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people realized the godlike power inherent in a large ship moving at very high speed, something that a handful of alarmists had pointed out early in the bubble-drive era, but not early enough to make a difference.
    Whoever they were, they’d had no regard for human life, their own or anyone else’s.
    Whoever they were, they took their ship, their Death Star as many people now called it, and boosted it away from the sun for many years, then boosted again to slow it down. Once stopped, they boosted again, and just kept on going, heading straight for the Earth.
    They were nudging the speed of light when they got here, which made them impossible to detect; any radar echo warning of their coming would arrive only fractions of a second before the ship itself. So there was no way to stop them.
    But navigation at near-light speed presented them with some difficulties of their own, and it seems there was no one aboard who was really up to the problem. Due to relativity, time had slowed to a crawl for them. They would have experienced a journey from the orbit of Pluto to Earth, for instance, in only seconds.
    It was apparently too much of a problem even for the ship’s computers. A single message was sent out, which was blue-shifted to the point that we almost missed it. It said, “Death to.”
    That was it. Death to.
    We’ll never be sure who they wished death to, though a strong case has been made that the impact point they were seeking was Washington, D.C. They came within a hair of missing the planet entirely, but close can count in things other than horseshoes. The Death Star grazed the planet, dipping into the atmosphere and then the Atlantic Ocean, before blazing off into space again in the form of superhot plasma. The collision created the largest tsunami in recorded history.
    That wave killed somewhere between three and four million people. We will never have exact figures, as many were buried in mud and many more were swept out to sea. The islands of the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States from Florida to Cape Cod were all devastated. Among the hardest hit areas was the central Florida coast, where my great-grandmother, Betty Garcia, owned and operated the Blast-Off Motel.
    She survived, and went to Mars to live with her family, and now I was going home because she was dying.
    THE BIG WAVE was the biggest catastrophe other than war ever to hit humanity. It accomplished what the American Civil War had not: It shattered the Union.
    Civil order in the Red Zone broke down quickly. Martial law was declared, and over several years, the country began to break apart. There was starvation and riots, and political chaos. Washington was a sewer, knee-deep in mud and rotting bodies. Competing governments were established in Chicago and in New York, which was north of the area of total devastation, and later in Los Angeles. A decade of civil wars, secessions, religious fanaticism, and sheer terrorism finally settled into the uneasy borders I could now see crawling below me on my visual political overlay.
    We were just passing over the boundary of Western America, which includes the former states of California and Arizona, most of Washington and Oregon, and much of Nevada and New Mexico. Up to the north was the Free State of Idaho, a continuing war zone largely taken over by Pure White Christians. The wall the Canadians had been forced to put up was too far north for me to see. We passed quickly over the Mormon State of Deseret and soon were looking down on the vast expanse of Heartland America, with parts of the Second Republic of Texas visible to the south.
    I suppressed a shudder. There were worse postings than Western America.
    There were eight splinter nations that used to form the United States of America, and three of those had an official state religion. In Heartland America it was an uncompromising form of Christianity I wouldn’t wish on a dog. I didn’t even like flying over the place, but