bottom of the trough, the jarring impact was accompanied by the sound of wrenching metal. Rivets popped as high up as the bridge and, somewhere deep, the keel broke. As if to finish them off, the towering walls of seawater slammed together around the
This last act of the angry sea might have killed everyone on board, except that the two great hands spent most of their energy smashing each other. As they rebounded off each other, the current they created dragged the stricken vessel to the surface.
She came up for only a minute and was soon awash and sinking.
The bridge was flooded from the impact, with the remaining windows smashed out. The water was frigid, cutting into one’s skin like knives.
Kurt still had his arm around Hayley. In the glimmer of the emergency light, he saw Joe opening a life-raft container, and Captain Winslow desperately trying to order the crew to abandon ship.
Kurt grabbed a life jacket, pulled it over Hayley’s head and cinched it tight.
“Stay with Joe!” he shouted.
She nodded as Kurt waded to where the XO had fallen. Heaving him up, he passed the unconscious man to the captain and then glanced at the stairwell to the lower deck.
He saw a crewman staggering upward as the water flooded down upon him. The man was injured. He could hardly fight the current. Kurt pulled him up and passed him to Hayley, who helped him into a life jacket of his own. Holding the rail, Kurt began to climb down.
“There’s no use,” the crewman said, “they’re all gone. Those that weren’t pulled out when she broke are drowned. It’s all water below this deck.”
Kurt ignored him, splashing down into the stairwell and diving into the icy black liquid. He inched forward, one hand on the wall, the other outstretched and numbly feeling around for any sign of a crewman. He found no one and turned back.
When he came up, water was pouring in through the shattered windows again. The top of the bridge was all that remained above water.
Joe grabbed him under the arm and yanked him free of the stairwell. “I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” he shouted, dragging Kurt to the hatch and toward the inflated orange raft.
Joe flung Kurt onto the raft and jumped on behind him. His momentum carried them away as the
Kurt glanced around. Aside from the single crewman who’d struggled up from belowdecks, only those on the bridge had escaped.
The hexagonal life raft rolled up on one of the low swells, and Kurt stared into the dark, his eyes straining for any sign of another raft or anyone in the water. He saw nothing. But neither did he see another flash like those that had preceded the strange ruts appearing in the sea. “Do we have any flares?”
Joe dug into the raft’s survival kit. “Six,” he said. “Three white, three red.”
“Fire a white one,” Kurt said. “We have to see if anyone else is out there.”
Joe pointed the flare gun skyward and fired. With a whoosh, the blazing little sphere rocketed upward, casting a harsh glow across the rolling waves. Kurt stared and stared, his eyes darting about, as the moving carpet of the swells stretched out before him.
Plenty of wreckage and debris had come to the surface. Insulation, packaged stores, and unworn life jackets, anything with buoyancy. He saw no sign of another raft but spotted two people bobbing among the wreckage.
“There,” he said, pointing and grabbing an oar.
The flare only lasted another ten seconds, but Joe had also found a flashlight. He kept it trained on the floating crewmen as Kurt and Captain Winslow rowed the life raft in their direction.
Kurt hauled the first crewman onto the raft. She was a young woman he recognized from the radio room. The second survivor was the boatswain’s mate Kurt had seen on the previous night’s watch. Neither one appeared to be responsive. Two others were found, who Kurt didn’t know by sight.
“Are… they… alive?” Hayley asked through chattering teeth.
“Barely,” the captain said. “They’re all but frozen. Hypothermia doesn’t take long in thirty-eight-degree water. We’ve got to get them warmed up.”
“With what?” Hayley asked.
“Body heat,” Kurt said. “Everybody needs to huddle together. We’re all wet. We’re all going to lose our heat fast if we don’t conserve it.”
The group began to move to the middle of the raft, leaning against one another and pulling a microfiber survival blanket over themselves. All except Kurt and Joe, who were aiming the flashlight around and looking for other survivors.
They pulled in a few empty life jackets and several pieces of cloth and plastic, things that might prove useful at some point, but they found no other survivors. Eventually, they knew there was no more point in looking.
“Better save the battery,” Kurt said.
Joe waited until he and Kurt were safely in the huddle with the others before he shut it off.
“Thirty-nine men and women,” the captain said. “What happened to the sea? What was that? I’ve never seen waves like that. They looked like craters appearing in our path.”
Kurt glanced at Hayley.
“Thero’s weapon did this,” she said grimly. “It distorts gravity.”
“And that gravity affects liquids far more easily than solids,” Kurt added, repeating her earlier statement in a somber tone.
“It’s like a bubble,” she managed. “Highly localized but very powerful. It forces the water to the side, and then, when it passes, the crater, as you called it, collapses on itself.”
“And the water comes crashing back in,” the captain added, showing that he understood.
She nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” the captain said.
“But it is,” she replied. “I helped construct the theory. And the sensor I used must have given away our position somehow. That’s the only explanation. The only way they could find us.”
Kurt tried to comfort her, but he didn’t have the words. Nor, in his most optimistic dreams, did he have any idea how they were going to survive, let alone prevent Thero from fulfilling his venomous threat.
TWENTY-SIX
A twelve-hour time difference separated Washington, D.C., and the small fleet of vessels approaching Antarctica. At eight o’clock, the morning shift took over from the night owls in the NUMA communications room, a large, modern workspace that looked something like an air traffic control center.
From there, NUMA teams and vessels were monitored and tracked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all around the globe. Data and communications were sent and received a variety of different ways, the preferred method becoming encrypted satellite communications. It was the most efficient means, the most secure, and the most reliable. Except when it wasn’t working.
Within five minutes of arriving, Bernadette Conry could tell that this was going to be one of those days when all the technology was more trouble than it was worth.
A ten-year NUMA veteran with short dark hair, light green eyes, and a strong sense of duty, Bernadette Conry wore fashionable glasses, little in the way of jewelry, and was known to be a detail-oriented manager.
Her first order of duty on any shift was to run through the list of ongoing operations with the communications specialists, with an eye toward fixing or avoiding any problems. All week long, an uptick in solar flare activity had made that a difficult task.
After going through a lengthy list of ships and operations teams that had experienced trouble during the night, she wondered how naval commanders had even functioned in the days without satellite tracking and
