Oracle

TWENTY-TWO

Jade felt a sudden misgiving as she stepped out onto the pier at the Nassau Harbor Marina. Directly ahead, moored at the first slip, was the bright yellow outline of the R/V Quest Explorer, a two hundred-fifty foot search and recovery ship owned and operated by Quest Maritime Incorporated. QMI billed itself as a private marine archaeological venture, but they were essentially treasure hunters on a grand scale, and not above renting their services out to paying customers; especially customers with the kind of money that Ophelia brought to the table. Yet, it was not the nearness of the search vessel that had shaken Jade’s confidence, but rather the enormous, city-sized cruise ships that were docked just beyond the Quest Explorer. There were three of them; eight hundred foot long behemoths, each capable of carrying nearly three thousand passengers and crew. These ships came and went daily, bearing tens of thousands of tourists, some arriving by sea, others flying into nearby Lynden Pindling International Airport, where Jade herself had landed only forty-five minutes earlier. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of visitors, roaming what were, if sensational reports were to be believed, the most dangerous waters on earth.

Somehow, the Bermuda Triangle didn’t seem quite so mysterious when you were in it. What had seemed like an earthshaking revelation just two days earlier, now felt more like a histrionic juvenile fantasy.

Did I get this wrong?

She cast a sidelong glance at Professor, whom she knew had spent the last two days undertaking a comprehensive review of incidents attributed to the Bermuda Triangle in an effort to focus their search. He had promised to present his findings as soon as they were aboard. His faintly smug expression told Jade there was an I told you so in her future.

A slender man with prematurely silver hair, wearing a bright red polo shirt with QMI emblazoned on the left breast, awaited them at the gangplank. He stepped forward and introduced himself, conspicuously directing his comments to Ophelia as if the rest of them were just hangers-on. “Welcome to Nassau. I’m Cliff Barry, VP in charge of special projects, and the Chief Mate aboard the Explorer.” He grinned. “Don’t worry about trying to remember all that. We all wear a lot of hats. If you need anything, just ask the first person you see wearing a shirt like mine, and if they can’t help you, they’ll find someone who can. Your equipment arrived earlier this morning, so we’re ready to cast off. The sooner we get on board, the sooner we’ll find what you’re looking for.”

Barry seemed more interested in getting everyone aboard than in learning names, so Ophelia merely thanked him and motioned for him to lead the way. Two crewmen met them at the top of the ramp and took their luggage, while Barry ushered them into the superstructure to a lavishly appointed salon that looked like a cross between the lounge of a five-star hotel and a nautical museum.

“Nice place,” Jade remarked.

“We had to dress it up a bit for the cameras,” Barry said with an airy wave. “I’m afraid the rest of the ship is a bit less luxurious.”

“Cameras?”

Barry’s friendly manner seemed to grow a few degrees cooler. “For the television series.” He gave an indifferent shrug. “If you want to get settled here, I’ll let Mr. Nichols know that you’re aboard so we can get underway.”

After he left, Jade turned to Professor. “Television series?”

He laughed. “Ask a red shirt.”

“QMI also produces a cable television series about marine archaeology,” Ophelia supplied. “Don’t worry. I don’t think it’s still on the air, and in any event, I’ve been assured that there are no cameras aboard. We don’t need to be worried about showing up on the History channel.”

“I’m a little more worried about the Norfolk Group putting in a surprise appearance,” Jade said. “This is all a little high-profile.”

“My brother has assured me that we need not worry about them anymore,” Ophelia said.

Jade did not feel assured, but before she could express her concerns, a faint vibration began to rise up from the deck. She felt a gentle rocking motion as the Quest Explorer began moving. Through one of the small porthole windows, which Jade suspected were more decorative than functional, the harbor and surrounding landscape moved by more quickly as the ship picked up speed.

A few minutes later, Barry returned, accompanied by two men. Both were older and had craggy weathered faces that bespoke a lifetime spent working in the elements. One man was tall and broad, with a mane of white hair, and wore a blue denim shirt that looked like working attire, but sported a conspicuous designer label. The other man was balding, and the gin blossoms flecking his nose made his already ruddy complexion look ever redder. He had the start of a paunch, which strained the lower buttons of his white uniform blouse with black epaulets.

“Ladies and gentleman,” Barry began, “This is Mr. Kit Nichols, president and founder of QMI…” The man in the denim shirt waved.

“And Spencer Lee, Master of the Ship.”

Lee’s demeanor was aloof, but Nichol’s effusive manner more than made up for it.

“Ms. Doerner. I’ve heard a great deal about you, but nobody told me how lovely you are. A pity we’re not filming. You’re about the prettiest sight I’ve ever seen on this old tub. And who else do we have with us?”

Ophelia began the introductions. “This is Dr. Chapman…”

The two men shook hands. “Call me Professor. Everyone does.”

“Love the hat. Professor of what, exactly?”

“Oh, this and that.”

Nichols laughed heartily.

“This is Dr. Dorion,” Ophelia continued. “He’ll be handling most of the technical aspects of the search.”

Nichols shook Dorion’s hand. “Just give Cliff your laundry list. And who is this?” He stopped in front of Jade and stared at her with a mischievous grin. “Saved the best for last.”

Ophelia started to answer, but Jade spoke first matching the older man’s smile. “I’m Jade,” she said simply, eschewing the use of titles. She kind of liked Nichols, but decided to reserve judgment on the others.

Nichols executed a half-bow, then gestured to the ship’s master. “Captain Lee here probably remembers when it was considered bad luck to have a woman on board a ship. Thankfully, we live in more enlightened times, but all the same, I hope that the presence of two lovely ladies doesn’t prove distracting to the crew.”

“I’m not the crusty old barnacle that Kit seems to think I am,” Lee said without much enthusiasm. “But if it’s all the same, I’d like to get down to business. I need to know exactly where we’re going.”

Ophelia gestured to Professor. “You have the floor, Dr. Chapman.”

Professor approached Lee and handed him a slip of paper. “Captain, set course for these coordinates. I’ll explain the reasons as soon as I get my computer set up.”

Lee departed, evidently more concerned with where they were going than why.

A few minutes later, they were all staring at a map of the North Atlantic region off the east coast of the United States. There was a conspicuous red triangle connecting Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.

Jade sensed a lecture coming on.

“This is the so-called Bermuda Triangle,” he said. “Or at least one version of it. These borders are arbitrary. From what I can tell, the term Bermuda Triangle first appeared in an article written by Vincent Gaddis in a 1964 pulp magazine; maybe the idea of a definite shape was sexier or something. In any case, the name stuck and people have been selling the myth ever since. The reality is a little more prosaic.”

Here comes the ‘I told you so,’ Jade thought.

“According to the most sensational reports, over a thousand ships have been lost in this region — which incidentally is an area of about a million and a half square miles, or more than twice the size of Alaska — in just over five hundred years of record keeping. Now, a thousand sounds like a big number, but if you average it out, that’s just two a year. When you consider that this is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and that Hurricane Alley runs right through it, two ships a year makes it a pretty safe area, statistically speaking.

“What’s more, a lot of the reports have been exaggerated, duplicated or simply fabricated from whole cloth. Many of them are simply stories that have been repeated so many times that there’s no way to go back and source them. If you cull the record down to disappearances of ships and planes that remain officially unexplained, you’re looking at maybe two dozen, but even most of those have a simple, mundane explanation.”

He touched a key on his computer and the map was replaced by a black and white photograph of a ship.

“The disappearance of the USS Cyclops in 1918 is a prime example of what I mean. The Cyclops shows up in almost every account of the Bermuda Triangle as proof of unexplained phenomena, and yet the facts of the case are that the Cyclops was overloaded, had lost one of its engines, may have been structurally unsound, and probably got hit by a storm. Any one of those factors could have doomed her. But that explanation is too boring for Triangle nuts.”

“That’s not all that’s boring,” Jade muttered.

“I heard that young lady.”

“Can’t you just give us a handout, or assigned reading?”

“It gets better, I promise.” Professor clicked another key and the image changed to a picture of several World War II era planes flying in formation. Jade sat up a little straighter. Maybe this wasn’t going to be an I told you so after all.

“Flight 19 is what really started people talking about mysterious phenomena. On December 5, 1945, a squadron of torpedo planes took off from Fort Lauderdale on a training exercise. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but the bottom line is that the pilots got lost in a place where they shouldn’t have gotten lost. It’s like those stories where people wander around in a blizzard and die within twenty feet of their front door. There was bad weather, but the squadron was in radio contact with the mainland for most of the flight. All they had to do was turn west and they would have found Florida, but they didn’t. The Navy was able to pinpoint their last known location to within fifty miles, but a massive search effort turned up nothing. The planes just vanished.

“Now, there are a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t make too much of this story. This was 1945 after all. Those pilots didn’t have GPS. The planes didn’t even have radar. Someone could have made a mistake calculating their position, which would mean that the searchers were looking in the wrong place. But if we accept the premise that there might be an unusual phenomenon at work in this region, then Flight 19 is the best place to start looking.”

“One of the big problems with conspiracy theories is that their proponents try too hard. In the case of the Bermuda Triangle, speculative writers gathered a lot of extraneous evidence to support the idea that there was this big zone of mystery, but because so much of their evidence can be refuted, it has the opposite effect. Instead of lending weight to their argument, the ninety percent of incidents with a mundane explanation obscure the remaining ten percent that we should be looking at. The first thing we need to do is get the idea of the Triangle out of our heads and focus instead on the area where Flight 19 first began encountering trouble. Somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas.”

He clicked the computer again and the screen changed to a picture of a lighthouse. “Which brings us to an incident that isn’t as well-known as these others, but is still pretty darned spooky.

“This is the lighthouse at Great Isaac Cay, northeast of Bimini and about sixty-five miles due east of Fort Lauderdale. The lighthouse is automated now and most of the buildings have crumbled into ruins, but in 1969, there were two lighthouse keepers stationed there. According to local lore, after Hurricane Anna swept through the islands in early August of that year, the lighthouse went dark. When officials went to the island to investigate, they discovered that the two lighthouse keepers had vanished without a trace.”

Nichols chuckled. “Swept away by the hurricane, no doubt.”

Professor gave patient smile. “That would be a very plausible explanation, but why didn’t the men just hunker down and ride out the storm. I checked the weather data and it turns out that there was no Hurricane Anna. Anna was a tropical storm that peaked on July 29 with maximum sustained winds of seventy miles per hour, and the closest it got to Great Isaac was three days later when the eye passed almost four hundred miles to the east.”

“Four hundred?”

“There may be a mundane explanation for what happened to those men, but then again, maybe not. In any case, it’s one of the incidents that can’t be easily dismissed, just like Flight 19, which incidentally would have passed very close to Great Isaac on the first leg of their mission, before they knew they were in trouble. That gives us two points of…well, if you’ll pardon the pun, triangulation. We’ll start our search there, at Great Isaac Cay.

“Which brings me at last to this,” He hit another button and the picture changed to a screen capture from a webpage. One of the entries was highlighted. “La Nuestra Senõra De La Misericordia was a treasure galleon that sank in 1594. The official record has it going down in the Atlantic off the coast of Portugal, but it’s never been found, and I think I may know why.

“These treasure ships didn’t sail alone; they were usually part of a large fleet, with the slow moving galleons protected by smaller, faster escort ships. It’s rare, though not unheard of, for an entire treasure fleet to be sunk—”

“The Plate Fleet of 1715,” intoned Nichols. “Twelve ships were lost in a hurricane. I looked for it myself a time or two.”

“Exactly. Although in that case as in most others, there were surviving ships that carried the news back to Spain. That’s how we know where to look. But the records going back to 1594 are spotty at best. The details could have gotten confused, but a more likely explanation is that the Spanish reported the location incorrectly in the hopes that they might one day be able to return and salvage it themselves. I think that’s what happened to the Misericordia. She actually went down near Bimini, and I think she took Alvaro and the Moon stone with her. Along with a fortune in Spanish gold.”

“Now you’re speaking my language,” said Nichols.

“You’re welcome to keep whatever gold we find,” Ophelia assured him. “Or rather, I should say, you’re welcome to fight it out with the Spanish government.”

Nichols shrugged. “Goes with the territory. Honestly, I’m too old to care about being rich. I’d rather be famous at this point.”

Well that explains the television show.

“We probably won’t find a wreck per se,” said Professor. “Four hundred years of exposure to salt water will have destroyed the wood and ferrous metals, and whatever’s left is probably buried under a couple tons of sediment. But if there really is some kind of space-time distortion going on, Paul’s clocks should detect it. From there, it’s just a matter of following our noses. The good news is that the wreck site will almost certainly lie on the continental shelf, max depth three hundred feet. Still a bit deep for recreational diving, but a hell of a lot better than twelve hundred.”

“You folks seem to know what you’re doing,” Nichols said, “Bimini is about ten hours out, figure another couple to Great Isaacs. We can start running the search as soon as cook puts out the first pot of coffee.”

He gave Ophelia a long scrutinizing stare. “You know, I’ve been sailing these waters most of my life. I’ve seen some strange things, but nothing to make me believe that there’s anything to these stories about the Bermuda Triangle. It doesn’t bother me that you’re going looking for — how’d Professor there put it? — spooky stuff. Honestly, I wish the cameras were rolling. Spooky stuff gets great ratings. I just want to know that this thing you’re looking for won’t get us all killed or give us cancer or something like that.”

Ophelia smiled. “I won’t make promises I can’t keep, Mr. Nichols. If you wanted safe, you should have chosen a different career.”

Barry gave them a brief tour of the ship’s working areas. Jade didn’t need to hear his explanation of what the “mailbox blowers” did. The big aluminum elbow pipes at the stern could be lowered into place over the ship’s screws, directing the engine thrust straight down to the sea floor, creating an artificial current to sweep tons of sediment away and hopefully uncover buried riches. The blowers were a standard tool of professional treasure hunters, though Jade had never seen boxes as big as the pair on the Quest Explorer.

Much of the deck served as a platform for the boom crane which could be used to deploy the submersible Quest Explorer-Deep, nicknamed “QED,” or retrieve heavy artifacts from the sea floor, like cannon or if they were really lucky, great big chests full of gold ingots.

The QED was parked on the foredeck, covered with heavy tarpaulins and strapped down. It looked smaller than Jade expected and she was a bit dubious about Barry’s claim that it could comfortably seat three people, “and all their cameras and sound equipment.”

The atomic clock Dorion had requested had been air freighted to Nassau ahead of their arrival, loaded aboard and stowed near the submersible. The long plastic shipping container looked ominously like a casket, “You’re welcome to inspect it now,” Barry told him, “but it’s going to be dark soon. Might be easier to wait until morning when you’ll have daylight.”

Dorion accepted this without protest and they continued the tour with a cursory glance at the engine room, finishing at their staterooms, which were nicer than some hotels Jade had slept in, but not on par with the salon. Jade’s luggage — which consisted only of a single carry-on size suitcase containing clothes and sundry items she had had picked up before leaving Greece — was waiting on the bed. There was nothing particularly essential in the case. She patted the pocket where she was keeping the Shew Stone — after Delphi, she had not let it out of her sight — then leaving everything where it was, headed back to the salon for dinner.

She found Professor standing on the deck, staring out across the water. “Hey sailor,” she called out, and then immediately wondered why she had.

He turned to her with an easy smile. “Careful. People will talk.”

She had to fight the urge to hit back with a barbed comment, maybe something about how people might talk about the time he had spent in Delphi with Ophelia. “Actually, I wanted to thank you for not shooting me down earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, you’re always Mr. Voice of Reason. You’re the last person I would expect to become a believer.”

He laughed. “‘Mr. Voice of Reason’? Jade, we’re scientists. It’s not about what we believe; it’s about going where the evidence leads. We already know there’s some weird science at work in the world. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’ as the Bard would say. So, when I went down the list of so-called Bermuda Triangle phenomena, I had to consider space-time distortions as a possible factor.”

“Yeah, well, thanks all the same.”

“Sure thing. Just remember, we’re scientists. Belief is for people who don’t have enough facts to back up their position. We go where the—” He trailed off, his eyes leaving her face and roving to the horizon.

“What?”

“Great Isaac Key is west-northwest of Nassau. The sun should be just off the port bow.”

Jade looked toward the orange orb of the setting sun. It was almost perfectly centered on the western horizon, parallel to the course of the ship. “We’re heading due north.”

