Without warning

Kipper hopped out again and hurried around to retrieve his phone from the backpack. The signal strength was good, and he was relieved to get a clear dial tone. The call to Barb’s phone stalled before it began, however. A recorded message 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 land line. It went though to voicemail 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 avoid a scene later on. If Barb wasn’t at home, it probably meant they were caught up in a 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 him and Barney 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, towards 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 his friend.

‘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?’ As he spoke, Kipper threaded past a knot of distressed-looking travellers, who were making their way towards a transit bus from a Horizon Air Dash 8. That done, he accelerated towards a vehicle exit up ahead.

‘You’ve seen that thing, haven’t you?’ said Tench, answering Kip’s question with one of his own. ‘Not unless we got attacked by the Death Star or the Go’auld 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 waved clipboard.

The council F-100 bounced up and down as they hit the outer road surface and Kip wrenched it around before gunning it towards the next exit. There appeared to be a couple of dozen soldiers on duty around this part of 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, Barney,’ said Kipper, breaking the silence. ‘I didn’t think – you got family back east.’

Tench 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 in the front line of a fight against something that had the power to zap a whole continent, they were all in deep, deep shit.

* * * *

9

MV DIAMANTINA, PACIFIC OCEAN, WEST OF ACAPOLCO

‘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 and neither one even noticeable as it had passed under the hull. The thing to the north was nothing like a tsunami. And, some five hundred and seventy nautical miles offshore from Acapulco, 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, Pete?’ asked Jules with a much cooler demeanour. ‘That bloody thing starts below the horizon. 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 main mast 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?’