Oracle

by David Wood

  It wasn’t hard to imagine someone with Ophelia’s resources moving heaven and earth to recover it from the depths. And wasn’t it possible that there were other pockets of dark matter scattered about the planet? If they were out there, Ophelia would keep Dorion looking until they were found, and then everything Jade had seen—things that even now were too horrible to contemplate—would still come to pass.

  There was only one way to definitely ensure that none of that would happen. All I have to do is let her have her way.

  Professor stepped to Jade’s side. “Ophelia, if you stay here you will die.”

  “If I die, it will be your fault,” she retorted. “If you just take the ship to land… No, you know what? Go ahead. Leave. I’ll figure it out myself.”

  “Well, we can’t have that.” Jade clenched a fist at her hip, and then threw an uppercut that connected solidly with Ophelia’s chin. There was a click as the blonde woman’s perfect teeth knocked together and then she slumped unconscious to the deck.

  Professor sighed. “I suppose now I have to carry her.”

  “Look at it this way. You’ll get to be the hero who carried her ass off the ship. I’ll just be the bitch who slugged her.”

  He stared down at Ophelia as trying to figure out what to do next. “She might sue, you know?”

  “Can I call you as a character witness?”

  Professor grinned and then knelt down and swept Ophelia’s limp form up and threw her over his shoulder. With Jade leading the way, they exited the bridge and headed out into daylight. The sun was already overhead.

  “How long do you think we’ve got?” she asked. “Relatively speaking, that is.”

  “No friggin’ clue. But it seems only a few minutes have passed since we woke up. So figure a few minutes more. And I’m not sure how far away we’ll need to be to escape the effect. So get a move on.”

  Jade did, but in some deep recess of her mind, she found herself craving one more glimpse at that otherworld where she and Maddock were together. Now that she knew the risk, what harm could it do?

  Plenty. A more pragmatic part of her quickly supplied the answer. If the ship sank while she was off in dreamland, her exercise in self-torture would prove very costly. That wasn’t the only good reason to avoid another window shopping trip. You and Maddock are done. Get over it. Get on with your life.

  The ship was alive with the noise of its own destruction. Rivets popped free of overstressed hull plates and flew like bullets across the deck. Bulkheads and support stanchions shrieked as they bent double. The center of the ship, where the Moon stone had been deposited, was already inundated with water, the deck sloping down in either direction to disappear beneath the murky surface. The ship was being folded in half by the mass of the Moon stone.

  Jade stepped off the stairs and headed for the davit holding the ship’s one remaining launch. She found the controls that would lower the boat into the water but stopped as she realized that someone would have to stay behind to operate them. “All aboard,” she told the others. “I’ll lower you down and then jump for it.”

  Professor looked as though he was about to overrule her, but she cut him off. “Let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”

  Without further comment, he heaved Ophelia into the small boat. Dorion stared at her inert form a moment and shook his head. “You know, I didn’t get a chance to tell you that I’m very happy you both are alive.”

  “Great,” Jade said with what seemed like appropriate abruptness. “We’re happy, too. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Dorion either didn’t get the hint or felt that whatever he had to say was more important than the immediate danger. “I need to tell you something before she wakes up.”

  Jade caught herself before dismissing him again. Had Dorion glimpsed the same future as she? A world torn apart by Ophelia’s madness? Was that what he felt he needed to tell her?

  Dorion started to speak again, but before he could utter a single word, he suddenly pitched back against the side of the motor launch, his chest erupting in a spray of red. At the same instant, the harsh reports of an automatic rifle firing multiple shots assaulted Jade’s ears. She instinctively threw herself to the side, knowing only that she had to find cover, but momentarily uncertain where the attack was coming from.

  There were more reports and she saw Professor moving in the opposite direction, rounds tearing into the inflatable boat and sparking of the metal deck plates all around him. There was a crimson puff as something struck him, and he crumpled to the deck.

  “No!”