Professor turned away without confirming the statement and headed for the stairs that led to the ship’s bridge, with Jade right behind him.

The control room, with its horseshoe-shaped bank of computer screens and other electronic equipment, looked more like something from a science-fiction movie, but there was only one bored crewman present. He sat in one of the fixed swivel chairs in front of the workstation, but was turned away, using the console as an armrest while he read a paperback novel. The crewman raised his eyes, but otherwise made no move to acknowledge their presence.

“What’s our course?” Professor asked.

With a sigh, the man put down his book — Jade recognized the cover art. It was the latest book in the Easter Egg series by Sue Denim — and swung around to glance at the screen of the nearest computer. “We’re here,” he said, pointing to a red dot. “And this dotted yellow line is our track.”

The indicated line showed the ship moving in the northwesterly direction, the direction they should be going.

“What’s our compass heading?”

“Compass?”

“You do know what a compass is.” Jade could hear the irritation in Professor’s voice.

“Sure, dude.” He peered at the screen again. “Three-oh-two degrees.”

“What does your compass say?” growled Professor through clenched teeth.

“The GPS is more precise than—”

Professor pointed out the side window at the setting sun. “The sun sets in the west. Did they teach you that in your GPS class? The sun says that were traveling north. Unless the sky is lying, there’s something wrong with your GPS, so tell me what your compass says.”

The chastened crewman quickly rose and moved to the center of the console. He shifted a stack of magazines to reveal an ancient looking binnacle. Even from across the room, Jade could see that the compass globe beneath the glass was spinning wildly.

The crewman stared at it in disbelief, and in a very small voice, said, “I think I’d better get the skipper.”

TWENTY-THREE

Lee arrived on the bridge reeking of mouthwash and after-shave, which Jade assumed was olfactory camouflage to mask a different kind of stink.

“Wonderful,” she muttered. “On top of everything else, we’ve got a drunk for a captain.”

The ship’s master went immediately to the GPS console and stared at it for several seconds. “This shows that we’re on course,” he insisted.

“Yes, sir,” explained the crewman. “But dead reckoning shows us heading north. The compass isn’t working and neither is the satphone.”

“Uh,” Lee glanced at Professor and Jade and seemed to realize he was in the spotlight. He straightened a little and when she spoke again, there was a little more certitude in his voice. “All stop. Until we can figure out where we are, there’s no sense in continuing in the wrong direction. It’s time for some good old fashioned seamanship.”

The crewman pushed a button on the console and Jade felt a subtle change in the vibrations rising from the deck.

Lee turned to face them. “I’ll have to ask you to leave so we can get some work done here. I believe dinner is being served in the salon, so why don’t you go grab a bite to eat. I assure you, we’ll be back on course within the hour.”

Jade started to bristle at the dismissal, but Professor took her arm and guided her from the room. When they were outside, she turned on him. “Are you going to trust that lush to get us back on course?”

“Not completely, but navigating open water isn’t…well, quantum physics. As long as he knows better than to trust the GPS, we should get where we’re going.”

“Speaking of the GPS, how can it be wrong? And the compass? Why was it spinning like that?”

“Did you forget where we are?”

She gave a short humorless laugh. “Is that your scientific opinion?”

“I don’t know. We could already be experiencing space-time distortions.” He paused. “Or there could be a more mundane explanation.”

“Like what?”

“Sabotage.”

The suggestion stunned Jade into silence until they reached the salon where Dorion and Ophelia were seated at a table. Dorion rose when they entered, but it was Ophelia that spoke first. “We’ve stopped.”

“I know,” Professor replied. “There’s a problem with the GPS navigation. They’re working on it now.” He turned to Dorion. “Paul, is there any reason why a dark matter field might disrupt satellite communications?”

The physicist’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “Digital communications require precise time synchronization. I suppose if the clocks were out of sync, it could cause problems.”

“What about a magnetic compass?” asked Jade.

“It shouldn’t be affected. Dark matter has no electrical charge. If WIMPs could disrupt a magnetic field, we would be able to detect them.”

“Are you saying the compass has failed too?” asked Ophelia.

“Spinning like a top,” Jade said. She turned to Professor. “Is that why you suspect sabotage?”

Ophelia gasped. “Sabotage?”

“It’s a possibility we have to consider. In fact, it’s a simpler explanation than dark matter. The GPS software could have been corrupted by a computer virus. It’s even easier to beat a magnetic compass.” Professor paused a moment before continuing. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, but we need to be on our guard. The Norfolk Group could have someone aboard this ship.”

“There’s a way to know for sure,” Dorion said. “Or at least to determine if we are being influenced by a dark matter field.”

“You mean the clock? Doesn’t it need to be synchronized? If this effect is messing with satellite communications that may be a problem.”

Dorion pondered this. “My system would function independently of the ship’s communication network. If I am also unable to connect, that would tend to rule out sabotage.”

Jade wasn’t sure which possibility was a greater source of anxiety. They were at least seventy miles from Great Isaac Cay, Professor’s ground zero for the space-time distortions. If they were feeling the effects this far out, what would happen as they got closer? A saboteur at least was something they could deal with.

As they headed out of the salon, Barry appeared. “I have some good news. Mr. Lee has plotted our position. We are a few degrees off course, but we should still arrive at our destination before dawn.”

“What about the GPS?” asked Ophelia.

“Mr. Nichols is working on it. He doubles as our Chief Engineer and Electronics Officer. I told you, we all wear a lot of hats.” He glanced past them at the untouched dinner plates on the table. “Where’s everyone off to?”

“We are going to use our equipment to see if we can detect anything unusual.”

“I thought you might want to try that. Watch your step. Ah, Ms. Doerner, if your friends can spare you, there’s something I wanted to go over with you.”

A perturbed frown flickered over Ophelia’s face, and Barry hastily added, “It will only take a minute.”

“Go ahead,” Dorion said. “It will take us a few minutes to unpack the gear.”

As Ophelia followed Nichols back into the salon, Jade and the others headed forward to where Paul’s equipment was stored. Jade noted that, in addition to the plastic seals on the latches, the plastic casket was also adorned with a sticker sporting a yellow and black trefoil.

“Uh, is this thing radioactive?”

“Why do you think it’s called an atomic clock?” Professor said in an ominous voice.

Dorion laughed. “Do not worry. There is a very small amount of cesium — which is why it must have a warning — but it is stable and shielded. You were exposed to considerably more radiation during the flight from Greece than this clock produces.”

“Is it possible the Great and Powerful Professor didn’t know that?” Jade elbowed him in the ribs.

“Of course I knew it. The atomic clock works by using a laser to antagonize cesium atoms so that they give of energy at a very specific frequency — nine point one nine two—”

“Enough,” Jade said. “Show off.”

As Dorion broke the seals, Professor got in a final comment. “There’s no radioactivity because the cesium doesn’t decay to release neutron radiation. The excited atoms act just like the spring in an old clock, or the quartz crystal in your…say, didn’t you have a watch?”

Jade shook her head and turned away, trying to avoid that particular discussion. As she did, something — a faint movement, a premonition — made her look past the container. The submersible was moving. “Look out.”

She leaped toward the two men, tackling them to the deck as the still-covered submersible swung toward them like a giant fist.

There was a crunch and a scraping sound as the QED collided with the shipping container, which in turn slammed into Jade. She tried to scrambled out of the way, saw Dorion and Professor attempting to do the same, but the relentless combination of submersible and casket bulldozed all three of them toward the deck rail.

In an instant that probably could only have been measured by Dorion’s clock, Jade saw that she was about to be crushed against the heavy tubular steel of the rail.

“This way,” shouted Professor. From the corner of her eye, Jade saw him insinuate himself in the gap between the horizontal rails. She thought he was jumping overboard, but as soon as he was clear of the rail, he gripped the edge of the deck and reached up to drag the dazed Dorion through as well.

Jade didn’t think she could hang on, but falling overboard and hitting the water some forty feet below had to be better than getting crushed. As she started to move forward however, she felt the container strike her again, driving her into the rail, pinning her…squeezing her.

Frantic, she desperately tried to squirm free, felt the hard rough plastic bowing just a little, but not nearly enough, and then, all of a sudden, she was free, squirted out like a bean from a husk, to land atop the container.

The reprieve was short-lived.

There was an ominous grinding sound as the container was relentlessly smashed between the rail and the QED. Jade launched herself down the length of the container, leaping clear just as the molded plastic collapsed like a Styrofoam cup under someone’s shoe. The submersible lurched and closed the gap in an instant, gonging against the rail, and then, with a tortured groan, the rail began to bend under the unyielding assault.

Jade lay on the deck, just a few inches from the QED, which continued to press against the rail like a tarp-covered battle tank. There was a sharp splitting noise, like the report of a pistol, and the rail along a considerable portion of the deck it was attached to, broke loose and fell away, allowing the little submarine which hung from a cable at the end of the boom crane, to swing out over the water like a pendulum.

She rolled to the edge of the deck and peered over, searching the water below for some sign that Professor and Dorion were still alive. She found them a moment later, not in the water, but still clinging desperately to the side of the ship. Professor hung by one hand, his other grasped Dorion’s arm. His face showed the intense exertion of suspending their combined weight. He couldn’t possibly hold on much longer. It was a wonder his grip hadn’t already failed.

With the QED swinging back and forth like something from an Edgar Allen Poe story, she did not dare try to assist them directly, and she wasn’t sure that she would be able to pull the two men back from the precipice. In the instant she contemplated their fate, it occurred to her that this could not be an accident. Someone had to be operating the crane, intentionally using both the crane and the deep sea vessel together like a wrecking ball, for one reason only: to kill the three of them.

Wonder who that could be?

Then another thought hit her. The crane!

She spun around and sprinted for the crane’s control station amidships. She was mentally preparing herself for battle with the would-be killer, but there was no one there; the saboteur, whomever he was, had already gone.

The unfamiliar lever controls were labeled and she quickly picked out one that seemed to regulate vertical lift. She pushed up and felt the entire ship shudder as the boom arm rose, lifting the still swinging submersible several feet above the deck.

She acutely felt the clock ticking down for Professor and Dorion. What if she was already too late?

She worked another lever and saw the crane arm swivel out over the water, and as the submersible started to swing again, she hit the winch control, unspooling the cable to lower the small underwater craft several yards.

The ship shuddered again and Jade heard a sickening crunch as the submersible dangling at the end of the cable swung back and slammed into the hull. Jade had a fleeting mental image — she hoped it wasn’t a literal vision — of Professor and Dorion smeared against the side of the ship. She raced back to the place where the disaster had begun, and sagged in relief when she found both men perched atop the mini-sub, clinging desperately to the cable.

It took less than a minute for a swarm of red-shirted crewmen to rush up from below decks, get the two men safely aboard, and begin assessing the damage. Ophelia and Barry hurried out as well, and a few seconds later, Lee and Nichols joined the throng.

Dorion appeared to be in shock and Ophelia moved to comfort him. Professor however was fully in control of his faculties and completely livid. He stalked toward Lee.

“There’s a killer on this ship,” he said in a low dangerous voice.

“Now just a second,” Nichols began, but Professor cut him off.

“We need to account for every person on board and then search the ship. If we don’t find anyone, then the killer is someone in your crew.”

Lee nodded, but kept glancing uncertainly at Nichols as if seeking his approval.

“Captain,” Professor said sharply. “You’re going to need to select a security detail for the search. Do you have weapons aboard?”

“Ah, weapons? Yes. We have a small arms locker.”

Nichols spoke up. “Dr. Chapman, I assure you, my crew is above suspicion.”

“Then our search will turn up the real saboteur. Make this happen, Mr. Nichols.”

The VMI founder reluctantly nodded his assent and Lee moved off to organize the security detail. Professor wasn’t finished however. “What’s the situation with the GPS?”

Nichols’ face screwed up in consternation. “I rebooted the system and it seems to be working again. Not sure what’s up with the compass; it’s about as old as some of the wrecks we dive on and honestly, we haven’t used it in years. But it hardly matters.”

“Why?” asked Jade.

“We have to head back to Nassau.”

Ophelia stiffened and strode over quickly to face Nichols. “Absolutely not.”

Jade heard unexpected steel in the blonde woman’s voice. “I’ve already paid you well, Mr. Nichols, and I’m willing to pay you a good deal more, but you will take us to our destination.”

“Ms. Doerner, when I agreed to this, I didn’t know that my ship was going to be in the crosshairs. Even if we ignore this incident, and I don’t think that’s a very good idea, the fact of the matter is that we’re not going to be able to use the QED until it is repaired and thoroughly tested and inspected. You can’t pay me enough to send her down to crush depth until that happens. And, if I’m not mistaken, the equipment you were going to use to focus your search just got pulverized. So what exactly do you hope to accomplish by continuing forward like nothing has happened?”

Nichols’ assessment of the situation hit Jade like a blow. Even though he had failed to kill them, the saboteur had done incalculable damage. Ophelia however was undeterred. “I can have another atomic clock flown out to us in forty-eight hours. As to the submersible, if the target location is at dive depth, we may not need it.”

Nichols’ frowned. “And if it’s not?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” She scrutinized him for a few seconds. “I’m surprised at your reluctance. Given your reputation, I didn’t think you would want to give up so quickly.”

Nichols reddened, but evidently remembered who was talking to him and swallowed his pride. “I have to answer to my stockholders, Ms. Doerner. And despite whatever reputation you think I have, safety is my primary concern.”

“Your stockholders will be grateful for the money that I’m paying you. They’ll be even happier when you discover a fortune in Spanish gold.”

Jade turned to Professor. “What do you think?”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure. If we can dive, then she’s right. But I don’t like the idea of pushing forward with a killer on board.”

“Going back now might give the Norfolk Group a chance to get even more men aboard.”

Lee returned before a consensus could be reached. “We’re still searching deck by deck, but it may not do us much good. One of the RIBs is missing.”

“Rib?” Ophelia asked.

“Rigid inflatable boat,” Professor explained quickly. “A Zodiac. Basically a big raft with an outboard.” He faced the captain. “You think our saboteur set out in open water?”

“It looks that way.”

“Could there be another ship shadowing us?” Jade asked.

“Possibly. But we’re not that far from Nassau. He could simply be heading back.”

“Then we should keep going. Make for Great Isaac.”

“Without a functioning atomic clock, we’re not going to be able to accomplish much.”

Jade turned back to Ophelia. “Are you serious about having another clock flown out to us?”

“I am,” Ophelia said. “But there’s something else I’d like to try first.” She glanced at Nichols and Lee, and then in a conspiratorial tone meant only for Jade and Professor’s ears, added, “I need to speak to you privately.”

TWENTY-FOUR

The search of the vessel yielded another vital clue to the identity of the saboteur. In addition to the motor launch, the ship had also lost a crewman — a last minute replacement added shortly before Jade and the others had arrived in Nassau. Nichols came to them in the salon with the news, and assured them that the rest of the crew was above reproach, but that did little to ease their concerns.

“Who hired him?” Jade asked.

“Cliff handles personnel matters,” Nichols replied and then seemed to grasp the subtext of the question. “You can’t think he’s involved in this, too?”

“He did call Ophelia away just before the attack. Almost like he wanted to protect her.”

Nichols swallowed nervously. “I trust Cliff implicitly.”

His tone was not quite convincing, but before he could further protest his subordinate’s innocence, Ophelia dismissed him tersely. “Thank you. We’ll talk about this more in the morning.”

When he was gone, she immediately changed the subject. “I will arrange to have another atomic clock brought to us by helicopter. It should take no more than forty-eight hours. Until then however, I believe there may be something else that can help us find what we’re looking for.”

“The Shew Stone,” Jade murmured.

Ophelia nodded. “We know it has a connection to what we seek. It didn’t show us anything at Delphi, but this close to our goal, close enough that the ship is already experiencing distortions of space-time, I believe we should take another look at it.”

“We don’t know that a dark matter field caused the problem with the GPS,” countered Professor. “In fact, given what just happened, I’d say that the explanation for that is almost certainly much more commonplace.”

Jade’s first impulse was to agree with Professor, but Nichols hadn’t said anything about the cause of the problem with the GPS; only that it had evidently cleared up with a reboot. That seemed inconclusive at best. “We’ve nothing to lose by trying it,” she said, taking the crystal ball out and placing it on the table. “Should we light some candles or something?”

Ophelia reached out for it quickly, greedily, and grasped it between thumb and forefinger. She held it up and peered into its depths as if hoping to see the answer to every question she had ever asked.

