Biney's laser cut everywhere, its white beam slashing through the afternoon. The birds fell to earth whenever it touched them.
"There," said Cookie. The laser grazed Tess, scorched her hull, moved up, and sliced off the communication pod. The pod exploded in a shower of sparks.
Cookie froze the picture.
"How'd Biney die?" Nightingale asked. "She was there at the end."
"She stood outside the airlock and held them off until we got everybody else in." Cookie was shaking his head. "We'll have to go back down."
No. Nightingale did not want anything more to do with this world. Under no circumstances would they go back.
"To get the lander," said Cookie, mistaking Nightingale's silence for indecision.
"Leave it, Cookie."
"We can't do that."
"It's too dangerous. We aren't going to lose anybody else."
PART 1
BURBAGE POINT
I
November 2223
The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs. -Gregory MacAllister, Have Your Money Ready
They came back to Maleiva HI to watch the end of the world.
Researchers had been looking forward to it since its imminence was proclaimed almost twenty years earlier by Jeremy Benchwater Morgan, an ill-tempered combustible astrophysicist who, according to colleagues, had been born old. Even today Morgan is the subject of all kinds of dark rumors, that he had driven one child to tranks and another to suicide, that he'd forced his first wife into an early grave, that he'd relentlessly destroyed careers of persons less talented than he even though he gained nothing by doing so, that he'd consistently taken credit for the work of others.