Impact

by Douglas Preston

  Abbey pried out a particularly large fragment and rolled it up to the crater’s rim, Jackie grabbing it and dragging it out.

  “There are a lot of damn rocks in here,” said Jackie. “How’re we going to know which is the meteorite?”

  “Believe me, you’ll know. It’s made of metal—nickel iron.”

  “What if it’s too heavy to lift?”

  Abbey pried another rock out of the bottom, hefted it, dumped it over the rim. “We’ll figure out something. The paper said it was a hundred pounds.”

  “The paper said that it might be as small as a hundred pounds.”

  “The bigger the better.” Abbey cleared some smaller rocks and tossed out a few shovelfuls of viscous mud. As they worked, the drizzle became a steady rain. Even with her slicker she was soon soaked. Cold mud kept slopping over the tops of her boots until her feet were slushing and sucking with every movement.

  “Get the bucket and rope out of the dinghy.”

  Jackie disappeared in the mist, returning five minutes later. Abbey tied the rope to the bucket handle and scooped up mud, which Jackie hauled out and dumped, handing it back for another load.

  Abbey grunted as she hoisted up another bucket of mud. She took the shovel and began probing down into the muck with it, the tip clinking on rock. “That’s bedrock, right there.” More probing. “The meteorite’s got to be down there, right among those busted-up rocks.”

  “So how big is it?”

  Abbey thought for a moment, did a mental calculation. What was the specific gravity of iron? Seven and change. “A hundred-pound meteorite,” she said, “would be about ten, twelve inches in diameter.”

  “That all?”

  “That’s plenty big enough.” Abbey inserted the tip of the pick between two broken rocks and pried them apart with a sucking sound of mud, and wrestled them up the slope. She was getting coated with mud and the rain was trickling down her neck, but she didn’t care. She was about to make the discovery of a lifetime.

  Randy Worth screwed the Marea’s engine panel back on and wiped off his greasy fingerprints. He shifted position and shined the light down into the engine compartment—everything looked normal, no sign of his work. He set the hatch back in place and dogged it down tight, again wiping it clean of greasy marks.

  The tools went back into the backpack, which he zipped up and slung over his shoulder. He stood up and looked around, his eye traveling over every surface, seeking any inadvertent sign of his presence. All clean. He checked the engine settings, circuit breakers, and battery dial to make sure they were all in the position he had found them.

  He ducked out of the pilothouse and listened toward the island. The rain was now drumming on the roof and pecking the surrounding ocean, but he could still hear the sounds of digging, the ring of iron against rock, the babble of excited conversation. It sounded like they’d be at it for a while yet.

  He moved to the stern, untied his dinghy, and climbed in. His skin itched, his scalp crawled, and something funny was going on behind his eyeballs. Crank was what he needed, and fast. He’d worked hard—he’d earned it. He pulled hard with the oars, so hard that one jumped out of its oarlock. With a curse, his hands trembling, he refitted it and rowed on. Soon the Marea had disappeared in the mist and a few minutes later his own scow loomed up, streaked with rust and oil.

  He climbed into his boat and retreated into the cuddy, where he fumbled around for the stash and pipe. He took out a rock with trembling fingers, tried to put it in the bowl, dropped it, swore, hunted it down, managed to get it in, and fired it up.

  Oh motherfuck, that was good. He lay back with a groan, feeling his cock go hard with the rush, his thoughts turning to what he would do to those bitches when he got them.

  Abbey continued shoveling mud into the bucket and prying out rocks, gradually clearing out the bottom of the crater where the bedrock had fractured. The rain continued, getting harder, and she could begin to hear surf on the invisible rocks below. A swell was making—they had better finish soon.

  She pried out an exceptionally big rock and Jackie climbed down to help her manhandle it out of the hole. She probed some more with the shovel, then got on her hands and knees and felt about in the chilly muck with her hands. “It really busted things up down here. But I think we’re getting close.”

  “You look a fright,” said Jackie, with a laugh.

  “You don’t look like a debutante at the cotillion either.”