“If it’s that easy,” Jade whispered to Professor, “then I guess we don’t need to find the Moon stone after all.”

After a moment, Ophelia set the globe down, her smooth face creased by uncharacteristic uncertainty.

“Did you see anything?” Jade asked.

“I’m not certain. For a moment, I thought I was somewhere else. At our corporate headquarters building in New York. I was in my office, but it…it wasn’t my office. Not the one I have right now. It was my brother’s office, one floor above mine, but somehow I knew that it had become my office.” She shook her head as if trying to clear away mental cobwebs. “What do you think it means?”

“Sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head?” Jade remarked. “I thought you and your brother were two peas in a pod.”

“I love my brother deeply,” Ophelia said, a faint smile touching her lips. “But he thinks he’s better and smarter than me, and as it happens, he’s wrong. I am much better suited to leading our family empire than he, but for many reasons, not the least of which is my gender, he will not admit it.”

“It may be a possible future,” breathed Dorion. “Where you have taken control of your company.”

Ophelia nodded. “I thought the same. This is a sign. If we can find the Moon stone, I will be able to use it to see the future more clearly, and that knowledge will enable me to chart a course that leads to ultimate success. Now I know that we cannot turn back.”

Jade thought it sounded more like Ophelia was misconstruing a wishful daydream as a vision supplied by the Shew Stone, but she said nothing. Regardless of where the images had come from, Ophelia’s “vision” offered no insight into the location of the Moon stone.

“May I?” Dorion asked, and then promptly picked up the crystal orb. Unlike Ophelia, he did not peer into, but instead held it tightly in his fist and closed his eyes.

The seconds stretched into a minute, then two, and the silence was almost unendurable. Jade could feel the vibrations of the ship’s engines, once more turning and propelling the vessel through the Atlantic, hopefully on the right heading.

Dorion had been statue-still the whole time, but after another minute or so, he seemed to relax, as if he had dozed off. Jade glanced at the others, silently telegraphing the message: ‘Should we wake him up?’

Before she could act on the impulse to do so, Dorion’s eyelids fluttered open. His gaze drifted for a moment and then he started, looking about wildly. “I’m on the Explorer?” He took a deep breath then looked down at the Shew Stone in his hand. “I did not lose consciousness, did I? The effect is similar to what I felt at CERN, but not as…”

“What did you see?” asked Ophelia, with the same eager breathlessness.

“I remember things that I know haven’t happened yet.”

“Did you see the location of the Moon stone?”

Dorion frowned and appeared to be searching his anachronistic memories. “I think I did. I remember you.” He pointed to Jade. “You were very excited. You were about to change into a diving suit right on the open deck. That must mean we find it. Perhaps if we get closer to the location, I will recognize it.”

“Then we are on the right course,” Ophelia said with sublime confidence. “Literally as well as…you know what I mean. We will find it.”

Jade’s first impulse was to caution against raising hopes too high, but she could not forget how they had found the stone sphere on Isla del Caño.

Dorion set the Shew Stone on the table. Professor turned to Jade. “I guess it’s your turn now.”

“Maybe you should give it a try?”

He shook his head. “No thanks, I don’t want to spoil the twist at the end. Besides, I think I’ve already caught a peek of the future, and there’s a great big Bootstrap Paradox coming down the pike. You go ahead.”

Now that the opportunity to glimpse the future had come, Jade felt apprehensive. There was a reason that, despite having the Shew Stone in her possession, she had not made a serious effort to test whether it possessed even a very small dark matter field. It seemed quite reasonable that it did. The ferocity with which Roche had pursued Jade, to say nothing of his prescient certainty that she would steal the orb, seemed to suggest that his uncannily accurate predictions were not simply well reasoned guesses. She wasn’t ambivalent about the crystal ball because of a fear that it might not work; quite the opposite in fact.

She reached out and took the orb in her hand. But I need to know.

Jade checked her watch again. Like her, the diver’s chronograph had picked up a few scars over the last few years. The stainless steel casing was scratched and the blue paint on the fixed bezel was chipped in a few places, but the sapphire crystal covering the blue watch face with the bright red sweep hands was clear and unmarred. It reminded her of another crystal she had looked into once, long, long ago.

He was late.

Professor was late. Strange how she still thought of him as Professor after all these years. After everything they had been through, everything they had made together, everything they had lost, he was still Professor.

And he was late. That wasn’t like him. She hoped he had merely been delayed by a detour to get around the riots, and not caught up in them.

Even from ten blocks away, the acrid smell of the smoke burned in her nostrils. Maybe the wind was blowing the fumes through the concrete canyons, or maybe the wildfire of violence had escaped containment and was now racing south, toward this bastion of wealth and power. Not that there was any danger here. The rioters would never reach this place, not with all the troops deployed throughout the city, and she hoped they had the good sense not to try.

“Jade!”

She turned in the direction of the hissed whisper and saw him, standing at the corner of the building. He wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Even without the hoodie covering his head, shadowing his features — she had actually gotten used to that silly fedora, and now she found herself acutely aware of its absence — he would have looked out of place here. Still, there was something about his presence, the way he moved, that made him seem almost invisible.

She smiled. It was good to see him again, in spite of the circumstances. “You made it.”

He nodded. “I think you’re right about this. About everything that’s happened.”

“How do we stop it?”

“You already know the answer to that,” he said. “The real question is, can we?”

Jade felt a knot of fear settle in her gut. He was right. “Have you got a plan?”

“You mean a better plan than go in with guns blazing?” He shook his head.

She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. This was bigger than just the two of them, but there wasn’t anyone else left now. All their friends were gone.

How did things get this bad?

She knew the answer to that, too.

My fault.

“She probably already knows we’re coming,” Professor said.

Jade nodded soberly. “But there’s something she doesn’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“How it ends.”

“Jade?”

Jade blinked and looked around. Where am I? She spotted Professor, but he looked different, younger, without the scar.

I remember this. Yet, it was an old memory, like something from a dream. Her eyes slid sideways and she saw….

The universe abruptly synchronized and she realized what had happened. This was the reality and all of those things that she now remembered so vividly were nothing but distant possible futures.

“Jade?” Professor repeated. “You okay?”

She nodded slowly, unable to tear her stare away from….

Ophelia leaned forward, her eyes alight with hope and anticipation. “What did you see?”

Jade shook her head. “Nothing.”

After two fruitless hours, Jade gave up on the hoped-for oblivion of sleep. She pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts and headed up to the deck to get some fresh air. The tropical night was warm and humid, but not uncomfortably so. The stars were startlingly visible despite the bright lights that illuminated the deck and shone out over the water, and a nearly full moon hung almost directly overhead.

The moon made her think about their goal, but also called to mind Professor’s theory about the added influence of tidal forces on the dark matter fields. Dorion had explained it to her on the flight from London. The Delphic oracle had only spoken on one day each month, when a half moon would have been visible in the sky during daylight hours. He had suggested that perhaps at other times, the alignment of earth, moon and sun might combine to negate the dark matter field, but there was another possibility, a simpler one to Jade’s way of thinking. The moon’s gravity complemented the dark matter field, and that effect was strongest when the moon was overhead. Perhaps that was why so many ancient cultures had worshipped the moon; perhaps they had known that, in addition to helping them mark the turning of the seasons, the moon might also reveal possible futures.

Maybe the knowledge of those possible futures, even at a subconscious level, lay at the heart of all the anecdotal reports about strange behavior during the full moon. There was a reason, after all, that insane people were called lunatics.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

She started reflexively, but it was Professor’s voice and she knew there was no cause for alarm. She turned and found him sitting in a deck chair, likewise gazing into the sky. “Guess I’m not used to being rocked in my bed all night long,” she lied. “What about you?”

“Stargazing. To be honest, I’m not exactly sold on the accuracy of this ship’s GPS navigation system.”

“You think it will happen again?”

He shrugged. “It’s like when you know something’s wrong with your car, but when you take it to the mechanic, everything runs fine. No one’s given a good explanation for why it started acting up, so the problem hasn’t been fixed.”

She was about to ask him for his opinion on what that cause might be, but realized she already knew the answer. “You think there’s another saboteur on board?”

“The thought has crossed my mind. Despite what Ophelia’s brother told her, the Norfolk Group hasn’t given up, and I don’t think they’ll stop now. It’s just a matter of time before they try again. They’ll probably wait until we get where going to make their next move, but…” Another shrug. “Better safe than sorry.” He stared at her appraisingly. “You saw something, didn’t you? Something you don’t want to tell the others?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Just like when you saw Hodges’ robot blowing up and killing us all was nothing?”

She put her hands on her hips in what she hoped looked like a sufficiently irritated pose. “As you’ll recall, that didn’t happen. These visions…premonitions…whatever you want to call them, are just possibilities, and when you get right down to it, we can imagine those for ourselves without magic or dark matter or whatever.”

“Fair enough. So what did you see?”

She pulled another chair up next to him and settled into it. “If you had the power to see possible futures, how would you use it?”

“Winning lotto numbers. Sports betting.” He said it with a grin. “But that word ‘possible’ kind of throws a monkey wrench in the works. So, I guess I’d look for things that aren’t subject to random variations.”

“Like what?”

“Well, natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. We can’t predict them, but the forces that govern those things are mechanistic. I told you about the Schroedinger’s Cat experiment right? That’s an example of alternate universes governed by randomness. But a lot of things are not random at all. The earth’s rotation, the phases of the moon, the tides; these things all happen the same way regardless of random variations. Or, if you believe in the multiverse hypothesis, those things happen the same way in all…well, most possible universes. That’s true of other things that we aren’t able to predict with certainty.

“We know, for example, that someday the Yellowstone super-volcano is going to blow. We don’t know what the tipping point is and there’s not a whole lot we can do to change those geological forces, but I have a feeling that when it finally does erupt, it will happen across all the possible universes. Or at least the ones that we are likely to inhabit. So, if you were able to see one possible future and pick up a newspaper that talks about an eruption at a specific date and time, then you could pretty confidently take action based on the knowledge that the event is going to occur. Evacuate the area, ground all flights, prepare for the ash cloud. Provided of course that you could get the authorities to believe you.”

Jade nodded slowly. “And if you weren’t a particularly scrupulous individual, what then?”

“I’d buy stock in bottled water and dust masks, I guess.” He paused for just a moment, then continued. “You think there’s a chance that someone who isn’t particularly scrupulous might be planning to do something like that?”

“And we’re working to help her get it.”

“Ophelia doesn’t strike me as being quite that calculating.”

“People change. And you know what they say about power and corruption.”

He frowned. “Now you’re getting into territory that isn’t quite so deterministic. In any case, you can’t judge a person on the basis of what they might do.”

“If you had known from the beginning that Hodges was already working for the Norfolk Group, what would you have done differently?”

“Point taken. So you think that if we allow Ophelia to find the Moon stone and open a permanent window on the future, she’s going to go all power hungry and destroy the world?”

“I don’t think it,” she said, almost at a whisper. “I saw it.”

And that’s not all I saw.

Professor was silent for a long time after that. Finally he said, “Forewarned is forearmed, right? Now that we know what might happen, we can take steps to make sure it never does.”

“And what if the steps we take are exactly what lead us to ruin?”

“You see why I’m happier not knowing. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to second-guess every decision. What you really need is a good night’s sleep though.”

“Probably. But I think I’ll just sit here with you a while longer.”

Professor smiled. “I can live with that.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The Quest Explorer arrived at its destination, without any further unexpected detours, in the early hours before sunrise. Jade had eventually turned in and slept successfully, her weariness overcoming her anxiety, but when she awoke, the apprehension returned in full force. As they sat over breakfast in the salon, she found herself staring at Ophelia the way a person might look at a career criminal or a known sexual predator, just waiting for them to give in to the dark desires hiding under the surface. And yet, Ophelia had not done anything wrong and might not ever do anything. Perhaps it would require only a single word, spoken at the right time, to ensure Jade’s memories of that dire future would never come to pass.

Jade knew that the answer to the riddle of what that tipping point might be was probably there in her memory as well, but when she tried to think back…or was it forward?…she could only remember terror and loss on a scale that almost made her start crying.

It didn’t happen. It won’t happen. I won’t let it.

After the meal, they all went out on the deck for their first look at the smudge of sand that was Great Isaac Cay. To call it an island was overly generous. The cay was little more than a brow of limestone which, by virtue of its location, had been trapping sand for uncounted millennia. Rising up from it like a rude gesture was the Great Isaac Lighthouse, a one hundred-fifty-two foot tall rusty white spire that flashed its automated navigational warning light every fifteen seconds to alert mariners to the treacherous shallows of the Bahama Banks.

From their anchorage just north of the cay, Jade found it hard to believe the light was still operational. The dilapidated tower and crumbling remains of keeper’s house and other support structures looked more desolate than some of the ruins she had excavated.

“It’s supposedly haunted,” Professor said, with a mischievous gleam in his eye and looking none the worse for wear after his all-night vigil. “According to the lore, in the nineteenth century, a ship foundered nearby with all hands lost except an infant child who washed ashore alive. The ghost of his mother still haunts the island, especially during the full moon, looking for her son. They call her ‘the Grey Lady.’”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jade had heard so many ghost stories in her years of field research that they were hardly more than background noise, but in this instance, she found herself hoping that Professor was just making it up.

He shook his head. “The Grey Lady bit is probably just a coincidence, but the part about the full moon got my attention. Especially since it’s a full moon tonight.”

“It’s not on the island,” Dorion said, peering at the lighthouse. “This is familiar, but we’re in the wrong place.”

Though she kept silent, Jade had felt it too. The sight of the lighthouse had awakened more memories of future events revealed to her by the Shew Stone, but she felt none of the excitement that had accompanied a similar awakening in Costa Rica. Rather, this felt like the first ominous step down a path that could only lead to tragedy

Nichols, who had joined them on deck, raised an eyebrow, but did not voice the question that was clearly foremost in his mind. “We can take you out in a launch. Circle the cay until you, uh, find what it is your looking for. If it’s in the shallows, we won’t be able to bring the Explorer in, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

He led them to the side of the boat where a rigid hulled inflatable boat hung in a davit. Further along the deck was an empty sling, which presumably had once held the boat stolen by the missing crewman who had tried to kill them with the submersible. The remaining launch was lowered into the water, and the four passengers joined Nichols and another crewman for the excursion. With Dorion providing navigational cues, they motored to a spot northwest of the cay.

Jade looked back to the lighthouse, recalling that this was the view as seen from the place where they had found… or rather would find… the Moon stone. Dorion confirmed this a moment later. “Here. It’s directly below us.”

Nichols looked over the edge. The blue water was stunningly clear and Jade could see the sandy bottom and the reef protruding through. There was nothing that hinted at an old submerged wreck. “You say the Misericordia is down there?”

Professor looked as well. “What do you figure? About six fathoms?”

Nichols nodded. “The Explorer draws just shy of twenty-eight feet. That’s a little shallow for my liking, but if we watch the tides and maybe shed a little ballast, we should be able to work in here. It’s a nice depth for diving. We won’t have to worry about decompression stops. But this is a tricky business. You start blasting holes in the reef, and two things are likely to happen pretty darn quick. First, the government’s gonna ask what the hell we’re doing, and where’s our permit? Second, every pirate from here to New Orleans is going to come running to see what we’ve found.”

“Pirates?” asked Ophelia, a little nervously.

“My rivals. Other treasure hunters. Claim jumpers.”

Jade knew that what Nichols was talking about simply went with the territory.

“It would be in our best interests to avoid drawing a lot of attention to our presence here,” Ophelia said.

“I disagree,” said Professor. “Given what happened last night, the wrong people already know that we’re here and they’ve always known what we’re after. Keeping things on the level isn’t going to make our situation any worse, and it will probably make it better since we’ll have the authorities on our side.”

Jade thought it was a good argument, but Ophelia disagreed. “Going through official channels takes time, Dr. Chapman, and that’s something that’s in short supply.”

“Can’t you grease the wheels?” Jade asked, with a little more snark than she intended.

“That works most of the time, but not always,” Nichols said. “All it takes is for one historian or government official who cares more about doing his job than earning his paycheck, and those wheels get very sticky. Our problem here is that we don’t have a good basis for a claim. No offense, Dr. Chapman, but what you’re doing is about the same as water-witching, and it doesn’t hold up in court. We’d need historical evidence supporting the idea that the Misericordia went down here — and if I’m not mistaken, Dr. Chapman told us that the evidence puts her a few thousand miles to the east. We would also need some physical evidence, including something that positively identifies the Misericordia. When I look down there, I don’t see any evidence of a shipwreck.”

