Hollis interrupted him. “Forget the ring,” she said with a weary knowledge of Wayville’s dealings with his editor. “Show her what the crab probes found in the purser’s office. Real treasure, Virginia.”

“Treasure?”

“You bet,” Jonathan said. “You won’t believe it. A bag containing almost all the mail written aboard ship on that first and only voyage. Needs computer enhancing, but it’s legible.” He flashed an excerpt on her screen:

April 13, 1912: It’s most uncomfortable here. The staterooms are too cramped, with lamp wires laid carelessly all over the place, waiting to trip the unsuspecting. The elevator boys have been smoking cigarettes in public. The stewards are rude. The food leaves much to be desired. I’ve been laid up with influenza and it’s getting extremely cold outside. So tell me, what can happen next?

“And this—the same day.” Another excerpt flashed up:

I met Mr. Ismay on deck today. He said something about ice warnings up ahead, but not to worry about it.

Virginia laughed. The last word about the Titanic would never be said. “Notes from the Purser’s Mailbag will be a wonderful new chapter for the next edition,” she said. “The night lives on,” she then added, now only slightly disappointed that her plan to follow the green flash all the way down the tower had been ruined by the call, because it still promised to be a good day. By the time she was ready for breakfast in the gardens, at least two or three more letters would be available. She could chase the green flash tomorrow or the day after. Archeological breakthroughs were much rarer.

In the forests below, lakes caught the first rays of the rising Sun and threw them back into space. Abandoning the two-dimensional sprawl of twentieth-century cities, Sri Lanka Tower, and others like it, had been erected in the world’s rain forests and farmlands, leaving the countryside virtually uninhabited. Even in Africa, where more than a hundred city arcologies had risen, nature was beginning to renew itself. It was a good day to be alive, she told herself, taking in the peace of the garden. Then, looking east, she saw it coming—at least her eyes began to register it—but her optic nerves did not last long enough to transmit what the eyes had seen.

It was quite small for what it could do—small enough to fit into an average-sized living room— but it was moving at 92 percent of light speed when it touched Earth’s atmosphere. A spear point of light appeared, so intense that the air below snapped away from it, creating a low-density tunnel through which the object descended. The walls of the tunnel were a plasma boundary layer, six and a half kilometers wide and more than 160 deep— the flaming spear that Virginia’s eyes began to register— with every square foot of its surface radiating a trillion watts, and still its destructive potential was but fractionally spent.

Thirty-three kilometers above the Indian Ocean, the point began to encounter too much air. It tunneled down only eight kilometers more, then stalled and detonated, less than two-thousandths of a second after crossing the orbits of Earth’s nearest artificial satellites.