Zero Hour

“Could this be an effect of the aurora?” he asked.

Hayley pulled back trembling. “It’s not the aurora,” she said. There was a chill in her voice. The sound of fear.

“What is it?”

“Electromagnetic discharge,” she said. “It’s a side effect of disturbing the zero-point field.”

“Because of your sensor?”

“No,” she said, shaking. “It’s not us. It’s Thero.”

The sea flickered again, much brighter this time, and the ship lurched downward. It happened so suddenly that Kurt and Hayley were flung to the deck. The bow dug into the water, and a towering wall of spray blasted up into the air and then fell in sheets around them.

Kurt pulled himself up and looked aft. A line of foam stretched out into the dark, straight as a ruler and perpendicular to their path, but he saw no retreating wave.

“Kurt,” Hayley cried.

He swung his eyes forward. The ocean was flickering again, a pale blue-green, just enough to show its contours in the dark. Fifty yards ahead, another line was forming on the sea. It peeled back like skin being cleaved open and formed a deep trough right in front of them. It stretched across the ocean in a straight line, but it wasn’t a wave. There was no raised vertical component to it. It was more like a gap in the water, like a drainage ditch cut across a road.

The Orion hit this gap at a slight angle. The ship rolled awkwardly as she plunged into it.

Kurt wrapped one arm around Hayley, crushing her to him with all his strength and lacing his other arm through the rail.

The ship’s bow knifed into the bottom of the trough, all but submarining. It was already rising as it reached the far side, coming up in a corkscrew motion, and flinging Kurt and Hayley into the air like riders who’d been tossed off a prize bull.

They landed on the deck just as a second curtain of icy water cascaded down upon them, soaking them to the bone.

Kurt tasted the salt of the water. It stung his eyes and the abrasions he’d taken from the first impact. Without waiting for her to stand, he grabbed Hayley, pulled her up and began ru

A foot of water had covered the foredeck. It sloshed out through the drainage holes, taking Hayley’s printed papers along for the ride.

A klaxon blared above them, and Kurt realized it was the ship’s alarm sounding for a collision. The ship was turning hard.

“Brace for impact!” the captain’s voice called over the loudspeakers. “All hands, brace for impact!”

Kurt glanced forward, looking past the bow. The ship’s lights had come on, illuminating a new trough directly in front of them, perhaps a hundred yards off. This one was deeper and wider than the other one, wide enough to swallow the ship. From Kurt’s angle, it looked like the edge of a great cliff in the center of the sea, an edge they were about to go over.

The Orion leaned hard over as the rudder hit the stops. Kurt felt the vessel shudder as the props went into reverse.

One look told Kurt it wasn’t going to be enough.

He pulled the hatch open and shoved Hayley through, scrambling inside right behind her and slamming the steel door shut. He wrenched the handle down, locking it just as the deck began to fall out from beneath him.

A moment of weightlessness followed, like they were on some gigantic amusement ride. Then Kurt was slammed into the deck. A tremendous boom reverberated throughout the ship, like a dozen ca

A muted silence followed, and Kurt knew the ship had gone under. If she was buttoned up tight, she would come to the surface again. But, for the moment, Kurt couldn’t feel her rising.

Several seconds went by before the momentum of the ship changed and she began to rise, several more before the sea released her.

She heaved up, bursting free of the water, and then crashing back down like a breaching whale. Kurt pulled Hayley to her feet and helped her forward.

They reached the bridge to find water sloshing about. One of the windows had been shattered and smashed in completely. The captain was hanging on the wheel, a bloody gash across his jaw. The XO was down on the floor and out cold, having been flung against the far bulkhead.

Joe was slamming a metal plate into the slot where the shattered window had been. He wrenched a lever tight, locking it into place just as the main lights went out.

“Power’s gone!” the captain said.

The sea flashed again, a beautiful and deadly blue that raced outward in all directions. Another trough began opening in front of them, the waters parting like the Red Sea.

The ship was still moving as the lip of the disturbance raced underneath them. She dropped once again.

In the darkness it was terrifying, a free fall that lasted for seconds but seemed endless. As the ship hit the bottom of the trough, the jarring impact was accompanied by the sound of wrenching metal. Rivets popped as high up as the bridge and, somewhere deep, the keel broke. As if to finish them off, the towering walls of seawater slammed together around the Orion like giant hands clapping.

This last act of the angry sea might have killed everyone on board, except that the two great hands spent most of their energy smashing each other. As they rebounded off each other, the current they created dragged the stricken vessel to the surface.

She came up for only a minute and was soon awash and sinking.

The bridge was flooded from the impact, with the remaining windows smashed out. The water was frigid, cutting into one’s skin like knives.

Kurt still had his arm around Hayley. In the glimmer of the emergency light, he saw Joe opening a life-raft container, and Captain Winslow desperately trying to order the crew to abandon ship.

Kurt grabbed a life jacket, pulled it over Hayley’s head and cinched it tight.

“Stay with Joe!” he shouted.

She nodded as Kurt waded to where the XO had fallen. Heaving him up, he passed the unconscious man to the captain and then glanced at the stairwell to the lower deck.

He saw a crewman staggering upward as the water flooded down upon him. The man was injured. He could hardly fight the current. Kurt pulled him up and passed him to Hayley, who helped him into a life jacket of his own. Holding the rail, Kurt began to climb down.

“There’s no use,” the crewman said, “they’re all gone. Those that weren’t pulled out when she broke are drowned. It’s all water below this deck.”

Kurt ignored him, splashing down into the stairwell and diving into the icy black liquid. He inched forward, one hand on the wall, the other outstretched and numbly feeling around for any sign of a crewman. He found no one and turned back.

When he came up, water was pouring in through the shattered windows again. The top of the bridge was all that remained above water.

Joe grabbed him under the arm and yanked him free of the stairwell. “I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” he shouted, dragging Kurt to the hatch and toward the inflated orange raft.

Joe flung Kurt onto the raft and jumped on behind him. His momentum carried them away as the Orion sank beneath the waves. It vanished to the sound of random, muffled explosions as the last air pockets in the ship were purged one by one.

Kurt glanced around. Aside from the single crewman who’d struggled up from belowdecks, only those on the bridge had escaped.

The hexagonal life raft rolled up on one of the low swells, and Kurt stared into the dark, his eyes straining for any sign of another raft or anyone in the water. He saw nothing. But neither did he see another flash like those that had preceded the strange ruts appearing in the sea. “Do we have any flares?”

Joe dug into the raft’s survival kit. “Six,” he said. “Three white, three red.”