The shock was therefore all the greater when Susan Skurla, who had volunteered for lookout duty, sounded the alarm on his pad, waking him from a peaceful sleep with warnings of “transient phenomena.”

As he pulled on his socks, the pad showed him an unimpressive blip, slightly more than twelve thousand kilometers astern.

Astern … Anjin wondered. Judging from the tension in Susan’s voice, he had been expecting a monstrous eruption only a few seconds forward. Any trouble astern, even the flare of the century, would now be lagging behind at five hundred kilometers per second and was hardly worth worrying about. He thought about telling the Second Officer that she should be ashamed to express such concern over a transient blip falling so quickly behind her, until he watched it disappear and reappear twice over the course of five seconds, and saw that its distance was holding steady at slightly more than twelve thousand kilometers.

“What do you make of it?” he croaked.

“Something highly reflective. Solid, probably. And unnatural.”

Ten long seconds passed, and still Anjin’s pad showed a tiny blip, slightly more than twelve thousand kilometers astern. He froze, then said, “I see what you mean, Susan. Better wake Captain Tam. We’re no longer alone down here.”

15

Pentecostal Apocalypse

Of the two billion people who died during the first moments of contact with the Intruders—and the ten thousand survivors whose lives were overturned— only two ever came to see the beings who had destroyed them. They were a priest turned submarine pilot and an historian turned VR addict turned historian again, not exactly the most random sampling of humanity, but it would do, for the Intruders, until something better came along.

On the day the ship rendezvoused with Earth and decelerated into a parking orbit, Alvin lay hidden beneath a kilometer of water. The instruments left on the surface told Hollis that the latest string of hurricanes had passed and the winds were abating. Frustratingly, her camera buoys were blinded by sheets of driving yellow rain that had reduced visibility to a few meters and had only now begun to retreat.

After following the seafloor west and arriving at the place where New York City’s historic Twin Towers should have been, Jonathan and Hollis were struck first by the change in basic geography. They realized immediately that the destruction seen in Long Beach could only furnish criteria for comparison to the forces unleashed against Manhattan. Something monstrous had turned the entire island into a cauldron of white-hot gravel, then pressed it beneath the Hudson. The first tides, as they spilled into the crater through Queens and Jersey City, must have recoiled as flashing white vapor, so that for a time the ocean trembled at the crater’s rim.

Even now, the waters steamed over a rock bed that would take years to cool. Near the center of the depression, where 68th Street and Hunter College had met Lexington Avenue, Hollis found a field of undersea geysers. Water was seeping down through the gravel and returning with stolen heat and mineral brines.