VOR 03 Island of Power

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  The log where Hank had sat down to empty the sand from his boots was a smoking hunk of splintered wood. He didn’t want to think about what he’d look like if he’d still been sitting there.

  “Amazing,” was all he could think to say as they stood up. He brushed the sand out of his hair and off his pants.

  Stephanie just kept staring out over the ocean.

  Quickly he bent and tied his boots, then said, “Quite a light show, wasn’t it?”

  “We’ve got to get off this beach,” she said suddenly, her face still turned toward the ocean. “If that black thing we saw was something hitting the ocean out there, we’ve got a tsunami coming.”

  He knew instantly that she was right. Even before the Earth had been sucked into the Maelstrom, tsunamis regularly struck the West Coast of North America. Most were small, generated by earthquakes in Japan or Alaska. But some had been large, killing dozens of people. This beach was the last place anyone wanted to be when even a small tsunami arrived.

  They’d been briefed on earthquakes and tsunamis shortly after arriving at the facility because a major fault line ran just a few kilometers off the coast. The memory of the hour-long session on tsunami survival came rushing back to him. At the time he thought it almost a waste of time. The subject had been laughably simple. “If you think a tsunami is coming, get to high ground.”

  Then the rest of the hour had been filled with the speed of waves and destructive power of the waves. The only actual new fact he’d learned was that a tsunami wasn’t just one big wave, but a series of them. How fast the first wave would reach the shore would completely depend on how far out the earthquake was. Or how far out something hit the ocean. Tonight it looked as if something just might have done just that.

  If it was only two kilometers out, they had five minutes to get to high ground. If the black shape hit ten kilometers out, they had a little longer. He figured thirty seconds to a minute had already gone by since they’d seen the shadow come down.

  “Run for it,” he said. “Trade flashlights. I’ll be right behind you.”

  He handed her his larger flashlight and took her smaller one, then glanced at his watch before taking off along the beach in front of the dunes.

  Running the hundred meters back up the beach in soft sand seemed to take forever. Hank kept glancing out over the ocean, his eyes watering in the wind, looking to see if the waves were being sucked back, the first indicator of a large tsunami wave coming in. But the moonless night was too dark to see anything.

  They reached the path up the sandbank, and Stephanie scrambled upward without stopping. She was almost ten years younger and in much better shape than he was. He forced himself to stop, take two deep breaths, then start up behind her.

  The research facility was buried underground in the side of the mountain inland from the beach. The huge blast doors there would protect them from any large waves if they could make it there in time.

  At the top of the dune she waited for him, working to catch her breath.

  “You all right?” she asked, panting as he scrambled up beside her.

  He could only nod because he didn’t have enough wind to even think about talking. The sand again filled his boots and socks, but at the moment there wasn’t time to empty them.

  Stephanie shined the light on her watch. “It’s been almost two and a half minutes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Right behind you,” he managed to say between choking breaths of cold air.

  The ground became harder, packed down and much easier to run on. Stephanie set a solid pace, one that allowed her to keep her flashlight on the path ahead. He stayed right behind her, even with his sand-filled boots. Hank was breathing harder than at any time he could remember in his life. Apparently he wasn’t in as good a shape as he had thought he was. Obviously he’d spent too many hours in the lab and not enough outside over the last few years.

  They crested a slight rise and entered a stand of pine trees. Ahead he could see the lights of the security perimeter of the base. There seemed to be a lot more activity going on than when they’d left, which made sense after that wild lightning storm.

  Stephanie glanced at her watch. “We’re at five minutes.”

  She knew the tsunami possibilities, probably remembered the training and time line as well as he did. He wanted to stop and listen for the waves, but he was panting too hard to be able to hear the pounding surf behind them. He just hoped the surf was still pounding. As long as it was, they were fine. It was when the surf went silent that they were in trouble, especially since at the moment they weren’t much more than twenty meters above ocean level. Not nearly enough to be safe from even a moderate-sized wave.

  Forty-five more seconds of running and they were at the guardhouse and the gate in the high chain-link fence surrounding the facility.

  “Wild storm, huh, Dr. Downer!” Craig shouted as they ran up. “You two caught in it?”

  Sergeant Craig was one of the two guards stationed on the gate. He wore the standard Union uniform and carried only a pistol sidearm. But Hank knew that two steps away inside the guardhouse was a Bulldog support rifle and other weapons. These days, Union soldiers didn’t go far without full equipment, even on a duty like this one, guarding a bunch of civilian scientists.

  Hank liked Craig. Actually, Hank liked most of the Union troops stationed at the facility. A good bunch of soldiers. He was glad they were there, even though some of the scientists complained of too much military.

  “We were,” Stephanie said.

  “Better button everything up,” Hank said after taking a deep breath. “We thought we saw something damn big come down out there in the ocean.”

  “Shit,” Craig said. “You think it might be a tidal wave?”

  “Good chance of one,” Stephanie said. “And it might be a big one. On the other hand, might not be one at all.”

