Impact

88

Jackie kept the boat in a slow circle in the lee behind Devil's Limb while Abbey and her father examined it for damage. He leaned into the main hatch, scrutinizing the engine compartment, while Abbey held a light for him. She could see black, oily bilgewater sloshing around in the well; the boat was leaking.

"How bad is it?"

Straw emerged, straightened up, and wiped his hands on a paper towel. He was soaked and his light brown hair was plastered to his forehead. He had a black eye and a cut on his cheekbone. "There're some nasty cracks in the hull that could get worse in a heavy sea. Nothing the bilge pumps can't handle now."

He came back up the companionway stairs into the pilothouse. Jackie had tuned the VHF to the marine weather channel, and the computerized voice droned out the ugly statistics: wave heights to fifteen feet, winds thirty knots gusting to sixty, heavy rain, a tidal surge five feet higher than mean, small craft warnings . . . The storm was going to get worse before it got better.

Jackie stood at the helm, peering at the paper chart spread on the dashboard tray. "I think we should go around Sheep Island and take the inside passage to Rockland."

Straw shook his head. "Put us in a beam sea. We'd be better off making a straight shot across the bay--in a following sea."

A flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed by a boom. Abbey caught a glimpse of the wreckage of the other boat, now just a tangled mass of shattered fiberglass being pounded into nothing by the relentless breakers on the reef.

"We could always head to Vinalhaven," said Jackie. "That would put us in a heading sea."

"That's a possibility."

Abbey finally said, "We're not going to Rockland or Vinalhaven."

Her father turned to her. "What do you mean?"

She faced him and Jackie. "We've got something more important to do."

They stared at her.

"This is going to sound crazy but Jackie will back me up. Last year, the U.S. put a satellite in orbit around Mars. The goal was to map the planet and its moons. One of the things it did was take pictures of Mars's moon, Deimos, with ground-penetrating radar."

"Abbey, please, this is not the time--"

"Listen to me, Dad! The radar woke up something on Deimos. A very ancient, very dangerous alien machine. Probably a weapon."

"Of all the crazy--"

"Dad!"

He fell silent.

"An alien weapon. Which fired on the Earth. That meteor we saw a few months ago was the first shot. That show on the Moon was the second shot."

She briefly explained how she and Jackie went looking for the meteorite and found the hole, how she'd met Wyman Ford, and what they had discovered.

The expression on her father's face suddenly changed from disbelief to skepticism. He looked at her intently. "And?"

"That shot at the Moon was a demonstration. A warning."

"So what's this thing you want to do?" asked Jackie.

A gust of wind buffeted the pilothouse, spray hitting the windows. "I know this sounds crazy, but I think we can stop it."

Jackie looked incredulous. "Three wet people huddled in a boat in a storm off the coast of Maine, without cell reception, are gonna save the world? Are you nuts?"

"I have an idea."

"Oh no, not one of your ideas." Jackie groaned.

"You know the Earth Station, that big white bubble on Crow Island? Remember going there on field trips in high school? Inside that bubble there's a dish that AT&T built to send telephone calls to Europe. Now it's used for satellite communications, uplink and downlink of television shows, Internet and cell phone calls, shit like that."

"Well?" Jackie swiped her wet hair out of her face.

"We point it at Deimos and use it to send that motherfucker a message."

Jackie stared at Abbey. "Like what kind of message? 'My big brother's gonna beat you up'?"

"I haven't quite figured that out yet."