“A fail-safe mechanism was initiated from a radio transmission from below. I thought you might know more about it.”
Jack glanced at Karen.
“It wasn’t from here,” she said. “I was with Rolfe at the time.”
“Then it must have been Spangler,” Jack said with a scowl. “His final attempt to kill me from the grave.”
“He must have really hated you, Jack,” Charlie chimed in. “A nuclear-tipped ICBM has our names on it.”
Jack’s eyes grew wide. He forgot about the chill in his limbs.
“How long do we have?”
“From Gabriel’s estimation, fifty-seven minutes. One minute after the solar storm hits.”
Jack shook his head. “So even if we can block this pillar and save the world, we still die in a nuclear blast.”
Charlie shrugged. “Pretty much.”
Jack sat quietly, stubbornly considering their options, then sighed. “What the hell. Heroes aren’t suppose to live forever. Let’s get this done. What’s this new plan of yours, Charlie?”
“It’s a long shot, Jack.”
“Considering our current state of affairs, I’ll take any damn shot.”
“But I really wanted to run my calculations by Dr. Cortez first.”
“Well, unless you have a Ouija board, that ain’t happening. So spit it out. What’s this plan?”
Charlie looked grim. “You gave me the idea, Jack. We overload the pillar with energy.”
“Try to short-circuit it?”
“Not exactly. If we overload the crystal with precisely enough energy, pulse it at exactly the right frequency, it should fracture the crystal without a kinetic backlash, like shattering a crystal goblet by striking the right note.”
“And you know the right note?”
Charlie nodded. “I think I do. But the hard part was finding a way to deliver the note. The energy has to be precise and sustained for three minutes.”
“And you figured this out?”
“I think so.” Charlie sighed. “That’s what Gabriel and I have been working on since you left—and you’re not going to like it, Jack. For this type of sustained power, we’ll need a particle-beam weapon.”
“How are we supposed to get our hands on such a thing?”
Charlie just stared at him as if he should already know the answer.
Then understanding struck Jack between the eyes. He jerked to his feet. “Wait…you can’t mean the Spartacus?”
“Gabriel obtained its specs. It should work.”
“What’s this Spartacus?” Karen interrupted.
Jack sank back down. “It’s a Navy satellite. The one I was putting into orbit when the shuttle Atlantis was damaged. Its equipped with an experimental particle-beam cannon engineered to knock out targets from space. Airplanes, missiles, ships, even submarines.” Jack turned back to Charlie. “But it’s defunct. Damaged.”
Charlie shook his head. “Only its guidance and tracking systems—which, of course, makes it useless to the government. For it to work, they’d need an operator sitting up there aiming the thing by hand.” Charlie paused. “But luckily, we have that operator right here.”
Jack did not understand, but Karen realized the answer. “Gabriel!”
“Exactly. I sent him earlier to try to access the satellite’s central processor. With the current global crisis and with the Spartacus classified as dead in space, he and Miyuki succeeded in slipping past the old firewalls. The satellite’s processor is still active.”
“You’re kidding…after all these years?” Karen asked skeptically.
“It’s solar powered. An infinite energy source.”
As the others talked, Jack sat quietly, flashing back to the bright satellite lifting from its shuttle bay cradle, silvery solar wings spreading wide. He tried to close his mind against what happened afterward but failed. The explosion, the screams, the endless fall through space…
He shivered—not from cold, but from a twinge of superstitious dread. The Spartacus was cursed. Death surrounded it. Nothing good could come from the wretched thing. “It won’t work,” he grumbled.
“Do we have any other choice?” Karen asked. She placed a hand on his shoulder, then spoke to Charlie. “When can we try it?”
“Well, that’s the clincher. We’ll have only the one chance. The satellite won’t come within orbital range until forty-eight minutes from now.”
Jack checked the clock. “That’s three minutes before the solar storm hits.”
“Three minutes is all I’ll need. Either it works or it doesn’t.”
Jack shook his head. “This is insane.”
“What do we have to do?” Karen asked.
“To target the pillar, Gabriel will need an active GPS lock. Something upon which to focus the cannon. We’re going to need you to place the Nautilus’s Magellan GPS homing device over by the pillar. It’ll feed data to the Fathom, and in turn I’ll send it to Gabriel.”
Jack shook his head. “Then we have a problem. The Nautilus is still outside the sea base. I had to do an emergency jettison to enter the docking bay. There’s no way to get to the Magellan unit outside.”
Karen spoke up. “What about the ROV robot?”
“It’s too crude to extract the Magellan unit without harming it. Someone would have to do it by hand.”
No one spoke. Everyone sat sullenly.
Then Karen brightened. “I may have an idea.”
11:44 A.M.
Standing in the docking bay, Jack watched the water level rise past the front port of his helmet. He moved his arms, acquainting himself to the deep-sea armored ensemble. It was one of the Navy diver’s suits. The large helmet had four viewing ports: forward, right, left, and above. The bulbous helmet was so wide that it blended flush with the suit’s shoulders, creating a bullet-shaped form with jointed arms and legs protruding from it. Small lights were mounted atop the helmet and at each wrist. There were also thruster assemblies built into the back, like the old rocket packs in scifi serials.
As Jack moved slowly about the filling bay, he found its operation fairly intuitive, similar to the EVA suits used for spacewalks.
“How’re you doing?” Karen’s voice came through the helmet radio. Through the seawater, he spotted her waving to him from the bay’s observation window. After talking with Charlie, Karen had taken Jack down to the docking level and shown him the “garages” where the huge suits were stored. He had to give her credit. It was a clever solution.