  Transfixed by the horror of the attack, Professor wounded, Dorion almost certainly dead, Jade’s rising panic held her rooted in place. From the corner of her eye, she saw a man walking purposefully toward her, a smoking rifle at the high ready.

  It was Hodges.

  Jade glanced frantically around but Hodges had every avenue of escape on the ship covered.

  On the ship….

  The urgency of the situation compelled Jade to throw caution to the wind. Before Hodges could pull the trigger, she sprang into motion, vaulted the rail and hurled herself into the ocean.

  THIRTY

  Hodges ran to the rail and stabbed the business end of the AR-15 over the side, but there was no sign of Jade.

  “Failed again, Brian?”

  He whirled, training the muzzle in the direction of the voice, the voice of his former partner. Chapman had pulled himself into a sitting position and but for the fact that his hands were pressed against the meaty part of his left thigh, trying to stanch the flow of blood from a bullet wound, he might have been merely lounging on the deck, soaking in the sun.

  “How many times is that now? Three? I think it’s probably a good thing you left the Myrmidons when you did. As inept as you are, I don’t think I’d want to go out in the field with you.”

  “It’s only a failure if you don’t fix it,” Hodge sneered. He lined up the iron sights on Chapman’s head and started to apply pressure to the trigger. “And I know exactly where to start.”

  Chapman shrugged. “So you kill me. Big deal. This ship is about to sink anyway. Meanwhile, Jade is getting away, and you just shot up your best way of going after her.”

  Without lowering the rifle, Hodge’s glanced at the RIB. A smear of blood marked the spot where Dorion had fallen but at the center of the stain was a ragged hole. The three-round burst that had felled the physicist had gone right through his body and torn up the launch as well. Although the vulcanized rubber more or less held its shape, the boat was no longer seaworthy.

  “Is she still alive?” Chapman asked.

  The question caught Hodges off-guard. The other man already knew Jade had escaped. So who was he…Ophelia? He leaned closer to the boat and saw her lying in a heap in the bilges of the inflatable launch. She had been splattered with Dorian’s blood, but his cursory glance revealed no sign of active bleeding.

  “Doesn’t matter. Like I said, we’ll all be at the bottom of the ocean pretty soon.”

  Hodges frowned. Chapman was right about the condition of the ship. The noise of its break-up was like the sound of a car wreck played back on an infinite loop. With the deck already awash, it was a wonder the ship was still afloat.

  He would have to find another way off the ship. There had to be inflatable lifeboats. He’d get Ophelia to one of those and then wait for rescue. If Jade survived the swim to the mainland, she would simply be the one remaining loose end to tie up. Despite Chapman’s taunt, he hadn’t failed at all.

  He raised the rifle again and took aim.

  Chapman spat out a laugh. “Really?”

  “I’m doing you a favor buddy. Unless you’d rather drown?”

  Hodges expected the other man to laugh or spout some defiant crap about not being afraid to die, but instead, Chapman cocked his head sideways and looked thoughtful. “Tell me one thing first. What did you see?”

  Hodges felt his mouth go dry. “What?”

  “When the moon
rose, we all blacked out. I’m guessing you did too. Just like that. Like someone came up behind you and conked you with a concrete block. Only it wasn’t exactly a blackout. More of a peek at the world as we wish it could be.”

  Hodges could hear his heart pounding in his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think I can guess,” Chapman went on. “You saw your family. Your wife. Your daughter. You saw yourself with them, the way it would have been if the attack on Norfolk had never happened. I’ll bet you couldn’t believe how much your daughter had grown.”

  “Shut up.”

  Chapman smiled and there was nothing mocking or menacing about it. It was a compassionate, avuncular smile. “What I don’t understand, Brian, is how you could have come back here after seeing that?”

  “Because it’s a lie,” Hodges hissed through clenched teeth. “They’re gone and that’s that. That other…whatever…it’s just a lie. It’s not my life. All that I have left is honoring their memory by stopping it from ever happening again.”

