Impact wf-3

by Douglas Preston

  He glanced away. "Everyone okay?"

  They nodded. It was a miracle they had all survived.

  "Now what?" said Jackie, wringing out her hair.

  Abbey looked around. The shingled mansion stood above the trees, upper-story windows glowing with light. Across the meadow, through a screen of trees, she could see the jetty and the island's cove, where a large white yacht was moored in a sheltered corner.

  Jackie followed her eye. "Oh, no," she said. "No way."

  "We've got to do it," said Abbey. "We've got to try. That alien machine is trying to get our attention, it wants to hear from us, and God knows what it'll do if it doesn't."

  Her father rose to his feet. "All right then. We're taking the yacht."

  Rising, they crossed the meadow to the cove. The wind was lashing the treetops and the house stood, gaunt and tall, in the gusting rain. They walked to the end of the pier. A dinghy had been pulled up on the floating dock; they pushed it back in the water and climbed in. Her father took the oars and rowed, putting all his weight into it. The dinghy ploughed across the choppy cove, and in a moment they'd drawn up to the yacht's swim platform. He jumped out and held the dinghy, hauling the others out. The pilothouse was unlocked.

  The keys were not in the ignition slots. They began searching and Jackie picked up a canvas bag and dumped it on the chart table. Money, tools, a whisky flask, and keys tumbled out.

  "Look here," said Jackie with a grin.

  Her father took the helm, ran his hand down the engine panel turning on circuit breakers; he checked the fuel and oil levels and stuck the keys into the ignition slots, firing up each engine in turn.

  The engines answered with a deep-throated rumble.

  Abbey saw the flicker of lights out on the pier. A hundred yards away, people were running down the pier, shouting and gesturing. The dock lights blazed on, turning the harbor as bright as day. A gunshot sounded.

  "Cast off!" Straw cried.

  91

  The yacht was longer and heavier than the Marea II, which made it considerably more seaworthy. The boat rounded the jetty, her father at the helm, doggedly ploughing into the heavy seas. Lightning flickered in the heavy rain and the roll of thunder mingled with the roar of the wind and rumble of the waves. The VHF radio sputtered to life and an unintelligible but clearly enraged voice crackled over it.

  Her father turned it off.

  The boat slammed through a wave, plunging down into the next trough. Abbey felt her heart up in her throat.

  "Jackie, get the electronics working," said Straw, gesturing at the wall of dark screens.

  Abbey said, "I'll search the boat for weapons."

  "Weapons?" Jackie asked.

  "We want to take over the Earth Station," said Abbey. "We're going to need a weapon."

  "Can't we just explain?"

  "I doubt it."

  Abbey tried to open the door to the cabin but it was locked. She raised her foot and gave it a kick, then another. The flimsy door popped open. She felt her way down the stairs, hanging on to the rails, and turned on the lights.

  Acres of mahogany and teak greeted her eye, a sleek galley filled with gadgets, a dining room beyond dominated by a huge flat-panel TV on the far wall, and a door into a stateroom. She went into the kitchen and began opening drawers, taking out the longest kitchen knives. Then she went into the stateroom forward. It was paneled in mahogany, with plush carpeting, recessed lighting, another big-screen television, and a mirror on the ceiling. She searched the bureau drawers, which seemed mostly stuffed with sex toys and erotic apparatus, and moved on to the bedside table.

  A revolver.

  She hesitated and took it.

  The boat shuddered, bashed by a wave, and various bric-a-brac shifted, some being flung to the floor. Another hollow boom and a light fixture was jarred loose, hanging by a wire. Abbey clung to the bedpost while the boat rose and rose, seemingly forever. It was far more terrifying being below, where you couldn't see what was coming. But as the boat continued to rise, she realized this was a big one: the biggest of all.