  More rocks, more mud came out of the hole. She stopped to feel around the muck with her hands.

  “Abbey, we’re not finding any meteorite.”

  “It’s here. It’s got to be.”

  She got on her knees and scooped mud off the granite bedrock below. The rain began washing the bedrock clean. Abbey could see, with mounting excitement, a radiative pattern of cracks in the bedrock, but the mud kept flowing in. “It’s got to be right here,” she said loudly, as if to make it so. She scooped more mud and rocks into the bucket.

  “It wasn’t one of the rocks we tossed out, was it?” Jackie asked.

  “I told you, it’s nickel iron!”

  “Whoa, just asking.”

  Exasperated, her heart sinking, Abbey felt all over the bottom of the depression. Perhaps the meteorite was wedged so firmly it felt like part of the bedrock. She scooped as much of the mud and gravel up with her hands as she could, filling the bucket a few more times.

  “Jackie, fill that bucket with seawater and we’ll wash this clean.”

  Jackie disappeared down the hill with the bucket, and returned a few minutes later. Abbey dashed it over the muddy, broken layer of bedrock.

  There was a gurgling sound and the water ran down a hole in the bedrock, just like going down the drain of a sink.

  “What the fuck?” She stuck her fingers in the hole.

  “I’ll get some more water.”

  Jackie jogged back up the hill with the bucket slopping water over the side. Abbey snatched the bucket and poured it into the pit. Once again the water disappeared, as if down a drain, this time exposing a perfectly round hole in the bedrock, about four inches in diameter, going straight down into the Earth. A web of cracks radiated from it.

  Abbey removed her glove and stuck her hand in the hole, feeling down as far as she could. The sides were as smooth as glass, a cylindrical hole so perfect it could have been drilled.

  She seized a pebble and dropped it into the center of the hole. After a moment, she heard a faint splash from below.

  Abbey stared up at Jackie. “It’s not here. The meteorite isn’t here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It just kept going.” And, despite all her efforts to stifle it, she began to sob.

  32

  The ruined monastery was crowded with fleeing villagers, the monks laying out sick people in the bombed-out sanctuary and bringing them food and water. The sound of crying children and weeping mothers mingled with the babble of confused and terrified voices. As Ford looked around for the abbot, he was startled to see orange-robed monks carrying heavy weapons, bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders, evidently patrolling the trails coming in from the mountains. In the distance, over the hilltops, he could see a black column of smoke rotating into the hot sky.

  He finally found the abbot, kneeling over a sick boy, comforting him and giving him sips of water from an old Coke bottle. The abbot looked up at him. “How did you do it?”

  “Long story.”

  He nodded and said, simply, “Thank you.”

  “I need a private place to make a satellite call,” said Ford.

  “The cemetery.” He gestured toward a mossy trail.

  Leaving the chaotic scene at the monastery behind, Ford made his way into a thinned area of forest. Scattered among the trees were dozens of stupas, small towers, each containing the ashes of a revered monk. The stupas had once been gilded and painted but now they were faded by time, some broken and tumbling to the ground. Ford found a quiet spot amo
ng the tombs, took out his satellite phone, plugged it into a handheld computer, and dialed.

  A moment later Lockwood’s thick voice came on. It was 2 A.M. in D.C. “Wyman? Did you succeed?”

  “You’re a damned liar, Lockwood.”

  “Just hold on. What do you mean?”

  “You knew all along where the mine was. The damn thing’s huge, you couldn’t miss it from space. Why did you lie to me? What was the purpose of this charade?”

  “There are reasons for everything—excellent reasons. Now: do you have the readings I asked for?”

  Ford controlled his anger. “Yes. Everything. Photographs, radiation measurements, GPS coordinates.”

  “Excellent. Can you upload them to me?”

  “You’ll get your data when I get my explanation.”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “No games. Just an exchange of information. In your office.”

  A long silence. “It’s foolish of you to take that line with us.”

  “I’m a foolish man. You already knew that. Oh, and by the way, I blew up the mine.”

  “You what?”

