This Green Hell

PROLOGUE

It had travelled for a billion years.

Exploded from its cold, black world by a massive meteor strike and scattered in a spray of diamond-hard matter throughout the universe.

Different-sized fragments would arrive at different times; some many millions of years before others. Some were folded deep below the primordial earth; others perished under a toxic sunlight.

It didn’t matter. It had travelled for a billion years. It could wait a billion more.