  She heard the muffled roar of the breaking comber and braced herself. It was as if a bomb went off; the boat was slammed sideways with a jarring crash, the sound magnified in the hollow room, glass breaking and objects flying. The room tilted more and more, heeling over, with bureau drawers opening, pictures falling from the walls, objects careening about, and for a moment Abbey felt the boat was going to roll. But the tilting finally came to a halt and with a groan of stress the boat began to right itself while dropping with a sickening plummet into the next trough. There was a terrifying moment of silence, and then it mounted again, up, up. Another muffled explosion, followed by the jarring, twisting motion. A popping sound resounded and the television screen shattered, the fragments cascading to the floor and rattling around like pebbles.

  She waited for the pause in the next trough and bolted for the stairs, making it up into the wheel house. One hand on the wheel, her father snatched the gun and popped open the cylinder. "It's loaded." He snapped it back into place, and shoved it in his belt.

  "You're . . . not going to use it, are you?" asked Jackie.

  "I hope not."

  92

  A half-hour later, with a huge relief, Abbey could begin to make out the lights of the Earth Station, winking on and off through curtains of rain. The yacht, its superstructure battered but still seaworthy, ploughed into the calmer waters of the well-protected anchorage that served Crow Island. The big white bubble itself loomed into view, illuminated by spotlights, rising from a cluster of buildings on the barren, windswept crown of the island.

  From a long-ago school trip Abbey vaguely remembered a couple of nerdy technicians lecturing them about what the Earth Station did and how they lived on the island and kept it running. Inside the huge white bubble was a huge, motorized parabolic antenna that she remembered could be rotated to point at any number of telecommunications satellites or even used for deep-space communications with spacecraft. But its primary function was to handle overseas telephone calls--or at least that was what she remembered.

  She hoped it could be moved to point at Deimos--and that Deimos, in its orbit around Mars, hadn't gone around the backside of the planet where it would be cut off from radio contact with Earth.

  The yacht slowed as it came into the harbor. It was well sheltered by two high, rocky arms of land that encircled the harbor like an embrace. A pair of concrete piers, old and cracking, jutted into the water below the Earth Station. A few boats were moored in the harbor but the ferry slip was empty.

  Her father throttled down and brought the yacht into the ferry berth, easing it toward the landing.

  Abbey checked her watch: four o'clock. She gazed up at the huge dome.

  "So what's the message?" Jackie asked.

  "I'm working on it." How could she even begin to understand the purpose of the alien weapon--if it even was a weapon--and what it wanted?

  "If it's a weapon," Jackie said, "why didn't it destroy the Earth already?"

  "Perhaps habitable planets like Earth are hard to find. Or maybe it didn't want to destroy the human race but instead do something else with us. Warn us, kick a little ass, intimidate with its power, enslave us."

  "Enslave?"

  "Who knows? Perhaps their psychology is so unreachable that we'll never hope to understand it."

  The engines backed as the yacht shuddered to a halt against the platform.

  "Tie up," her father ordered tersely.

  Abbey and Jackie hopped out and secured the boat. They stood on the dock in the howling storm, the rain lashing down. Abbey was so wet and cold that she hardly felt it. Looking at her father and Jackie, she realized they looked a fright, faces smeared with engine oil, clothes smelling of diesel.

  Abbey glanced up at the dome and felt incipient panic; what should she say? What could she say that would save the Earth? Suddenly her plan seemed half-baked, even idiotic. What was she thinking--that she could talk
this alien machine out of destroying the Earth? On top of that the machine might not even be able to interpret English--although she felt certain an artifact that advanced would surely be capable of listening in on communications, translating and interpreting what it picked up.

  Whatever. It was worth a try--if she could only think what to say.

  Her father tucked the gun into his belt. "Follow my lead, stay cool--and be nice."

  93

  Hunched against the storm, they made their way to the end of the pier and up the asphalt road leading to the complex of buildings on the crown of the island. The wind howled, lightning flashed, and the thunder mingled with the crashing of surf on the shore to create an continuous roar of sound.

  As the road ascended the island, the Earth Station came into full view, occupying the highest ground, a big white geodesic dome rising over a cluster of drab cinder block buildings, with a radio tower and cluster of microwave antennas. Far from being a high-tech wonder, the Earth Station had a sad, neglected air about it, a feeling of desuetude and abandonment. The dome was streaked with damp, the houses shabby, the road potholed and weedy. Once whitewashed, the buildings had been so scoured and battered by storms that they had been partly stripped back to raw concrete. A large Quonset hut, open on one end, was filled with rusting equipment, stacks of I-beams, sand piles, and graying lumber. Below the station, in a protected hollow, stood several houses and what appeared to be a recreation hall. A scattering of gaunt, gnarled spruces--the only trees on the island--surrounded the houses, providing little shelter and less cheer. The rest of the island was barren, covered with grass, scrub, and knobs of glacially polished granite.

  The road split and they took the fork leading to the Earth Station. A rusty metal door stood in a concrete entryway, the word trance on it, the first part effaced by weather, and was illuminated by a harsh fluorescent light that cast a pall over the dismal islandscape. Abbey reached out and tried the handle. Locked. She rang a doorbell set into a rusted plate.

  Nothing.

  She pushed the button harder but heard no ring inside, and finally resorted to knocking. A crackle of static sounded from a rusted grate next to the door, and a tinny voice came out. "What's the matter, Mike, forget your key again?"

  Abbey spoke into the grate. "This isn't Mike. We made an emergency landing in your harbor. We need help."

  "What? Who's that?"

  "WE'VE BEEN SHIPWRECKED," Jackie yelled into the grate, enunciating each word.

  "Holy crap." The door opened immediately. A balding, cadaverous man of about fifty stood in the doorway, the sad fringe of hair around his pate tied back in a long, thin ponytail. "Good God! Shipwrecked? Come in, come in!"

  They filed into a stuffy annex, grateful for the warmth. An old bulbous television stood in the corner, screen filled with silent snow. On the table were scattered the remains of a midnight snack, candy bar wrappers, several Coke cans, and a coffee mug, along with several well-worn books--Eliot's The Waste Land, Kerouac's On the Road, Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

  "Are you all right?" the guard said, staring at them and almost babbling. "Did your boat sink? Sit down, sit down! Can I get you some coffee?"

  "We're fine now," said her father, extending his hand. "My name's Straw. Our boat's in the harbor."

  "Coffee would be great," said Jackie loudly.

  "Right, hey, coming up."

  They sat down at the metal table and the man bustled over to a coffeepot warming on a hot plate and poured out coffee, bringing the steaming mugs to the table with jars of cream and sugar. Gratefully, Abbey dumped in huge amounts of cream and sugar, stirred, and drank.

  "What the heck were you doing out there in that storm?" asked the man.

  "It's a long story," said Abbey's father, stirring his coffee.

  "Do you want me to call the Coast Guard?"

  "No, we're safe now. Please don't. They wouldn't come out here anyway, until the storm's blown over."

  "Of the northeasters I've seen out here," said the fellow, "this is one of the bigger ones--especially for summer. You're damn lucky to be alive."

  "Who else is on the island?" her father asked casually.

  "There's me and three others--two technicians and a communications specialist. We live in the houses down below."

  "With your families?"

  "No families out here. We come for a three-month rotation, three on, three off. This is my fourth year. The pay's great and you get a chance to unwind from the world. Read. Think. By the way, name's Fuller. Jordan Fuller." He stuck out a lanky hand and they introduced themselves all around.

  Her father nursed his coffee. Rain battered the windows. Even at the top of the island, Abbey could hear the muffled thunder of surf on the rocks below.

  "So you're up here in this station all by yourself tonight?" her father asked, stirring.

  "No, there's a technician in the station. I'm sort of just security. Dr. Simic's in the station now."

  "And when does he get relieved?"

  "She. Not til seven."

  "We'd like to meet Dr. Simic," Abbey said.

  Fuller shook his head. "Sorry. Can't go in there. Off limits."

  "Come on," Abbey said, with a laugh. "I've been in there twice before. On school field trips."

  "Well, that's different. We get a lot of school groups. But normally no one's allowed in. Door's kept locked at all times."

