CHAPTER FOUR
December 19, 2012 AD – 12:32 PM,
Middle of the Atlantic Ocean
15:32 GMT
• • • • •
The boat was unique in the true sense of the word.
In fact, it didn’t really resemble a boat at all.
It looked more like a spacecraft that was hovering just over the crystal deep blue of the Atlantic ocean. From a distance, the Moondance had a sexy silhouette that could almost be mistaken for a luxury yacht. But the lines did not exactly match any known type of vessel. The entire boat was covered in a black sparkly plating which had been fashioned to fit every corner of the highly customized hull, decking, and cabin. Sharp angles and flat surfaces of black plating combined to create a stealthy predator feel to the ship. Above the main hull, the entire upper portion of the yacht was extended on massive scissor hydraulic arms, creating a large indoor flying-bridge that reached up like a command terrace on battleship. Coming off the rear of the flying-bridge was a wide shield-shaped retractable hardtop canopy with the same black plating on top, which extended back over the extra large rear deck like a high-tech picnic umbrella on robotic arms.
But it was the color of the ship that was mesmerizing.
The sun was coming from high in the southern hemisphere and the water sparkled like a layer of rhinestones floating on the surface of the deep blue sea. And in the middle of this shimmering sheet, the Moondance sparkled, too. Flecks of light came from inside the pitch black color of the plating that created the skin of the ship. Uniformly spread through the blackness of the unknown metamaterial glinted tiny flashes of prismatic color and light. In the bright sun of the Atlantic, the effect was spectacular. The ship seemed to have an aura around it. If you stared at the plating, the movement of the ocean and the reflection of the sunlight caused the boat to undulate in a liquid rainbow moiré. Tiny explosions of light and color spread over the panels in waves that oozed in sync with the gentle swells of the sea.
The final visual effect of this atomic-scaled light show was to make the Moondance appear to match the color of the ocean when viewed from above. And because of the way light works, the Moondance also looked like the distant horizon and sky when viewed from the perspective of another ship on the surface. Although that was not the intention of the radiation-shield nano-material, the result was that the ship had a crude form of built-in adaptive camouflage. It didn’t make the ship invisible, but it made it much harder to pick it out of the big blue ocean.
As far as Marshall Tomkin was concerned, that alone was worth the trouble of retrofitting his pride and joy, the Moondance. As he glanced back toward the bridge from his fishing chair in the stern, Marshall decided the new retractable hardtop cover over the rear deck wasn’t too bad, either. Although now that he looked at it, he thought the nano-plating made the cruiser yacht look like a floating version of a stealth bomber.
Before he could finish his mental appraisal, he heard the familiar snap of fishing line and the high pitched gearing of saltwater tackle running out on drag. Marshall instinctively tightened his grip on the fishing pole he was holding between his legs. But as he turned away from the bridge, he realized it wasn’t his rig that had a hit. About four feet away in the other fishing chair mounted on the stern of the boat, Marshall’s nephew, Luke Tomkin, was struggling with a fishing pole much smaller than the one Marshall had. As he watched Luke pulling and reeling in the line, Marshall caught a glimpse of himself fifteen years earlier. It was actually shocking how much they resembled each other.
At forty-six, Marshall was fifteen years younger than Luke’s father, who was Marshall’s oldest brother. Luke was fifteen years younger than Marshall and just turned thirty-one. There was unquestionably a family resemblance between all of three of them. Although he was only his uncle, Marshall could have easily passed for Luke’s brother. They both had creamy brown hair, as all the men in their side of the family had. But Marshall usually kept his hair short; a leftover from a long ingrained habit.
Luke’s hair was more like golden locks than hair. Marshall always marveled when he stopped and looked at his favorite nephew. He was as fit as a human could be. Not that Marshall was in bad shape. Luke didn’t have as much mass as Marshall had, but Marshall was by no means fat for a man of any age. Truthfully, he was mostly muscle and looked like he had the body of a twenty-six year old. Marshall instinctively looked at his arms as he thought this. His arms were big, especially his forearms. He always had large forearms. It was from his younger days as a trampolinist and an acrobat. At the height of his training in high school, he had forearms that were as muscular as his calves, which were massive. Even at forty-six, his legs were large and ripped. He didn’t do anything much more than run. But he could run and run.
