Douglas Preston - Impact

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.

Her father tucked the gun into his belt. "Follow my lead, stay cool--and be nice."

93

Hunched against the storm, they made their way to the end of the pier and up the asphalt road leading to the complex of buildings on the crown of the island. The wind howled, lightning flashed, and the thunder mingled with the crashing of surf on the shore to create an continuous roar of sound.

As the road ascended the island, the Earth Station came into full view, occupying the highest ground, a big white geodesic dome rising over a cluster of drab cinder block buildings, with a radio tower and cluster of microwave antennas. Far from being a high-tech wonder, the Earth Station had a sad, neglected air about it, a feeling of desuetude and abandonment. The dome was streaked with damp, the houses shabby, the road potholed and weedy. Once whitewashed, the buildings had been so scoured and battered by storms that they had been partly stripped back to raw concrete. A large Quonset hut, open on one end, was filled with rusting equipment, stacks of I-beams, sand piles, and graying lumber. Below the station, in a protected hollow, stood several houses and what appeared to be a recreation hall. A scattering of gaunt, gnarled spruces--the only trees on the island--surrounded the houses, providing little shelter and less cheer. The rest of the island was barren, covered with grass, scrub, and knobs of glacially polished granite.