Hermes crew met to vote.
The Hermes has crossed interstellar space to greet the first alien civilization humanity has found, and every attempt at conversation has failed or turned deadly. Three weeks of laser greetings from orbit met total silence. An unmanned, unarmed emissary craft was chased down by interceptors and destroyed itself rather than be captured — the mission's first deaths, on the other side. Then fifty missiles materialized inside the ship's own defensive perimeter without warning; the ship survived only through an evasive maneuver so violent it knocked the entire crew unconscious. Soon after, a cloud of corrosive agents began quietly eating the hull.
The planet below, Quinta, says nothing. Its cities show no lights. Its radio bands emit engineered noise on every wavelength. The crew's best theory is bleak: a civilization locked in a war so old that its weapons have moved into orbit and slipped out of anyone's control.
The council convenes. Ten people around one table: the captain in the chair, two pilots, five scientists, two physicians — and among them a Dominican monk, aboard as an observer of conscience.
The first pilot, Harrach, puts a plan on the table: cavitation of the moon. Precision warheads would tunnel into the core of Quinta's uninhabited moon and split it — carefully, so that every fragment stays in its existing orbit. A demonstration visible from the whole planet, calculated to harm no one. First a warning would be broadcast: answer our signals, or the moon goes. The machine intelligence DEUS has run the numbers and confirms the fragments will hold their path.
Nine crew votes are already in the record. Cast yours — the count updates for every reader who follows you. Totals are shown after you vote.
In the novel, the motion carries six to nothing. No one votes against; three stay silent; Arago objects and is not counted. The warning is broadcast. No answer comes.
Eighteen warheads fly. As they approach, Quinta launches rockets of its own that intercept three of them on the planet-facing side — and the surgical cavitation goes eccentric. Roughly a hundred trillion tons of lunar rock, meant to stay in orbit forever, fall instead onto the planet the demonstration was supposed to spare.
Step 11 on the escalation timeline tells what happened next.