Just as he was about to remind himself to hit the treadmill today, he saw Luke start fighting with his fishing rod like a kid with a big dog’s leash. Marshall slowly began to reel in his tackle as he settled back into his chair.
“Easy there… Don’t pull too hard or you’ll—“
Just when Marshall was about to pass-on the hard-earned knowledge of a seasoned professional fishing captain, Luke’s line snapped loose, and the pole popped up toward his nephew’s face.
“Damn it…” Luke sat back into the leatherette of the fishing chair in dejection. “I really suck at this,” he said as he looked over at his uncle.
“I told you all those English Lit classes would get you nowhere,” quipped Marshall. “Now if you’d listened to me and joined the Army, as I did, you might have mastered a few more of these practical life skills. But no… You had to do it your own way.”
“You know how much I love poetry,” Luke retorted sardonically.
Marshall glanced at him sideways just as he felt a nibble on his deep-water fishing rig.
“Then why the hell did you get a PhD in Nano-Technology?”
Before Luke could answer, Marshall’s fishing line started screaming out. He casually turned away from Luke and began reeling in his pole. Marshall picked up the rod from the holder in his chair and kept it in his left hand. Luke watched as his uncle’s pole was bending and twisting back and forth from the fish on the hook. Marshall never moved anything but his right hand that was slowly turning the reel. His left forearm flexed like a giant leg muscle as the end of the pole twisted side to side violently, but the handle of the fishing rod never moved. It looked like it was mounted in a statue of a fisherman and only the hand on the crank turned.
Luke was amazed at the strength of Marshall’s arms, but he kept up the banter. “Don’t forget about the Master’s Degrees in Astrophysics and Medical Biophysics. There’s another perfectly good pair of opportunities I wasted when I could have been getting my poetry diploma.”
“Well, it’s probably for the best. I’ve read some of your poetry. You chose wisely.”
Just then, Marshall saw the fish at the end of his line. It was a yellowfin tuna about two-and-a-half feet long. As he started to feel the fight of the young fish, he just barely saw his nephew out of the corner of his eye.
Luke stuck out his middle finger and smirked. “Yeah? I got your poetry, right here.”
He was still holding his middle finger out as Marshall started to reel the young tuna out of the water. It started splashing and kicking as soon as Marshall lifted it clear of the slightly churning water coming from the multi-props under the oversized rear deck. Marshall effortlessly popped his wrists on the pole, and the slimy kicking fish started flying directly toward Luke. He barely had time to retract his still extended Secret-Sign-of-the-Gentryhood and dodge to the right, before the flying fish whizzed past Luke’s head and slid across the deck behind him.
Marshall just looked at Luke. “Now, now… That’s no way for a genius wunderkind like you to behave.” He waved his finger from side to side at his reflexively gifted nephew like a school teacher.
Luke shook his head as he got up and walked over to the flopping fish. “Whatever… Let??
?s get this inside and check it for—“
Marshall interrupted him.
“I was meaning to talk to you about that, my obstinate first mate. Your Captain is hungry. So how ‘bout we do the necropsy later… on another fish, perhaps? And instead, I can grill up my floppy little friend over there for some lunch.”
Luke looked up at his uncle. He had lots of things that he felt like saying. But he decided against it and held up his hands as he backed away from the tuna. “Whatever… Captain…”
Marshall smiled as he squatted down and grabbed the fish under its gills to hold it still. Then he took his fishing knife out of the sheath on his leg and expertly pierced the brain of the young game fish. Then he removed the hook and started for the sliding glass doors in the rear of the boat.
