object. The computer merged the returning sonoscans into a simulated image and threw up a scale bar and composition estimate. The object was a blob of fused ceramic, 2.13 meters on a side. It rotated and plummeted, then carved out a crater sixty-four meters away.

“What in hell was it?” Jonathan asked.

Hollis said, “I hope it’s not Calypso II, but it can’t be anything else.”

Two more blobs hit beyond the glow of the floodlamps.

“Wayville, we’re in real trouble.”

Jonathan heard a loud bang. The hull shivered. “You mean our support ship just sank?”

Hollis shook her head and nosed Alvin up. “Much worse,” she said, but her words were drowned out by the high-pitched rumbling that was rolling toward them.

Up! Up! It was the only way. Hollis knew what was coming and wanted to be at least three hundred meters above the thing when it swept by. If Alvin’s jets survived the strain! But she didn’t want to rise too high. What was happening on the bottom had to be ten times worse on the surface. Calypso II was proof of that. Let the crisis roll over and under, she decided, and use the intervening kilometers of ocean as a shield for Alvin.

As she and Wayville stared at their screens, the avalanche seemed at first glance to be the disaster of 2010 all over again; but the sonoscans showed this one to be trillions of tons more massive than the movement that had buried the Titanic. This time the liner would be hidden so deep as to be forever beyond human reach. No one would ever touch her again.

“Ballard,” she whispered, with fear constricting her throat, “you’ve finally had your way.”

6

Ceres Station

Viewed from the distance of the Voyager II spacecraft, from a height of almost six light-days, the single most breathtaking aspect of the solar system was how closely it resembled the Saturnian and Uranian ring systems. There were gaps where any student of Newton would expect to find them, marking the paths of little worlds that had swept up whole mountains of debris. But this ring plane was not a mere two or three light-seconds across; it was in fact the largest structure in this part of the cosmos, a fractal image of Saturn’s dust lanes projected on a screen more than twenty light-hours wide.

On the outer rim was the edge of the Oort Disk, where comets formed. Looking sunward, the outermost world-pair, Pluto-Charon, together with Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter, had carved out the ring system’s widest gap. If she had been equipped with more advanced sensors, Voyager II could easily have resolved the innermost ring— which began just inside the orbit of Mercury and descended almost to the Sun’s surface.