Impact (39 page)

She ducked down the stairs into the cabin.

Undogging the hatch, she saw the crack had opened up again, worse than ever, seawater pouring in. She grabbed the tape and peeled off a strip, trying to affix it to the crack, but it was underwater again and the previous piece had pulled loose. The heavy flow of water coming in prevented any attempt to cover it.

“Get the bucket brigade going!” her father cried.

“It’s coming in too fast!”

“Then shift the forward bilge pump aft! Jackie! Get to it!”

Jackie ducked down into the forward hatch and emerged a moment later with the pump, a roll of hose, and some wires.

“Cut the hose and wires,” said her father. “Hardwire it straight to a battery and reclamp, run the hose out a porthole.”

“Right.”

The boat boomed and groaned through the seas while they worked furiously. In five minutes they were done, the outflow hose pushed out a porthole.

The pumps hummed. The rising water in the bilge held steady and even began to drop.

“It’s working!” Jackie yelled, giving Abbey a high five.

At that moment a huge wave slammed the hull with a deep thunderous boom and Abbey heard a
crack!
Suddenly the water in the bilge was boiling in, a cascade of air bubbles coming up.

“Oh my God.”

Abbey watched in horror as the water gushed and swirled up, within moments spilling over the hatch and flooding the cabin.

“Dog the hatch!” Jackie screamed.

Abbey slammed the hatch into place and jerked around the levers as water came squirting up around the edges, and in a moment it was sealed. But the remedy was only temporary. The bulkheads, run through by cables and hoses, were not watertight and Abbey could hear the roar of water coming into the engine compartment.

“On deck!” she heard her father yell.

They scrambled up.

“Dad!” She scrambled up. “We’re sinking—”

“Get on your life preservers. Now. As soon as that water tops the forward bulkheads, we’re DIW.”

Trying to build as much forward momentum as possible, he shoved the throttle to the console. The boat roared past Ripp Island and Abbey got a glimpse of the lights in the admiral’s house flickering dimly through massive curtains of rain. Even with the engine at peak rpms the boat was slowing rapidly and beginning to list. The engine struggled, roaring.

“We’re sinking!” Jackie cried.

A wave broke over the side, tilting the boat, and it remained cockeyed, dragging itself along, the heaviness of the incoming water straining the engine. Abbey glanced at the raging currents beyond, the massive breakers thundering on the rocky shore; they would not survive a sinking.

Her father spun the wheel and pointed the boat straight toward the rocks of Ripp Island. Now the seas were bashing the boat on the beam, water erupting over the gunwales. A lash of sparks arced across the engine panel. With a loud
pop
the electronics went dark and the smell of fried insulation filled the wheel house. Simultaneously the engine coughed, jerked, and died. Steam came rushing up from the engine compartment, bringing with it the stench of oil and diesel. The boat slid along, propelled more by current than momentum, the waves breaking over the sides. Lightning flashed and there was a roar of thunder.

The boat swung toward the pounding surf, the combers pushing it toward the line of white.

“You two, get in the bow and get ready to jump!” her father cried.

The boat, now dead in the water, swung past the tail of the rip current and another rising breaker caught it by the stern and carried it toward the maelstrom.

“Go!”

Clinging to handholds and the rail, Abbey and Jackie went forward. The surf in front of them roared like a hundred lions, a great boiling mass of white, with great jets of spray leaping ten, twenty feet into the air. Her father stayed in the wheel house, at the wheel, trying to keep the boat aligned.

“I can’t do it,” Jackie said, staring forward.

“No choice.”

Another massive, breaking wave caught the stern and carried the boat forward, forward; as the curler thundered down upon them, the boat was propelled into the frothing surf. A massive, jarring crunch, almost like an explosion, shook the boat as they struck the rocks. But the deck held and the next wave lifted the boat and carried it past the worst of the breaking sea. It came down with another hideous crash, breaking its back, the deck suddenly askew.

“Now!” came the roar of her father’s voice.

They both leapt into the swirling water, scrambled for a footing. A wave came blasting over the
Marea II
, but the boat itself absorbed the brunt of the force, giving them just enough time to pull themselves up.

