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confidence, assuming that Cross had the same high-level security clearance as most people who visited the R&D section of NanTech. Even though NanTech was a private firm, the bulk of its Secrecy Division, as Jamison playfully called it, was funded by the military.
    The fear had been, before the aliens had come, that other countries would develop a series of nanoweapons, things that would destroy electrical systems. Yet the nanoweapons would be undetectable, and even if they were traced to the source, they would be impossible to find and remove.
    Military intelligence had shown that no other country was close to developing anything like that, so after the initial wave of research on finding nanoweapons, the research shifted to making and hiding nanoweapons. Jamison’s division was split: half the division discovered ways to hide the weapons while the other half discovered ways of finding them.
    So, after Cross got a chance to think about it, he went to NanTech for help. Finding the nanomachines—an actual nanomachine, not a fossilized one from a previous visit by these aliens—might provide a way to understand what they were fighting.
    And better yet, fight back.
    That was what Cross thought about the most. Stopping the next attack and fighting back. Humanity had to. There was no choice.
    In spite of himself, Cross shuddered.
    Cross knew that he and his team weren’t the only ones working on ways to fight the aliens. There were branches of military all over the world working on ways to stop the alien ships, but Cross and his team were focusing on stopping what the aliens dropped. The nanoharvesters.
    Nonetheless, here in the field, Cross felt out of place. He wasn’t a hands-on technology guy, and he’d only recently learned about nanomachines. He was in Monterey because he knew what the nanomachines looked like, at least in fossilized form. He had been studying them since before the alien ships arrived. People like Jamison could study them as well, but they didn’t have quite as much experience as Cross did.
    And, in fact, the one man who had more experience than Cross—his friend Edwin Bradshaw—was in Brazil with Portia Groopman, the genius of nanotechnology, using the same devices to try to find alien machines.
    He hefted the wand Jamison had given him. It was light, so light that it felt as if he were holding a toy. Only the glass base gave it any weight at all.
    When Cross had tested the device back at NanTech, Jamison had apologized for the glass. “It’s more tempered than bulletproof glass,” he had said, “but it does make the wand heavier than we want. We’ve just found that glass is the best substance for the base.”
    Heavier. The wand wasn’t heavy at all. In fact, if it were any lighter, Cross might forget that he was holding anything.
    Jamison clutched his wand as if it were a golf club and he were staring at the first tee on a complicated hole. With his other hand, he shaded his eyes.
    “This stuff goes on forever,” he said. He sounded mournful.
    Cross nodded.
    “You know the odds against finding a single nanomachine?” Jamison asked.
    In fact, Cross knew them exactly. “They’re not as slim as you might think,” he said. “Because there is a lot of ground that got covered, the aliens had to use billions and billions of those nanomachines. Even if they left one in a million behind, there should be hundreds of thousands of them scattered in this dust.”
    “Machines smaller than a speck of dust.” Jamison sighed. “Just because we think they’re here doesn’t mean these wands will find them.”
    Cross knew that. They’d had that discussion back at NanTech. “Why’re you getting pessimistic on me now, Lowry?” Jamison didn’t answer. He just stared at the blackness in front of them.
    Cross understood. Over the years, he had stood on hundreds of sites of devastation—devastation that had ruined civilizations thousands of years before. He had sifted through the archaeological