***
The Gulf of Mexico was a serene flat vista of light aqua against a pale blue morning sky as the shrimp trawler Lisa Marie moved out of Cameron Bay, Louisiana. Captain Lee Thibault stood in the wheelhouse, the warm bow-breeze reminding him how good it was to be on the sea again after a day laid up at the docks. It hadn’t taken Thibault and his two-man crew more than a day to run out of patience with the curfew keeping them safe in port. Lee knew as well as anyone that if this war-of-the-worlds went on for days or weeks or months, people would be going hungry. And catching food was what his boat and his life were all about. The Lisa Marie and her crew wouldn’t do anybody any good sitting idle at the pier. So here they were, heading out to the shrimp shoals just like any other day. Lee looked behind him to see what his deck hands were up to. Pete Hampton and Lonny Bremmer were relaxing on the benches astern, chatting just like always. That was reassuring.
The ship channel was deserted except for the Lisa Marie and out past the last marker buoy the horizon was an unbroken line of blue. That wasn’t right. On most days shrimp boats and freighters would have been everywhere. High up the sky, the moon was flashing those weird lights but nothing had come of them yet, not around Cameron Bay. And there was no use hiding anyway, Lee figured. If whoever was up there wanted to blast his boat they’d get her whether she was at sea or tied up at the quay.
He steered out into the Gulf with a sense of purpose. Everybody had a part to play and his was bringing up food from the sea bottom. War didn’t change that. He felt a little more at ease when his sonar told him the shrimp banks were beneath him. He was about to tell Pete and Lonny to run out the nets when he noticed a streak in the sky to the southeast like a jet contrail moving up from the horizon. He grew more concerned when, instead of moving slowly across the sky like other jets would, this one seemed to come straight at him.
He cut the Lisa Marie’s engines and she slowed and wallowed forward.
“Hey,” he called to the two men on the deck below. “What do you make of that?” They stood and stared at the thing, shielding their eyes from the sun.
Pete looked up at him. “I don’t know. Whadda you think it is?”
Lee didn’t think for long before he acted. He shoved the gear lever into forward again and gunned the throttle, pulling the bow around sharply to the right to run for home. As the Lisa Marie accelerated he glanced up at the white streak through the cantilevered masts and rigging and felt a chill set into the pit of his guts. The thing at the front of the streak had grown until it looked like the head of a big comet coming right at him. Now he was sure it meant trouble. There was a fierce orange glow to it, hotter than red-hot, just what you’d expect from something plunging all the way down from outer space.
The thing made no noise, coming at them faster than the speed of sound. And as if one spaceship was not bad enough, Lee noticed two other streaks coming from the same point on the horizon. The lead craft grew in apparent size as it approached and Lee saw it was an immense gliding spaceship coming his way at hellish speed. He reflexively crouched as if he could somehow duck under the massive falling object and began to recite a Hail Mary. The thing rushed overhead and slightly to one side of them. As he and his mates turned to watch its plunging course, a huge pressure wave blasted into the Lisa Marie, sending Lee reeling against his helm station and knocking the deck hands off their feet. The Lisa Marie heeled over in the grip of a gale-force wind, taking water over her gunwale before she righted herself.
As the blast died down and the boat came upright, Lee looked at the object rushing away to the north. It was much bigger than his boat, as huge as one of the cruise ships that sometimes lumbered through these waters. The titanic spacecraft was canted back on its delta-shaped wings with rear flaps down to slow its descent. Still supersonic, it receded quickly toward the Louisiana shoreline, the air in its wake shimmering with heat coming off its hull. It fell steadily and soon was skimming the Gulf’s surface, throwing up white spray that coiled into the turbulent air behind its twin tail fins. It plowed deeper into the water and walls of white spray rose hundreds of feet on each side of it. Then the mist settled and the spacecraft’s rounded ark-like hull floated smoothly on the surface of the Gulf, perhaps a mile away.
But there were more of these strange things in the sky. Lee turned to see five more streaks fanning out from the horizon. He forced the throttle farther forward, steering for the channel-entrance buoy and worrying at the strained thrumming of the engines, hoping she’d hold together long enough to make it back to the inlet before the invaders had them surrounded.
As the Lisa Marie chugged for her homeport it became clear to Lee that his boat was beneath the notice of whomever was aboard the spacecraft. While the second landing craft was splashing down, the first headed away from them toward an inlet ten miles down the coast between the towns of Creole and Grand Chenier.
On the deck, Lonny was crossing himself. Lee called down to him, “I hope Grand Chenier folks are ready. Something very bad is coming their way.”
Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall Page 21
