Just nine days short of America’s tricentennial celebrations, every inhabited planetary surface in the solar system had been wiped clean by relativistic bombs. Research centers on Mars, Europa, and Ganymede were silent; even tiny Phobos and Moo-kau were silent. Port Chaffee was silent. New York, Colombo, Wellington, the Mercury Power Project and the Asimov Array. Silent. Silent. Silent.

A Valkyrie rocket’s transmission of Mercury’s surface had revealed thousands of saucer-shaped depressions where only hours before had existed a planet-spanning carpet of solar panels. The transmission had lasted only a few seconds—just long enough for Isak to realize there would be no more of the selfreplicating robots that had built the array of panels and accelerators, just long enough for him to understand that humanity no longer possessed a fuel source for its antimatter rockets—and then the transmission had ceased abruptly as the Valkyrie disappeared in a silent white glare.

Presently, most of the station’s scopes and spectrographs were turning Earthward, and Isak found it impossible to believe what they revealed. The Moon rising over Africa from behind Earth was peppered with new fields of craters. The planet below looked like a ball of cotton stained grayish yellow. The top five meters of ocean had boiled off under the assault, and sea level air was three times denser than the day before—and twice as hot.

Sargenti, her face slick with sweat, wiped the picture of Earth and Moon from her liquid crystal pad, tossed it onto Isak’s table, and slumped back in her chair.

“We’re going to have to power down even more,” she said, smoothing back her long black hair with both hands. She had talked of doing something about her hair, and he wondered now if his silence had prevented her from cutting it short.

Isak put his own pad on top of hers, leaned against his balcony railing, and stared off into empty space, as if searching for something in the deep twilight of the amaryllis garden below. Finally, he looked beyond the garden toward the lake where a few children were playing and said, “It’s going to get awfully dark in here.”

“You have no choice but to order it,” Sargenti said. “You do understand what has happened, don’t you?”

Isak understood too well. If there had been any questions at all, the Peterson transmission had answered them. The solar system had been “bug bombed,” as if humankind had been nothing more to the Intruders than an insect infesting an apartment dwelling. And now there were ample signs that the hunt for the surviving eggs of human civilization was beginning.

It would be impossible to stop Ceres’ fusion reactors from leaking neutrinos into space, right through the many kilometers of surrounding rock. It was also clear that the R-bombs had zeroed in on the signatures of civilization everywhere, overlooking Ceres so far by some happy accident. It seemed likely that the Cerans would enjoy only a brief respite if the Intruders began stringing neutrino telescopes across Earth’s ocean basins and the asteroid’s reactors continued to outshine the galactic neutrino background.