“Sir, we don’t have enough fuel to make landfall anywhere.”
“Do as Admiral Poldan ordered. Get close to one of your escort ships and punch out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All escort ships, this is Captain Robinette. Close on the last location of the Washington and recover whoever managed to get off, then get the hell out of there.”
Lewis handed Duncan several more sheets of imagery. She laid them out in front of her. The KH-14 had tracked the George Washington as it headed toward the black cover of the guardian shield. Duncan stared at the pictures, focusing on the warped flight deck. Laying the images out in time sequence, she could see the progression of something moving outward from the rear flight deck. In one of the photos an F-14 had sat next to the warp. In the next one, the rear half of the plane was gone. In the next, it was gone entirely.
“Ms. Duncan, this is Captain Robinette.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Do you have the imagery?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
“Let me check on something,” she said. She pulled out the papers she had been faxed from the NSA regarding what the guardian had accessed through the Interlink.
While she was doing that, Captain Robinette filled her in. “CINCPAC has ordered the rest of Task Force 78 to back off to a minimum of two hundred miles from Easter Island after picking up the survivors.”
“What about the Washington?”
“We still don’t know what happened to it, but at the speed and direction it’s moving it’ll go under the shield in about ten minutes, and then we estimate it will hit the shore of Easter Island.”
“How many people got off?” she asked.
“We don’t know yet. It’s pretty confused out there right now.”
Duncan stopped at a certain page as it suddenly occurred to her what she was looking at. “Jesus, we gave it to the damn thing.”
“Gave who what?”
“The guardian. Nanotechnology.”
“What?” Robinette repeated.
Duncan was remembering scientific briefings she’d received. “I think the Washington was attacked by a virus.”
“A virus?” Robinette sounded skeptical. “How can a virus do that to metal?”
“Because the virus is made of metal. Microscopic robots.”
“What the hell do they want the Washington for?” Robinette demanded. “To make more of themselves.”
CHAPTER 14
A seemingly irresistible force hitting an immovable object. Never in the history of man-made objects had something so large headed for something so solid at such a high rate of speed.
Foam spewed from beneath the bow of the USS Washington as it steamed at flank speed, almost forty miles an hour, toward the rocky shore of Easter Island. The alien shield had briefly turned off, allowing it to pass through, and now the land was less than half a mile away. Displacing over a hundred thousand tons, its momentum was so great that even if the order had been given for full reverse to the ship’s engine room, there was no way it could avoid hitting the island at this point. But there was no one on the bridge who was capable of giving an order and no one in the engine room who would have been able to respond.
The massive moai statues of the Ahu Nau Nau Grouping, just above one of only two beaches on the island, Anakena on the north side, stood tall on their ahus stone platform, gazing with stone eyes at the ship rapidly approaching them.
The bow hit the bottom less than a hundred meters from shore. It made the Titanic hitting the iceberg seem like a fender bender. Steel sheared the coral off, splintering into the rock beneath even as the ship continued to close on shore, slowing only slightly.
As steel and rock fought, the island gradually won the battle. The Washington came to a halt, over two hundred meters of ship out of water and on the beach. Below the waterline, over 150 meters of the ship had been crushed, gouging out a twenty-meter-deep trench in the rock below leading up to the shore. The forward edge of the flight deck had crumpled from the destruction of the ship below.
With the last screech of tearing metal bouncing off the rim of Rano Kau, silence once again came to the island.
“Jesus!” The Springfield’s sonarman ripped off his headset and threw it down on the console. “The carrier’s hitting the island!”
Standing behind him, Captain Forster could hear the terrible sound of the Washington hitting Easter Island, relayed by the one thousand hydrophones arrayed in the sonar sphere in the front end of his submarine, echoing out the phones.
The sound grew louder to the point where every member of the crew could plainly hear it reverberating through the hull. Then silence.
The Springfield rested on the bottom, four hundred meters below the surface and just outside the shield. Two foo fighters hung in the water nearby, little golden orbs, three feet across, with the power to destroy the heavily armed submarine.
Even as he tried to imagine what could have happened to the Washington, Forster was looking at the displays on the screens in front of him. Able to use only their passive systems, he was working half blind. They had followed the sound of the carrier heading toward the island and now could pick up the other ships in the task force moving about.
“What’s that?” Forster pointed at one screen. It “painted” a map of the seafloor around them, leading up to the slightly curved line that indicated the shield surrounding Easter Island less than a mile away. There was now a small anomaly along a curved line, showing how the sound had partially reflected off the alien shield.
“I don’t know, sir,” the sonarman answered. “It wasn’t there before, but the shield went off for about thirty seconds as the carrier went through, then back on.”
“Overlay the bottom chart,” Forster added.
The computer screen cleared for a second, then the image was superimposed on a hydrographic chart of the sea bottom. A line between Forster’s eyes narrowed as he located the anomaly. It was where a very narrow and steep cut bisected the ocean bottom, where the Washington had dug a channel out of the rock. The shield had not snapped back into place there because the gap had not existed before. “I do believe we might have found a hole in the shield around the island.”
Major Quinn had the orbit of the talon plotted on the main board in the Cube with a thick blue line. It was moving slowly eastward over the United States, leaving behind the destruction it had caused in Montana. A thick red line represented the Stratzyda’s track, now over the North Pole and heading south across the Atlantic.
Quinn typed in a command and dotted lines, the same colors, shot out from each track. They intersected over the middle of the Atlantic.
“Hoping something changed?” Larry Kincaid stood behind Quinn’s command console.
”Someone could have made a mistake in projecting the paths,” Quinn said.
“No mistake,” Kincaid said. “It’s physics, pure and simple. They intersect in twenty-two hours. Let’s be glad that Lexina doesn’t have any maneuvering control and has to wait for the spin of the Earth and the drifting path of the talon to intersect with Stratzyda’s. Then wait again for both to drift over the center of the United States. They both have to drift east, across Asia, the Pacific, and then over target in thirty-one hours.”