“Dad!” Abbey screamed. It was pitch black and she couldn’t see anything except the vague gray shape of the boat. “Dad!”

“Get up here!” Jackie cried.

Abbey scrambled up through the boulders, half-swimming, half-slipping in the surf, and in a moment she made it to the top of a sloping rock. She saw a shape in the water, an arm, and her father rose from the breakers, his arm wrapped around a rock.

“Dad!” Abbey scrambled down and seized his arm, helping to pull him to safety. They retreated up the rocks and into a small meadow at the shoreline, breathing hard from the effort. For a moment they watched in shocked silence as the
Marea II
, lifted high on the rocks, virtually split in half. The two pieces were sucked back out, wallowing and turning in the boiling sea, cushions and trash dancing on the waves. She glanced at her father’s face, turned toward his wrecked boat, but the expression was unreadable.

He glanced away. “Everyone okay?”

They nodded. It was a miracle they had all survived.

“Now what?” said Jackie, wringing out her hair.

Abbey looked around. The shingled mansion stood above the trees, upper-story windows glowing with light. Across the meadow, through a screen of trees, she could see the jetty and the island’s cove, where a large white yacht was moored in a sheltered corner.

Jackie followed her eye. “Oh, no,” she said. “No way.”

“We’ve got to do it,” said Abbey. “We’ve got to try. That alien machine is trying to get our attention, it wants to hear from us, and God knows what it’ll do if it doesn’t.”

Her father rose to his feet. “All right then. We’re taking the yacht.”

Rising, they crossed the meadow to the cove. The wind was lashing the treetops and the house stood, gaunt and tall, in the gusting rain. They walked to the end of the pier. A dinghy had been pulled up on the floating dock; they pushed it back in the water and climbed in. Her father took the oars and rowed, putting all his weight into it. The dinghy ploughed across the choppy cove, and in a moment they’d drawn up to the yacht’s swim platform. He jumped out and held the dinghy, hauling the others out. The pilothouse was unlocked.

The keys were not in the ignition slots. They began searching and Jackie picked up a canvas bag and dumped it on the chart table. Money, tools, a whisky flask, and keys tumbled out.

“Look here,” said Jackie with a grin.

Her father took the helm, ran his hand down the engine panel turning on circuit breakers; he checked the fuel and oil levels and stuck the keys into the ignition slots, firing up each engine in turn.

The engines answered with a deep-throated rumble.

Abbey saw the flicker of lights out on the pier. A hundred yards away, people were running down the pier, shouting and gesturing. The dock lights blazed on, turning the harbor as bright as day. A gunshot sounded.

“Cast off!” Straw cried.

91

The yacht was longer and heavier than the
Marea II
, which made it considerably more seaworthy. The boat rounded the jetty, her father at the helm, doggedly ploughing into the heavy seas. Lightning flickered in the heavy rain and the roll of thunder mingled with the roar of the wind and rumble of the waves. The VHF radio sputtered to life and an unintelligible but clearly enraged voice crackled over it.

Her father turned it off.

The boat slammed through a wave, plunging down into the next trough. Abbey felt her heart up in her throat.

“Jackie, get the electronics working,” said Straw, gesturing at the wall of dark screens.

Abbey said, “I’ll search the boat for weapons.”

“Weapons?” Jackie asked.

“We want to take over the Earth Station,” said Abbey. “We’re going to need a weapon.”

“Can’t we just explain?”

“I doubt it.”

Abbey tried to open the door to the cabin but it was locked. She raised her foot and gave it a kick, then another. The flimsy door popped open. She felt her way down the stairs, hanging on to the rails, and turned on the lights.

Acres of mahogany and teak greeted her eye, a sleek galley filled with gadgets, a dining room beyond dominated by a huge flat-panel TV on the far wall, and a door into a stateroom. She went into the kitchen and began opening drawers, taking out the longest kitchen knives. Then she went into the stateroom forward. It was paneled in mahogany, with plush carpeting, recessed lighting, another big-screen television, and a mirror on the ceiling. She searched the bureau drawers, which seemed mostly stuffed with sex toys and erotic apparatus, and moved on to the bedside table.