  “Let’s not take any chances,” Craig said. He took two steps and punched an alarm button on the side of the guardhouse, then quickly keyed in a code on an electronics pad.

  Instantly the lights around the forest came up to bright intensity, pushing away any shadows. A siren sounded, three quick blasts, then pause, then three quick blasts, then pause again.

  Then it repeated.

  That pattern meant take cover inside, the facility was about to lock down.

  “Get inside, you two!” Craig shouted.

  Stephanie took Hank’s hand and pulled him at a run down the paved driveway toward the underground complex. The complex only had one entrance, a ten-meter-high set of heavy, vaultlike blast doors on the outside and another set thirty paces inside the tunnel. Hank knew that the thirty paces between the doors were solid concrete all the way over and under the entire facility. It had been made earthquake-and nuclear-attack proof, and if a big wave was coming they were going to need the protection.

  Hank actually managed to keep up with Stephanie, sand in his boots and all. A few dozen other civilians and guards were running ahead of them.

  It wasn’t until they were almost to the first door that Hank heard what he’d been very afraid they were going to hear.

  Silence.

  The continuous background sound of the ocean surf had completely stopped, and a calm had settled over everything. Even the wind seemed to have suddenly stopped.

  He looked back as he ran. Craig and the other guard were a good fifty steps behind them, coming at full speed toward them, their rifles held in front of them.

  “It’s coming!” Stephanie shouted.

  Ahead of them the rest cleared the first door and kept running.

  Hank and Stephanie ran side by side, making the last twenty steps through the huge metal outer doors of the facility in what seemed like a silent eternity. Then they went past the equally heavy inner doors.

  In front of them stretched another twenty meters of well-lit tunnel, with a guard post on the wall to the right. Beyond all that was the facility, one of the Union’s top research and devel
opment establishments, staffed with hundreds of its elite.

  “Get those doors shut!” Craig yelled behind them as he reached the outer door.

  “Be ready to close the inner ones, too!” Hank called to the guards inside the tunnel guardhouse.

  Slowly, almost too slowly it seemed, the giant doors swung shut as outside a roar seemed to be building. It sounded as if the entire planet was suddenly becoming angry and growling low and deep at them.

  Craig and the other guard cleared the inner door just as it started to close.

  But Hank wasn’t so sure the outer door was going to get shut in time.

  Seconds seemed to tick by as the rumbling, crashing sounds outside grew and grew.

  The huge doors got closer and closer together, then finally banged shut with a finality that sent a wave of relief through him.

  A few seconds later the inner doors did the same.

  Safe.

  He let out a deep breath. Stephanie did the same.

  “Lock everything down!” Sergeant Craig ordered.

  “Locked down,” the guard replied.

  Then, as if the ground around them was angry that the first huge wave couldn’t get to them, everything shook.

  Dust sifted down from the concrete above them, but nothing broke loose.

  Not even the lights flickered.

  And then it was over. The first wave had passed. If it were a normal tsunami, there would be others following.

  Silence filled the tunnel.

  Finally Craig turned to Hank and Stephanie. “ Thanks, Docs,” he said. “I have a sneaking hunch you two just saved our lives. I owe you.”

  Hank looked at the huge metal doors filling the end of the tunnel and laughed. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I’m just glad to be standing right here.”

  Again the ground shook around them as a second wave pounded the outside entrance.

  2

  Time: 6:05 A . M . Pacific Time

  4 hours, 34 minutes after Arrival

  Dr. Stephanie Peters stood next to Sergeant Phoebe Malone in the entrance tunnel as the huge metal inner doors to the facility opened. The antiseptic smell of the facility’s processed air was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of the sea—a thick, almost fishlike odor that Stephanie knew at once didn’t bode well for what they would find outside. Normally, the grounds smelled of pine trees from the surrounding forests. The ocean scent was usually a distant, background presence, never this strong.

  The exterior security cameras had all been knocked out last night, so they had no idea what they would find this morning. Considering the strength and number of those monitors, it wasn’t likely to be anything good.

  The wide concrete tunnel between the two blast doors looked undamaged, so Malone turned and shouted, “Open up the outer doors!” Her deep voice echoed down the tunnel.

  Phoebe Malone was one of the toughest, take-no-prisoners members of the Union guard assigned to the facility. She had chopped short black hair, a strong body, and a deep voice that Stephanie thought could take down an enemy soldier with a yell. She had never seen Malone in anything but standard-issue uniform and doubted the woman even had any other clothing.

  Stephanie had at times made various friendly overtures toward Malone, but the sergeant had always brushed her off. Phoebe Malone was obviously one of those military types who would rather be on the front lines than wet-nursing a group of scientists.

  Slowly the outer doors opened with a grinding and snapping sound. Usually they made no sound at all. Another bad sign.

  Finally, the two massive steel doors were open wide enough to let one of the facility’s vehicles out, and Sergeant Malone shouted for them to halt.

  The early-morning light wasn’t bright coming through the opening, but then the Maw’s light never seemed that bright to Stephanie, even on a clear day when it was directly overhead. This early in the morning it seemed more like an artificial light was on outside the doors.

