• • •
Two kilometers to the east, Captain Korvold was staring through his binoculars at the Divine Starwhen 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 Starcascaded 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 Narvikbegan 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 Starevaporated, 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 Invinciblestill 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 Gertwas twisted and thrown on one side, the hull plates saucered inward between her frame and longitudinal beams. Like the Narvik, the Invinciblehad 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 Invincibleand Old Gertwere 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. The Invinciblewas about to take her own journey to the abyss.
The urge to live surged within him, and then Knox was scrambling up a slanted deck, too dazed to feel the pain from his injuries. Charging in panic through the door to the crane deck, he dodged around the dead bodies and over the devastated steel equipment that sprawled everywhere. Fear took the place of shock and built to a tight, expanding ball inside him.
He reached the twisted remains of the railing. Without a backward glance, he climbed over and stepped into the waiting sea. A splintered piece of a wooden crate bobbed in the water a few meters away. He swam awkwardly until he could clasp it under one arm and float. Only then did he turn and look at the Invincible.
She was sinking by the stern, her bows lifting above the Pacific swell. She seemed to hang there for a minute, sailing toward the clouds as she slipped backward at an ever increasing speed and disappeared, leaving a few bits of flotsam and a cauldron of churned water that soon subsided into a few bubbles tinted in rainbow colors by the spilled oil.
Frantically Knox searched the sea for other members of the Invincible‘s crew. There was an eerie hush now that the groans of the sinking ship had passed. There were no lifeboats, no heads of men swimming in the sea.
He found himself the only survivor of a tragedy that had no explanation.
5
BENEATH THE SURFACE, the shock wave traveled through the incompressible water at roughly 6,500 kilometers per hour in an expanding circle, crushing all sea life in its path. Old Gertwas saved from instant destruction by the canyon walls. They towered above the submersible, shielding it from the main force of the explosive pressure.