Dragon

“So has a manned flight to Mars, but the rocketry to get there has yet to be built. Nor has a monster dredge. I know a lot of people in marine engineering, and I haven’t heard even a vague rumor about such a project. No mining operation of this magnitude can be kept secret. It’d take a surface fleet of at least five ships and thousands of men working for years. And there is no way they could pull it off without detection by passing ships or satellites.”

Stacy looked blankly at Salazar. “Any way of telling when it happened?”

Salazar shrugged. “Could have been yesterday, could have been years ago.”

“But who then?” Stacy asked in a vague tone. “Who is responsible for such technology?”

No one immediately answered. Their discovery did not fit accepted beliefs. They stared at the empty swath with silent disbelief, a fear of the unknown trickling down their necks.

Finally Plunkett gave an answer that seemed to come distantly, from outside the submersible. “No one on this earth, no one who is human.”

4

STEEN WAS ENTERING into a state of extreme emotional shock. He stared numbly at the blisters forming on his arms. He trembled uncontrollably, half mad from the shock and a sudden abdominal pain. He doubled over and retched, his breath coming in great heaves. Everything seemed to be striking him at once. His heart began beating erratically and his body burned up with fever.

He felt too weak to make it back to the communications compartment and warn Korvold. When the captain of the Norwegian ship received no replies from his signals to Steen, he would send another boarding party to see what was wrong. More men would die uselessly.

Steen was drenched in sweat now. He stared at the car with the raised hood and his eyes glazed with a strange hatred. A stupor descended over him, and his crazed mind saw an indescribable evil in the steel, leather, and rubber.

As if in a final act of defiance, Steen took vengeance against the inanimate vehicle. He pulled the Steyr automatic he’d found in the captain’s quarters from under his waistband and raised the barrel. Then he squeezed the trigger and pumped the bullets into the front end of the car.

•   •   •

Two kilometers to the east, Captain Korvold was staring through his binoculars at the Divine Star when she blew herself out of existence, vaporizing in the final blink of his eyes.

A monstrous fireball erupted with a blue brilliance whose intensity was greater than the sun. White hot gasses instantly burst over an area four kilometers in diameter. A hemispherical condensation cloud formed and spread out like a vast doughnut, its interior quickly burned out by the fireball.

The surface of the sea was beaten down in a great bowl-like depression three hundred meters across. Then an immense column consisting of millions of tons of water rose into the sky, its walls sprouting thousands of horizontal geysers, each as large as the Narvik.

The shock wave raced from the fireball like an expanding ring around Saturn, speeding outward with a velocity approaching five kilometers a second. It struck the Narvik, pulping the ship into a formless shape.

Korvold, standing in the open on the bridge wing, did not see the holocaust. His eyes and brain had no time to record it. He was carbonized within a microsecond by thermal radiation from the explosion’s fireball. His entire ship rose out of the water and was tossed back as if struck down by a giant sledgehammer. A molten rain of steel fragments and dust from the Divine Star cascaded the Narvik‘s shattered decks. Fire burst from her ruptured hull and engulfed the shattered vessel. And then explosions deep in her bowels. The containers on her cargo deck were tossed away like leaves before a gust from a hurricane.

There was no time for hoarse, tortured screams. Anyone caught on deck flared like a match, crackled, and was gone. The entire ship became an instant funeral pyre to her 250 passengers and crew.

The Narvik began to list, settling fast. Within five minutes of the explosion she rolled over. Soon only a small portion of her bottom was visible, and then she slid under the agitated waters and vanished in the depths.

Almost as suddenly as the Divine Star evaporated, it was over. The great cauliflower-shaped cloud that had formed over the fireball slowly scattered and became indistinguishable from the overcast. The shimmering fury of the water calmed, and the surface smoothed but for the rolling swells.

Twelve kilometers across the sea the Invincible still floated. The incredible pressure of the shock wave had not yet begun to diminish when its full force smashed into the survey ship. Her superstructure was gutted and stripped away, exposing interior bulkheads. Her funnel tore from its mountings and whirled into the boiling water as the bridge disappeared in a violent shower of steel and flesh.

Her masts were bent and distorted, the big crane used to retrieve Old Gert was twisted and thrown on one side, the hull plates saucered inward between her frame and longitudinal beams. Like the Narvik, the Invincible had been beaten into a formless shape that was almost unrecognizable as a ship.

The paint on her sides had blistered and blackened under the fiery blast. A plume of black oily smoke billowed from her smashed port side and lay like a boiling carpet over the water around her hull. The heat bored right through anyone exposed in the open. Those below decks were badly injured by concussion and flying debris.

Jimmy Knox had been thrown violently into an unyielding steel bulkhead, bouncing backward and gasping for air as if he was in a vacuum. He wound up flat on his back, spread-eagled, staring up stunned through a gaping hole that appeared as if by magic in the ceiling.

He lay there waiting for the shock to pass, struggling to concentrate on his predicament, wondering in a fog what had happened to his world. Slowly he gazed around the compartment at the bent bulkheads, seeing the heavily damaged electronic equipment that looked like a robot with its guts pulled out, smelling the smoke from the fires, and he felt the hysteria of a child who had lost his parents in a crowd.

He looked through the slash above into the bridge housing and chart room. They had been gutted into a tortured skeleton of deformed beams. The wheelhouse was a smoldering shambles that was now a crypt for burned and broken men, whose blood dripped into the compartments below.

Knox rolled to his side and groaned in sudden agony caused by three broken ribs, a twisted ankle, and a sea of bruises. Very slowly he pushed himself to a sitting position. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, surprised they had remained perched on his nose during the incomprehensible devastation.

Slowly the dark curtain of shock parted, and his first thought was of Old Gert. Straight from a nightmare he could see the submersible damaged and out of contact in the blackness of the deep.

He crawled across the deck in a daze on hands and knees, fighting back the pain, until he could reach up and grasp the receiver to the underwater telephone.

“Gert?” he burst out fearfully. “Do you read?”

He waited several seconds, but there was no reply. He swore in a low monotone.

“Damn you, Plunkett! Talk to me, you bastard!”

His only answer was silence. All communications between the Invincible and Old Gert were broken. His worst fears were realized. Whatever force had battered the survey ship must have traveled through the water and mangled the submersible that was already subjected to incredible pressures.

“Dead,” he whispered. “Crushed to pulp.”

His mind suddenly turned to his shipmates, and he called out. He heard only the groan and screech of metal from the dying ship. He moved his eyes to the open doorway and focused on five bodies sprawled in untidy, stiff attitudes like cast-off display mannequins.

He sat fixed in grief and incomprehension. Dimly he felt the ship shudder convulsively, the stern slipping around and sliding beneath the waves as though caught in a whirlpool. Concussions reverberated all around him.