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an original populationof only about 8 million.”

“And how does this have a bearing on what happened to the N’gai civilization?”

“Obviously, the individuals who left would have been comprised of the better educated portion of the population, the scientistsand technical people especially, those with an affinity for new and advanced technologies. The people who programmed the machinesthat kept civilization going. I suspect that the Refusers were—not less intelligent, perhaps, but more set in their ways,less adaptable, less flexible, and less willing to embrace new ideas and new technologies. There is always a small subset of any population that distrusts technology or modern medicine to the point of irrationality.”

“Anti-vaxers.”

“They were one example, yes. The nineteenth-century Luddites were another.”

“Or the people today denying that the Singularity is coming.” Gray sighed. “It doesn’t give me a lot of hope for our species.”

“It is inevitable that in any given population, a subset will prefer to remain as it is, where it is. Not everyone will be . . . ‘taken.’”

“And when heaven was offered to them, they refused to go.”

“When the ur-Sh’daar Transcended,” Konstantin told them, “the Sh’daar remained, perhaps justifiably distrustful of the science that had destroyed civilization.”

“But why?” Kline said. “It doesn’t make sense!”

“It is possible,” Konstantin told her, “that the Refusers saw the Draleth Ja not as heaven . . . but as hell.”

Chapter Fourteen

21 April, 2429

Quito Space Elevator

160 kilometers up

1115 hours, EST

The elevator capsule was beginning to fall.

People screamed, knowing that it was far too soon to experience weightlessness. Some began to unstrap from their seats.

“Everybody stay put!” Koenig bellowed. “Stay strapped in!” Microgravity, he knew, would not last for long.

Even at this altitude there was still atmosphere outside, and as the pod dropped, picking up speed, those traces of atmospherewould become thicker . . . and thicker. Within seconds, the passengers began feeling the jolt and increasing weight of deceleration.They would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at several thousand kilometers per hour.

“Give us some options, Konstantin,” Koenig snapped. He already felt as though a large person was seated on his lap. “Whatcan we do?”

“I can see none,” Konstantin told him. “These elevator pods have no cockpit, no controls.”

“They have parachutes, don’t they? For emergencies?”

“Generally they do. However, I have checked the emergency descent system on this capsule, and it appears that the parachute has been removed.”

Koenig felt a cold knot in his gut. “Sabotage?”

“More likely it was a matter of shoddy maintenance practices,” Konstantin replied. “There have been no emergency descentsfrom any space elevator for over a century. The parachute may have been removed some time ago to give the capsule extra cargocapacity.”

Was it as simple as that? Careless maintenance and cutting corners? Enough people, Koenig knew, wanted him dead. It was hardnot to see deliberate calculation here. “Tell whoever is in charge of safety inspections for this capsule that he’s fired.”He felt the G-forces building.

“I see one possible solution,” Konstantin told him. “I am dispatching fighters and SAR tugs from SupraQuito. They may be ableto use their grav drives to slow your descent.”

Koenig glanced out the transparent bulkhead. A faint haze of orange fire was beginning to glow around the capsule’s lowerend. The vast, round sweep of Earth was still visible, but air friction was beginning to create a plasma sheath around thefalling pod. Very soon now, communication would be cut off by the ionization, and he would lose contact with Konstantin.

And not long after that, he and every person on board the falling capsule would die.

 

USNA CVS America

CIC

N’gai Cluster

1123 hours, FST

Gray awoke in his command chair in America’s CIC, blinking away the mists of the dreamlike alien virtual world. He could still see those McKendree cylinders burning . . .

“How’d it go, sir?” Mackey asked him. “You were out for two hours.”

“Pretty well,” Gray replied. He had to focus on what he was saying, speaking the words out loud rather than simply thinking them. “The xenosoph and xenotech departments are still over there, putting together some records we can take back with us. It shouldn’t take too long.”

“We learn anything useful?”

Gray sighed. “I wish I knew. A lot of it we already knew. Some of it . . .”

What the alien had told them about the Sh’daar equivalent of the Godstream was new, and it made Gray wonder if Earth wasn’tcloser to their own Schjaa Hok than anyone had guessed.

What they had not learned was if there’d been some sort of trigger to kick the whole process off. Sometimes, when all theconditions were right, you could have a supersaturated solution simply waiting for an event, a seed that would cause the entiresolution to precipitate or crystalize. Water in a bottle might be cooled to just below freezing . . . and then the slightestbump would turn every drop of liquid to a solid mass of ice.

What had triggered the Sh’daar Schjaa Hok?

What might trigger a similar Transcendence for Humankind? That, more than anything else, was why Koenig had sent them outhere on this pursuit of wild migratory waterfowl.

“Make all preparations for getting under way, Captain,” Gray told Mackey. “Lieutenant West? Pass the word to the rest of thesquadron.” He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “We need to get home.”

He could still see those burning cities.

 

Quito Space Elevator

120 kilometers up

1129 hours, EST

The interior of the elevator pod was growing hot. The G-forces had peaked at nearly seven Gs, then gradually lessened as the falling pod approached terminal velocity. The view outside was almost completely masked by orange-hot plasma.

“Konstantin! Can you read me?”

Koenig thought he heard fragments of a reply, broken words and phrases, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. Thepod was increasingly shrouded by that layer of ionization that cut off radio communications.

Was the same true of laser communications? The pod had receivers and transmitters for laser-com telemetry, he knew, but hehad no control over them, no more than he could use his long-dormant military piloting skills to bring the capsule under control.Never in his life had Alexander Koenig felt so completely and uselessly helpless.

“—SAR—” he heard in-head. Konstantin was trying to tell him something, but