The interior of the rear cabin on the boat looked as futuristic as the exterior. The entire back wall was a sliding glass door that opened out onto the rear deck. Two bench seats sat below a bank of windows on each side of the back door. Electronic equipment, computers, and instruments covered the rest of the open space on the two long side walls, making the room look like a well outfitted laboratory rather than the main cabin on a boat. On the front wall, was a large widescreen monitor above a curved helm control panel and several banks of nautical instrumentation. Displayed on the high definition monitor was an overhead satellite image showing a geometric grid of glowing buoy markers covering an enormous swath of the Atlantic ocean. In the center of the grid of markers, was a large, amorphous blob, which was colored red and labeled ‘Magnetic Anomaly’ next to a small radiation symbol. Inside the northwestern quadrant of this blob was a flashing icon for the Moondance. Marshall stepped into the room and started for the stairway to the galley below.
Luke followed into the rear cabin and spoke to Marshall before he got to the hatchway. “Just let me look at the gonads, first. It’ll only take a minute, and then you can sushi up some lunch.”
Marshall spun on his heel like he was marching and headed over to a large metal lab bench in the middle of the room. When he got to the workbench, he tossed the young pelagic predator on it with a plop. Luke stepped up to the table and elbowed his uncle aside, then put on surgical gloves. He confidently grabbed a blade from the magnetic tray and began to dissect the fish near the bottom rear of the tail.
“Hey… Doctor Frankenstein… Don’t chop up my pretty fish tail. I need that for the sushi appetizers.” Marshall leaned against the railing of the nearest bank of equipment and crossed his legs.
Luke positioned a lighted magnifying lens over the tuna then expertly opened the fish belly, leaving all of the internal organs uncut. He continued to work on the fish with both hands as he talked to Marshall.
“Hands of a surgeon and the reflexes of a fighter pilot. Remember?”
“So exactly why did you become an over-educated inventor of the most expensive synthetic lead sheets in the world?”
“Leave my nano-shield out of this. It’ll save your boat in a solar storm.”
“Blah, blah, blah. Don’t get me started. I was out here for a week before you told me the whole truth about these nano doodad whatchamacallits. You should have told me before I agreed to let you put it on my fishing boat.”
“This is no fishing boat. I don’t care what your Nautical License says.”
“Well, not any more it isn’t. Now she looks like the Batmobile. I used to be able to pick up chicks in my beautiful boat. But now? Well, let’s just say it’s a good thing she looks like a stealth bomber… ‘cuz I’ll have to sneak up on any woman I wanna catch.”
“Blah, blah, blah.” Luke was mostly ignoring Marshall while he worked on the fish. He grabbed a video camera head on a swing arm and pulled it over the fish on the table. Then he slid up out of the floor mounted stool and switched the camera on at a console mounted in the ceiling over the arm. A video monitor to the left of the table now showed a close-up of the fish where Luke had been dissecting it.
“Be happy your balls are in better shape than our deep sea buddy here.” He pointed to the screen as he finally looked over at Marshall.
Marshall didn’t budge. “Found some more mutant caviar, did we?”
“More like deep fried fish balls. And I mean the little-bitty kind. Not the kind you like to fry up in that gourmet kitchen downstairs. Which is large enough to feed a small army, I might add.”
“It’s called a ‘galley,’ my landlubber friend.”
“Whatever…”
Then Luke noticed what Marshall was leaning against.
“Hey, get the hell off that. If you screw this up, we have no early warning system.”
Marshall still didn’t budge. Instead, he gave Luke a look that said, “Excuse me?”
Luke recognized the look, immediately. He rolled his eyes back in his head and sighed deeply. Then he recited, “Oh Captain, this is your lowly First Mate. Please would you—“
Marshall interrupted him. “Wrong. Start over.”
Luke clinched his jaw and started over. “Oh Captain, this is your lowly First Mate, Gilligan, Please would you stop leaning on the very important piece of equipment that NASA was kind enough to loan to me? And that I am responsible for with my life as I recall the conversation with the Director.” Then Luke un-clinched his jaw and smiled. But it was a very fake smile.
Marshall jumped off the console he was leaning against.
“So you command, so shall it be, my young Jedi apprentice.” He loved making fun of Luke’s childhood fondness for the Star Wars movies. The fact that his gifted young nephew was named, Luke, only made the ribbing easier.
