Impact

by Douglas Preston

  _______

  Back in the meeting, the president was standing at the end of the table, Manfred next to him, his face almost purple with rage.

  “What’s this about a message? I want to know what the hell you were talking about.”

  “It seems,” said Ford, “my assistant sent a message to the alien machine on Deimos and received a reply.”

  “How?”

  “Using the Earth Station in Muscongus Bay, the one on Crow Island.”

  A silence. “And what was the message?” the president asked.

  “I don’t know. They took away my phone. May I suggest that we call them and find out?”

  “This is preposterous—” said Manfred, but he was silenced by an irritated gesture from the president.

  The president pointed at the phone by his elbow. “Call them. We’ll put it on speaker.”

  The guards released him. An assistant handed him a paper with the Earth Station telephone number on it. Ford approached, picked up the receiver, and punched it in.

  What in hell, he thought as the phone began to ring, had Abbey done now?

  99

  The distant, tinny sound of a ringing phone sounded on the speakers in the Sit Room, one, two rings, and then a hasty answer.

  “Crow Island Earth Station.”

  “This is Wyman Ford,” he said. “In the White House Situation Room.”

  A silence. “This is Dr. Sarah Simic, technical director for the Crow Island Earth Station. I have some . . . truly astonishing news to report.” Her voice was steady, but with a slight tremble in it.

  “Let’s have it,” said Ford. “We’re listening.”

  “Let me put on Abbey Straw, who made the contact. She’ll explain. But let me just say this is legitimate. We’ve checked and double-checked it.”

  A moment and then Abbey’s voice came on, high and nervous, “Hello?”

  “Abbey?”

  “Wyman? You won’t fucking believe—”

  Ford quickly interrupted, “I’m here in the White House Situation Room, Abbey, with the president, and we’re all listening to you on speakerphone.”

  “Oh.” A silence. “Excuse my salty language.”

  “What is it?”

  “We sent a message to Deimos, using the Earth Station.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why! With those shots, the alien thing was trying to send us a message. Tell us something. It obviously wanted a response, it was trying to solicit a response. Otherwise, why not just destroy us with the first shot? No—that was a classic shot across the bow, to use naval parlance.” She paused. “I figured we better respond—or the next shot might be the end.”

  “What was the message?”

  “Let me explain first. Think about it. A shot across the bow. Why does a ship do that? To get another ship to stop, to surrender, to permit boarding. Right? So I figured that’s what the thing wanted. So I sent it the message it wanted to hear.”

  A pause.

  “Which was?” asked Ford.

  “Just what I said. What do you do with a shot across the bow? You surrender. So I sent it a message: ‘WE SURRENDER.’ ”

  A long, shocked silence. “Oh my God,” said the national security advisor. Mickelson’s face turned white.

  “And the response?”

  “I’ll read it verbatim. It was a little confused. ‘SURRENDER ACCEPT. WAIT. WE COME.’ ”

  “You surrendered?” thundered the president. “You surrendered on behalf of the United States of America?”

  “Who’s that yelling?”

  “I am the president.”

  “Oh. Sorry. No, sir. You don’t understand. No way are we surrendering! Heck, this is what ships did all the time in naval warfare in the past. They pretended to surrender and then blew the hell out of the boarding party when they least expected it. What we’re doing is buying time, that’s all. Unless God just repealed the speed of light, it’s going to take many years for that alien outpost on Deimos to communicate with its home planet. It’ll have to do that if they’re going to come. It’ll be twenty, thirty years, maybe even centuries before they come, depending on how many light-years away those scumbags are. That message just bought us time to get ready, arm ourselves, and prepare for the invasion.”

  “Did you say ‘invasion’?” Mickelson asked.

  “Yeah. Invasion.”

  A thunderous silence.

  “You didn’t think we were really going to surrender, did you?” Abbey said. “The hell with that: we’re gonna fight.”

  EPILOGUE

  The sun had set, the sea was calm, the sky airbrushed with stars. Abbey stood at the end of the pier in Round Pond, looking out over the dark harbor, the white fishing boats at anchor all swung in the same direction by the tide, as if carefully arranged by some invisible being. A faint breeze ruffled the water and was slapping the rigging of a large sailboat against the mast, a rhythmic clanking that echoed across the water, like a clock marking time.

