It struck them in a display of sheet lightning, forked lightning, chain lightning, and fireballs. Collingdale couldn’t get away from it. He wandered through the ship, downing glasses of rum, extreme behavior for a man who seldom drank. He couldn’t stop moving, from the bridge to the mission center to the common room to his cabin to Riley’s quarters. (“Hey, Dave, look at what this damned thing is doing in the north.”) It fed his rage to watch, and for reasons he would never understand, it gave him a twisted pleasure to hate so fiercely.

When finally the cloud grew dormant, pieces of it broke off and began to drift away, as if there were no gravity near the planet to hold on to them. The skies began to clear.

The cities were charred and wrecked, wreathed in black smoke. Ava was in tears. Most of the others were in a state of shock. The devastation was more complete than anything they had imagined.

Collingdale was drinking black coffee, trying to clear his head, when a couple of the technicians created a commotion. “Look,” one of them said, pointing at a screen.

At a city. Intact.

Untouched.

Its towers still stood tall. Its hanging walkways still connected rooftops. A monument was down, and, on its southern flank, a minaret had collapsed. Otherwise, it had escaped.

It was halfway around the globe from where the intersection with the cloud had happened. The safest possible place. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough. Other cities, equally distant, had been leveled.

They went back and looked at the record.

Collingdale saw it right away: snow. The surviving city had been experiencing a blizzard when the cloud hit.

“It never saw this place,” said Ava.

FIELD REPORT: Moonlight

The only aspects of this civilization that survive are the city that suffered a timely blizzard, and the bases the inhabitants had established on the moon and on the third planet. And in the artifacts that we’ve managed to haul away.