“It’s buried under the sand,” Dorion said. “Right down there.”

“Do you know anything about marine archaeology Dr. Dorion? Do you know what happens to a ship that sinks, especially in a place like this? Salt water can do a number on a wooden ship right quick. While that’s happening, currents and storms are pounding against the wreck, ripping it apart and scattering it across the ocean floor. If any pieces big enough survive the storm season, they might become an artificial reef. Coral and other organisms start to grow on it the ribs of the ship or the cannon, and pretty soon, what’s left of the ship has become a new reef. Experts like me know how to look at a bottom profile and see the outline of an old wreck in the shape of the reef. I’m not seeing that here.”

Dorion spread his hands helplessly. “It is there.”

“Be that as it may, we can’t file a claim until we can prove it.”

“And we can’t prove it until we start excavating,” Jade said. “We’re chasing our tail.”

“I need what’s down there,” Ophelia said. Her tone was more authoritarian than desperate, and Jade was reminded that Ophelia was used to getting what she wanted. This time would be no exception.

Nichols’ scratched his chin. “Well, I’ve got a pretty good in with the guy who makes these decisions. They would much rather deal with someone like me than with some of my competitors. I’ll make the calls, but I’m going to need a lot of latitude for these negotiations.”

“You have carte blanche,” Ophelia assured him. “Whatever it takes.”

Nichols seemed genuinely surprised by this. “I don’t get it, Ms. Doerner. You’ve already got more money than God, and treasure hunting, for all its romantic appeal, is a lousy investment. Why are you doing this?”

Ophelia ignored him.

By the time the Quest Explorer was over the coordinates Dorion had indicated, Nichols had used his blank check to secure permission to excavate an exploratory hole. Jade and the others could do little more than stand by and watch as the mailbox blowers were lowered into place over the ship’s propellers. The crew had stripped down to swim trunks. Even Nichols had traded in his designer work shirt for a pair of baggy board shorts. His deep bronze all-over tan confirmed Jade’s suspicion that he remained very involved in the day to day operations of his company. Jade hoped that the ship’s master would stay in uniform, or at the very least, stay on the bridge; even the thought of Lee half-naked was enough to make her throw up a little in her mouth.

With the blowers locked in place, the engines revved up, and for the next fifteen minutes or so, the ship sat unmoving, held in place by anchors with all the slack hauled in, as a blizzard of sand swirled up from below and turned the blue water a milky white. While they waited for the sediment cloud to clear, Jade and Professor began getting ready for the dive.

“I’ll stay topside,” Professor told Jade. “Just in case there’s a problem.”

“Are you sure?” She had never known Professor or any other SEAL to pass up a chance to get wet, but he nodded.

“Probably no reason to worry, but after what happened last night, I’m not going to take any chances.” He stared at her for a second and then said, “Where’s your watch?”

She shrugged. “Broke.”

He stripped off his own wrist chronograph and handed it to her. Jade felt her breath catch when she saw the watch — a stainless steel Omega Seamaster with a bright blue face — but as soon she felt it in her hand, the weird feeling passed. It looked a lot like the watch she’d been wearing in the vision the Shew Stone had showed her, but it wasn’t the same; Professor’s watch was bigger and heavier.

“I’ll want that back. I hope you can take better care of it than you did your own.”

“Yes, dad.” She slipped it over her wrist and closed the double-clasp. The watch was two-fingers loose.

“Just wear it outside the sleeve of your wetsuit,” he directed. “And don’t forget to look at it once in a while.”

“The dive isn’t going to take that long,” she said, and then wished she hadn’t.

“Oh. Sure, I guess you would already know that.”

She managed a wan smile. “The good news is, you probably don’t need to worry about anything going wrong. Not here at least.”

“Maybe nothing goes wrong because I’m worried.”

“Touché, Professor. Well played.”

She stripped down to her bikini without the least trace of self-consciousness. Having spent more than half her life — nearly all her childhood — in a swimsuit, it was second nature now. Still, as she started to pull on a wetsuit borrowed from the Quest Explorer’s gear locker, Jade had to admit, she did look pretty good in the little red two-piece.

As she was donning the rest of her gear, Ophelia joined them. Like everyone else, she was in a swimsuit, which in this case was a tasteful, if ridiculously expensive Missoni Mare psychedelic pattern bikini which fully accentuated her enhanced physique, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the male crewmen she walked past. Jade was a little surprised by her own reaction; she felt threatened in a way that had nothing at all to do with sexuality.

“I’d like to dive,” she said.

Professor met Ophelia’s gaze and his eyes did not stray. “Are you certified?”

The slight tilt of her head was answer enough.

“In order to SCUBA dive, even if it’s just recreationally, you need to have a certification. And to get the certification, you have to take a class and pass a test. So, if you haven’t done that, the answer is, ‘sorry, no.’”

“I’m a fast learner. You can teach me.”

“Yes, I can. I’m a certified instructor. Maybe later, if there’s time, I can get on the Internet and print the manual for the bookwork portion of the class. But right this minute, the answer is, ‘sorry, no.’”

There was nothing Ophelia could say that would change Professor’s mind, but Jade had to wonder if there was anything Professor could say that would make Ophelia realize that. Evidently, ‘sorry, no’ was enough. Ophelia turned away, with almost preternatural calm, and strode back the way she’d come.

Jade watched her leave. “She’s going to get Nichols, or someone else, to let her make the dive.”

“Probably. And she’ll probably do just fine.”

“Then why didn’t you just give in?”

Professor shrugged. “Dunno. You ready?”

Jade put on her mask and, with Professor trailing, made her way down a gangplank to the dive platform at the waterline. Dorion and several members of the crew gathered above, eager to see what treasures would be found. On the platform, another crewman, likewise suited up to dive, showed Jade the weighted line that would take them to the edge of the excavation. From there, she would be on her own, free to investigate the hole that Explorer had blasted in the reef. Without further delay, Jade held her mask in place and stepped off the platform into the lukewarm soup of the Atlantic.

Ophelia’s expression betrayed none of the rage that was burning just beneath her smooth exterior. How dare they deny me this opportunity! They wouldn’t even be here if not for me.

Nichols would not refuse her. She had already found the correct pressure point to use against him. The only question was whether he could give her what she wanted quickly enough. Perhaps she could also get him to recall the divers, bring Jade back up before she found the prize. Ophelia wanted to be the first to find it, the first to touch it and peer through the window into the infinite possibilities of the future.

There was no sign of Nichols on deck. She found that odd, but a helpful crewman who seemed to be having difficulty raising his eyes to meet hers — a fact that she found deliciously satisfying — told her where to find Cliff Barry. Barry seemed all too eager to accommodate her, and led her to a private companionway that had not been on their tour. There was just one door at the end of the corridor, and beyond it, Barry told her, lay Nichols’ executive stateroom.

Barry knocked and Ophelia tapped her foot, counting out the seconds. There were two things she hated: being told no and waiting. Having been subjected to the former by Chapman made this all the more unendurable. Finally, the door opened, but the face that greeted her did not belong to the owner of QMI.

Ophelia stared at the familiar visage for a moment. “I know you.”

Recognition quickly gave way to alarm, but before she could protest, Barry addressed the man. “We’re alone.”

“Inside, quickly.” The man stepped back and Barry put an impertinent hand on Ophelia’s back and pushed her forward into the stateroom.

Ophelia tried to mask her rising fear with outrage. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled, and then rounded on the unidentified man. “You were at Delphi. One of the men that tried to kill us. How dare you—”

“Shut up.” The order was delivered in a cold, emotionless voice that was somehow more commanding than if it had been a shout. Ophelia closed her mouth and said nothing more. “Thank you,” he continued. “My name is Brian Hodges, and yes, I was there at Delphi. And before you say anything more, you should know that I’m here because your brother sent me to keep you out of trouble. You have no idea what you’re playing with here, Ms. Doerner.”

“You’re trying to stop us. You tried to kill the others last night.”

“Yes. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped and now things are considerably more complicated.”

“Why are you doing this?”

Hodges’ eyes narrowed. “I’m sure your brother told you about the Norfolk Group, and what we’re trying to do. That thing you’re looking for could set the world on fire. We — the Group, men like your brother — are not going to allow that to happen. In a situation like this, our protocols call for total sanitization. But apparently, those hard and fast rules aren’t so hard and fast when family is involved.” He made no effort to hide his contempt. “Big brother doesn’t want little sister to get hurt, so that puts me in a bit of a pinch.”

Ophelia’s heart was racing. Despite all they had been through, even the harrowing events in Greece, only now did she recognize so acutely her dangerous position. There was no one here to protect her and the only weapons she had with which to take control of the situation — her money, and her sexuality — were not going to make a bit of difference here. She drew in a shaky breath and said, “I won’t give up. If that means you have to kill me—”

“I’m not going to kill you, Ms. Doerner. Not if I can help it. And since it’s obvious that I can’t get you to listen to reason, that leaves me just one option.”

“What’s that?”

His lips curled into a humorless smile. “I’m going to help you get what you want.”

Jade followed the line down quickly, holding her mask against her face and blowing through her nose to equalize the pressure in her inner ear. She could feel the powerful tug of the Gulf Stream’s current. Five hundred years ago, European mariners had relied on this warm-water conveyor belt to speed them across the Atlantic with their cargo of wealth from the New World, but the current was capricious. The strong surface current also energized tropical cyclones; it had probably been just such a storm that had thrown the Misericordia onto the shoals near Great Isaac Cay, and then buried it under tons of sand.

The weighted line ended at a berm created by the powerful thrust from the Explorer’s engines at the edge of a much deeper crater. Most of the sediment stirred up by the operation of the mailbox blowers had settled, but Jade could see the flow of the current in the few remaining suspended motes. It wouldn’t be long before the ocean filled in this divot and erased all trace of their excavation.

Jade stared down into the crater for a moment, marveling at what had been uncovered. She had not expected to see a Spanish galleon, sitting pretty and just waiting for her to stroll its perfectly preserved decks, yet what she now saw was almost as impressive. The ship had been mauled relentlessly by the currents and eroded by the corrosive power of salt water, but she could clearly make out the heavy wooden beams of its skeleton. Other dark shapes were starkly visible against the white sand. Metal artifacts perhaps, encrusted and oxidized, lay scattered about the bottom of the crater.

The crew diver joined her there a moment later, and after flashing her a thumbs-up, kicked forward and dropped down into the hole. Jade went in after him. To maximize their search time, they split up and began swimming in opposite directions, scouring the bottom for treasures. Although Jade was only really interested in one item, anything that might establish the identity of the wreck would help them legally justify their initial exploration, which could prove essential if the recovery of the Moon stone turned out to be more difficult than expected. Jade’s prescient glimpse into the not-too distant future assured her it would not, but inasmuch as she hoped that vision would turn out to be wrong, it was better to do this by the numbers.

Beneath the sand lay an encrusted mass of limestone, the ancient remains of the reef upon which the sediment had accumulated.

The surface was crenelated with fissures and gaps — what treasure hunters called “solution holes” where coins, chains and other items could often be found. Jade painstakingly inspected several of these as she made her way around the circumference of the hole. She was careful to check her watch, just as Professor had told her, and was surprised by how little time had passed. Usually, when she was sifting through a ruin, looking for potsherds or other bits of ancient detritus, she fell into a sort of fugue state where hours could slip by without her knowledge. She was surprised to see that she had only been in the water for about twenty minutes and was nearly halfway around the edge of the circle. The other diver was just a few yards away, and Jade decided that when they met, they would head back to the surface for a break.

She returned her attention to the task at hand, exploring another solution hole. Something glinted from the crack in the limestone and when she took hold of it, she could feel a heaviness that could only mean she had found gold. It was a chain of thick links, similar to those found at other wrecks of the period. She tugged on it gently but the underlying rock refused to yield it up. She pulled harder and suddenly a section of stone broke free, releasing a cloud of sediment.

Jade slipped the heavy chain into her sample bag and waited for the silt to settle out. As it did, she spied something smooth and black with a gently convex surface that disappeared into the surrounding encrustation. It was too large to be a cannonball and a closer inspection showed none of the pitting and corrosion that marred metal objects.

She stared at it for a full minute before realizing what it was.

TWENTY-SIX

The atmosphere aboard the Quest Explorer was electric with the news of Jade’s discovery. Ophelia seemed to have completely forgotten about Professor’s slight and now hovered anxiously at the edge of the planning session for retrieving the Moon stone.

“It’s not dangerous,” Jade insisted, “but touching it would be a very bad idea, especially for a diver on the bottom.”

She did not elaborate and no one asked her to explain, but she wondered if perhaps the object was more dangerous than she was willing to admit. A blackout like the one she had experienced in Teotihuacan might prove fatal in the unforgiving underwater environment. Worse still, the Moon stone’s effect was not limited to direct contact. When Jade had come back aboard, she discovered that Professor’s watch was running a full six minutes slow.

Dorion had been astounded. “That’s the time dilation effect,” he explained. “You were much closer to the event horizon than we were on the surface.”

“You said the difference would be measured in nanoseconds,” Professor pointed out.

“I thought it would. The field must be more massive than I imagined.”

“That will make the Moon stone considerably heavier. Perez mentioned that the orb was heavier, but if it has enough gravity to cause a time differential that significant, then it may be too heavy to lift.”

“Surely it can’t be that heavy,” Ophelia countered. “The Spaniard, Alvaro, was able to drag the thing through those tunnels under the pyramid by himself.”

“It may have continued to accrete more dark matter,” said Dorion. “The sphere shape and the existing field would continue to draw in particles as the Earth passes through space, just like a black hole grows more massive as it pulls in material.”

“We have to try,” Ophelia insisted. “This ship can lift cannons. Surely it can lift a big stone ball.”

“Just how big are we talking?” asked Nichols.

Jade recalled the small portion of it that had been exposed, a section about eight inches across. “Judging by the curvature, I’d say the size of a big beach ball. Maybe twenty-four inches max.”

Professor did some quick math in his head. “A little over seven thousand cubic inches.”

“A cubic inch of twenty-four karat gold weighs seven-tenths of a pound,” Nichols supplied. “If it’s as heavy as gold, then figure about two and a half tons. I seriously doubt this rock of yours is that heavy, but even if it is, our boom crane can lift twice that much.”

“It may be much heavier,” Dorion said in a quiet voice, “to create that kind of relativistic effect…” He lapsed into silence as if unable to put his fears into words.

“Maybe your watch is just running slow,” Nichols countered. “Anyway, we won’t know until we’ve tried.”

“How will we secure it?” asked Jade.

“Cradle sling. Probably two or three overlapping. We’ll clear away the surrounding matrix and then wrap it from the sides. Floatation tubes will add some buoyancy and make the crane’s job a little easier until we can get it to the surface. Should be a walk in the park.”

Jade wasn’t quite so sanguine, but Nichols knew his business. “Let me set the slings.”

“Have you ever done that before?” asked Nichols, skeptically.

“No, but I’ve got the most experience of anyone here with an object like this. I know to treat it like a live wire.”

Nichols frowned and then glanced at Ophelia as if asking her permission. Ophelia just nodded. Jade found that strange, but decided to chalk it up to Nichols simply being paranoid about the possible liability if anything happened to Jade during the procedure.

“I’ll have one of my techs shadow you. We won’t try to lift until he checks your work.”

“Fine by me.”

Nichols nodded. “All right then. Let’s go get your Moon stone.”

Two hours later, and with Professor’s chronograph synchronized to GPS time, Jade was back in the water. She wasted no time with further exploration, but went directly toward the bright orange flag that marked the Moon stone’s location. Using a small rock hammer, she went to work on the buildup of minerals that had accumulated around the sphere, vacuuming the residue away with a suction pump. The encrustation was softer than she had expected, as if the sphere had only been sitting there for a few years instead of more than four hundred. Perhaps, she thought with just hint of concern, the effect of time dilation close to the sphere was so strong that it had actually only been years and not centuries.

Further digging soon revealed a dark orb, smooth and black as graphite, about two feet across, just as she had estimated. The color, or rather the lack thereof, was remarkable, and Jade wondered if it was also an effect of the dark matter field, absorbing light like a black hole. She would have expected the ancient craftsmen who made the Moon stone to use a silver metallic rock, but perhaps they had known what scientists would only discover thousands of years later — the moon only appeared to be a bright white light in the sky because of reflected sunlight. In reality, Earth’s satellite was as dark as the black volcanic sands that coated the beaches of her native Hawaii.

