Douglas Preston - Impact

He hoped his piece-of-shit boat would last the season. Then he'd buy insurance and sink it. All he had to do was stick a bad fuse into the bilge pump, moor his boat, and wait two days.

As Thrumcap Island passed to starboard the distant outline of Crow Island came into view, the huge white dome of the old Earth Station rising up like a bubble. The Crow Island ferry was just coming out of the harbor, churning away as it rounded the point and headed for Friendship. As he glanced back toward the mainland he was surprised to see a boat anchored in a quiet corner of Marsh Island Passage. He squinted.

The Marea . Abbey Straw's boat.

He immediately throttled down, staring. A feeling of rage crawled up his spine and spread through his brain like water into a sponge. Fucking jungle bunny, he couldn't forget what she'd said about that deeper , deeper shit. Right in front of that cunt Jackie Spann, somebody should whack her upside the head. There they were, on Louds Island, looking for the treasure of Dixie Bull. The rumor going around town was that Abbey had gotten her hands on a map.

As the boat drifted in the tidal current, Worth pulled the last can of Coors out of the plastic rings and tossed the plastic overboard. Maybe it'll strangle a few seals.

He hammered down the beer and stuck the can in the beer holder screwed to the side of the engine panel. He was starting to feel edgy, tense, his skin crawling. The crank bugs. He began itching nervously at the skin of his cheek, inadvertently breaking off a scab, feeling the wetness of blood on his fingertips.

He swore. Ducking into the tiny cuddy, he removed a glass bulb pipe from behind some gear, dropped in a rock, and with a shaking hand lit a Bic and directed the flame down into the bulb. There was a sudden cooking noise and he drew in hard, filling the bulb with smoke, then taking it into his lungs. Leaning back against the hull, he closed his eyes and let the rush happen, a sense of elation so strong it made him feel, for a moment, almost like a real human being.

He stuffed the pipe and crank back behind the fishing gear and bounded into the wheel house, feeling on top of the world. Once again he saw the Marea casting a long shadow on the water, and a black rage seized his heart. They were digging for treasure and with a map they might even find it.

Suddenly, he had an idea. A good idea. In fact, it was the best idea he had ever had.

Worth checked his watch: four o'clock. The girls were obviously going to spend the night on the boat. This would give him time to go into Round Pond, fuel up, load up on beer and beef jerky from King Ro. He could pay a visit to his connection and score some more crank and collect the money he was owed for the stuff he'd boosted out of that mansion on Ripp Island. He could be back out at Louds at dawn.

With an out-loud laugh he goosed the throttle to 3000 rpms, spun the wheel, and headed back out past Thrumcap Island and around the southern end of Louds toward Round Pond Harbor.

With the money from the treasure, he'd buy himself a new boat--and he'd name it the Skull and Crossbones .

12

"He looks like Squealer, the Beanie Baby pig," said Mark Corso. "You ever see that pig? Big, soft, fat, and pink."

Marjory Leung leaned back on the stool and laughed, her long black hair swaying, then lifted the martini to her pursed lips. Corso watched her abdomen stretching, her apple-shaped breasts sliding under the thin stretchy cotton of her top. They were in one of those California theme bars, done up in bamboo and teak, with corrugated tin roofing and colored floor lights, tarted up like some watering hole on the beach in Jamaica. Reggae music throbbed in the background. Why was it in California that everything had to look like somewhere else? He remembered what Gertrude Stein had said about California. There is no there there. How true it was.

"Freeman warned me about him," he added. "How the hell did a guy like that get to be second in command?"

Leung set the drink down and leaned toward him, conspiratorially, her thin, athletic body like a bent spring. "You know why he keeps his door shut?"

"I've often wondered about that."

"He's surfing for porn."

"You think so?"

"The other day I knocked on the door and I heard this sudden movement inside, like he was startled. And then when I came in he was hastily tucking in his shirt and his computer screen was blank."

"Putting away his schlong, I bet. The very thought makes me want to puke."

Leung issued a bell-like laugh, twisting on her stool, her hair swinging again, her knee touching Corso's. Her drink was almost empty.

He polished off his own drink and waved his hand for another round. The knee remained in contact with his. Leung worked at the Mars mission down the hall as a Mars meteorology specialist. She was funny and irreverent, a refreshing change from the nerds who swarmed that end of the building. And she was smart. First-generation Chinese, she'd grown up in the back of a Chinese laundry run by her parents. They didn't speak English and she went to Harvard. Corso liked that kind of story. She was like his own grandfather, running away from home in Sicily and getting to America, all by himself, at the age of fourteen. Corso felt a kind of kinship with her.

"You read that report on Freeman?" he asked her.

"Yeah." The bartender slid the drinks over and she took hers. "So creepy . We used to come here for drinks once in a while."

Corso had heard about something brief between Leung and Freeman. He hoped it wasn't true.

"It's just awful, him getting murdered like that." She shook her head, sending ripples through that hair.

Corso took a chance, pressing his knee against the side of hers with a little more pressure. There was an answering pressure. He could feel the flush of the martinis traveling through his capillaries.

"You must have taken it hard," she said.

"I did. He was a really good guy. A little crazy."

"You know why he got fired?" she asked.

"Not specifically. Other than a sort of general deterioration. He might have had a run-in with Derkweiler over data issues."

"Data issues?"

"Gamma ray data." Corso realized he was approaching a security compartment line, talking about data outside of the building with a person in another section. He sipped his drink; fuck the rules.

"Oh yeah," she said. "He was talking about that but I didn't really get it. What about gamma rays?"

"Seems to be a gamma ray source somewhere on Mars. A point source. At least, that's what I get when I subtract the overall background noise--a faint periodicity."

She leaned forward. "Wait a minute. You're kidding."

She got it right away , thought Corso. "No, no kidding. The period is somewhere around twenty-five to thirty hours. Which is pretty close to the Martian day."

"What the heck in the solar system could be producing gamma rays? Not even the sun has enough energy."

"Cosmic rays."

"Yeah, but cosmic rays produce a weak, diffuse glow from every body in the solar system. You say this signal has periodicity. That implies a point source on the planet's surface."

Corso was even more taken aback by how fast she was figuring it out.

"Right. Problem is, the Compton detector on MMO isn't directional--no way to tell where the gamma rays are coming from. It could be anywhere on the planet's surface."

"You have any ideas what it might be?" Leung asked.

"At first I thought it might be from a nuclear reactor that crashed on the planet's surface--maybe from a secret government project. But I ran the calculations and it would have to be, like, a reactor the size of a mountain."

"What else?"

Corso took another swig. He could feel his heart pounding from the pressure of his knee, now on her inner thigh. She was returning the pressure. "I've been wracking my brains. I mean, high energy gamma rays are usually only produced by big-time astrophysical processes--supernovae, black holes, neutron stars--stuff like that. Or in a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb."