Without Warning (11 page)

“I reckon it came from space,” said the airman, a native of New Orleans to judge by his accent. “Something like a black hole that brushed up against us.”

He was young, with a smattering of pimples on his fleshy pink jowls.

“Black holes don’t really brush up against anything,” said Kipper. “They suck in whole planets and crush them to a singularity.”

He’d seen that on the Discovery Channel once. It made him feel better to have something to say.

“A singu-what now, sir?” asked the airman.

“A singularity,” said Kipper. “It’s, uh, where energy and matter get crushed down into a single state that is so small it’s almost not even there.”

“Shit,” said the young man. “Well, I guess that ain’t no singularity out there.”

“Nope,” agreed Kipper. “Guess not.”

“Do you know what we’re gonna do about it, sir, to turn it off?”

Kipper could see from the strain around the boy’s eyes that he was really asking another question.
How are we gonna make this better? How are we going to get our world back?

“Son,” said Kipper, who felt old enough to call the airman that, “you and I are going to do our jobs. And somebody, somewhere else, is gonna see to punching lights out on this motherfucker.”

“So you think it can be turned off, sir?”

The need in the boy’s voice was almost painful.

Kipper tried for a nonchalant shrug.

“I’m an engineer. I was always taught that if something can be turned on, it can be turned off,” he said.

But he didn’t believe that for a second. Not after seeing the thing with his own eyes.

By the time his flight touched down at Sea-Tac, Kipper had almost forgotten the crash back in the Cascades. As the young guardsman who’d strapped him into his seat in the Blackhawk back in the mountains had explained, there were almost certainly no people on that flight anyway. They’d been “disappeared.” The phrase gave him a twitchy feeling. It was redolent of the bad old days in Chile, where he’d done some contract work for Arthur Andersen on a power-station project back in the eighties. People by the thousands got “disappeared” there. As frightening as that had been, however, it was also comprehensible. Bunch of assholes who looked like they’d been tricked out as opera villains in military drag had simply decided to murder anyone who looked sideways at them.

What he’d seen as soon as the chopper lifted clear of the deep valley in which he’d been trekking was entirely
in
comprehensible. The brooding mass of the Cascades still blocked from view a good deal of what the guardsmen were calling “the wave,” but the goddamned thing was reared up so high he could still see it anyway, soaring off toward space somewhere beyond the skyline of the ranges. That was bad enough, but what they’d told him about the effect of this “wave” had drilled a cold, dead finger bone into his heart. Hundreds of millions of people, gone. Whole cities, close enough to the whole country, empty. Ships plowing into ports and exploding. Cars just veering off the road, uncontrolled, crashing into each other because nobody was behind the wheel. Planes falling out of the sky, as he’d seen with his very own eyes earlier that day. It’d been happening all over. Still was, in fact. The Air National Guard had jets up right now, waiting for half a dozen flights whose tracks were due to take them over Seattle. They’d been authorized to shoot them down well short of the city.

Kipper caught himself obsessively twisting and wrenching one of the straps on his backpack as he tried to imagine what had happened, what bizarre correlation of physical forces might have done such a thing. He couldn’t think of a single explanation. He was a civil engineer, a good one, but he maintained a professional interest in related fields, and indeed in most of the hard sciences. As a young boy he’d wanted to be an astronaut—who hadn’t?—but he wasn’t one for uniforms and taking orders and sucking up
a lot of chickenshit nonsense. So he’d refused to go down the path his old man had been pushing him toward, a career in the air force. He loved building things, not blowing them up. He’d never quite gotten the bug out of his system, though, and a lot of his downtime consisted of reading the sort of scientific journals to which he might have contributed had he pulled on a space suit for real, instead of just in his dreams.

But nothing he’d ever read or learned or seen in his private or professional experience went one inch toward explaining what the hell had happened while he’d been off on his precious fucking nature walk.

As the C-130 dropped toward the tarmac with a dense, industrial roar, Kipper shook himself out of his thoughts like a dog throwing off pond water. The plane touched down on a patch of concrete apron north of the control tower, affording him a good view of both runways and the terminal complex. He could see right away that things weren’t normal. There was an unusually large number of planes on the ground, and none taking off. In one glance he could make out the logos of half a dozen stranded carriers. Midwest. JetBlue. Frontier. China Airlines. They all had flights parked by terminals they wouldn’t normally use. A bunch of 737s and MD-80s from Alaska Airlines had huddled together, a bit like an old wagon train, down near the fire station, while a collection of jumbos and long haulers from overseas had gathered at the southern end of the airport. As his plane rumbled along the tarmac, a United Airlines Airbus aborted a landing with a scream of turbines and a building roar as she heaved herself back into the sky again. Kipper craned out of the cabin to see if he could spot whatever had gone wrong, but the guardsmen were already popping harnesses and hurrying him out of the aircraft.

“This way, sir,” a woman in a Nomex flight suit yelled at him, pressing a firm hand on his shoulder. “Follow me.”

Kipper did as he was told, crouching slightly for no good reason. It just seemed appropriate. The airport was a thunderbowl of screaming engines, jet exhaust, and speeding vehicles, all of it controlled in some vague, chaotic way by hundreds of scurrying, shouting men and women in coveralls and earphones. There were a lot more military uniforms than he was used to seeing, as well. The engineer allowed himself to be led across to a waiting pickup with city markings, where Barney Tench, a huge unkempt figure in khaki drill pants and a faded blue shirt, was waiting for him, looking worried.

Tench came forward, holding out his hand, shaking his head.

“Man, am I glad to you see you, buddy,” he called out over the background roar. “Thought we might have lost you up there, Kip. We lost a lot of people
upstate. I think Locke’s gone, Owen too. Nobody can find the mayor either, but Nickells wasn’t scheduled to be out of town, so maybe he’ll turn up. It’s chaos, man. Fucking chaos.”

His friend sounded unbalanced, which was one of the more disturbing developments of the morning. Barney Tench was usually as phlegmatic as a statue. Nothing upset him. It was why Kipper had insisted on hauling him in all the way from Pittsburgh when he’d taken the city engineer’s job. There’d been some grumbling about him hiring an old college beer buddy, but that had fallen away as Barn had settled into the job. You couldn’t ask for a better right-hand man.

Except that at this moment, his strong right hand was trembling and pale.

Kipper threw his gear in the back of the truck, yelled his thanks to the aircrew who’d picked him up, and climbed up into the driver’s-side seat, motioning for Barney to follow.

“Okay, Barn, gimme the keys. I’ll drive, you chill the fuck out, and we’ll deal with this like we would any problem. Step by step. First. Has anyone spoken to Barbara since you got my number off her? She’ll be freaking out wanting to know I’m okay.”

Barney had the good grace to look guilty.

“I’m sorry, Kip. It’s just been a hell of a morning. And I … well …”

“Okay. Give me your cell. I’ll call her now.”

Barney shook his head.

“No point, man. The nets are jammed. Your sat phone might work, though.”

Kipper took a small, calming breath. “Okay. Two minutes.”

Kipper hopped out again, and hurried around to retrieve his phone from the backpack in which he’d stored it. The signal strength was good, and he was relieved to get a clear dial tone. The call to Barb’s phone, however, stalled before it began. A recorded voice told him that due to higher than normal demand, his call could not be connected. Kip grunted and tried their home phone number, an old-fashioned landline. It went through to voice mail on the fifth ring.

“Hi, honey. It’s me. They got me. I’m back safe. I have to go into the city. When you get home and get this message, stay there. Don’t go out again, okay? Things are gonna be crazy for a while. Love you. Love to Suzie, too.”

He hung up, hoping that would forestall a scene later on. If Barb wasn’t at home it probably meant they were caught up in some traffic jam somewhere, hopefully not for too long. Some of the roads had looked like parking lots on the flight in. It was going to take them a while to drive into town.

