“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
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
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.”