Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

“What?” someone asked. “Why?”

“They’re probing us. Waiting for us to power up and homing in on our signal. Shut the system down!”

Thero went to switch the system off himself, when an arm barred him. He turned to see his son, George.

“How dare you stay my hand!” Thero shouted.

“It’s too late,” his son told him. “Like radar, we’ve already been painted. There’s no point in shutting it down now.”

“That may not be true,” Thero charged.

“You know it is,” George said.

“Then we must stop them,” Thero blurted out.

He looked over to the engineers. “If they can detect us, then we can find them. Pinpoint the origin of this distortion. Quickly.”

The Korean and the two Iranians sprang into action, glancing up at Thero nervously, gawking at him as he conversed with his son.

“Do not raise your eyes to us!”

They looked back down at their work, made a series of calculations, and came up with a solution.

“Typing the location in now,” the Iranian woman said.

A map appeared on the monitor above the Plexiglas viewport. It displayed Thero’s location, his island of Tartarus. It also displayed the waters of the Southern Ocean and the southwestern tip of Australia. A flashing dot indicated the location where the offending distortion was located. Almost due east, only nine hundred miles from the island.

“How could they be so close?” he gasped. “Traitor. There must still be a traitor among us!”

“It must be a ship,” the Korean said.

“Of course it’s a ship!” Thero bellowed.

“Perhaps we should shut down,” Thero’s son suggested.

“Now?!” Thero barked. “I think not! Like you said, it’s too late. Prepare to destroy them.”

“It’s not wise to risk full power without testing.”

The crew continued to gawk at the argument between father and son. The embarrassment enraged Thero even further. “No more questions!”

“The system isn’t ready!” his son pleaded.

“Silence!”

With that, Thero’s son retreated, and Thero gazed out at his crew.

“Set the machine for a short impulse,” he ordered. “Align the dislocation to occur directly in their path. The distortion alone should swallow them whole.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Kurt and Joe were still on the bridge, waiting for a printer to churn out the latest weather map, when it jammed midpage and wouldn’t restart.

“What’d you do?” Joe asked.

“I didn’t touch it,” Kurt said.

Joe stepped to the computer to restart the printing process. “That’s weird.”