  Chapman nodded slowly. “You honor their memory with cold blooded murder?”

  Hodges felt raw anger surge through his extremities. How dare you? “No. This is personal.”

  He pulled the trigger.

  When she had decided to jump overboard, Jade had half-expected a long drop followed by a jolting impact with the surface. But, instead of something only slightly less brutal than her leap from the cliffs of Isla del Caño, what she got was more like a cannonball into a swimming pool. The Quest Explorer had taken on so much water that the ocean was already pouring over the deck. She barely had time to arch her body and put her hands out ahead in some semblance of a dive.

  Her first thought was to dive deep. She knew that the supersonic rounds from Hodges’ assault rifle wouldn’t be able to reach her even just a foot or so under the surface. Still, she would have to surface eventually and the only way to make sure that Hodges wasn’t waiting to pick her off again was by swimming so far under the surface that he wouldn’t see her at all.

  She swam down, kicking furiously to overcome her natural buoyancy in salt water. When the pressure in her inner ear made it feel like her head was going to burst, she leveled out and turned back toward the ship. If she could swim under it and surface on the other side, she might be able to sneak up behind Hodges and get the drop on him. Then she would be able to save the others.

  If they’re still alive.

  She knew that Dorion was dead. His wounds had probably been instantly fatal. This realization stung a bit, but only because she felt that she had failed somehow. The grief would come later.

  She wanted to believe that Professor and Ophelia were still alive. After all, she had seen a future where they were both still breathing. But, if the Moon stone disappeared into the unreachable depths of Little Abaco Canyon, then everything about that future would change.

  They’re still alive, she told herself. And I’m going to save them.

  As deep as she thought she had gone, it wasn’t enough. The mostly-submerged hull was an impenetrable yellow wall, blocking her path, reaching down further than she could see and sinking deeper before her very eyes.

  Oh, God. I’m too late.

  She abandoned the attempt to swim under and instead angled up in the direction of the bow where she and Professor had climbed up the anchor chain…yesterday? A few minutes ago? With the anchors reeled, there would be no cable to climb up now, but if the ship was as low in the water as it appeared, she wouldn’t have to climb.

  When she surfaced, she found that the bow of the ship was actually higher than it had been when they had boarded earlier, and now rose up at a thirty-degree angle from amidships where the Moon stone was pressing down with all the mass of a miniature black hole. She sidled along the sloping deck until it met the water then pulled herself aboard.

  She couldn’t believe how much the ship’s condition had deteriorated in just the minute she had spent underwater.

  A minute to her at least; maybe as she had moved further away from the Moon stone, the time dilation effects had decreased. She had too much else to worry about right now to even attempt trying to figure whether that meant the ship’s break-up was happening faster or slower, relatively speaking.

  She instinctively ducked low as soon as she was aboard. Hodges was only about a hundred feet away, close enough that she could easily make him out, and if he happened to look her way, her rescue attempt would be stillborn. The good news however was that she could also see Professor, alive and evidently conversing with his executioner.

  He’s stalling. He knows I’m alive and on my way.

  There was no way to know if that was true, but believing it gave Jade the courage to get moving again. She crept forward, ascending the sloped bow, past the submersible which, despite the fact that it was once more covered and secured with heavy straps, looked as though it might slide down the deck like a hockey puck. When she was no longer in Hodges’ line of sight, she circled to the opposite side of the ship to begin descending.

  As she got close enough to eavesdrop on the conversation, it occurred to her that she hadn’t given any thought to how she would actually save Professor.

  “…unless you’d rather drown?” Hodges was saying.

  “Tell me one thing first. What did you see?”

  “What?”

  She had her dive knife. If she could get close enough, she could either drive the five-inch long tanto-style titanium blade through Hodges’ heart, or use the razor sharp edge to slit his throat.

  If.

  Knife work was tricky business and she was not exactly a trained knife fighter. Hodges probably knew more about that kind of combat than she did; if she didn’t get it right on the first try, he would probably take the blade and use it to kill her. Or just shoot her.

  As she stared across the deck at them, contemplating her options, she realized that Professor was staring right at her.

  “When the moon rose, we all blacked out,” he was saying, “I’m guessing you did too. Just like that. Like someone came up behind you and conked you with a concrete block. Only it wasn’t exactly a blackout. More of a peek at the world as we wish it could be.”

  Jade broke into a grin. Thank you, Professor.

  She looked around. Not a single concrete block in sight, but there were plenty of other things that might work as a makeshift bludgeon. She spotted a fire extinguisher mounted to a bulkhead. That’ll do.

  Hodges answer was nervous, evasive. Professor had found the chink in his armor.

  Professor kept talking, digging at the subject like a dog gnawing at a bone. His tone was confrontational and Jade knew what he was trying to keep Hodges angry, off-balance, so that she could approach undetected. She lifted and placed her steps with exaggerated caution to avoid splashing in the water that now covered the deck in a thin layer.

  I’m a ninja, Jade told herself. I’m invisible. Just keep him occupied, Prof.

  “What I don’t understand, Brian, is how you could have come back here after seeing that?”

  Hodges was too consumed by anger to notice her approach. “Because it’s a lie. They’re gone and that’s that. That other…whatever…it’s just a lie. It’s not my life. All that I have left is honoring their memory by stopping it from ever happening again.”

  She raised the fire extinguisher, ready to hammer it into the back of his head, but Hodges still had his rifle trained on Professor, his finger on the trigger. If she hit him, he might pull the trigger with a reflex action.

  She gestured to Professor, trying to silently communicate the message: Get him to lower the gun.

  “You honor their memory with cold blooded murder?”

  Jade couldn’t believe her ears. Instead of talking Hodges down, Professor had just poked him in the eye.

  “No.” Hodges’ voice was as cold as ice. “This is personal.”

  There was not a doubt in Jade’s mind that Hodges was going to pull the trigger. She swung
the fire extinguisher with all her might, but in the instant before she made contact, she heard the strident crack of Hodges’ rifle.

  There was a loud clank as the metal container hit home and Hodges staggered forward, dropping the rifle. Jade’s attention was on Professor. She had seen him try to move at the last second, throw himself to the side, out of the line of fire, no doubt trying to time his dodge with Jade’s attack. They had both been a nanosecond too slow. Professor now lay sprawled on the deck, blood streaming from his head and flowing into the two-inch deep accumulation of water in which he lay. More blood oozed from the wound in his thigh.

  Jade let the fire extinguisher fall from her hands and rushed forward to his side, unaware of her own desperate murmured “No! No! No!” She knelt, touching his face, unsure of what she was even trying to do.

  The amount of blood was appalling, and yet when she searched for a wound, she was surprised to see that the source of the hemorrhage was a ragged gash that furrowed his left cheek and continued in a bloody groove that ran up the side of his head, just over his ear. The bullet had only grazed him.

  Professor was still alive.

  Stunned unconscious by the high-energy impact, possibly concussed, certainly in danger of bleeding out, but alive.

  A groaning sound from behind her reminded Jade that Professor was not the only person in danger. She whirled around and saw Hodges, woozy but still on his feet, reaching for the fallen rifle, which now lay in two-inches of water.

  Jade leaped for the gun in a headfirst dive. Her outstretched hand caught the still warm barrel of the weapon just as Hodges curled his fingers around the pistol grip. Jade pulled, twisting her body, so that the muzzle pointed harmlessly past her. Hodges pulled too, his finger grazing the trigger, and the gun barked.

  The rifle barrel jumped like a live wire in Jade’s grasp, searing the skin of her palm. Although the bullet sizzled harmlessly past her, a spray of hot gasses hit her in the face, surrounding her with the sulfur stink of gunpowder. She let go, a reflex action, and saw Hodges pull the weapon to his shoulder in preparation to fire again.