  “Stopped, Sergeant,” the guard in charge of the door shouted.

  “Stand by,” Malone shouted back, then she and two of her men went through, picking their way in the debris that the doors had pushed back.

  Stephanie and three of the other medical staff followed, growing more and more shocked at what she saw. Logs, sand, and brush filled the area in front of the big doors. And everything was wet.

  The ocean was now visible down the hill, the gentle blue waves gleaming in the morning light. But before last night it had been impossible to see the water from the door of the facility. There had been a thick forest and a fairly large sand dune between the entrance and the beach. The same dune she and Hank had scrambled up in trying to outrun the storm.

  Now every tree lay smashed flat, many sticking half out of the sand. And the top of the dune was completely gone, with massive streambeds cut through it from the water flowing back to the sea.

  The path she and Hank had used to run back from the beach was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the more she looked, the more she realized that the beach was farther inland by a good distance.

  The five-meter-tall chain-link fence that had surrounded the facility entrance was smashed in places and gone in others. The main guardhouse where Craig and the other guard had been stationed last night was nowhere in sight. She and Hank really had saved their lives.

  Sergeant Malone stood to one side and surveyed the damage as a couple of the other scientists joined Stephanie and the medical crew.

  She turned, hoping to see Hank among them. He wasn’t. It was Dr. Richard Lee, the Union’s foremost expert in computers, and Dr. Jeff “Chop” Edaro, its top man in molecular physics. If there was a rule of the universe he didn’t understand, no one did.

  Lee was tall, with gentle hands and a smile that could disarm a Neo-Soviet soldier. Edaro, “Chop” to his friends, was intense and just as friendly. And not once would he tell them how he got the nickname. Lee claimed he knew, but would only say it came from a trip the two had taken with a couple of other friends to Phoenix. And that the name had cost him money.

  Though the facility’s researchers were often working on diverse projects, they’d already spent months on end together underground, and so tended to get to know one another. Sort of like a high school where no one ever went home.

  Stephanie looked back down the tunnel and sighed. She and Hank had passed the last few hours since barely escaping the wave curled up together in his bed. When she tried to rouse him this morning, he said he wanted to get another hour of sleep before going to the lab. She’d thought he was kidding. Sometimes she didn’t know how he could stay so focused on his work.

  “Holy smokes,” Edaro said as he came up to her. “You two were really lucky. How many waves hit here?” Even then he was playing with a little golf ball he always seemed to be carrying, flipping it softly into the air. Stephanie had found it a little disconcerting at first, but now she was used to it.

  “Seismographs say four big ones and two smaller,” Lee said, coming out the door to look up the hill above them. “Looks like it went another twenty meters above the entrance. Too bad the exterior monitors didn’t survive. It would have been interesting to watch.”

  Stephanie turned to stare at him. “Interesting for who?”

  “What about Dustin Cove?” Edaro asked, still tossing that little ball into the air and catching it.

  “There’s been no word from the troops and civilians in Dustin Cove,” Sergeant Malone said coldly. “Rescue crews are coming over from Portland to help out there. Our orders are to stay put and get back to normal as quickly as possible.”

  Stephanie felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach. She and Hank had worried last night about their friends living in Dustin Cove, knowing all they could do was hope the tsunami wouldn’t be as bad as they feared. Now, of course, Stephanie could see the truth. The waves had been worse.

  Bigger than she had feared they would be.

  She glanced in the direction of Dustin Cove, but couldn’t see
it. From the looks of the destruction around them, they’d be lucky to find any of its inhabitants alive.

  “Any idea how far up and down the coast the destruction was?” Dr. Lee asked.

  “None,” Malone said.

  A private named Skinner came out the door, glanced around, then approached Malone. “Sergeant, we have satellite confirmation on the island.”

  “Island?” Stephanie asked.

  Malone nodded. “Seems an island about two kilometers wide and six kilometers long appeared out there about fifteen kilometers offshore. That’s what caused all this.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Lee asked. “Volcanic?”

  “I have no idea,” Malone said. “That’s up to you scientists to decide.”

  Stephanie stood there speechless as Malone set up guard stations. Then she picked her way through some fallen logs and headed back inside, Skinner close behind her.

  Stephanie glanced up at the angry blue-white eye of the Maw that lit the sky, then turned and stared out over the sea, trying to catch a glimpse of what she and Hank had seen come out of the sky last night. No rock that big could have fallen from orbit and not been a terminal event, a cataclysmic happening so large as to destroy all living things on Earth.

  Yet now they were saying something had come down out there, something big. And she and Hank had glimpsed it in the midst of the horrific lightning storm. Something big and dark, slowly lowering itself into the ocean.

  “I have a sneaking hunch,” Lee said, “that pretty soon some of us are going to find out exactly what landed out there.”

  “You mean an expedition?” Stephanie asked.

  “Count me in,” Edaro said, pocketing his golf ball and smiling. “Anything to get me out of that lab and into the air and light.”

  “Such as it is,” Lee said, motioning up at the Maw, which had replaced the vanished sun.