  Wyman Ford stood at her side.

  “This is where I had set up my camera,” Abbey said, “when that thing passed overhead.”

  Ford nodded, his arms folded, staring out to sea.

  “It started as a bright light behind the church, totally silent, and then came flashing overhead with a bunch of sonic booms before disappearing behind Louds Island, there.”

  “So that’s how it began,” said Ford. “Incredible what’s happened since.” He unfolded his arms and turned. “I came up to see you because we wanted to offer you a job. We need you, your insight. Your intelligence. For what is to come.”

  Abbey felt herself flushing.

  “Thanks to you,” Ford continued, “we have time to prepare. Time for you to become more useful by getting educated. You go back and finish your degree and we’ll hire you.”

  “I was kicked out of Prince ton. Who’s going to give me a scholarship now? I’m broke.”

  Ford’s hand went into his pocket and emerged with a white envelope. “Prince ton. Full scholarship.”

  “How—?”

  “A few well-pulled strings.” He held out the envelope.

  She hesitated.

  “Take it. We need all the bright people we can get. We’ve got a big job ahead of us.”

  She took it. “Thank you.”

  He smiled and held up something else: a key on a chain. He gave it a shake.

  “What’s that?”

  “The keys to the Marea III.”

  Speechless, she took them.

  “It only seemed right,” he said, “after what happened. Compliments of the president. It’s a new one this time, a thirty-eight-foot Stanley, moored in Boothbay Harbor. You’ll have to go down there and drive it back up. Surprise your father.”

  “Thank . . . thank you.” Abbey felt her throat closing up.

  “You already sank two of your father’s boats—you think you can keep this one afloat?”

  She nodded.

  He fell silent, looking out to sea. Then he spoke again. “The world’s a changed place. Sure, we’re seeing riots, suicide bombings, crazy religious revivals. The Muslim world is on fire. But it looks like the rest of the world’s turning the corner. China and India are both on board, bringing together their best and brightest with ours, the Russians, and the Europeans. The Japanese, Israelis, and Koreans have been amazing. It looks like a period of openness and cooperation—at least in most of the world—is at hand. You could be part of it . . . you will be part of it.”

  Abbey nodded.

  “And now I’ve a little piece of classified information to give you. Extremely classified. Want to hear it?”

  Abbey glanced at Ford. He was still looking out to sea—or rather, to the stars.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is it’s hard to keep secrets and this one must be kept. You’ll understand why when you hear it.”

  “You know I can keep a secret.”

  “Last week, one of the satellites in
place around Deimos by chance intercepted a powerful burst of radio noise from the artifact. Evidently a communication of sorts.”

  “Did you decipher it?”

  “No. And we never will—it appears highly encrypted. The important thing wasn’t what was in the message, but where it was headed.”

  “Where?”

  “It was aimed at a stellar remnant in the constellation Corona Australis—the Southern Crown—known as RXJ. Astronomers have known about RXJ for decades. Very mysterious. It’s an intense gamma ray source surrounded by a vast cloud of expanding dust—all that remains of a gigantic supernova that occurred about twelve million years ago.”

  “What’s mysterious about it?”

  “RXJ has been the leading candidate of what astronomers call a ‘quark star’ or ‘strange star.’ ”

  “Strange star?”

  “That’s right. A ball of strange matter, the core remnant of the supernova. The supernova vaporized whatever solar system might have been present around the original RXJ sun. It also sterilized the entire stellar neighborhood with an intense flux of gamma rays. It could have happened naturally. But then, it might have been . . . unnatural.”

  Abbey’s mind reeled at the implications. “Are you saying that there couldn’t possibly be any life where the message was sent?”

  “Exactly. Not within ten light-years, at least. The artifact sent a message to one of the most dead and irradiated corners in the galaxy.”

  “But . . . why? What does it mean?”

  Even in the dimness, Abbey could see a gleam in Ford’s eyes as he gazed intently into her own. He said nothing and merely waited for her to understand. And suddenly, Abbey did understand—completely.

  “So the alien artifact sent a message back to its home world,” she said slowly. “But it ain’t never gonna get a reply.”

  Ford nodded. “Whoever they were, they’re long beyond replying.”