Battleship (Movie Tie-in Edition) (2 page)

And when they hadn’t been working, there had been plenty of late-night parties to blow off steam. Curiously, some of the best ideas had resulted from those gatherings, as idle talk and occasionally drunken inspiration had sent the group sprinting back to the lab to try implementing them.

Now, finally, all of that had come to a head. Approaching the moment with what seemed appropriate pomp and circumstance, Nogrady had arranged a full-blown ribbon-cutting ceremony. His colleagues had suspended a long, red ribbon across the middle of their now state-of-the-art facility and Nogrady had sliced through it with a replica samurai sword he’d borrowed from Doctor Okuda. This had been met with a burst of cheers, followed by the scientists settling down to work. There was growing excitement in the air for this moment toward which they had been building for two years.

“Synch with Morocco and Oahu,” Nogrady said briskly. He was trying to keep his voice flat and even. He needed to remain professional, and chortling with unconcealed delight would certainly not be in keeping with his desired demeanor.

“Synched,” said Carlson, a young technician who was so fresh out of grad school that sometimes he was jokingly referred to as still having that “new scientist smell.”

There had been a constant buzz of motion and activity, but all that somehow quieted to a hush when Carlson said that. Everyone stopped in anticipation of Nogrady’s next words.

He tried to think of something that wouldn’t sound too pretentious and he failed utterly. “People … get ready to make history.”

Doctor Calvin Zapata rolled his eyes when Nogrady spoke about making history. Zapata thought that Nogrady was brilliant, but—even for a scientist—he could be kind of a dork on occasion. This was one of those occasions.

Not to mention the fact that Zapata had his own issues with what they were doing there that he had to deal with. Issues that he wasn’t hesitating to voice to one of his coworkers, Rachel Dorn. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Rachel was also the best-looking woman in the place: several years younger than Zapata, with thick red hair, a charming array of freckles across her nose that had faded during her time there (but were still slightly visible), and horn-rimmed glasses that were perpetually perched on the edge of that same nose.

He was seated next to Dorn, both of them on rolling chairs, studying the readouts to make sure that—as the energy levels increased—the climb was slow and steady and didn’t spike. In a low voice he muttered, in regards to Nogrady’s pronouncement, “I think that’s what Napoleon said right before Waterloo.”

She shook her head. “Cal …” she said scoldingly, knowing what was coming next.

She was absolutely right. Zapata was on a roll, and faint recriminations from Dorn weren’t about to stop him. “Everyone here still believes that if there’s life out there, it’s kind and good and all that
Kumbaya
crap.”

Dorn had been keeping her attention fully on the
monitoring devices in front of her, but she risked a sidelong glance at Zapata. “Your conspiracy disorder is activating again.”

He rolled in closer to her under the guise of wanting to speak confidentially. In point of fact, he just liked being near her. She smelled incredible. He had no idea how the hell she was getting a supply of whatever that scent she wore was, considering they were in the middle of nowhere. It took him a moment to get focused back on what he’d just been talking about, but he managed. “We need to worry about what happens
after
we get a response, because believe me, it’s not gonna be—”

“All Kumbaya? Cal, do you even know what ‘Kumbaya’ means?”

He paused, looking confused. “It means everybody gets along and toasts marshmallows around a campfire and stuff. Doesn’t it?”

“It means ‘come by here.’ It’s asking for God to come by and smile on his creations. And if there
is
a God,” she added, smiling, “then he created whatever’s out there, and maybe he’d like us all to meet and hold hands.”

If she hadn’t been so charming, Zapata would have been appalled by her naïveté. “If there really
is
intelligent life out there and they ‘come by here,’ ” he said sourly, “it’ll be like Columbus and the Indians. Only
we’re
the Indians.”

“Most of the time he traded peacefully with the Indians, except for one time in the Dominican Republic when the Indians attacked and drove him away. So what’s your point?”

He stared at her. “You’re just a fount of information today, aren’t ’cha.”

“Look, Cal,” she said patiently, “if you don’t believe in the mission, why are you here?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question. “J. Robert Oppenheimer never believed in using atomic weapons. But
he’s the guy who built the bomb. The Manhattan Project was where the smartest guys in the world were. And the smartest women, too,” and he winked at her.

She shushed him and pointed toward the other side of the room. They turned their attention there as Nogrady, standing behind Carlson, rested a hand on the young technician’s shoulder. “Send it,” he said.

