Douglas Preston - Impact

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 fiberglass 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?"

Jackie nodded, swallowing.

Abbey looked around. The V-berths were a mess, the sleeping bags rumpled up, dirty dishes in the sink, everything covered with shredded fiberglass powder. The water was gushing in through the hole and she could hear the automatic bilge pumps running.

The toolbox under the sink . Staying low, she reached across and yanked opened the cabinet.

A voice sounded across the water. "Hey, girls! Daddy's home!" Another six blasts from the gun followed, ripping through the cabin over their heads. Keeping low, Abbey dragged the toolbox out and unlatched it, the tools spilling to the floor. She sorted through them, grabbing a fish knife and a hammer. "The Mace. Where is it?"