Impact wf-3

by Douglas Preston

  "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 among 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 pictures. 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.

  The only thing that would save him at all was the eight thousand dollars he had coming in severance and vacation pay.

  He poured a cup of coffee, dumped in an excess of cream and sugar, and sipped it. He still had the radar images of Deimos to look at but he doubted they would reveal anything, since the radar resolution was thirty meters, as opposed to one meter for the photographs. At least there were fewer images to look through.

  Reluctantly, he went back to the hard drive and called up the radar images. They had been computer processed into long vertical slices through Deimos's surface, the radar penetrating as much as a hundred meters deep. The images came up as long, black strips, like ribbons, with the surface and subsurface features outlined in red and orange.

  Almost immediately, he saw something odd. Under Voltaire crater, a dense, symmetrical knot of material reflected back a bright orange. He squinted, trying to make it out. Then he leaned back: of course, it was merely the meteoritic body which had gouged the crater in the first place. No mystery there. NPF scientists had probably already examined it and come to the same conclusion.

  Nevertheless, he called up the visual image of Voltaire crater and examined it again. It was the deepest and freshest crater on Deimos, so deep that part of the crater bottom was in shadow.

  He leaned forward, squinting. There was something in that shadow.

  Using the proprietary image enhancement software loaded on the drive, Corso worked on pulling the image out of the darkness. He increased contrast, painted it in false colors, sharpened edge transitions, and manipulated almost every pixel to extract the maximum visual information from the faintest and most ambiguous data. Corso had been doing this very thing for almost a year and he knew exactly how to tease the image into life--if it was a real image and not a glitch. It was a difficult and subtle process which took almost an hour. With each pass, his surprise turned to astonishment, amazement, and finally stupefaction. Because what he saw, deep in the shadows of Voltaire crater, was not a natural object. There could be no doubt. It was not a glitch, a software artifact.

  It was a construction, an artificial object, a machine.

  Breathing hard, he stood up and went to the window, leaning on the sill and sticking his head into the feeble stream of cool air coming from the AC, sucking it in, trying to get his breathing under control. The sun was setting over the intersection, casting a brownish light over the waste-scape of cars, traffic lights, power lines, and tawdry businesses, all dotted about with limp palm trees.

  A machine. An alien machine.

  Mark Corso suddenly felt calm. Amazingly calm. This was far bigger than his petty personal problems. He reminded himself why he had gone into science to begin with. This was why.

  Now that he was out of work, he had time to think things through and decide what to do. The data was classified and his possession of it a felony, so he couldn't just announce his discovery. If he reported it back to NPF, they would surely find a way to deprive him of credit and perhaps even send him to prison. For that reason, he had to move carefully, think things through, not do anything rash. He needed space and time and calm to make the right decisions. Because what he did next would not only determine his future, but it might well affect the future of the planet.

  He took another deep breath, rose, and began to pack up his apartment for his move back to Brooklyn.

  35

  A thunderous roar sounded, once, twice, the rounds punching through the fiber
glass walls of the wheelhouse, spraying Abbey with sharp slivers. With a yell she threw herself to the deck, her mind in a blank panic. The boat had suddenly materialized out of the fog, bearing down on them at full speed, and as it swung sideways and reversed with a huge roar, she had found herself staring at Randall Worth with a massive handgun, pointing it at them and firing.

  "What the fuck?" Jackie screamed, huddled on the deck.

  Boom! Boom! Two more bullets crashed through the windows and another blew out a hole the size of a tennis ball near her head.

  "Jackie!" she screamed. "Jackie!"

  "I'm here," came her choked voice.

  Abbey turned to see her friend cowering in the corner, hands over her head. "Get below!" she yelled, crawling toward the companionway. "Below the waterline!" She reached the companionway and tumbled headfirst down it, spilling onto the floor of the cabin. Jackie arrived a moment later, screaming and covering her head.

  "Jackie, are you hurt?" Abbey yelled.

  "I don't know," Jackie sobbed.

  Abbey checked Jackie all around, but could find no blood beyond cuts from fiberglass shrapnel.

  "What the fuck?" Jackie screamed, her hands over her head. "What the fuck?"

  "It's Worth. He's shooting at us."

  "Why?" she wailed.

  Abbey shook her again. "Hey! Listen--to--me."

  Jackie gulped.

  Another round of gunfire smashed through the superstructure, ripping through the hull and portholes above the V-berths. One of the shots blasted a hole at the waterline and the sea came gushing in.

  Jackie screamed, covering her head.

  "Listen to me, God damn it!" Abbey reached over and tried to pull Jackie's hands away from her head. "We're below the waterline. He can't hit us here. But he's going to board. We've got to defend ourselves. Do you understand?"