Under the watchful eye of the salvage tech, Jade carefully wrapped four web-like cargo slings around the exterior of orb, securing them in place with titanium carabiners. She wasn’t worried about whether the reinforced nylon straps and the metal links would be able to bear the strain of lifting something that might weigh as much as a mid-sized car, but something — a prescient memory perhaps, or maybe just a bad feeling — told her that recovering the Moon stone would not go as smoothly as Nichols believed.

She clipped the last D-ring in place and then turned around just in time to see the salvage tech kicking toward the top of the crater. Her brow furrowed behind her mask, but after a few seconds she saw him descending once more, this time trailing a thick cable that was attached to an enormous metal hook. He wrestled the unwieldy length of braided wire into place above the sphere and then handed the hook to Jade. The cable was surprisingly stiff and she had to plant her flippered feet on the floor of the excavation in order to get the leverage required to bring the hook close enough to grab the carabiners.

The exertion left her arms feeling rubbery. She knew that she had probably been breathing a little harder too, using up her precious supply of air. According to her watch, she still had at least twenty minutes of bottom time, and if she ran out unexpectedly, she could always ditch her gear and make an emergency free ascent, but it probably wouldn’t come to that. They were nearly finished.

With one hand on the cable, she turned to get more instructions from the tech diver but he was no longer in the crater with her. She looked up and spotted him, a dark speck moving beneath the enormous oval of the Explorer’s hull.

Where’s he going?

“Where is she?” Professor said. He sounded irritated, but Dorion thought perhaps he was trying to hide his concern. “She’s five minutes overdue.”

Dorion leaned out over the rail and peered down into the depths, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on down in the excavation. There was little to see, but Dorion had learned how to spot the rising bubble of the divers’ exhalations. “They do not appear to be out of air.”

Professor shook his head. “She’s got a reserve, but the whole point of a reserve is that you don’t use it. You keep it, well, in reserve. For emergencies.”

“If there are relativistic effects from the Moon stone, as I believe there must be, then time is passing more slowly for Jade. To her, it may seem like only a few minutes have elapsed.”

Professor made a growling noise, as if acknowledging the possibility but drawing no comfort from it. Dorion knew that no further explanation was required. He was used to people looking at him blankly when he tried to explain even the simplest aspects of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, but he knew that Professor was already well versed in the subject. He still didn’t know exactly what subject Chapman was a professor of, but he was one of the few people Dorion had ever met, outside of CERN, whom he considered to be an intellectual peer.

“Someone’s coming up,” shouted a crewman, and both Dorion and Professor hastened to the edge to watch the diver rise into view. Dorion felt a twinge of disappointment when he saw that it was the salvage technician that had gone down to supervise Jade. Barry joined them on the dive platform and helped the man climb aboard and shed his gear.

“Where’s Jade?” Professor asked.

“Just finishing up,” the diver said. He turned to Barry. “Now is as good a time as any.”

Something about the man’s tone, or perhaps it was the look in his eyes, resonated with something in Dorion’s memory. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but he knew that he had glimpsed this moment before. No doubt it was part of the same vision that had led them to this spot. He had not told the others everything he had seen while holding the Shew Stone. So much of it had seemed irrelevant or just completely unimaginable, and just as with his earlier premonitions at CERN, sometimes it took a trigger to bring one of those memories to the forefront of his consciousness. That was what he was experiencing now, but only as a vague feeling of foreboding.

Something bad was about to happen.

He was still thinking that when he saw Barry nod to the diver. In a smooth, almost nonchalant motion, the Chief Mate hefted one of the diver’s oxygen bottles and swung it like a baseball bat. There was a loud clank as the aluminum cylinder slammed into the back of Professor’s head.

Professor crumpled, dazed but still clinging to consciousness. Dorion felt similarly stunned by the brutal attack. He drew back, a purely reflexive movement, and looked about for some avenue of escape. No one moved to block him. Instead, Barry deftly picked up a heavy weight belt and wrapped it around Professor’s waist. The latter seemed to grasp what was happening, but his efforts to resist were slow and ineffective. Barry got the belt buckled and then gave Professor a hard shove that toppled him over the edge of the platform where he vanished with a small splash.

Dorion ran. He sprinted up the gangplank to the main deck where Ophelia, Nichols and several other crewmen were looking on.

“Ophelia,” he shouted. “They just—”

His cry fell silent as he caught sight of the familiar, but almost forgotten, face of Brian Hodges, standing with the others.

Ophelia stepped close and placed a hand on Dorion’s arm. “It’s all right, Paul. You’re in no danger.”

Dorion gaped. His mouth worked but he couldn’t find any words.

“It’s going to be okay,” Ophelia continued. “This is the way it has to be. You’ll see.”

She turned her head toward Hodges and gave a nod.

Hodges returned the nod and then directed his attention to Nichols. “Do it.”

Dorion felt paralyzed. Do it? Do what? This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.

Or was it?

The memories of an uncertain future broke free from the place where he had, in utter disbelief, locked them away, and flooded through him.

It was.

The Quest Explorer’s engines roared to life, and the ocean beneath the ship began to boil.

Jade heard a splash, not an unusual sound on a dive site, and looked up at the outline of the hull. Something was coming down. No, not something. Someone. The outline of the rapidly falling figure was distinctly man-shaped, but something looked wrong about it. The man wasn’t kicking with his fins or trying to reach the guide line. He was simply sinking, and fast. Someone had fallen overboard.

Without a second thought, Jade let go of the cable and started swimming for the distant shape, even as she saw the current grab hold and start to pull him away. The Gulf Stream hit him like a stiff wind, dragging him away but without enough force to slow his downward plunge. She could see that the man was moving, struggling, but none of his efforts seemed to reverse his awful trajectory.

Kicking furiously now, her fins propelling her through the water like a rocket, she could make out more detail. The man wasn’t wearing a wetsuit, definitely not a diver….

Oh my God. It’s Professor.

At that instant, an ominous rumble filled her ears. She glanced up just in time to see a plume of white froth erupt at the stern of the Quest Explorer.

Disbelief and rage vied for primacy in Jade’s mind. What were they doing up there? With a diver in the water and a man overboard, they had fired up the mailbox blowers. Were they insane?

Then, as the blast hit her like the spray from a fire hose, engulfing her in a storm of white violence, she knew that the answer was much worse.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“What are you doing?” shrieked Dorion. “They’ll be killed.”

For just a moment, his shock at seeing Hodges, the man who had tried to murder them more times than he could remember, was overcome by the immediacy of the peril Jade and Professor were now in.

Ophelia hushed him again. “It was a tragic accident,” she said, as if reading from a newspaper obituary. “Jade made an unscheduled dive, not realizing that we were about to start another excavation. Dr. Chapman dove in to save her and was caught in the blast.”

For a moment, his mind refused to accept Ophelia’s complicity in what was unfolding. “You’re working with…him?”

She gave him a sad look. “It has to be this way, Paul. It’s the only way they’ll let us continue our research.”

Dorion still could not fully process this.

Hodges stepped close, his face a mask of cold menace. “Dr. Dorion, whether or not you continue to live is entirely inconsequential to me. If this is going to be a problem, you can join your friends down there.”

“Paul, don’t think about it,” Ophelia urged. “I need your help. Don’t you see this is for the best? It was a tragic accident. That’s all.”

Dorion gaped at her. Had she actually convinced herself of the lie?

Nichols rejoined them and spoke directly to Hodges as if they were old friends. “That’s probably long enough.”

“Any sign of them?”

“No. If they do pop back to the surface, that is to say if they weren’t blasted into chum or buried in sediment, both of which are pretty darn likely, it won’t be until we shut the blowers off.”

Hodges looked skeptical. “Could they still be alive down there? Ihara has a SCUBA tank.”

“I suppose anything is possible. She was probably already well into her reserve. If she had more than ten minutes left, I’d be very surprised.”

“Then keep the blowers running for ten more minutes.”

Nichols shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

You’re the boss, Dorion thought. Professor had speculated that the saboteur who had tried to kill them with the submersible might actually be a member of the crew. Now the truth was revealed; not one member of the crew, but all of them.

Hodges had no doubt come aboard in Nassau. How did he escape the authorities in Delphi? The answer to that was obvious as well. Ophelia’s brother, a member of the deadly Norfolk Group, had seen to that, springing the assassin from jail and putting him back on the hunt, but this time with a difference; this time, his orders were to keep Ophelia alive.

And Ophelia insisted on keeping me alive.

Like a complex equation suddenly resolving before his eyes, Dorion saw that he really had no choice in the matter. Jade and Professor were already dead. His continued defiance would not bring them back, and would accomplish nothing more than to cut short his own life. Ophelia was right. There was work to do, amazing work. He had glimpsed the possibilities of the future as if through a window. Now it was time to open the door and step through into an amazing new world.

“A tragic accident,” he mumbled, and then turned to Ophelia and nodded.

Jade’s world vanished in a tumult of white noise. The force of the blowers knocked her mask askew, flooding salt water into her eyes with a fury that felt like sand paper. She bit down on the SCUBA regulator mouthpiece, knowing that if she lost it, she was dead.

The struggle to simply stay alive consumed her thoughts, but some analytical part of her brain, far removed from the now-dominant reptilian survival instinct, demanded an explanation. Why had Explorer turned on the Jacuzzi jets? Why had Professor fallen overboard?

Professor!

The blowers slammed her into the seafloor. The impact drove the breath from her lungs, and despite her best efforts, she felt the regulator explode from between her teeth. She flailed frantically in the total whiteout until she managed to snag the air hose and felt along its length until she found the mouthpiece. She struggled against the weight of the water pressing down from above. Farther away from the source, it was a little less like being under a rocket taking off, more like being under a waterfall, or being caught in the spin cycle at Pipeline. She couldn’t swim, but she could crawl, and just that tiny scrap of control brought her back a step from pure panic mode.

Professor!

He was still out there, drowning, maybe already dead.

She refused to accept that. And yet, unless she did something immediately, it would be true.

She crawled forward blindly, trying to fix his last position in her mind’s eye. She had been swimming toward him when the blowers had started up, maybe twenty yards away. If the blowers had driven him to the bottom as well, then she would find him somewhere along the straight line she was now moving.

But what if she couldn’t keep a straight line? What if, in the blast from the Explorer’s props, she had gotten turned around, or Professor had been blown in another direction? What was to stop her from wandering around in circles, like the pilots of Flight 19, mere inches from Professor as he drowned?

If he was still alive, he had only seconds remaining. She knew that SEALs prided themselves on being able to hold their breath longer than anyone, but something told her Professor might not have gotten a chance to draw a good breath before going in.

Don’t think about that. Just find him.

She tried to straighten her mask, but in the relentless cascade, it was impossible to clear it of water. She gave up, visibility was nil anyway, and started crawling forward, sweeping out with her hands every few feet in hopes of snagging his inert form.

Too bad the Shew Stone didn’t show me this, she thought mordantly. And yet, in a strange way, it had. It had shown her a future where she and Professor were preparing to make their last stand against a power-mad Ophelia Doerner. Ophelia had evidently taken that step, gone over to the dark side, which meant that the future she had seen had to be real.

And that meant Professor was alive and she was going to save him.

She kept moving, kept searching, refused to acknowledge the passing seconds, every one of which took Professor closer to oblivion.

Her groping hands found something, a rock like so many others she had found…no, wait. Her fingers were raw from searching and dragging herself across the reef. She couldn’t tell what she was touching now, but there was something different about it. She found it again, grasped it, pulled herself close.

It had moved. Definitely not a rock.

She was close enough now to make out a blur of color, the bronze hue of tanned skin.

It was Professor.

Frantic but now also hopeful, she drew herself closer, climbing his torso like a horizontal ladder over a crevasse, and found his face. Unable to tell if he was conscious — she would not allow herself to think past that — she took the regulator from her mouth and pushed it between his lips.

Nothing.

She let go of the mouthpiece and instead pressed her own mouth against his, exhaling her breath into him.

He jerked, started coughing and thrashing, but she held fast, one arm wrapped around his neck, unable to do anything but ride out the spasms as his body fought to purge the water from his lungs. Then, miraculously, she felt a tapping against her back.

She thrust the regulator at his face and this time he took it of his own accord. She felt more spasms, but after a few seconds, he was pressing the mouthpiece into her hands again. She took it, drew a shallow breath then forced herself to take another, this time deeper, filling her lungs.

Your turn, she thought, handing it back to him.

With each hand-off, the coughing spasms eased until he seemed to be breathing normally. Jade had let go of his neck, but now had one arm wrapped around him, hugging him close as if he were the only stable thing in her universe.

Abruptly, the pressure holding them down eased and Jade felt her natural buoyancy return. The ominous rumble of Quest Explorer’s engines abated as well, replaced by the eerie calm of the still ocean. She looked up, half expecting to see total normalcy restored to the submerged depths, but everything remained shrouded in a dark fog of sediment.

She felt Professor tapping her again. She could just make out his face, only an inch or two from his. He brought his hand close and pointed up. What was he trying to tell her? Swim back to the surface?

No. Someone had just tried to kill them again. Not just a lone saboteur, but someone who could command the Explorer’s crew to throw Professor over and fire up the blowers. Whoever was behind it probably thought they had succeeded, that both Jade and Professor were dead. Better to let them go on thinking it.

So what was he trying to say?

He opened his mouth and allowed a single globule of air to escape. As it rose into the cloud, he pointed at it.

Bubbles.

With the blowers off, their air bubbles would rise to the surface where a keen-eyed lookout might divine their significance.

Hoping that she understood what he wanted, she shrugged out of the tank harness and closed the valve on the manifold, shutting off the flow of air. Professor nodded, then pointed up again.

Duh. Of course we have to go up. But what about people up there waiting to kill us?

He must have heard what she was thinking, or read the question on her face, because he shrugged.

One thing at a time.

TWENTY-EIGHT

While half the crew scanned the murky water for any trace of Professor and Jade, the rest set about preparing for the recovery of the Moon stone. Dorion watched, not knowing whether to hope that the two lost souls would reappear. Hodges had insisted on running the engines for the full ten minutes of air that might be left in Jade’s tank, and once that was gone, they would certainly drown. But if, as Dorion suspected, time passed more slowly in close proximity to the Moon stone, then what seemed like ten minutes on the surface might only be one or two minutes on the bottom. But even if Jade and Professor did not drown, Hodges was waiting with an assault rifle from the ship’s small arms locker, ready to pick off anyone who surfaced.

“It will take about twenty minutes for this cloud to dissipate,” Nichols said. “But the package is already secured to the cable. Once it clears, we can send a diver down and hook up a floatation bag. Then we can bring it up.”

Hodges did not look particularly pleased with this assessment. Dorion recalled that the man’s mission in life was to destroy objects like the Moon stone, not bring them into the daylight. He was faintly surprised to hear Hodges say, “I don’t want to wait that long. Get your diver in the water now. He can follow the cable, so visibility isn’t a problem. I want to be underway within the hour.”

Nichols looked ready to argue, but evidently thought better of it. He turned away to give the orders.

“This is really happening, Paul,” Ophelia said, breathless with anticipation. “All our years of searching have finally brought us here. The power to see the future will be in my hands. I will be the new oracle, and I will use my sight to reshape the world.”

Dorion gave a glum nod. He understood her eagerness, indeed he had felt the same way for many years, hoping, though perhaps never really believing that they would actually find what they sought. Now that it was almost in hand, and at an unimaginable price, he found himself unable to share her excitement.

But this is the future I saw.

He recalled the old story of Croesus, who had been told by the oracle of Delphi that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. When he was defeated in battle, he returned and demanded to know why the oracle had misled him. ‘A great empire was destroyed,’ the oracle had replied. ‘Your own.’ The story was part of the recorded history of Delphi, but it read like a parable. Knowledge of the future was a double-bladed sword, fire in the hands of a child. Worse, it was a mirror, revealing more about the desires of the person who looked for it, than certain knowledge of what was to come. Desire was the force that shaped the future, not dark matter. Ophelia would have the future she craved, regardless of whether she possessed the Moon stone.

And what of me? What will my future be?

That was something the Shew Stone had not shown him.

It seemed only a minute or two had passed when the divers returned, their task accomplished. Even Nichols voiced amazement at how quickly they had finished, but Hodges curtailed the discussion with a terse growl. “Get on with it.”

