It was a picture, blown up to about half a meter square. Any Spacer would recognize it as an iconic image from the Epic. It was the last photograph that Ivy’s fiancé, Cal Blankenship, had texted to her from the conning tower of his submarine, moments before closing the hatch and diving to escape from the opening salvo of the Hard Rain. The image was dominated by two concentric circles: in the middle distance, the aperture of the open hatch, framing a disk of sky already split in two by the fiery trace of a bolide. Surrounding that, much closer to the camera, the engagement ring that he had just removed from his finger.