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?