Impact

tide. I'll go steal his dinghy, get our boat, and come to you. I'll pass as close to shore as I dare. When you hear me coming, start swimming. The current'll be with you.'

'Okay,' Jackie whispered.

Suddenly, Abbey noticed a flash in the sky, a rapid brightening. For a moment she thought the killer had found them, suddenly turning on his flashlight beam.

'Shit!' Jackie said, ducking and covering her head in an instinctual movement.

After a moment, Abbey poked her head up and stared at the Moon. 'Oh my God! Jackie!'

A huge fireball blossomed on one side of the Moon, with a jet of glowing dust shooting laterally from the opposite side, extending itself as if in slow motion, becoming so bright Abbey had to shield her eyes. It was strange, weird, a spectacularly beautiful phenomenon, like the Moon had burst, releasing a string of glittering jewels spilling out of its interior, glowing with internal fire.

Meanwhile, the fireball on the other side of the Moon also expanded in size and color, from brilliant cold blue in the center to a greenish yellow, grading to orange and red at the edges, like a wedge expanding from the surface of the Moon.

'What the fuck?' Jackie stared, her eyes wide.

The brightening light bathed the islands, the dark spruces, the rocks, the sea in a greenish yellow color, false and garish. The horizon came up, razor-sharp, the sky above it deep purple, the ocean below a pale green flecked with black and red.

Abbey turned her gaze back to the Moon, squinting her eyes against the brightness; a kind of halo was now developing around the disk, as if the Moon had been struck or shaken, lofting dust into space. A vast silence seemed to settle onto the seascape, the spectacle unfolding in absolute stillness which made it seem all the more surreal.

'Abbey!' came Jackie's low, panicked voice. 'What is it? What's happening?'

'I believe,' said Abbey slowly, 'that the weapon on Deimos just took a potshot at the Moon--a much bigger one, this time.'

69

Harry Burr walked down the shingled beach, semiautomatic pistol in one hand, probing the woods and rocks with his flashlight, searching for a glimpse of fleeting figures, a face crouching among the trees, something. He knew they were on the island--their dinghy was still up on the beach and burgers had been burning on the stove. He was also pretty sure Ford didn't have a piece--otherwise he'd have used it in the bar or at the parking lot. So he was the only man with a gun.

He swore under his breath. Somehow they'd gotten wind of his coming. They'd probably heard the sound of his boat engine, which at night carried across the water a long distance. Still, he was holding all the cards; he'd cornered them on a small island and there was no way they could escape--except by dinghy. They couldn't swim to their boat--the tide was coming in full bore and the currents were swirling past the island at several knots. They'd be swept past before they'd ever make it.

There were two dinghies on the island: his and theirs.

It wasn't hard to see what they'd do: try to get one of them. His first job was to secure them. He walked down the beach to where their dinghy was pulled up. He thought of shoving it off into the current but decided that would be risky, leaving himself without a backup if something should go wrong. Instead, grasping the painter, he hauled it up into the woods where it was more or less hidden. Then he removed the oars and hid each one in widely separated locations, shoving them into raspberry thickets. It would take hours to find them.

Now to secure his own boat.

A sudden light above his head caused him to duck and spin around, gun at the ready, until he realized it was coming from above. The full Moon. He stared up at it as a bright jet seemed to come off its surface and extend into the night sky. Another bright spot appeared on the opposite side. What the hell was it?

Just a strange cloud passing over the Moon, creating a striking optical illusion.

Moving rapidly and silently through the trees, he worked his way toward the northern end of the island until he had reached his own dinghy. It sat peacefully in the brightening moonlight. He was about to haul it up and hide it as he'd done the other one when he had an idea: to leave it in full view as bait, hide and wait for them to come get it. When they found their own dinghy missing, they'd come after his. What other course of action did they have? They couldn't hide forever.

He took up a well-hidden position behind a jumble of rocks at the edge of the shore and waited.

The sky grew brighter by slow degrees, and he glanced upward, wondering what the hell was going on with the Moon. The strange cloud kept getting bigger, and it really didn't look like a cloud after all.

He turned away, focusing on the problem at hand, waiting for them to come. He hardly had to wait: after only a few minutes he spied a shadow moving along the edge of the forest; he raised his Desert Eagle, switched on the internal laser sights, then thought better of it and turned them off. No reason to spook them with a dancing red dot. They would be close enough for a kill without it.

But the silhouette was alone. It was the girl. Ford was not with her.

70

Driving south on Interstate 295, near Freeport, Ford noticed the sudden light in the night sky. He peered out the windscreen at the Moon and, with a sudden feeling of dread, pulled off the highway to get a better look. He stepped outside in the summer night and stared, aghast, at the jet of light rising from the Moon's surface. As he watched, more cars began pulling off the highway, people getting out to stare and take pictures.

A long trail of glowing material seemed to be shooting away from the Moon's surface, elongating across the night sky, blazing yellow. And on the opposite side was a similar puff of debris, more bulbous, material ejected as if from an impact.

It looked exactly like the Moon had been shot through by something that entered on the right and exited on the left.

Another shot from the thing on Deimos?

No question about it. And this time a much larger projectile of strange matter must have been used, big enough to create a spectacular display on Earth. Perhaps even designed to create a display. The last one had largely gone unnoticed; this one wouldn't. Even as he watched, the tail of debris kept extending itself, gradually elongating into a broad curve by the Moon's gravity.

This was striking confirmation that Abbey was right: that the alien artifact on Deimos was a weapon and had fired again, this time at the Moon. But why? As a demonstration of power?

There was no sense gaping by the side of the road, thought Ford. He had a plane to catch. He slipped back into his car and switched on the radio, tuning it to the local NPR station. The thunderous sounds of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor came out the speakers, but almost immediately a newscaster broke in, interrupting the program with a special announcement about the 'extraordinary phenomenon occurring to the Moon.'

'We reached Elaine Dahlquist,' the announcer said, 'an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for