“Okay, let’s get going,” he said, climbing back into the cabin.

They pulled away, with Kipper driving south, toward the main terminal building. As they approached, he could tell it was crowded, with thousands of people lining the big glass windows that looked out over the tarmac.

“You got any idea what’s going on, Barn, beyond the headlines?” he asked.

“Wish I did, Kip. This is like a horror movie. First I heard this morning was Ross Reynolds on KUOW saying he thought we’d been nuked or something. Communications went down. Civil-defense alarms went off. Chaos and fucking madness.”

“But it wasn’t an attack?”

Kipper threaded past a knot of distressed-looking travelers who were making their way toward a transit bus from a Horizon Air Dash 8. Then he accelerated toward a vehicle exit up ahead.

“You’ve seen that thing, haven’t you? Not unless we got attacked by the Death Star or something. Right now the whole fucking world is just as weirded out as us.”

Kipper waved off a security guard who seemed intent on holding them up, and accelerated past, paying no respect at all to his frantically waving clipboard.

The F-150 bounced up and down as they hit the outer road surface, and Kip wrenched them around before accelerating toward the next exit. There appeared to be a couple of dozen soldiers on duty around the airport, although what role they were playing he couldn’t tell. Mostly they seemed to be doing traffic control, barring any civilians from leaving the facility.
That’s gonna end in tears,
he thought. Seattle wasn’t the sort of town where folks took well to being dicked around by crew cuts and camouflage. It was a righteous certainty that if he stuck his head outside right now he’d hear some would-be grunge god caterwauling about “fascists” and “Nazis.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kipper. “I didn’t think, Barney. You got family, back East.”

Barney breathed deeply and nodded.

“Everyone has somebody. So do you.”

Kipper said nothing.

His immediate family was here, thank Christ. But his dad was in Kansas City. And he had a sister in New York. Their mother had died three years back. New York and KC, of course, were both behind the Wave.

He knew now why Barney had sounded so bad on the phone. There were some good folks on the city council, as well as a fair leavening of pinheads. But if Seattle was on the front line of a fight against something with the power to zap a whole continent, they were all in deep, deep shit.

“Man, I vote we stay the hell away from that,” said Fifi.

It looked like Hollywood’s idea of a mid-ocean tsunami, a mind-fucking wall of water that stretched across the horizon and reached miles into the sky—which was utter bullshit, of course. The
Diamantina
had struck two tsunamis in the time that Pete had been her skipper, both of them over a thousand nautical miles away from any coast, neither of them even noticeable as they passed under the hull. The thing to the north was nothing like a tsunami. And they were sailing closer to it with every minute.

“No arguments from me, sweetheart,” he agreed. “We’ll keep a safe distance.”

“That’s
not
what I said,” she insisted.

“And how close is that?” asked Jules with a much cooler demeanor. “That bloody thing starts
below
the horizon, Pete. God knows how high it is. If it wanted to reach out and grab us it probably could.”

Pete Holder swung under the boom of the mainmast to get a better view. He frowned.

“I don’t think it’s going to grab anyone, Jules. It’s not alive. It’s not even moving.”

“Whatever,” she said with real exasperation. Whenever she was pissed off with him her voice became even more clipped and correct than normal. “If we have to do this, let’s get it done, and then get the hell out of here, shall we?”

By “this” she meant boarding the luxury cruiser they’d intercepted on their run toward the Mexican coast. The vessel, an enormous aluminum and composite superyacht, was obviously unmanned. It wasn’t drifting, but the engines were pushing it along on a southerly heading at just a nudge over six knots. It had emerged from behind the screen of the energy wave two hours earlier, easily visible on the
Diamantina
‘s radar. Pete had thought nothing of it until Mr. Lee had come to drag him away from the news feed on the computer. Lee’s incomparable pirate’s eye had spotted something very special on the horizon.