A revolver.

She hesitated and took it.

The boat shuddered, bashed by a wave, and various bric-a-brac shifted, some being flung to the floor. Another hollow
boom
and a light fixture was jarred loose, hanging by a wire. Abbey clung to the bedpost while the boat rose and rose, seemingly forever. It was far more terrifying being below, where you couldn’t see what was coming. But as the boat continued to rise, she realized this was a big one: the biggest of all.

She heard the muffled roar of the breaking comber and braced herself. It was as if a bomb went off; the boat was slammed sideways with a jarring crash, the sound magnified in the hollow room, glass breaking and objects flying. The room tilted more and more, heeling over, with bureau drawers opening, pictures falling from the walls, objects careening about, and for a moment Abbey felt the boat was going to roll. But the tilting finally came to a halt and with a groan of stress the boat began to right itself while dropping with a sickening plummet into the next trough. There was a terrifying moment of silence, and then it mounted again, up, up. Another muffled explosion, followed by the jarring, twisting motion. A popping sound resounded and the television screen shattered, the fragments cascading to the floor and rattling around like pebbles.

She waited for the pause in the next trough and bolted for the stairs, making it up into the wheel house. One hand on the wheel, her father snatched the gun and popped open the cylinder. “It’s loaded.” He snapped it back into place, and shoved it in his belt.

“You’re . . . not going to use it, are you?” asked Jackie.

“I hope not.”

92

A half-hour later, with a huge relief, Abbey could begin to make out the lights of the Earth Station, winking on and off through curtains of rain. The yacht, its superstructure battered but still seaworthy, ploughed into the calmer waters of the well-protected anchorage that served Crow Island. The big white bubble itself loomed into view, illuminated by spotlights, rising from a cluster of buildings on the barren, windswept crown of the island.

From a long-ago school trip Abbey vaguely remembered a couple of nerdy technicians lecturing them about what the Earth Station did and how they lived on the island and kept it running. Inside the huge white bubble was a huge, motorized parabolic antenna that she remembered could be rotated to point at any number of telecommunications satellites or even used for deep-space communications with spacecraft. But its primary function was to handle overseas telephone calls—or at least that was what she remembered.

She hoped it could be moved to point at Deimos—and that Deimos, in its orbit around Mars, hadn’t gone around the backside of the planet where it would be cut off from radio contact with Earth.

The yacht slowed as it came into the harbor. It was well sheltered by two high, rocky arms of land that encircled the harbor like an embrace. A pair of concrete piers, old and cracking, jutted into the water below the Earth Station. A few boats were moored in the harbor but the ferry slip was empty.

Her father throttled down and brought the yacht into the ferry berth, easing it toward the landing.

Abbey checked her watch: four o’clock. She gazed up at the huge dome.

“So what’s the message?” Jackie asked.

“I’m working on it.” How could she even begin to understand the purpose of the alien weapon—if it even was a weapon—and what it wanted?

“If it’s a weapon,” Jackie said, “why didn’t it destroy the Earth already?”

“Perhaps habitable planets like Earth are hard to find. Or maybe it didn’t want to destroy the human race but instead do something else with us. Warn us, kick a little ass, intimidate with its power, enslave us.”

“Enslave?”

“Who knows? Perhaps their psychology is so unreachable that we’ll never hope to understand it.”

The engines backed as the yacht shuddered to a halt against the platform.

“Tie up,” her father ordered tersely.

Abbey and Jackie hopped out and secured the boat. They stood on the dock in the howling storm, the rain lashing down. Abbey was so wet and cold that she hardly felt it. Looking at her father and Jackie, she realized they looked a fright, faces smeared with engine oil, clothes smelling of diesel.

Abbey glanced up at the dome and felt incipient panic; what should she say? What
could
she say that would save the Earth? Suddenly her plan seemed half-baked, even idiotic. What was she thinking—that she could talk this alien machine out of destroying the Earth? On top of that the machine might not even be able to interpret English—although she felt certain an artifact that advanced would surely be capable of listening in on communications, translating and interpreting what it picked up.

Whatever. It was worth a try—if she could only think what to say.