  “Blown. Gone. Sayonara.”

  “Are you crazy? I told you not to touch it!”

  Ford made a huge attempt to control his boiling anger. He took a deep breath, swallowed. “They’d enslaved whole villages, women and children. Hundreds of people were dying. There were filling up a mass grave with the dead. I couldn’t let it continue.”

  There was a silence. “What’s done is done,” said Lockwood finally. “I’ll see you in my office as soon as you can get here.”

  Ford killed the call, unplugged the phone, and powered it down. He took a few deep breaths, trying to regain his equilibrium. It was quiet in the cemetery; twilight was falling and the last glimmer of light clipped the treetops, sprinkling the cemetery in flecks of green-gold light. Gradually he felt a bit of sanity returning. What he had seen would never leave him, as long as he lived.

  And then there was the problem about the mine itself—something he had not mentioned to Lockwood. It was a realization so strange, so utterly bizarre, that it defied analysis. But the implications were terrifying.

  33

  Back at the wheel of his own boat, Worth cracked a beer and watched the rain running in ever-changing curves down the windows. The girls had been on the island for two hours at least. Must be a big fucking treasure, he thought.

  He checked the RG .44 Mag again, the gun he’d used to rob Harrison’s Grocery when he was fifteen, holding it up, sighting down the barrel, balancing it in his hand. He’d recently tried to pawn it to get money for crank but no one would take it. Said it was a piece of shit. What did they know? It had worked just fine the other night, and he smiled at the thought of all the frogs he and his uncle had turned into little pink clouds with the gun.

  He sighted down the barrel, pretending to aim at a gull bobbing in the water behind the stern rail. He wished he could pot it—it would raise a nice cloud of feathers—but he couldn’t risk the noise. “Bang bang,” he said. The gull flew away.

  He placed the gun on the dashboard, next to four boxes of bullets, a fixed-blade Bowie knife, baling wire, cutters, rope, and duct tape. He didn’t think he was going to need the latter, but it was there just in case. He took another swig of beer and listened. Beyond the hiss of the rain it had become silent out there, in the fog, with only the intermittent cry of an invisible gull. He could feel the early stirrings of the crank bugs, but he ignored them. No way could he be high when it came time to pull this off.

  He felt the boat move a little, the stern swinging in the freshening breeze. In the past half hour the swells had started to come in, long and low, signaling the approach of weather. He checked his watch. Five o’clock.

  It was getting late. With the rising sea he knew they couldn’t anchor off Shark Island for the night—too exposed. They’d get the treasure on board and run for the inner islands, probably back to the cove on Otter where they had gone to ground after that business on the admiral’s island.

  He heard something and listened. Faint voices coming across the water, the rattle of oars in oarlocks. They were rowing back. He could hear them shipping the oars and unloading stuff into the boat, the thump of gear, the clanging of a shovel. Their voices were low, very low. With the coming of the rain the fog had thinned, but visibility was still less than a hundred yards.

  Worth gave everything a quick check. All was ready.

  He heard the engine on the Marea fire up. It idled for a while as they raised anchor. They were probably messing around with the VHF radio and radar, wondering why they weren’t working. If they were smart, they’d have brought a handheld radio and GPS as backup, but his search of the Marea hadn’t turned up either one.

  The Marea’s engine revved and Worth watched the green blob of the boat move on his radar. He glanced at his watch, marked the time. Five-oh-nine.

  He reset his radar’s range to two miles, turned up the gain, and watched the Marea moving westward, toward the inner islands, just as he expected. When the Marea crossed the one nautical mile line on his radar, Worth started his own engine, hauled anchor, and began following them at a distance. It was a six-mile stretch of open water to reach the shelter of the inner islands and they were cruising at six knots. The sea was getting rougher by the minute.

  After about a mile, he slowed. The Marea had stopped. He quickly shut down his own engine and drifted, listening. Nothing. The Marea’s engine had definitely quit: it was dead in the water, shrouded in fog, seven miles offshore, communications down.