Nichols gave the order to start the compressors.

“How long will this take?” asked Hodges.

“That depends on how heavy the package is. We probably won’t need to fully inflate the tube to see some results. Might just be a minute or two.”

Curious in spite of himself, Dorion moved back to the rail and peered down into the murky water, straining for some glimpse of the object that, even without fully realizing it, he had been searching for ever since that fateful day at CERN. The Moon stone. The original Omphalos.

He had never stopped to think about its origin. He felt quite certain that the spherical shape facilitated the accumulation of dark matter particles, pulling them in the way a black hole draws in material to increase its mass, but where had the process begun? Was it a natural occurrence, perhaps a small concentration that had been present when the earth’s crust had formed? That was unlikely; at its formation, the earth would have been molten and anything as massive as the sphere would have promptly sunk to the earth’s core. Something from a meteorite perhaps; that made more sense. The ancients of Mycenae had recognized something special about the stone globe and venerated it without really understanding what made it powerful. Perhaps they had not been the first; perhaps it had been found somewhere else, moving around the ancient world from one conquering kingdom to the next.

I wonder if Jade had a theory about that.

“What’s happening?” Ophelia’s gasp brought him back to the moment.

He expected to see the water boiling with air bubbles bleeding off the flotation bags or perhaps even glimpse enormous bladders rising into view through the silty water, but what he saw instead defied easy explanation. The water at the rear of the ship had risen up into a hump, like a wave or a swell, building but not breaking. The area of disturbance was only about fifty feet across, but already high enough that it had formed a sloping hill of water. Held in place by its anchors, the Explorer could not slide down the face of the disturbance, so instead the entire ship canted forward, nose pointing downslope. Dorion had to clutch at the rail to keep from tumbling across the deck.

Hodges rounded on Nichols. “What’s happening?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this.” He stabbed a finger at Dorion. “Ask him. He’s the expert.”

Dorion shook his head, but even as he did, he realized that perhaps he did know. “When Alvaro and Perez removed the stone from Teotihuacan, it triggered an earthquake that collapsed the tunnel and trapped Perez.”

“So?”

“That earthquake may have been caused by a gravitational anomaly. The dark matter field created by the sphere is just strong enough that any attempt to move it upsets the local gravity.”

Nichols was dubious. “You’re saying that little ball of rock can create earthquakes?”

“Or in this case, a tidal event. It is pulling the water toward it, causing a localized high tide.”

“We caused it, just by trying to move the stone?” said Ophelia. “How is that possible?”

“The orb has been sitting undisturbed for centuries, at equilibrium with its environment. If you have scales that are perfectly balanced, even a tiny grain of sand can upset the balance.”

“Is it going to get worse?” Hodges asked.

Dorion spread his hands. “I cannot say. I have never seen anything like this.”

As if he had been eavesdropping, Lee staggered down the stairs from the bridge cursing loudly and, if Dorion was not mistaken, a little drunkenly as well. “What are you doing to my ship?”

“It’s fine, Spencer,” Nichols said, though he sounded unconvinced of that himself. “Just an unexpected swell.”

“The hell you say.”

Hodges echoed the captain’s reservations. “If this keeps up, cut the damn thing loose. We’ll destroy it with explosives and that will be the end of that.”

“No!” Ophelia almost screamed the denial. Dorion could not recall her ever sounding quite so desperate. “You must not. I forbid it.”

Hodges appeared unimpressed by her outburst, and several of the crewman seemed poised to do as he had instructed, but before anyone could move, something erupted from the center of watery hill. Dorion spotted something that looked like an enormous black inner tube on the crest of the tidal bulge, and then, as if breaking through had somehow pierced an invisible membrane holding its shape, the water simply fell back into the ocean.

The Explorer’s decks heaved back and forth as the ship strained against its anchors. Hodges cast a baleful glare in Ophelia’s direction, but after a few more seconds, the turbulence seemed to abate and everyone aboard the research vessel could clearly see the flotation airbag bobbing on the surface less than a hundred feet off the stern.

“Reel it in,” shouted Nichols. “We’ve got it now.”

There was a mechanical whirring as the slack was taken out of the lift cable, then without warning the deck lurched beneath Dorion’s feet. The cable hummed and the entire structure of the boom crane began to groan in protest.

“It’s okay,” Nichols said. “This is normal.”

Dorion detected a note of uncertainty in the man’s tone, as if his assurance was as much for himself as the rest of them. The noise grew louder, supplemented by the whine of the cable winch straining against the load, but at the end of the line, the giant pillow-shape of the flotation bag was rising perceptibly. After a few seconds, it cleared the wave tops and through the curtain of runoff, Dorion could see, nestled in the embrace of the cargo slings, a spherical object. The titanic tug-of-war continued, the crane creaking as if on the verge of collapse, the Moon stone rising inch by grudging inch higher above the ocean’s surface.

“It’s a bit heavier than I thought it would be,” Nichols muttered, sounding even less confident than before.

Dorion’s concerns however were easing by degrees. Every inch won would greatly reduce the overall load on the cable, decreasing the likelihood that it would snap. The possibility of some other catastrophic failure remained, but if the crane’s engineers had done their job correctly, the cable would be intentionally designed to fail before the framework supporting it gave way.

The struggle reached a tipping point, figuratively speaking, when the load was brought above the level of the Quest Explorer’s main deck. Nichols gave the order to swing the boom over the deck and the anxious spectators cleared out of the way as the Moon stone was brought aboard the ship.

The crane operator reversed the direction of the winch but despite the fact that the cable was being paid out in miniscule increments, when the burden finally touched the deck, there was a resounding thump, like the impact of a car crash.

Dorion realized he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a long sigh. It was done. All the years of searching, all the sacrifice, had been leading him to this moment. For better or worse, they had found the prize. He glanced over at Ophelia and saw the same emotion writ large in her reverent gaze. Then, a flash of sunlight hit his face, momentarily blinding him. He raised a hand to shade his eyes, and saw that the sun was low in the western sky, its daily journey through the heavens nearly complete.

That’s odd. Where did the day go?

Jade’s last breath burned in her lungs as, clinging to Professor’s arm, they cautiously ascended through the gloomy waters toward what she hoped was the underside of the Quest Explorer’s hull. If they surfaced out in the open, they would be instantly visible to whoever had just tried to kill them, and she was pretty sure that was everyone on the ship’s crew.

She followed Professor’s lead, trusting his combat-tested instincts to guide them to where they needed to be. Although she was an experienced diver, and had dealt with more than her share of sticky situations, this was definitely his area of expertise, which became evident when Jade glimpsed the dark outline of the hull looming overhead.

She broke the surface as cautiously as her urgency would allow and greedily sucked in breaths until the throbbing in her chest finally relented. Beside her, Professor did the same, while gingerly probing the back of his head.

“What happened to you?” she whispered.

“Someone sucker punched me. Barry, I think. Should have known better than to turn my back on him.”

“I don’t think he’s working alone.”

Professor nodded. “Well, I’m still seeing the world a little cross-eyed, but I think I’ll live.”

“Good. What do we do now?”

“Well, assuming that everyone on this tub is gunning for us—”

“You think Paul and Ophelia are in on this, too?”

He inclined his head. “Okay, maybe not them, but assuming that almost everyone on this tub is gunning for us, we have to stay out of sight. The good news is that they must think we’re already dead.”

As if to underscore this supposition, they heard the noise of machinery moving on deck. The crew was moving ahead with the recovery of the Moon stone.

“I’d like to wait until night fall, but that’s a long time to spend dangling our legs like shark bait.”

Jade looked down into the water nervously; that thought had not even occurred to her.

“So,” Professor continued, “What we’re going to have to do is shimmy up the anchor chain, and when no one is looking, sneak aboard. There are lots of places to hide on a ship this big, and unless I’m mistaken, they’re going to be otherwise occupied for the next hour or two.”

“Do you think Paul and Ophelia are all right?”

He shook his head, wincing as movement aggravated his injury. “Hard to say. I think maybe whoever’s running the show has explicit instructions to keep her safe. Remember how Barry pulled her aside last night, just before they tried to smash us with the submersible?”

Jade nodded. “If they’re both safe, then maybe all we need to do is lay low until the ship returns to port. After that…?”

Professor heaved a weary sigh. “After that, I just don’t know. Let’s get on board and worry about the rest as it comes.”

As Professor had predicted, the full attention of the crew was fixed on the task of bringing the Moon stone to the surface. He barely made a sound as he climbed up the anchor line and pulled himself through the hawsehole on the starboard bow. Jade was not quite as stealthy, but she could have been banging a drum and still gone unnoticed. The air aboard the ship was filled with a discordant symphony of electric motors straining and metal groaning under tremendous stress.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Jade whispered as she cleared the hawsehole. Professor touched a finger to his lips and then motioned for her to seek concealment behind a stack of shipping pallets. The noise continued for several minutes, during which time Jade wondered if the ship was going to shake itself apart.

“What time is it?” Professor asked.

“Time for you to get a watch,” she retorted, in a misbegotten attempt to lighten the mood. She slipped the chronograph off her wrist and handed it to him, but did not fail to notice that both clock hands were close to the twelve o’clock position. “Is that right?”

Professor glanced at the watch, as if that was all it took to confirm what he already knew. “According to this watch, and my body clock too, for that matter, it’s just after noon. But the sun is going down.”

“We weren’t on the bottom that long.”

“Nope. This is the time dilation effect Paul was talking about. Time is moving slower, relatively speaking, the closer we get to the Moon stone. Now that it’s on the ship with us, we’re all caught in the effect.”

Jade squinted at the horizon. She could actually see the sun moving through the sky like a time lapse sequence or a video playback on fast forward. “Is that something we should be worried about?”

A deep gonging noise reverberated through the entire vessel as the Moon stone was lowered to the deck. Jade waited for the vibrations to subside, but instead of dying down, the faint tremors seemed to increase in frequency until the deck plates felt almost electric under her feet.

“I think,” Professor said gravely, “it might be.”

Brian Hodges stared at the black stone sphere, still partially concealed by mesh slings and the deflating airbag, and felt an overwhelming sense of destiny. This artifact was an insult to everything he believed, mocking the tragic loss he had suffered with its very presence, and yet now he understood that he had made the correct decision in allowing Ophelia to proceed with her plans to recover it from the ocean floor. Now that it was aboard, he could deal with the threat it represented permanently.

When he had joined the Norfolk Group, he had imagined that he would be striking a pre-emptive blow against fundamentalists and extremists who would use ancient relics to draw true believers to their jihads and holy crusades, the way Roman soldiers rallied around their battle standards. He never would have believed that some of those artifacts might actually possess supernatural attributes. Yet, here before him, was something infinitely more dangerous than a mere symbol, and he was the only person on earth who could do something about it. He slung the AR-15 rifle he’d taken from the ship’s locker across his back and headed for the stairs that led up to the bridge.

Ophelia must have divined his intent. “Where are you going?”

He ignored her, taking the steps two at a time, and burst into the control room where Lee and two other crewmen were huddled over a console. The master of the ship, his alcoholic flush deepened to a dark magenta by anxiety, looked up as if he had been expecting the intrusion.

“Set a course for deep water,” Hodges said. “It doesn’t matter where. Just get us somewhere where we can deep six that thing.”

“No!” The protest came from behind him. Ophelia had followed him to the bridge.

“Believe me,” Lee said. “I’d like nothing better. But the GPS is completely screwed. Worse than last night. I have no idea where we are and no way to tell where we’re going.”

Contrary to what Chapman and the others had no doubt believed, the previous night’s technical difficulties had not been an act of sabotage. Hodges had been informed of the malfunction, and now he realized that, even at a distance, the ship’s hardware had been affected by the artifact that now sat on the deck below. This time, a simple reboot would not suffice to fix the problem.

“Just point us in the right direction,” he snarled. “It’s a big ocean and I’m not asking you to be picky.”

Lee chewed his lip. “Deepest spot that’s close to us is Little Abaco Canyon. More than two miles deep in some places. It’s about a hundred nautical miles from here. We could be there in about twelve hours.”

His forehead drew into a furrow as he glanced at the wall clock. It read 12:15 p.m. and yet beyond the large windows, the setting sun was clearly visible. Time and the ability to measure it had ceased to have any meaning.

“Can you steer us there by dead reckoning?”

“No,” Ophelia shouted. “You can’t do this.”

Hodges rounded and struck her a vicious backhand blow. The impact stung his hand, but the sensation was deliciously satisfying, as was the sight of Ophelia crumpling senseless to the deck. Then, as if what he had done was of no more consequence than swatting a fly, he turned back to Lee. “Can you?”

The captain nodded. “I can wing it. It’s east-by-southeast. If we veer off course, we’ll see Abacos and be able to correct.”

Lee’s drunken slur did not fill Hodges with confidence, but what alternative was there? “Do it. We may not have much time.”

Lee straightened and addressed one of the crewmen. “You heard the man. Take the helm. Bring us about. Engines at one-quarter until I give the word.”

Hodges felt the ship begin to move. Through the window, the blood orange orb of the sun, which was just beginning to kiss the flat line of the horizon, seemed to slide sideways and then disappeared altogether. Lee stepped over Ophelia and stuck his head through the door in order to continue tracking the sun’s position. “On my mark, straighten the rudder and all ahead full.”

“Aye, sir. On your mark.”

Hodges craned his head around and caught a glimpse of the sun, flattening out against the horizon as day slipped into night.

“Now!” Lee cried.

Hodges felt the ship lurch as the engines revved up and the Quest Explorer surged forward like a racehorse out of the gate.

Lee stepped back inside and peered through the window into the deepening twilight. A few seconds later, a slim fingernail of silvery light appeared in the gloom. “There,” the captain said. “Head for the moon.”

The moon.

Ophelia and Dorion had called the black orb “the Moon stone” and hadn’t the physicist talked about tidal forces and gravitational anomalies?

Without saying another word, he stepped over Ophelia and headed for the deck. He wasn’t sure what it was about the rising moon that was nagging at his consciousness, but he had a feeling Dorion would know.

Jade felt the subtle shift at her center of gravity as the ship began moving, turning. Before she could frame the obvious question, Professor stiffened in alarm.

“What the hell are they doing?”

Jade shared his concern, but did not understand the reason for it. “What’s wrong?”

“Think about it. That thing they just brought on board is probably the source of all the weirdness that’s been attributed to the Bermuda Triangle for the last four hundred years. And that was when it was just sitting there, buried under tons of sand and doing nothing. Moving it has clearly upset the natural equilibrium and exacerbated the effect. It’s obviously screwing with space-time, and something tells me that what we’ve seen so far is just the tip of iceberg.”

“Okay. So?”

“Bermuda Triangle?” His voice was uncharacteristically harsh. “Ships and planes vanishing without a trace. You really think we should be trying to go anyplace with that thing on board?”

“Oh. I see your point. So what do we do about it?”

He frowned, but it was a look of concentration. “The Phoenicians found a way to move that thing across the Pacific three thousand years ago. Maybe the field is more massive now, but it must equalize after a while. Maybe there’s some kind of trigger that…” His eyes widened and he turned to peer into the darkest part of the sky. “Oh, no.”

Jade followed his gaze and spied the full moon, bloated and yellow just above the black line of the horizon. Before she could say anything, the glowing disk seemed to grow even larger, until it filled her vision. She thought she heard Professor’s voice reaching out to her, but his words, if indeed there were any, were swallowed up in the sudden rushing sound that filled her ears.

TWENTY-NINE

Jade looked up and saw Dane Maddock standing over her, a bottle of Dos Equis in each hand. One for him, one for her. She reached out and took the proffered bottle, feeling the cool glass against her palm and beads of moisture — condensation drawn out of the humid tropical air — trickling across the back of her hand, He smiled at her and Jade felt a surge of emotions well up in her heart.

This was perfect.

She took in her familiar surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. She was on the foredeck of Maddock’s boat, Sea Foam, as it rocked gently in its slip at the Key West marina, watching the sun go down out in Gulf. The sky a dazzling swirl of orange and purple against water that was almost black.

This was the life she was meant to have.

He sat down beside her and reached out with his own bottle, tapping it against the neck of hers. “To the good life.”

She laughed, but something about his toast left her ill-at-ease. “What made you say that?”