  "But you can open it, right?" her father asked, rising.

  "Sure I can. Why do you ask?"

  Her father removed the revolver from his pocket and laid it carefully on the table, keeping his hand on it. "Then please do it."

  94

  The president was already standing impatiently at the far end of the Sit Room. The wall monitors were ablaze with CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and Bloomberg.com, the sound turned off, flashing images of the Moon, various talking-head astronomers, and the growing chaos caused by widespread power outages and computer failures.

  Ford filed in with the rest and they all remained standing, waiting for the president to sit. But he did not sit down. The flat-panels switched over to videoconferencing mode, the images of generals, cabinet officers, and others popping up.

  "All right," said the president, "let's have it."

  Lockwood nodded to an assistant and an image of the Deimos Machine flashed on the biggest screen at the end of the room.

  "What you're looking at, Mr. President, is a photograph taken by the Mars Mapping Orbiter on March twenty-third of this year of an object hidden in a deep crater on Mars's moon, Deimos. Voltaire crater. Some background first: Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, named after the Greek gods of Dread and Terror. Both appear to be recently captured asteroids--recent as in half a billion years. Their almost perfectly circular orbits in the ecliptic have long puzzled astronomers, who've never been able to figure out how Mars could have captured these two asteroids into coincidentally perfect orbits unless a third body were involved, which removed some of the angular momentum from the other two and was flung away, never to be seen again. This has always seemed to astronomers to be a highly unlikely event."

  "What does this have to do with anything?"

  "Mr. President, the idea has been raised that both Phobos and Deimos may have been placed in orbit artificially."

  "All right. Go on."

  Lockwood cleared his throat. "The object you see in this picture--which we're calling the Deimos Machine--is clearly not natural. We believe it was built by an unknown, extraterrestrial intelligence. We believe it is the source of the gamma rays which the MMO has picked up. And we also believe it lobbed a lump of strange matter at the Earth on April fourteenth, and a larger piece at the Moon tonight, which as you know destroyed Tranquility Base. In this sense, it appears to be a weapon.

  "A rough analysis of surface erosion from micrometeoroids and the accumulation of regolith around it indicates an age of between one hundred and two hundred million years old. All the satellites we have in orbit around Mars which can b
e redirected to Deimos are being redirected.

  "Deimos is like a misshapen potato--it doesn't rotate like a normal planet. It sort of tumbles. Obviously the Deimos Machine can't fire unless Voltaire crater is oriented toward the Earth. And since it's a deep crater, the orientation has to be fairly close. That doesn't happen very often and not on a regular schedule."

  "And?"

  "It was aligned in April, the night the strange particle struck. The next alignment was tonight. You saw what happened to the Moon."

  "When's the next alignment?"

  "Three days from now."

  "When will the satellites be in position around Deimos?" asked the president.

  "Over the next few weeks," said Lockwood.

  "Why so long?"

  "Most require gravitational and orbital assists. They don't have the fuel to go jetting anywhere at a moment's notice."

  "Isn't it possible," asked the president, "that repositioning our satellites around Deimos might be seen as an aggressive maneuver?"

  "The satellites are small, fragile, and clearly unarmed," said Lockwood. "But, yes, there's a danger that anything we do--anything--might be misinterpreted. We're dealing with alien thinking, even if it is alien A.I. It also might be defective. Malfunctioning."

  The DIA asked, "This 'strange matter' that you say was fired at the Earth--I don't understand why it's so dangerous. Just what does it do?"

  Lockwood spoke. "It's a form of matter that converts regular matter into strange matter on contact, like Midas turning everything he touched to gold."

  "How would that be dangerous?"

  "For one thing, the Earth would shrink to the size of a baseball. And then, because strange matter is unstable, it would explode with force so great it would blow apart the solar system, driving strange matter into the sun, which would then explode, affecting our corner of the galaxy." His deep, pebbly voice seemed to echo ominously in the room.

  "So why did the last one go through the Earth without destroying it?"