Douglas Preston - Impact

The road split and they took the fork leading to the Earth Station. A rusty metal door stood in a concrete entryway, the word trance on it, the first part effaced by weather, and was illuminated by a harsh fluorescent light that cast a pall over the dismal islandscape. Abbey reached out and tried the handle. Locked. She rang a doorbell set into a rusted plate.

Nothing.

She pushed the button harder but heard no ring inside, and finally resorted to knocking. A crackle of static sounded from a rusted grate next to the door, and a tinny voice came out. "What's the matter, Mike, forget your key again?"

Abbey spoke into the grate. "This isn't Mike. We made an emergency landing in your harbor. We need help."

"What? Who's that?"

"WE'VE BEEN SHIPWRECKED," Jackie yelled into the grate, enunciating each word.

"Holy crap." The door opened immediately. A balding, cadaverous man of about fifty stood in the doorway, the sad fringe of hair around his pate tied back in a long, thin ponytail. "Good God! Shipwrecked? Come in, come in!"

They filed into a stuffy annex, grateful for the warmth. An old bulbous television stood in the corner, screen filled with silent snow. On the table were scattered the remains of a midnight snack, candy bar wrappers, several Coke cans, and a coffee mug, along with several well-worn books--Eliot's The Waste Land , Kerouac's On the Road , Joyce's Finnegans Wake .

"Are you all right?" the guard said, staring at them and almost babbling. "Did your boat sink? Sit down, sit down! Can I get you some coffee?"

"We're fine now," said her father, extending his hand. "My name's Straw. Our boat's in the harbor."

"Coffee would be great," said Jackie loudly.

"Right, hey, coming up."

They sat down at the metal table and the man bustled over to a coffeepot warming on a hot plate and poured out coffee, bringing the steaming mugs to the table with jars of cream and sugar. Gratefully, Abbey dumped in huge amounts of cream and sugar, stirred, and drank.

"What the heck were you doing out there in that storm?" asked the man.

"It's a long story," said Abbey's father, stirring his coffee.

"Do you want me to call the Coast Guard?"

"No, we're safe now. Please don't. They wouldn't come out here anyway, until the storm's blown over."

"Of the northeasters I've seen out here," said the fellow, "this is one of the bigger ones--especially for summer. You're damn lucky to be alive."

"Who else is on the island?" her father asked casually.

"There's me and three others--two technicians and a communications specialist. We live in the houses down below."

"With your families?"

"No families out here. We come for a three-month rotation, three on, three off. This is my fourth year. The pay's great and you get a chance to unwind from the world. Read. Think. By the way, name's Fuller. Jordan Fuller." He stuck out a lanky hand and they introduced themselves all around.

Her father nursed his coffee. Rain battered the windows. Even at the top of the island, Abbey could hear the muffled thunder of surf on the rocks below.

"So you're up here in this station all by yourself tonight?" her father asked, stirring.

"No, there's a technician in the station. I'm sort of just security. Dr. Simic's in the station now."

"And when does he get relieved?"

"She. Not til seven."

"We'd like to meet Dr. Simic," Abbey said.

Fuller shook his head. "Sorry. Can't go in there. Off limits."

"Come on," Abbey said, with a laugh. "I've been in there twice before. On school field trips."

"Well, that's different. We get a lot of school groups. But normally no one's allowed in. Door's kept locked at all times."

"But you can open it, right?" her father asked, rising.

"Sure I can. Why do you ask?"

Her father removed the revolver from his pocket and laid it carefully on the table, keeping his hand on it. "Then please do it."

94

The president was already standing impatiently at the far end of the Sit Room. The wall monitors were ablaze with CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and Bloomberg.com, the sound turned off, flashing images of the Moon, various talking-head astronomers, and the growing chaos caused by widespread power outages and computer failures.

Ford filed in with the rest and they all remained standing, waiting for the president to sit. But he did not sit down. The flat-panels switched over to videoconferencing mode, the images of generals, cabinet officers, and others popping up.

"All right," said the president, "let's have it."

Lockwood nodded to an assistant and an image of the Deimos Machine flashed on the biggest screen at the end of the room.

"What you're looking at, Mr. President, is a photograph taken by the Mars Mapping Orbiter on March twenty-third of this year of an object hidden in a deep crater on Mars's moon, Deimos. Voltaire crater. Some background first: Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, named after the Greek gods of Dread and Terror. Both appear to be recently captured asteroids--recent as in half a billion years. Their almost perfectly circular orbits in the ecliptic have long puzzled astronomers, who've never been able to figure out how Mars could have captured these two asteroids into coincidentally perfect orbits unless a third body were involved, which removed some of the angular momentum from the other two and was flung away, never to be seen again. This has always seemed to astronomers to be a highly unlikely event."

"What does this have to do with anything?"

"Mr. President, the idea has been raised that both Phobos and Deimos may have been placed in orbit artificially."

"All right. Go on."

Lockwood cleared his throat. "The object you see in this picture--which we're calling the Deimos Machine--is clearly not natural. We believe it was built by an unknown, extraterrestrial intelligence. We believe it is the source of the gamma rays which the MMO has picked up. And we also believe it lobbed a lump of strange matter at the Earth on April fourteenth, and a larger piece at the Moon tonight, which as you know destroyed Tranquility Base. In this sense, it appears to be a weapon.

"A rough analysis of surface erosion from micrometeoroids and the accumulation of regolith around it indicates an age of between one hundred and two hundred million years old. All the satellites we have in orbit around Mars which can be redirected to Deimos are being redirected.

"Deimos is like a misshapen potato--it doesn't rotate like a normal planet. It sort of tumbles. Obviously the Deimos Machine can't fire unless Voltaire crater is oriented toward the Earth. And since it's a deep crater, the orientation has to be fairly close. That doesn't happen very often and not on a regular schedule."

"And?"

"It was aligned in April, the night the strange particle struck. The next alignment was tonight. You saw what happened to the Moon."

"When's the next alignment?"

"Three days from now."

"When will the satellites be in position around Deimos?" asked the president.

"Over the next few weeks," said Lockwood.

"Why so long?"

"Most require gravitational and orbital assists. They don't have the fuel to go jetting anywhere at a moment's notice."

"Isn't it possible," asked the president, "that repositioning our satellites around Deimos might be seen as an aggressive maneuver?"

"The satellites are small, fragile, and clearly unarmed," said Lockwood. "But, yes, there's a danger that anything we do--anything--might be misinterpreted. We're dealing with alien thinking, even if it is alien A.I. It also might be defective. Malfunctioning."

The DIA asked, "This 'strange matter' that you say was fired at the Earth--I don't understand why it's so dangerous. Just what does it do?"