He smiled and gestured toward the sunset. “Look around. We’re living the dream here. You. Me. A tropical paradise. And Bones is three thousand miles away, helping Crazy Charlie with his latest get-rich-quick scheme. Does it get better than that?”

The good life.

“I have gazed upon the life that might have been as one might gaze through a window,” she murmured. “If only I could open the window and step through, I would.”

Maddock’s smile slipped by a degree. “What is that, a poem?”

The words — words she had read in another life, another reality — tugged at her, a force like gravity, drawing her out of this most perfect of worlds.

No. This is the life I want.

She clutched at memories like a lifeline. The day they had met, when he had saved her life after she’d gotten trapped while cave diving. The year they had been together; the fights, but also the good times, and then the break. But he had come back. He had come to her in Japan and they had fought the Dominion together, and when it was over, he had taken her back into his life and….

That’s not what happened.

But in another universe… in this universe… it was.

She reached out and took his hand, as if physical contact might anchor her to this reality, but it wasn’t enough. She knew that she was an intruder here, a usurper. This was only the life that might have been, not her real life.

But what if it could be?

The inner voice was so seductive, the touch of Maddock’s hand was so real. What would she have to do to stay in this moment?

No. This is wrong. This is a lie.

She let go of his hand, thrusting him away. The abrupt motion caused the beer bottle to go skittering across the deck, vomiting a trail of foam.

“Jade, what’s wrong?”

She could already feel herself being pulled, like a rubber band snapping back after stretching almost to its breaking point. Every fiber of her being told her to hang on to this world. She had passed through the window…no, the open door…and all she had to do was shut it behind her forever.

Can I do that?

Should I?

It was already too late. Maddock’s face vanished into the haze and the setting sun became darkness and then….

The touch of sunlight on her eyelids roused Jade.

Sunlight?

She sat up with a start. The sun had risen and now hung low in the eastern sky. That can’t be right. The sun just went down.

The accelerated dawn was not the strangest sight to greet her eyes. Something had happened to the ship, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on exactly what. Everything appeared…crooked. Bulkheads were tilting at crazy angles. The deck was warped beneath her, buckling as if under extreme pressure. It reminded her of Salvador Dali paintings where solid objects melted and flowed like Silly Putty. When she got to her feet, she could see the wave-tops flashing by dizzyingly fast, but the water level was alarmingly close to the deck; the Quest Explorer was sinking.

“Jade!”

Even though it only seemed as if a few seconds had passed since she’d last heard him speak, she turned to Professor as if he were an old friend she hadn’t seen in ages and threw her arms around him. He returned the embrace with equal enthusiasm.

“Thank God,” he whispered. “I was afraid you…I didn’t have time to warn you.”

She let go and held him at arm’s length. “Warn me?”

“You saw something again didn’t you?”

The thought of what she had seen sent a pang through Jade. No, it was worse than that. It ripped off the scab and rubbed jalapeno juice into her wounded heart. Professor, perhaps noticing her reaction, did not ask. “Me too. And I think I know what’s going on here. The disappearances of the men at the lighthouse, the ships found completely abandoned. Even what happened with Gil Perez.” He glanced at the sky. The sun was climbing fast, though that didn’t seem to mean anything anymore. “We don’t have much time. I’ll explain on the way.”

“The way to where?”

“The bridge,” he said, already moving away.

Jade started after him. “In case you’ve forgotten, the people on this ship are trying to kill us.”

“Not anymore.” He gestured to the main deck where the she had last seen the crewmen gathered around the Moon stone. The black orb was still there, but the area appeared completely deserted. As she started to turn away, she spied movement behind the sphere. Before Jade could shout a warning to Professor, what she had glimpsed resolved into a person. It was Dorion.

“Paul!” Jade cried out. “You’re still here.”

He jogged over to join them. “Where did everyone go?”

Professor paused at the base of the stairs. “Do you remember how Perez said that he had seen the life that he might have had if he had made different choices? I think that when you are this close to the dark matter field, that’s exactly what happens. You don’t just see possible futures; you see alternate realities in the multi-verse. Worlds where the decisions we make spin off to form alternate timelines.”

Jade nodded dumbly. That sounded about right.

“Maybe you see the life you think you should have had,” Professor continued, and Jade thought she heard a hint of anguish in his voice.

What did you see? Maybe there was a reason he had not asked her that question.

“A window into other worlds,” Dorion said, “but not a door. The same rules that govern our universe, also govern the multiverse. Everything must balance. If a person tried to pass between realities, it upsets the balance and the results are, well, unpredictable at best. Possibly even catastrophic.”

“‘Look but don’t touch.’” Professor summarized. “That’s what happened to Perez. He thought the other reality he was seeing was a way to escape being trapped underground, but when he tried to pass through, the fabric of reality got mixed up. All the different possibilities got jumbled and when the pieces finally settled, there were two Gil Perez’s in our world: one in the cavern under the pyramid, and another in Mexico, accused of deserting his post in Manila.”

Jade thought about how she close she had come to making a similar decision. “So if we tried to stay in one of those other realities, the same thing might happen to us? We could get teleported somewhere else?”

“The earth keeps moving through space,” Dorion said. “So when you get pulled back, you don’t end up where you started. It is like stepping off of a moving train and then trying to get back on. You’ll end up in a different car, if you don’t get left behind altogether.”

Jade swallowed. She had wanted to stay in that other world so badly she could taste it, yet if she had tried where would she have landed? In the middle of the ocean? Outer space?

“I think that’s what happened to the crew,” Professor said. “I guess we were smart enough not to fall for it. Or just plain lucky.”

Jade felt that luck had played more of a part in her case. It had happened so quickly. She wondered what alternative realities had enticed the crew. Had Nichols glimpsed a world where he was a famous treasure hunter, a world-renowned celebrity, whose exploits made the front page of every newspaper? Had Lee seen himself, clean and sober, and in command of a five-star cruise ship? What about Ophelia? For that matter, what ‘might-have-been’ had Dorion glimpsed and ultimately rejected?

“I think it peaks when the moon rises,” Professor continued. “The additional pull of gravity supplies an extra kick to the dark matter field. We’re safe for the moment, but with this time dilation effect, we won’t have long.” He started up the stairs. “We have to abandon ship; leave in the RIB.”

“Then why are you going up there?” When he didn’t answer, her curiosity got the better of her and she headed up the stairs after him, with Dorion right behind her. She passed through the doors a moment later and was surprised to find him kneeling over a groggy Ophelia.

“I guess we’re not the only survivors after all,” Jade said under her breath. Evidently, whatever alternative reality Ophelia had glimpsed had not been as enticing as the prospect of using the Moon stone to dominate her family enterprise, and perhaps the rest of the world, too.

“What…” Ophelia looked up at him, then at Jade. Although her disorientation might have been attributable to the effects of the Moon stone, there was a spot of blood at the corner of her mouth and a distinctly hand-shape bruise on her cheek. When her eyes fell on Dorion, her expression became apprehensive.

She doesn’t look very happy to see him. I wonder why?

Ophelia’s gaze came back to Professor. “What happened?”

“Long story,” Professor told her. “Jade, get her up.”

Jade helped Ophelia stand while Professor went to the helm. Through the big window that looked forward, Jade could see land directly ahead and approaching fast. Only then did it occur to her that the ship’s engines were still chugging away. Professor adjusted the controls and the view changed, the islands slipping away to their left.

“That should do it,” he said. “Unless I’m mistaken, that’s Abaco to port. Once we’re past it, there’s nothing more but open ocean all the way to Africa. Not that this tub is going to hold together long enough to make it that far.”

“It is Abaco,” Ophelia said blearily. “Hodges wanted the captain to make for Abaco Canyon. He was going to dump the Moon stone there.”

“Hodges? He’s here?” Professor looked at her for a moment, but then shook his head. “Well, he had the right idea. The canyon would be the perfect place to get rid of it. I think that, in addition to everything else, the dark matter field is creating a gravitational anomaly that’s causing the ship to implode. It’s going to sink, probably very soon. We have to try to get it away from populated areas before it does.”

Ophelia came wide-awake. “No. You can’t. We have to save it.”

Jade placed a hand on her shoulder. “Ophelia, the Moon stone is dangerous. It’s already taken the crew.”

Ophelia looked around, evidently noticing for the first time that there were only the four of them on the bridge. She frowned but then pointed to the not-too-distant outline of Greater Abaco Island. “There’s land right there. We can put into port. Quarantine the ship until we’re able to figure out how to move it safely.” She turned to Dorion. “Paul, you said it would settle down if we stop moving it. Tell them.”

He started to answer, but Jade cut the debate short. “We’re getting off this ship. End of discussion.”

Professor stepped away from the helm and went to the chart table, on which a map of the Bahamas was displayed underneath a sheet of Plexiglas. He tapped it. “We were here, at Great Isaac last night at sundown. Now we’re here. That’s about a twelve-hour journey under normal conditions. With the ship taking on water, it’s probably taken a lot longer…relatively speaking that is. From an outside perspective, we’re moving at a normal speed, but because of the time dilation effect, a twelve or fifteen hours only feels like a few minutes. To us, it’s like hyperspace travel.”

Outside the window, the southern tip of Greater Abaco Island slid out of view. Professor returned to the helm and adjusted course again.

“So what does that mean?”

He searched the controls for a moment, found what he was looking for, and pressed a button. The engines instantly fell silent but the ship continued to move forward at what seemed like breakneck speed. In the sudden quiet, the noise of the ship’s slow structural collapse was audible. “It means, we’re right where we need to be, and not a moment too soon. Now, let’s get the hell off this ship.”

“No!” Ophelia jerked and began clutching around her for a handhold, like a defiant child refusing to leave a playground. “I won’t go.”

Jade was about to respond with an appeal to reason, but the memory of what she had seen in the Shew Stone vision silenced her. There were worse things than letting Ophelia go down with the ship.

The Moon stone would be lost, probably irretrievably so, at the bottom of a submarine canyon. Without it, the dire future Jade had envisioned could not possibly happen. Or could it?

It wasn’t hard to imagine someone with Ophelia’s resources moving heaven and earth to recover it from the depths. And wasn’t it possible that there were other pockets of dark matter scattered about the planet? If they were out there, Ophelia would keep Dorion looking until they were found, and then everything Jade had seen — things that even now were too horrible to contemplate — would still come to pass.

There was only one way to definitely ensure that none of that would happen. All I have to do is let her have her way.

Professor stepped to Jade’s side. “Ophelia, if you stay here you will die.”

“If I die, it will be your fault,” she retorted. “If you just take the ship to land… No, you know what? Go ahead. Leave. I’ll figure it out myself.”

“Well, we can’t have that.” Jade clenched a fist at her hip, and then threw an uppercut that connected solidly with Ophelia’s chin. There was a click as the blonde woman’s perfect teeth knocked together and then she slumped unconscious to the deck.

Professor sighed. “I suppose now I have to carry her.”

“Look at it this way. You’ll get to be the hero who carried her ass off the ship. I’ll just be the bitch who slugged her.”

He stared down at Ophelia as trying to figure out what to do next. “She might sue, you know?”

“Can I call you as a character witness?”

Professor grinned and then knelt down and swept Ophelia’s limp form up and threw her over his shoulder. With Jade leading the way, they exited the bridge and headed out into daylight. The sun was already overhead.

“How long do you think we’ve got?” she asked. “Relatively speaking, that is.”

“No friggin’ clue. But it seems only a few minutes have passed since we woke up. So figure a few minutes more. And I’m not sure how far away we’ll need to be to escape the effect. So get a move on.”

Jade did, but in some deep recess of her mind, she found herself craving one more glimpse at that otherworld where she and Maddock were together. Now that she knew the risk, what harm could it do?

Plenty. A more pragmatic part of her quickly supplied the answer. If the ship sank while she was off in dreamland, her exercise in self-torture would prove very costly. That wasn’t the only good reason to avoid another window shopping trip. You and Maddock are done. Get over it. Get on with your life.

The ship was alive with the noise of its own destruction. Rivets popped free of overstressed hull plates and flew like bullets across the deck. Bulkheads and support stanchions shrieked as they bent double. The center of the ship, where the Moon stone had been deposited, was already inundated with water, the deck sloping down in either direction to disappear beneath the murky surface. The ship was being folded in half by the mass of the Moon stone.

Jade stepped off the stairs and headed for the davit holding the ship’s one remaining launch. She found the controls that would lower the boat into the water but stopped as she realized that someone would have to stay behind to operate them. “All aboard,” she told the others. “I’ll lower you down and then jump for it.”

Professor looked as though he was about to overrule her, but she cut him off. “Let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”

Without further comment, he heaved Ophelia into the small boat. Dorion stared at her inert form a moment and shook his head. “You know, I didn’t get a chance to tell you that I’m very happy you both are alive.”

“Great,” Jade said with what seemed like appropriate abruptness. “We’re happy, too. We’ll talk about it later.”

Dorion either didn’t get the hint or felt that whatever he had to say was more important than the immediate danger. “I need to tell you something before she wakes up.”

Jade caught herself before dismissing him again. Had Dorion glimpsed the same future as she? A world torn apart by Ophelia’s madness? Was that what he felt he needed to tell her?

Dorion started to speak again, but before he could utter a single word, he suddenly pitched back against the side of the motor launch, his chest erupting in a spray of red. At the same instant, the harsh reports of an automatic rifle firing multiple shots assaulted Jade’s ears. She instinctively threw herself to the side, knowing only that she had to find cover, but momentarily uncertain where the attack was coming from.

There were more reports and she saw Professor moving in the opposite direction, rounds tearing into the inflatable boat and sparking of the metal deck plates all around him. There was a crimson puff as something struck him, and he crumpled to the deck.

“No!”

Transfixed by the horror of the attack, Professor wounded, Dorion almost certainly dead, Jade’s rising panic held her rooted in place. From the corner of her eye, she saw a man walking purposefully toward her, a smoking rifle at the high ready.

It was Hodges.

Jade glanced frantically around but Hodges had every avenue of escape on the ship covered.

On the ship….

The urgency of the situation compelled Jade to throw caution to the wind. Before Hodges could pull the trigger, she sprang into motion, vaulted the rail and hurled herself into the ocean.

THIRTY

Hodges ran to the rail and stabbed the business end of the AR-15 over the side, but there was no sign of Jade.

“Failed again, Brian?”

He whirled, training the muzzle in the direction of the voice, the voice of his former partner. Chapman had pulled himself into a sitting position and but for the fact that his hands were pressed against the meaty part of his left thigh, trying to stanch the flow of blood from a bullet wound, he might have been merely lounging on the deck, soaking in the sun.

“How many times is that now? Three? I think it’s probably a good thing you left the Myrmidons when you did. As inept as you are, I don’t think I’d want to go out in the field with you.”

“It’s only a failure if you don’t fix it,” Hodge sneered. He lined up the iron sights on Chapman’s head and started to apply pressure to the trigger. “And I know exactly where to start.”

Chapman shrugged. “So you kill me. Big deal. This ship is about to sink anyway. Meanwhile, Jade is getting away, and you just shot up your best way of going after her.”

Without lowering the rifle, Hodge’s glanced at the RIB. A smear of blood marked the spot where Dorion had fallen but at the center of the stain was a ragged hole. The three-round burst that had felled the physicist had gone right through his body and torn up the launch as well. Although the vulcanized rubber more or less held its shape, the boat was no longer seaworthy.

“Is she still alive?” Chapman asked.

The question caught Hodges off-guard. The other man already knew Jade had escaped. So who was he…Ophelia? He leaned closer to the boat and saw her lying in a heap in the bilges of the inflatable launch. She had been splattered with Dorian’s blood, but his cursory glance revealed no sign of active bleeding.

“Doesn’t matter. Like I said, we’ll all be at the bottom of the ocean pretty soon.”

Hodges frowned. Chapman was right about the condition of the ship. The noise of its break-up was like the sound of a car wreck played back on an infinite loop. With the deck already awash, it was a wonder the ship was still afloat.

He would have to find another way off the ship. There had to be inflatable lifeboats. He’d get Ophelia to one of those and then wait for rescue. If Jade survived the swim to the mainland, she would simply be the one remaining loose end to tie up. Despite Chapman’s taunt, he hadn’t failed at all.

He raised the rifle again and took aim.

Chapman spat out a laugh. “Really?”

“I’m doing you a favor buddy. Unless you’d rather drown?”

Hodges expected the other man to laugh or spout some defiant crap about not being afraid to die, but instead, Chapman cocked his head sideways and looked thoughtful. “Tell me one thing first. What did you see?”