Luke groaned out loud, as he stepped over and checked the electronic box on the console marked SOHO II.
“Pleeeaase tell me that you didn’t talk like this when you were actually a Colonel in the Army.”
“Yes young Luke, I did,” he said melodramatically with his own fake smile. Then he dropped the smile. “And don’t try to impress me with all your NASA technology. I don’t call a few minutes much of an early warning system.”
Luke went back to the exam table and zoomed the video camera in to look at the gonads. They had odd looking growths on them that stuck out of the reproductive organs of the fish like dark bulges. He also went back to talking to Marshall while he worked.
“Have you ever heard of something called the speed of light? You’re lucky we can get any warning at all. The solar observatory satellite system was actually designed to measure the intensity of the storms and the waves of radiation that accompany them. It’s more important to know how big a coming solar storm is, even if we only know that a few minutes before it hits.”
“I still don’t see the logic in it, at all,” interjected Marshall. “What good is an early warning system if it doesn’t give you any warning?”
“Well, like I said, it’s not really an early warning system. That’s just what we’re using it for. It’s more of a gauge to measure how big they are. There seems to be a pattern emerging lately with the new giant storms we’ve been having this past year. The bigger the storm, the longer the duration… and the bigger the magnetic wave that pushes it, the faster that big nastiness gets here. Most solar storms take hours or even days to get to us. But these recent storms have been so large, and the magnetic wave behind them is so massive, they get here shortly after the actual sunlight and the radio signals from the satellites reach us. If we can find a relationship between the initial event and the intensity, we hope we can predict the dangerous storms better. That’s what we’re trying to determine with the satellite constellation around the Sun. But I really don’t see why you keep whining about the SOHO II warning time. I told you the radiation plating will keep your precious boat safe.”
Now it was Marshall’s turn at the one word comeback.
“Whatever…”
Then he watched as Luke finished the photo essay of his latest radiation mutated fish find. Luke finally pulled off the rubber gloves and pushed the video camera up out of
the way. Then he slid up off the stool and gestured to the fish.
“There you are, Captain. Lunch may now be prepared.”
Marshall shook his head as he pushed past Luke and grabbed the fish by the tail. He used his other hand to stuff the guts back into the belly, then carefully picked up the body and held the fish closed with his fingers. But as he turned and started for the galley below, an alarm sounded above the main monitor. When they both turned to look, the screen automatically switched from the overhead buoy diagram to a radar screen. A beeping red signal was coming in from the northwest, several miles away from their boat in the upper left corner of the radar sweep. It appeared to be moving steadily across on a due east heading. But after a few moments of watching the radar screen, they could both see it wasn’t moving terribly fast. It was also not moving on an intercept heading for the Moondance. As Luke watched the radar screen, Marshall tossed the fish back onto the exam table and walked over to the helm while he wiped his slimy and bloody hands on his shorts. He punched a few keys on a panel, and the main screen changed, again. This time it had a side-scan radar image of the vessel. The outline of the boat could be seen in the glowing edge-enhanced view of the obliquely approaching ship.
Marshall pressed another couple of keys and a small window popped into the corner of the main screen, then rapidly began to scroll through a library of ship silhouettes. In just a few moments, it hit on a match. A drawing of a pleasure cruising yacht popped over the edge enhanced image of the distant vessel. The identification of the manufacturer and the style were listed below the image like a heads-up-display in a fighter cockpit. Marshall checked the speed of the intruder along his crossing pathway north of their present position.
“Looks like a pleasure cruiser heading east. Probably going to Cape Verde.”
Then he looked over at Luke, who had walked up next to him in front of the main monitor. Luke had his arms crossed in front of his chest and smiled at Marshall.
“You wanna tell me, again, why a fishing boat needs a side-scan standoff radar identification system?”
“You wanna tell me how you even know what a side-scan standoff radar identification system is?”
“You’re not the only one who watches the Military Channel, you know.” Luke looked at his uncle. His tone was suddenly serious. “Do you think we should warn them about the magnetic anomaly? They’re inside of it now.”
