I gasped. So did Linda. Warren and Jennifer had slightly better control of their reactions. They were simply silent, taking in the planetwide devastation.
“Rapatho,” Bligh’s voice said in my head.
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said, trying somehow to mitigate the disaster before me and calm the emotional turmoil. “Maybe Perdenne passed through a dense swarm of meteors or—”
“Rapatho,” Bligh repeated with even more conviction. On the forward monitor, several screens were highlighted, showing densely compact craters overlapping one another. “Those were major cities. Meteors don’t target cities.”
I had no comeback for that.
Warren commented quietly, “This all happened a long time ago. Those are old craters. Perdenne’s not like our airless moon where things stay the same forever. There’