  He restarted his engine and throttled up full, heading straight for the Marea. The image loomed on the radar, getting closer, half a mile, quarter mile, three hundred yards . . .

  At a hundred yards he made visual contact, the Marea materializing out of the fog. One of the girls was messing with the VHF radio, the other had the engine hatch open and was peering inside with a flashlight. They both turned and stared at him.

  Hello, bitches.

  Twenty feet from the Marea he swung his boat ninety degrees to starboard, shifted into neutral, and reversed hard, bringing the boat to a sudden halt. Then he grasped the handle of the RG with both hands, took aim at the two girls, and opened fire.

  34

  Mark Corso slammed and locked the door to his apartment, dropped the box on the kitchen table, and rummaged frantically under the sink for a screwdriver. The baby was crying again, the air-conditioner still groaned, and sirens wailed on the boulevards, but it was all background noise to Corso, who was intent on the task at hand. Shoving the screwdriver in his back pocket, he picked up a kitchen chair and moved it into the center of the living room, climbed up, and unscrewed the light fixture in the ceiling. He pulled it down and reached up into the hole, retrieving the hard drive.

  In a moment he had his desktop booted up and plugged into the drive. With a feverish intensity he typed in the password, getting it wrong three times in a row before he calmed himself. He quickly looked up Deimos’s actual orbital period—which was 30.4 hours, as compared to 24.7 hours in the Martian day. Then he called up the gamma ray data and examined the periodicity: 30.4 hours.

  He had spent hundreds of hours looking at high-res pictures of the Martian surface, looking for something different, something odd, something that might be a gamma ray source. But the orbiter had taken pictures of four hundred thousand square kilometers of the Martian surface at the highest resolution, and looking through the images was like looking for a needle in a haystack in a field of haystacks. Deimos was different. Deimos was tiny—a potato-shaped rock only fifteen by twelve kilometers. Whatever was generating gamma rays on Deimos would be easily found.

  Hardly able to breathe, he searched the folders and files on the 160-terabyte drive and located the small one labeled DEIMOS. About three or four months before, he now recalled, the MMO had made a close pass of Deimos, hitting it with ground-penetrating radar and taking extremely high-resolution pi
ctures. It was the first time Deimos had been imaged since Viking I in 1977.

  He opened the file and saw that there were only thirty visible-light images and twelve radar images of Deimos.

  Calling up the first image, he enlarged it to the highest resolution, laid a grid over it, and visually inspected each square, one at a time, for anything that looked funny. Deimos had a largely smooth, featureless surface, mostly covered with a thick gray blanket of dust, only lightly held in place by the moon’s feeble gravity. There were half a dozen craters, of which only two had been named, Swift and Voltaire.

  Trying to slow himself down, to be methodical, he eyeballed each grid in turn. The resolution was good enough to show individual boulders on the surface, some as small as three feet across.

  Finishing up with that photograph, he went on to the next, and the next. An hour passed, and then two, and finally Corso was finished. He had found nothing: just a few large, deep craters, rocks, fragments of ejecta, and endless fields and drifts of regolith.

  He rose, suddenly feeling utterly exhausted and deflated. It occurred to him he might have been pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp: perhaps all he was seeing was the cosmic-ray-induced glow from the entire moon, which was so small as to appear to be a point source in the data.

  With this discouraging thought in mind, he put on a pot of coffee. While it was percolating, he thought about his own situation. It was a disaster. He was fucked financially. He had already broken the lease on this apartment, losing his deposit and last month’s rent; he’d put down first, last, and a deposit on a more expensive apartment that he now couldn’t afford. He didn’t have enough money left to move his shit from one apartment to the next, let alone move back to Brooklyn. And yet that’s what he’d have to do. He couldn’t afford to stay here while looking for a new job, keeping up with his student loans, and paying off his maxed-out credit cards. He didn’t want to stay in Southern California anyway; he loathed everything about the place—except Marjory. Marjory. They’d given him such a bum’s rush out of NPF that he hadn’t even had time to say good-bye to her, to explain, to be cheered up by her wisecracks and off-color comments.