spray of reflective highway paint.
“What is it?” she asked.
Kurt looked at his palms, rubbing his fingers across it. The reflective dust spread like wet powder, some of it coming off. The glittering effect was plainly visible, but no matter how hard he squinted the cause was impossible to see. Nor could he feel it, even when trying to rub it between his fingers. All of which meant one thing.
“Jinn’s microbots,” he said.
He explained what they were and pointed out how the sea was filled with them. Looking straight down, he saw that the concentration was like a spoonful of sugar thrown onto a black dinner plate. He felt the heat reflecting off it. He explained that some of the little machines had been found on the catamaran.
“Are they harmful to us?” Leilani asked.
“I don’t think so,” Kurt said. He left out the part about them consuming organic matter. Fortunately, the ones on their skin didn’t appear to be in eating mode like the ones in Marchetti’s lab. “All the same, I wouldn’t mind stumbling across a boat with a good shower right about now.”
Leilani tried to smile.
Kurt had no way of knowing that they were near the edge of Jinn’s horde and that the concentration he was seeing and the reflective effect they were witnessing was nothing compared to what Paul, Gamay and Marchetti had seen from the balcony of Aqua-Terra’s control room. Still, he found it hard to take his eyes off the sparkling sea.
As he stared, a breeze tugged at his sleeve and ruffled the parachute tarp. Without moving, Kurt looked toward the bow and watched as the tarp rose up, settled softly and then rose again.
The breeze grew stronger, and Kurt had to grab the lines to keep the big chute from billowing out. He turned to Leilani. “Tie this chute to those handles on the right and get the other one out.”
Leilani was already moving, not even questioning him. The breeze was blowing in from behind them and slightly north. It was a hot wind like the Santa Anas of California or the siroccos of the Sahara. It felt like a hair dryer on his back, but Kurt didn’t care.
He and Leilani worked rapidly. The boat was equipped with a half dozen separate handholds and a pair of cleat handles up front. In a minute, the lines of both parachutes were tied off to these eight points and were snapping taut as the chutes billowed out in front of the boat.
They filled like sails, and the boat began to move, pulled along by the two parachutes as if they were a pair of magical horses. As the chutes caught more and more wind, the boat picked up some speed. The deflated parts of the boat kept it from moving as fast as it had with the outboard running, but at least it was going.
Kurt had no idea where a wind in these doldrums had appeared from, but he didn’t care. They were moving again and moving was better than sitting any day.
Gusts blew in, the lines snapped and strained, yanking the boat forward.
“Hang on!” Kurt shouted for at least the third or fourth time that day. “I have a feeling this is going to be a wild ride.”
CHAPTER 42
AQUA-TERRA’S BRIG SAT ON THE LOWEST LEVEL OF THE island that was above the waterline. Now back in their luxury cell, Paul, Gamay and Marchetti were similarly at their absolute lowest. For exactly fifty-three minutes Jinn had kept them cuffed to the rail out in the blazing solar reflection, the swirling gusts and the heat.
Paul Trout had never seen the inside of a tanning booth in his life, but it felt like the observation deck had been turned into just that, with heat and blinding light added for good measure.
It had been a surreal experience as reflections danced across Aqua-Terra in a dizzying, almost hypnotic display. Because the tiny mirrors moved independently on the water, the light they reflected also moved independently, making it impossible to really study the effect. Paul could only get a sense of it, like being in a swirling fog and yet knowing that it was made up of billions of independent molecules of water vapor as opposed to being a single thing.
And as hard as it was to look at the decks and structures around them, it was impossible to look at the ocean for any length of time. To protect his eyes, Paul had kept them shut tight for most of the fifty-three minutes. As a result, his main impression of the ocean’s surface was a glittering mass like an endless sea of diamonds. Low ripples ran through it, brought on by minor swells that hadn’t been present an hour before. Wind currents stirred up by the reflected heat swept across the shimmering surface, making it appear almost like a living thing. It was breathing, moving, waiting. In a way, it was as beautiful as it was terrifying.
Eventually the time expired and Jinn had given the order, turning the sea of diamonds gray once again. The bots quickly submerged and the ocean looked like any other throughout the world.
“I feel like I fell asleep on the beach,” Paul said, amazed at how taut and red his skin was.
Across from him, Marchetti paced and occasionally checked the view through the large windows while Gamay sat beside him and attempted to apply some sort of first-aid balm to his split lip and bloody tongue.
“At least we know how they’ve been able to tamper with the water temperature,” Marchetti said.
“Please hold still,” Gamay asked.
She held a swab and some antibacterial ointment from a first-aid kit at the ready, but each time she’d moved in Paul started to speak again.
“Fat lot of good it’ll do us,” he said.
“Paul.”
“I am holding still.”
“Not the part I’m trying to fix.”
Paul nodded and held his mouth open like a patient at the dentist.
Marchetti stopped his pacing. “The question is, what will happen now that they’ve put their plan into overdrive?”
Paul hesitated, waiting as long as he could. “I can tell you exactly what’s going to happen,” he said finally.
Gamay exhaled sharply and pulled back.
“They’re creating a massive column of cold water, with temperatures more at home in the North Atlantic than here in the middle of a tropical sea. Temperature gradients like that are known to intensify or even create storms and cyclones. Not just in the air but under the surface.”
“And once they stop radiating the heat back into the air, the cold water will start absorbing heat from the air above it again,” Marchetti said, “reversing the equation.”
“If this plan continues,” Paul added, “the ambient air temperature will drop rapidly, but only above the one area they’ve affected. The rest of the ocean will still be hot and humid. Have you ever seen what happens when hot and humid air combines with cold?”
“Storms,” Marchetti said.
Paul nodded. “I was in Oklahoma several years back when a cold front blew through after three days of humidity. They had a hundred tornadoes touch down over a three-day period. I’m guessing out here we’ll see one big storm: a tropical depression or a cyclone. We might see a hurricane form all around us.”
Gamay had given up trying to dab Paul’s lip. “But this is the dead zone,” she said. “The storms don’t usually form here. They form to the north and east, and they track toward India. That’s where the monsoons come from.”
Paul considering the implications. “We’re almost on the equator. A storm forming here will track west and get swept up toward Somalia, Ethiopia and Egypt,” he guessed.
“That’s already happening,” Marchetti said. “I read something about record rains in the Sudanese highlands and southern Egypt. The article said Lake Nasser had risen to a level not seen in thirty years.”
Paul remembered hearing something similar. “And that’s probably just the beginning.”
Marchetti was pacing, rubbing his chin with one hand and looking very shaky. “What happens once the air is destabilized into a storm?”
Paul looked off toward the windows, facing southwest. He was recalling lectures on storm generation and the
