With traditional authority discredited, Keene found himself suddenly elevated to being a principal governmental advisor on the situation. As conditions worsened worldwide with Athena’s approach, he was sent to California as part of a team helping to organize the nation’s crash program of emergency measures and evacuations. But the planetwide cataclysm of meteorite and climatic storms, flooding and conflagration, gravitational and electrical upheaval, were on a scale that dwarfed anything that had been imagined, overwhelming all attempts to cope. In the final days, with the world as they had known it ending around them, Keene and a small group of companions that fate had thrown together embarked on a desperate cross-continental journey to a site in Mexico, where a shuttle remained that could get them off the surface.
From orbit they watched Earth’s final destruction as it gyrated in a final close pass with Athena before Athena detached to careen onward toward the outer Solar System. For days they drifted in space, not knowing if anyone else was left alive anywhere, but were finally picked up by the vessel that had brought the Kronian delegation to Earth and which had remained in the vicinity, rescuing survivors who had managed to escape from the surface.
And so they returned with the Kronians to begin new lives in the unique culture that had come to exist among Saturn’s moons, now the sole, slender remnant of human civilization—and for all anyone knew, the last refuge of surviving humanity anywhere.
Meanwhile, Athena continued to wreak havoc and disruption among the bodies of the Solar System.
PART ONE
The Kronians
CHAPTER ONE
Delmor Caton, Surface Operations shift supervisor at the industrial constructions in progress or at Omsk, felt an empty feeling taking hold deep in his stomach. His throat tightened in an effort to coax up moisture against the sudden dryness.
It was fear.
He had thought he would grow immune to it after the things he had seen and lived through in the course of the last three years. But it was never long before something else happened to remind all of them that there would probably never be any escape from the danger for the rest of their lifetimes. Earth had been devastated before, and mankind had lived in terror for centuries afterward. . . .
Alarm signals whoop-whooped through the domes and tented excavation sites gouged into the ice on Saturn’s sixth major moon, Rhea. Simultaneously, alerts were flashed on the emergency bands to mobile units scattered across the surface and to the commander of the military-style training base that the Security Arm operated two hundred miles away. The drills had become second nature. Surface access locks and bulkhead doors throughout the site were closed; all occupants in the first ten levels down from the surface who were not already kitted up began putting on suits; vehicles caught outside sealed hatches and raced for whatever cover they could get to. Caton glanced at the others in the upper control room overlooking the workings around the main shaft, clearing desks and consoles, shutting down systems, and helping each other secure helmets before evacuating to the communications center below. He snapped a switch to kill the sirens and leaned forward in his seat toward the console microphone.
“Alert is confirmed. Multiple impact hazard zeroed on this area in fifteen minutes, twenty seconds if not neutralized. We’re getting everybody underground. Regular drill, Code Orange. Surface operations are closing down. Out.”
One of the wall screens showed a view of Athena, currently between the orbits of Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt on the far side of the Solar System—an almost-Earth-size ball of white-hot vapors and magma with plasma tails millions of miles long braided into fantastic forms by electrical forces, giving it the appearance of an animal head glowering between fiery horns. Thousands of years before, when proto-Venus was a similar rogue incarnation recently born of Jupiter, the mythologies of cultures worldwide had depicted it as fiery cow, bull, or wolf deity returning periodically to loom terrifyingly in the skies and wreak destruction across the Earth. Although Athena itself was at present far away, its rampage through the Solar System had effects that could strike anywhere.
Caton rose and turned to find Tanya, one of the operators, stopped halfway to the door, still clutching her helmet and staring back at the image. She was one of the few survivors to have made it to Saturn three years previously, rescued by the Kronians from one of the pilot Terran scientific bases left stranded on Mars. Tears of rage and frustration glistened on her face. Not Kronian-born or raised here from childhood as an immigrant, she was still struggling to adapt to the new ways of living, knowing that everything that had been familiar was gone permanently, and nothing resembling the world she had known as home could exist again until long after her lifetime. “Why? . . . Why won’t it leave us alone?” she whispered.