Marshall punched a few keys on the panel, and the screen changed once more. This time it was the overhead view of the ocean, again. The boat icon to the northwest of them was blinking red and a straight line extended out from the flashing light slightly toward the northeast. Below that line was a calculation of the time remaining for the boat to exit the wall of the area marked by a radiation symbol. A third bold line extended from the Moondance icon to the approaching ship and then several other lines fanned out along the projected pathway of the oncoming ship. Each of the lines had a targeting solution ratio of distance, speed and time highlighted across the screen in a multicolor gradient feathering out from the icon of the Moondance like the NBC peacock tail. Marshall shook his head.
“No… They’re heading across a corner. At the rate they’re going, they’ll be out of it soon. They should be fine.” Then he turned toward Luke again.
Luke still had his arms crossed. But he was smiling even bigger.
“So, you wanna tell me why a fishing boat needs that target-acquisition system you just used?”
Marshall decided to play along.
“I’ll tell you why I’m such a paranoid bastard right after you tell me, again, why this thinner plating you put on my multi-million dollar sweetheart here, only gives us a twenty minute window inside a bad solar-storm before we get our gonads nuked like our fishy friend here?”
Then Marshall turned around and grabbed the fish from the exam table. He held it out by the tail and pointed the dead tuna at his nephew while he finished.
“And for a bonus, I’ll even let you in on a little secret of my own about my little floating lover. If you can explain to me why you felt it was appropriate to tell me this news after I’d been out here for a week, hopping in and out of this magnetic hole of yours?”
“Well for starters, you were pretty inflexible about the weight limit on this mysterious fishing boat of yours. And secondly, if you would have let me use the absorbed energy to run something on the ship, then I could have used thicker shielding in the areas over inhabited portions.”
Marshall was shaking his head while still pointing at him with the dead and gutted tuna like a pregnant sword with bloody tassels. Luke had to try hard not to crack up as the fish guts started dripping onto Marshall’s sandals. Marshall ignored the fish but answered Luke.
“I told you, I have plenty of power aboard the boat.”
“Yes, I know you did. But if I put thicker shielding without having a nearby drain ground for the redirected electrical energy, then the static charge build-up from a big radiation shower would short across the air below the plates.”
Marshall’s arm finally gave out, and he dropped the fish to his side.
Luke continued to defend himself, but was fighting a smirk the whole time.
“And you know what I said one of those static shocks would be like, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Like a jolt from a lightening bolt… Fine. That explains the thinner plates and the twenty minute egg-timer for my balls. But what about the tiny detail of you forgetting to tell me about this little issue before last week over steaks and beer? Got an answer for that, smart-ass?”
Luke knew he was busted. He reached for a straw, anyway.
“What? You didn’t get the memo?”
Marshall burst out laughing and almost dropped the fish. Luke couldn’t hold it back any more and started laughing, too.
Then Marshall turned and headed toward the galley swinging the fish like a kid swinging his lunch box.
“Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
Luke just shook his head. Sometimes, he thought his Dad may have been right. Marshall never did grow up. That was probably why Marshall was Luke’s favorite uncle. He yelled after him.
“But it shouldn’t matter how much time we have to get outta the radiation… if this boat is as fast as you say it is.”
He could hear as Marshall got to the bottom of the stairs and tossed the fish on the cutting board in the massive floating kitchen. Then he heard him yell back into the stairwell.
“Listen you little turd bucket, she’s plenty fast enough. And don’t try to change the subject. You still haven’t answered my question. So unless you want the nasty end of this fish, and some of that mutant caviar you pulled off that fish we caught yesterday… as your lunch… I’d lay off insulting my baby.”
Luke took off for the stairs to the galley as he yelled back down to him.
“Whaddya mean insults? I was just asking you how fast she was.”
He stopped at the top of the stairs and saw his uncle down below looking back up at him. Marshall flipped his middle finger at him before heading over to start lunch.
Luke laughed to himself as he headed downstairs to help.
“I see you’re a member of the Gentryhood, too.”