Fragment (45 page)

Andy whispered in what he hoped was Hender’s ear. “Go on, Hender.”

Hender suddenly appeared in brilliant, rippling colors. “Hello, people!” he said in a fluting voice. “Thank you for saving us!”

All the hendropods blushed into vivid color beside him then and waved at the camera in Peach’s hand as they fluted together, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

“Well…what the…?” The President’s mouth hung open.

The astonished Commander-in-Chief glanced at his defense secretary and then back to the frightened people who stood defiantly on the bow of the
Trident.

Half a billion people were watching the hendropods as the omnivorous eyes of humanity opened across the face of the Earth.

Some laughed at what they saw and thought it was a joke. Others scoffed and thought it was a fraud. Some recoiled and thought it was a horror, and others wept in awe and called it a miracle. Still others trembled with rage and believed it was the Apocalypse.

People watched in real time as their world was instantly turned upside-down. All who watched knew the human race had arrived at a moment of judgment that would mark its destiny and its character, and its world, forever, and the war over the meaning of that moment had already begun in living rooms, cafes, bars, and dormitories across five continents.

“Sweet Jesus H. fucking Christ,” the President said.

Behind the backs of the
Trident’s
crew, the camera showed the Navy bearing down as the second ship circled across their starboard bow, and a third ship appeared on the horizon.

Nell grabbed the mike from Cynthea. “Mr. President, if you are watching, you must spare these special beings!”

Admiring Nell’s chutzpah, Cynthea reclaimed the mike from her, whispering
“Finally
, a little drama, Nell. Good work, girl.” Then she shouted into the microphone, “So now we wait
with the rest of the world to see what their fate and ours will be!”

Marcello watched the second hand of his watch as it crossed the 30-second mark, and he placed his hand on Hender’s arm as he closed his eyes.

Hender patted Marcello’s hand and Andy’s shoulder reassuringly as his eyes moved in separate directions.

Nell squeezed Geoffrey’s hand hard.

The destroyer’s bullhorns crackled, and a voice boomed over the decks: “THE PRESIDENT HAS ORDERED US TO STAND DOWN. WE ASK PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD.”

“Drama!” Cynthea exalted.

Then they all cheered, hugging each other across species as the U.S. Navy stood down.

Thatcher recognized the blue lid of a glass jar wedged between the bottom and the pontoon of the Zodiac. Another nut jar. Thank God, he was starving.

He tugged it, planted his feet on the pontoon. He pulled it out and twisted it open as he brought it close to peer inside.

Henders wasps and drill-worms spilled out of the jar onto his face and eyes. It was seconds before he realized it was one of Hender’s bug-jars that they had waved hours earlier to get the
Trident’s
attention.

Thatcher screamed and knocked the satphone overboard as the drill-worms punctured his eyelids and one of the raft’s air chambers simultaneously.

He writhed, tangled in lines and scuba gear, shrieking as the Zodiac partially deflated and one side folded around him. His panic slowly turned to shocked disbelief. Thatcher saw a burst of light as the worms corkscrewed into his optic nerves, and then there was darkness, and a while later there was no more.

All the way from Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, the dull black B-2 stealth bomber cruised at Mach 2 at an altitude of twelve hundred feet over the South Pacific ocean.

“Look at that, Zack! The thing’s already breaking apart,” said the copilot.

As they approached the island they could see one of its walls collapsing into the ocean as they approached.

“Damn! OK, let’s lay this egg,” said the pilot.

Before the aircraft cleared the cliffs of Henders Island, the bomb bay doors opened and a B83 gravity bomb fell forward. A parachute deployed and like a two thousand pound lawn dart, the warhead plunged five thousand feet.

As the aircraft pulled up, the bomb’s hardened nose penetrated forty feet into the rocky core of the island. The reverberating clap of the missile’s impact with the stone heart of Henders Island drew rats, spigers, and swarms, which converged around the neat hole punched into the island’s bull’s eye. A 120-second delay began ticking down inside the bomb so that the pilots could achieve safe distance before its one-megaton nuclear warhead detonated.

“That’s gotta be the most expensive can of Raid in history,” the pilot remarked as they left the island at twenty miles a minute, covering nine miles in about thirty seconds. The boomerang-shaped B-2 banked in a wide circle as they gained altitude.

“Check it out, Zack,” the copilot said.

The two men looked over the expanse of the carbon-graphite composite wing as a brilliant light popped like a giant flashbulb in the bowl of the island.

A 250-foot deep crater a thousand feet wide was instantaneously excavated at the island’s center from the initial blast.

Within four seconds every living thing on the surface of the island was vaporized and the ashes blasted over the rim in a cone of smoke. Sand turned to glass. Rock flowed red-hot as a sun-like inferno filled the bowl.

The bomber pilots watched the eruption of light bloom on the island like a yellow rose.

“Don’t look at it too long,” the pilot warned. “Burns the retinas.”

“We’re past the nine-mile range…” the copilot said. “God, you can feel the heat of that thing from here!”

The intense light faded as a giant funnel of dense smoke rose out of the bowl three miles into the sky.

“We better stay ahead of the shockwave,” the pilot said, and he throttled up to just under the speed of sound.

“Target confirmed killed, Base. Copy?”

“Copy that. Mission accomplished. Come on home, boys.”

Nell and Geoffrey gazed
from the prow of the
Trident
at the crimson dawn.

Geoffrey cocked his head and studied her wryly for a moment.

“So, I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s sexier than a man who knows the right thing to say?”

“A man who knows when not to say anything.” Geoffrey lifted her chin to meet her smiling lips with his.

Hiding inside a hatchway Zero videoed them kissing, and Cynthea whispered restlessly in his ear: “Are you getting that?”

Zero popped his left eye open at Cynthea.
Yup
, his eye said.

Hender’s grin and eyes appeared first as he seemed to materialize behind the two young scientists on the prow. They laughed to see him.

“Oh wow…” Cynthea whispered. “Get that, get that,
get that, baby!
”

Hender moved between them and hugged Geoffrey and Nell with four arms, and together they faced the uncertain dawn.

Page 27 of
A Field Guide to Henders Island
by Geoffrey Binswanger-Duckworth, Nell Duckworth-Binswanger, and Andrew Beasley, 1
^st
edition.

Page 39 of
A Field Guide to Henders Island
by Geoffrey Binswanger-Duckworth, Nell Duckworth-Binswanger, and Andrew Beasley, 1
^st
edition.

Map of Henders Island

Preliminary sketches of a spiger by Nell Duckworth on board
Trident
, August 26—“motion studies.”

Preliminary sketches of a spiger by Nell Duckworth on board
Trident
, August 27—“speculations on internal structures.”