Hodges felt his mouth go dry. “What?”

“When the moon rose, we all blacked out. I’m guessing you did too. Just like that. Like someone came up behind you and conked you with a concrete block. Only it wasn’t exactly a blackout. More of a peek at the world as we wish it could be.”

Hodges could hear his heart pounding in his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think I can guess,” Chapman went on. “You saw your family. Your wife. Your daughter. You saw yourself with them, the way it would have been if the attack on Norfolk had never happened. I’ll bet you couldn’t believe how much your daughter had grown.”

“Shut up.”

Chapman smiled and there was nothing mocking or menacing about it. It was a compassionate, avuncular smile. “What I don’t understand, Brian, is how you could have come back here after seeing that?”

“Because it’s a lie,” Hodges hissed through clenched teeth. “They’re gone and that’s that. That other…whatever…it’s just a lie. It’s not my life. All that I have left is honoring their memory by stopping it from ever happening again.”

Chapman nodded slowly. “You honor their memory with cold blooded murder?”

Hodges felt raw anger surge through his extremities. How dare you? “No. This is personal.”

He pulled the trigger.

When she had decided to jump overboard, Jade had half-expected a long drop followed by a jolting impact with the surface. But, instead of something only slightly less brutal than her leap from the cliffs of Isla del Caño, what she got was more like a cannonball into a swimming pool. The Quest Explorer had taken on so much water that the ocean was already pouring over the deck. She barely had time to arch her body and put her hands out ahead in some semblance of a dive.

Her first thought was to dive deep. She knew that the supersonic rounds from Hodges’ assault rifle wouldn’t be able to reach her even just a foot or so under the surface. Still, she would have to surface eventually and the only way to make sure that Hodges wasn’t waiting to pick her off again was by swimming so far under the surface that he wouldn’t see her at all.

She swam down, kicking furiously to overcome her natural buoyancy in salt water. When the pressure in her inner ear made it feel like her head was going to burst, she leveled out and turned back toward the ship. If she could swim under it and surface on the other side, she might be able to sneak up behind Hodges and get the drop on him. Then she would be able to save the others.

If they’re still alive.

She knew that Dorion was dead. His wounds had probably been instantly fatal. This realization stung a bit, but only because she felt that she had failed somehow. The grief would come later.

She wanted to believe that Professor and Ophelia were still alive. After all, she had seen a future where they were both still breathing. But, if the Moon stone disappeared into the unreachable depths of Little Abaco Canyon, then everything about that future would change.

They’re still alive, she told herself. And I’m going to save them.

As deep as she thought she had gone, it wasn’t enough. The mostly-submerged hull was an impenetrable yellow wall, blocking her path, reaching down further than she could see and sinking deeper before her very eyes.

Oh, God. I’m too late.

She abandoned the attempt to swim under and instead angled up in the direction of the bow where she and Professor had climbed up the anchor chain…yesterday? A few minutes ago? With the anchors reeled, there would be no cable to climb up now, but if the ship was as low in the water as it appeared, she wouldn’t have to climb.

When she surfaced, she found that the bow of the ship was actually higher than it had been when they had boarded earlier, and now rose up at a thirty-degree angle from amidships where the Moon stone was pressing down with all the mass of a miniature black hole. She sidled along the sloping deck until it met the water then pulled herself aboard.

She couldn’t believe how much the ship’s condition had deteriorated in just the minute she had spent underwater.

A minute to her at least; maybe as she had moved further away from the Moon stone, the time dilation effects had decreased. She had too much else to worry about right now to even attempt trying to figure whether that meant the ship’s break-up was happening faster or slower, relatively speaking.

She instinctively ducked low as soon as she was aboard. Hodges was only about a hundred feet away, close enough that she could easily make him out, and if he happened to look her way, her rescue attempt would be stillborn. The good news however was that she could also see Professor, alive and evidently conversing with his executioner.

He’s stalling. He knows I’m alive and on my way.

There was no way to know if that was true, but believing it gave Jade the courage to get moving again. She crept forward, ascending the sloped bow, past the submersible which, despite the fact that it was once more covered and secured with heavy straps, looked as though it might slide down the deck like a hockey puck. When she was no longer in Hodges’ line of sight, she circled to the opposite side of the ship to begin descending.

As she got close enough to eavesdrop on the conversation, it occurred to her that she hadn’t given any thought to how she would actually save Professor.

“…unless you’d rather drown?” Hodges was saying.

“Tell me one thing first. What did you see?”

“What?”

She had her dive knife. If she could get close enough, she could either drive the five-inch long tanto-style titanium blade through Hodges’ heart, or use the razor sharp edge to slit his throat.

If.

Knife work was tricky business and she was not exactly a trained knife fighter. Hodges probably knew more about that kind of combat than she did; if she didn’t get it right on the first try, he would probably take the blade and use it to kill her. Or just shoot her.

As she stared across the deck at them, contemplating her options, she realized that Professor was staring right at her.

“When the moon rose, we all blacked out,” he was saying, “I’m guessing you did too. Just like that. Like someone came up behind you and conked you with a concrete block. Only it wasn’t exactly a blackout. More of a peek at the world as we wish it could be.”

Jade broke into a grin. Thank you, Professor.

She looked around. Not a single concrete block in sight, but there were plenty of other things that might work as a makeshift bludgeon. She spotted a fire extinguisher mounted to a bulkhead. That’ll do.

Hodges answer was nervous, evasive. Professor had found the chink in his armor.

Professor kept talking, digging at the subject like a dog gnawing at a bone. His tone was confrontational and Jade knew what he was trying to keep Hodges angry, off-balance, so that she could approach undetected. She lifted and placed her steps with exaggerated caution to avoid splashing in the water that now covered the deck in a thin layer.

I’m a ninja, Jade told herself. I’m invisible. Just keep him occupied, Prof.

“What I don’t understand, Brian, is how you could have come back here after seeing that?”

Hodges was too consumed by anger to notice her approach. “Because it’s a lie. They’re gone and that’s that. That other…whatever…it’s just a lie. It’s not my life. All that I have left is honoring their memory by stopping it from ever happening again.”

She raised the fire extinguisher, ready to hammer it into the back of his head, but Hodges still had his rifle trained on Professor, his finger on the trigger. If she hit him, he might pull the trigger with a reflex action.

She gestured to Professor, trying to silently communicate the message: Get him to lower the gun.

“You honor their memory with cold blooded murder?”

Jade couldn’t believe her ears. Instead of talking Hodges down, Professor had just poked him in the eye.

“No.” Hodges’ voice was as cold as ice. “This is personal.”

There was not a doubt in Jade’s mind that Hodges was going to pull the trigger. She swung the fire extinguisher with all her might, but in the instant before she made contact, she heard the strident crack of Hodges’ rifle.

There was a loud clank as the metal container hit home and Hodges staggered forward, dropping the rifle. Jade’s attention was on Professor. She had seen him try to move at the last second, throw himself to the side, out of the line of fire, no doubt trying to time his dodge with Jade’s attack. They had both been a nanosecond too slow. Professor now lay sprawled on the deck, blood streaming from his head and flowing into the two-inch deep accumulation of water in which he lay. More blood oozed from the wound in his thigh.

Jade let the fire extinguisher fall from her hands and rushed forward to his side, unaware of her own desperate murmured “No! No! No!” She knelt, touching his face, unsure of what she was even trying to do.

The amount of blood was appalling, and yet when she searched for a wound, she was surprised to see that the source of the hemorrhage was a ragged gash that furrowed his left cheek and continued in a bloody groove that ran up the side of his head, just over his ear. The bullet had only grazed him.

Professor was still alive.

Stunned unconscious by the high-energy impact, possibly concussed, certainly in danger of bleeding out, but alive.

A groaning sound from behind her reminded Jade that Professor was not the only person in danger. She whirled around and saw Hodges, woozy but still on his feet, reaching for the fallen rifle, which now lay in two-inches of water.

Jade leaped for the gun in a headfirst dive. Her outstretched hand caught the still warm barrel of the weapon just as Hodges curled his fingers around the pistol grip. Jade pulled, twisting her body, so that the muzzle pointed harmlessly past her. Hodges pulled too, his finger grazing the trigger, and the gun barked.

The rifle barrel jumped like a live wire in Jade’s grasp, searing the skin of her palm. Although the bullet sizzled harmlessly past her, a spray of hot gasses hit her in the face, surrounding her with the sulfur stink of gunpowder. She let go, a reflex action, and saw Hodges pull the weapon to his shoulder in preparation to fire again.

Ignoring the pain in her hands and the deadly threat of the gun, Jade leaped at him, thrusting finger-claws at his face. Hodges, still unsteady on his feet from her initial attack, tried to draw back but was too slow. Jade felt her fingers sink into something wet, and all of a sudden, Hodges was screaming like a wounded animal.

He flung the gun away, and reached up with both hands to protect his already ruined eyes. Blinded and vulnerable, overcome by primal panic, he stumbled back, tripped, fell on his back with a splash. Jade, in the grip of a similar animal instinct, pounced after him, beating her fists at him, raining wild blows down on his face. She had taken a self-defense course during her college years, and Maddock had tried to teach her a few martial arts moves, but what she did now was nothing like that. This was pure fury. Revenge for Paul Dorion’s murder, and Acosta and Sanchez, too. Payback for shooting Professor and for trying to kill her over and over again.

“Jade!”

She could hear someone shouting her name, but it was the sound of tearing metal, the tilting of the deck and the rush of water all around that finally broke through the fog of war. Hodges lay beneath her, still making a weak effort to fend off her attack and keep his head above water.

“Jade!” It was Professor. “We have to go! Now!”

She stared at him. It seemed impossible that he was standing, that he was even conscious. His face was ghostly pale, except where blood streamed from the ragged gash on his cheek. The flesh around the wound was swollen, distorting his features and giving him a dazed, zombie-like expression. He wobbled unsteadily, trying to keep the weight off his injured leg.

“We have to swim for it,” he said, but she knew there was no way he would be swimming anywhere. What he meant was: You have to swim for it.

She looked over at the partially deflated launch, wondering if it was buoyant enough to act as a life preserver, then she had an idea. “The submersible!”

He blinked at her, and then his face revealed comprehension. “Okay. It’s worth a shot.”

She rushed to his side and draped his arm over her shoulder, then began hobbling up the canted deck toward the tarpaulin-covered QED. Despite having been used as an impromptu wrecking ball in the failed attempt to kill them, there was little visible evidence of damage. The miniature submarine was designed to withstand more than three thousand pounds per square inch of pressure, so she doubted very much that getting banged against the side of the ship, an impact about equivalent to getting in a fender bender in a supermarket parking lot, could have compromised its structural integrity. Besides, they weren’t going to be using it to dive.

She used her knife to cut away the bungee cords that held the tarps in place, revealing the yellow tank-like submarine. A series of welded rungs led up to the top and a cylindrical protuberance that ended in an entry hatch with a big flywheel. Jade gave Professor a boost then clambered up to help him get the hatch open.

From this slightly elevated perspective, they witnessed the beginning of the end for the Quest Explorer. Inundated by tons of seawater, its support beams bent and hull plates overstressed, the ship could remain afloat no longer.

Jade wrestled the hatch open. “In you go,” she said. “None of this ‘ladies first’ crap this time.”

Professor did not argue, but allowed her to help him maneuver into the opening. He stopped just before his head and shoulders could disappear from view and said one word. “Ophelia.”

“Crap,”

Let her die, Jade thought, but what she said was, “I’ll be right back.”

Hodges hovered on the edge of consciousness. The first hit — Jade’s sneak attack — had nearly done him in. Everything after that had been like the death of a thousand cuts, no one blow severe enough to do any real harm, but cumulatively and when added to that initial skull-fracturing impact, enough to put him down.

He wanted nothing more to simply give in, surrender himself to oblivion, but the release of unconsciousness was like a fog all around him, evaporating when he tried to embrace it.

His mouth filled with warm seawater. He involuntarily inhaled, and the subsequent choking fit brought him fully alert. He sat up and saw through one blurry eye — the other was swollen shut from Jade’s attack — that the water was rising fast all around him. In another second, he was fully immersed, half-floating as the ship sank away beneath him.

His first thought, I’m not going to die, was almost immediately supplanted by, I’m not going to live.

He could swim for it. There was land on the horizon, how far away? Twenty or thirty miles? He was a good swimmer; he might be able to make it.

You saw your family.

Chapman’s words haunted him. How had he known that?

You saw yourself with them, the way it would have been.

He had just assumed the weird episode was some kind of hallucination. He had dreamed the same thing so often, then awakened expecting to roll over and find his wife curled up next to him in bed. Brian dreamed it so many times that for several weeks after the attack, he had refused to sleep. Only after joining the Norfolk Group, focusing his grief into something meaningful, had the dreams finally stopped. He hadn’t really understood that this was different until Chapman had said it.

His glimpse of another world, of sitting down to dinner with his wife and his daughter, had not been a dream, not a replay of the life he had lost. It was the life that he could have had…that he should have had. The black orb — the Moon stone — had shown it to him.

What I don’t understand is how you could have come back?

Come back? Did that mean he had a choice in the matter?

He understood now what had become of the crew. Each one of them had seen something, another life, a better life, and had made the decision to stay.

His angry response to Chapman’s taunt had been a lie to cover a new upwelling of grief. I could have stayed with them?

Maybe it was still possible.

He oriented himself toward the center of the ship and started swimming, diving deeper to reach the place where he had last seen the Moon stone. He knew the ship was sinking fast, that he was now caught in the boundary layer, pulled along like a leaf caught in a slipstream, but he didn’t care. The Moon stone would save him; it would transport him away from this terrible world to a much better place.

It wasn’t there. Through the murk, he could see that the deck had collapsed under the prodigious weight of the sphere. He felt a moment of panic. Had it continued right through the hull?

No, there it was, hanging from a tangle of slings and cables just a few feet below. Ignoring the pressure building in his ear, he gripped one of the straps and pulled himself to it.

How do I make it work? Before, it had simply come over him like a fainting spell, no rhyme or reason. Maybe if he could touch it….

He tore at the slings, trying to find the stone orb nestled within. His fingers grazed something hard and smooth to the touch. He pressed harder against it.

“Take me there,” he screamed. His words, his last breath rushed out in a cloud of bubbles. “Take me back, damn you.”

Darkness swelled around him, and he sensed that he was almost there.

Jade dropped from the top of the submersible and into thigh deep water that was rising fast. Part of her couldn’t believe she was doing this, risking her life to save the woman who would….

I can’t judge her for what she might do, Jade told herself. Yet if she saved Ophelia now, and every dire part of that future came to pass, it would be her fault.

What good was knowing the future if you couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it?

But she couldn’t just let Ophelia die. That wasn’t in her nature.

She spied the RIB, swamped by inrushing water, but still afloat at least for a few more seconds. The davits were already under water and in a moment, they would pull the inflatable boat down, too. Ophelia was a motionless heap sloshing in the bilge space. There wasn’t time to rouse her and Jade didn’t think she could swim back to the QED dragging the woman along, so instead she drew her knife and cut the boat free of the davit with two quick slashes. With one hand gripping the RIB, she started swimming back toward the submersible.

The water was lapping at the open hatch cover by the time she reached it, which made dragging Ophelia from the RIB and dropping her in a lot easier. Unfortunately, water was already beginning to pour down into the craft.

She could see Professor below, waving to her urgently. “Come on!”

“I have to cut us loose,” she shouted back.

He started to say something but then just nodded. He knew.

She wrestled with the hatch cover until it fell into place, shutting off the cascade of seawater into the submersible’s interior. The water rose to cover the flywheel even as she was spinning it to seal Professor and Ophelia safely inside.

And herself out.

She rolled off the submersible and swam down to where a couple of heavy-duty ratchets secured it to the deck. She sawed through one. The submersible shifted, like a dog straining against its leash, but like that dog, remained fixed in place. She kicked to the other strap, started cutting.

The pressure in her ears was tremendous. She worked her jaw trying to equalize it so she could keep working, and tried not think about how fast the ship was sinking or how long that last breath she had taken would last.

Or whether she would be able to swim to the surface.

The strap parted with an audible snap and the QED shot up like a bottle-rocket. The sudden displacement of water created a cavitation wave that tumbled Jade over, disorienting her for several seconds, and when she finally stopped spinning, the submersible was gone and the surface seemed so very, very far away.