One of my lasting memories with my father was the two of us watching the 2016 presidential debates, the topic: How to deal with a nuclear Iran. “Listen closely, Robbie. You’re about to hear two supposedly devout Christians invoke God’s name to justify a future nuclear attack that will accelerate the end of civilization as we know it. And yet, it’s not them I blame, it’s the rest of us—the morally blind majority willing to consider the annihilation of millions of innocent people just because they happen to be Muslim, never realizing their indifference will destroy all of us.”

Indifference. It was so easy when we weren’t the ones being bombed or tortured. When it wasn’t our job lost, our home foreclosed upon, our family living in a shelter.

When had caring about others become a debatable political issue? When had peace and love been labeled a weakness?

Where had we lost our way?

*   *   *

Soaring over the redwood forest, I realized that I had fallen into the same trap as the Washington bureaucrats who had authorized the nuclear “defense protocol” during the Great Die-Off, justifying the eradication of the transhuman population as soulless creatures hell-bent on wiping out the cephaloped species.

That GOLEM had to be shut down, I harbored no doubt. But nuking the Holy City and all its inhabitants suddenly seemed wrong. Remove the dictator from the scene and an oppressed people could flourish.

Transhuman Andria and her kind deserved that opportunity.

And so I instructed the transport pilot to land in an isolated field, seeking another battle plan. We had the Alpha Colonists’ bomb, perhaps we could salvage some of its nonnuclear components?

Transhuman Andria, armed with telescopic claspers used during the cephaloped hunting expeditions, quickly dismantled the nuke. The device was a rudimentary design that used a battery to deliver a power surge to a blasting cap of C-4 explosive in order to blow one piece of plutonium through another, starting a chain reaction that would end in a nuclear explosion. Every part had been removed from Oceanus—including the plastic explosive that had been intended as a backup to destroy the ice sheet in the event the ship’s rockets had failed to ignite when it was time to resurface.

ABE guided me in reassembling the explosive using only the C-4. Once Transhuman Andria verified GOLEM was in its lab, we’d drop the bomb into the facility, directing the transport’s powerful gravitational field over the blast radius to confine the detonation and convert the fallout into a Terra-strength electromagnetic pulse.

One way or another, GOLEM would be destroyed.

*   *   *

It was 8:13 at night by the time we made our approach to the crater. The atmosphere was charged with static electricity, the elements playing havoc with the transport’s guidance system. Whatever the lunar event to come was, it would be happening soon.

Dharma gripped my arm, pointing behind us to the western horizon.