His commlink vibrated against his wrist. It was Alexandra, who’d arrived two days before on the al-Jahani with a cargo of nukes, which she’d been instructed to use in an effort to blow away the cloud. Nobody believed it could be done, but no other course of action offered itself. The cloud was simply too big, thirty-four thousand kilometers in diameter. A few nukes would have no effect.

“Yes, Alex. What’ve you got?”

“It’s still slowing down, Dave. And it’s still on target.”

“Okay.”

“It’s coming in on your side of the world. Looks as if it’s homed in on your city. We’re going to set the bombs off tonight. In about six hours.”

The omega was slowing down by firing jets of dust and hydrogen forward. Riley thought it might also be twisting gravity, but there was no evidence yet to support that idea. The only thing that mattered was that, however it was managing things, the cloud was going to arrive right on top of Moonlight.

THEY WANDERED FOR hours through the underground. There was a network of smaller chambers connected to the large area. They found an endless number of chairs, bowls, radios, monitors, plumbing fixtures, conference tables. Artifacts they couldn’t identify. Much of it was in surprisingly good condition. There were boxes of plastic disks, undoubtedly memory storage units. But electronic records were fragile. Early civilizations carved their history onto clay tablets, which lasted virtually forever. More advanced groups went for paper, which had a reasonable shelf life, provided it was stored in a dry place and not mishandled. But electronic data had no staying power. They had not yet been able to recover a single electronic record.

There were some books, which had not been stored properly. Nevertheless, they gathered them into plastic containers. They’d been in the area several weeks, but there was a special urgency about this visit. The cloud was coming. Anything they did not carry off today might not survive.