‘A rising bulge, spilling into the forest?’ Lilith winks at Engle.

The national security advisor ignores her. ‘When the caldera erupts again, the explosion will yield a detonation comparable with an asteroid strike. The pyroclastic blast will instantly kill tens of thousands of people living in the area. The resultant ash cloud that rises into the stratosphere will cover most of the United States, primarily affecting the Great Plains—America’s breadbasket. Harvests will be obliterated overnight. The ash plume will eventually span the entire globe, blanketing the atmosphere and blotting out the sun’s rays, condemning our planet to a hundred-thousand-year ice age.’

‘Brrrr.’

‘I’m so glad you’re amused.’

‘Donald, darling, everyone with a sixth-grade education knows about Yellowstone’s caldera. The Army Corps of Engineers have been focused on the problem for a decade. Your own administration siphoned a billion dollars from the Midwest farm subsidies program to vent the magma pocket.’

‘For some unknown reason, the vents failed. The caldera’s volcanic chambers collapsed four weeks ago, creating one massive magma pocket. Pressure within the pocket continues to rise. Our geologists now predict the caldera will erupt within the next four to six months. Maybe sooner.’

‘Of course, you already knew that,’ the president states, staring hard into Lilith’s unnerving turquoise eyes. ‘We know you’ve had contacts feeding you information directly from the US Geological Services long before you married your deceased billionaire and long after you began humping John Zwawa in the Oval Office. You must have been one helluva lay; either that, or you really put the fear of God into the former president. A hundred billion a year since 2032, secretly diverted from the bottomless money pit over at the Pentagon into H.O.P.E.’s Mars Colony project. Sweetheart leasing deals at Cape Canaveral and Houston … even access to Golden Fleece. All that support and you still fell behind.’

Mulder jumps in, as rehearsed. ‘The problem, Madam President, is that Lilith was relying on Golden Fleece to equip her shuttles with zero-point energy.’ The chief of staff shakes his head. ‘It was a risky gamble, Lilith. The geeks over at Majestic-12 have been vying for the same breakthrough for a century now; in fact, it was at their insistence that the moratorium on the Large Hadron Collider was lifted during President Stuart’s first term in office.’

Lilith remains silent, her internal thoughts whirring at light speed.

‘Face the facts,’ Mulder continues. ‘Engineering mistakes delayed the first Mars supply shuttles by three full years. Four weeks ago, only days after the caldera collapse, H.O.P.E. took on new investment partners in Moscow and Beijing. Coincidence? Maybe. More likely another cash shortage, caused by the sudden escalation in raw materials and astro-engineers. After fifteen years you’ve only managed to complete two biodorms on Mars and three agricultural pods, reducing your capacity to sustain a populace from nine thousand to just over fifteen hundred. Compounding the problem is that you only have a dozen operational shuttles, each one capped out at fifty-two passengers.’