Virginia was more than three hundred kilometers away when the light burst toward her. Every nerve ending in her body began to record a strange, prickling sensation—the sheer pressure of photons trying to push her backward. No shadows were cast anywhere in the tower, so bright was the glare. It pierced walls, ceramic beams, notepads, and people— four hundred thousand people. The maglev terminal connecting Sri Lanka Tower to London and Sydney, the waste treatment centers that sustained the lakes and farms, all the shops, theaters, and apartments liquefied instantly. The structure began to slip and crash like a giant waterfall, but gravity could not yank it down fast enough. The Tower became vapor before it could fall half a meter. At the vanished city’s feet, the trees of the forest were no longer able to cast shadows; they had themselves become long shadows of carbonized dust on the ground.

In Kandy and Columbo, where sidewalks steamed, the relativistic onslaught was unfinished. The electromagnetic pulse alone killed every living thing as far away as Bombay and the Maldives. All of India south of the Godavari River became an instant microwave oven. Nearer the epicenter, Demon Rock glowed with a fierce red heat, then fractured down its center, as if to herald the second coming of the tyrant it memorialized.

The air blast followed, surging out of the Indian Ocean—faster than sound—flattening whatever still stood. As it slashed north through Jaffna and Madurai, the wave front was met and overpowered by shocks rushing out from strikes in central and southern India.

Across the face of the planet, without warning, thousands of flaming swords pierced the sky.

5

Up!

“The night lives on,” Virginia said.

“You bet,” Jonathan answered, and got no reply.

CLANG! The ocean around Alvin seemed to . .. move, reminding Jonathan of the barely perceptible jolt that had been the only sign of Titanic’s dreadful impact with the ice 164 years ago.

“What was that?” Hollis demanded.

Jonathan raised his hands. “I don’t know. Nothing I did.” He looked out the viewport. Clouds of sediment churned a meter high as far as the floodlamps enabled him to see. “Something moved out there.”

“Calypso II,” Hollis called, “there seems to have been a quake. Felt close. Do you have an epicenter?”

The acoustic communications system answered with a clean silence.

“Calypso II, please respond.”

When she got no answer, Hollis cranked up the resolution on the sonoscans, boosted her signal output, and peered into the still-rising murk.

“Calypso II, we’ve lost downlink,” she announced.

Silence.

“Maybe we should start back up/’ Jonathan suggested.

“Not yet.” A loud ping sounded from Hollis’s notepad, then another, and the liquid crystals flashed a red warning. “Stand by, Wayville.”

Ping, ping, ping.

“I’m receiving multiple targets!” Hollis shouted. “They’re coming down fast. That’s it!” She throttled the motors and began pulling clear of the hull and siphons, driving east as fast as she could.

On his notepad, Jonathan saw a scatter field coming, at least five large objects over an area of half a klick—a duck’s-eye-view of a shotgun blast—and it would hit in less than a minute.