Carlson inputted the codes that would bring the entire facility online. There was a pause, no more than half a heartbeat, but enough time for Zapata to realize that if everything suddenly short-circuited and went dark, he wouldn’t be the least bit choked up about it.

Instead all the instrumentation came online perfectly. The project had gone live.

The next sound they heard was a hollow popping noise. One of the scientists had opened a bottle of champagne. The cork flew, ricocheted off a far wall and bounced off Zapata’s forehead as if it had eyes. Nobody except Dorn noticed, and she put up a hand to suppress a laugh. Zapata forced a smile.

The very first glass to be filled with champagne was handed over to Nogrady. He held it up and announced, “And that’s how it starts.”

Similar scenes were simultaneously being enacted in Morocco and Hawaii. In both those locations, as well as this one, the radar dishes pinged to life and began sending out a steady signal. Thousands of miles over the planet, satellites were orbiting, their panels adjusting to receive the transmissions and beam them into the depths of space.

It was the astronomical equivalent of a message in a bottle, but at least it was something.

Zapata watched all the relays, the steady pulsing lines moving with perfect synchronization across the screens, indicating that everything was processing correctly. Everyone else, even the enticing Dorn, was part of the celebration, Dorn clapping her hands and “whooping”
as if she were at a football game. Only he remained at his station, watching the results of the initial pulses with cold, hard eyes.

Get ready to make history
.

Nogrady’s words came back to Zapata.
Yeah. That’s all well and good. But there’s a thin line between making history, and being made history. And I hope to God we haven’t crossed it
.

The Hideaway was kind of a dump. The patrons liked it that way. It meant that the idiot tourists tended to stay the hell away from it, and it could be someplace for people who were in the know to hang out.

It was a hotel bar, attached to a hotel that was somewhat of a fleabag itself. But it was cheap, which was something you couldn’t say about a lot of hotels in Honolulu, and that was enough to prompt a few tourists—who didn’t care that the neighborhood was run-down—to book rooms there. Not a lot, but enough to keep the place in business. It was also a popular hangout for the U.S. Navy, for reasons that no one could quite determine. The general suspicion was that the tradition had its roots somewhere back in the days of the Pearl Harbor bombing. Supposedly key Navy personnel had snuck off the base and were drinking at the Hideaway when the Japanese attacked. Consequently they survived, and the place had maintained a charmed existence ever since.

At least that was how the story went.

The cocktail waitress looked worn and haggard, as she tended to be when she was approaching the end of her shift. Her straight black hair was tied back in a bun, but there were random strands hanging in her face. She wore a blue flowered sarong—since that was what the tourists expected—but she moved like someone who wasn’t particularly comfortable in it. She’d rather be wearing a T-shirt and shorts any day.

Pouring whiskey into two shot glasses, she placed them onto a tray and headed over toward a table where a couple of brothers, the Hoppers, were seated. They’d both already had more alcohol than they really should have, but they didn’t care in the least. All that mattered to them was that the whiskey arrived in time, because the clock was ticking down. There were a few other customers in the Hideaway, but most of them were pretty much drunk anyway, oblivious of one another’s existence. “I love my life,” she muttered unconvincingly.

The Hopper brothers were waiting for her, a bedraggled-looking cupcake sitting in front of them, a single pathetic candle sticking lopsidedly out of it, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Stone Hopper was tall and lean, with a head of thick blond hair, a wide nose and plain, open eyes that seemed incapable of hiding a lie. His default expression, indeed his entire attitude, was one of patient understanding. But that could, at a moment’s notice, harden into a look of total command. Considering he was an officer in the U.S. Navy, it was a capability that served him in good stead.

His brother, Alex, was a different story. Barrel-chested and well-muscled, he maintained a look of permanent party-boy dishevelment. On any given day he had at least three days’ growth of beard, with his overlong brown hair frequently hanging in front of his round face. A T-shirt
that read
Burnt Demolition Co
. was stretched across a ripped chest that had gotten that way mostly because he had formerly worked at the place emblazoned on his shirt. The job was gone, but the shirt remained. He had long ago disdained his first name, embracing his surname and preferring to be addressed simply as “Hopper” or “Hopps.” When asked, he would cavalierly explain that “Alex” was a lame-assed name compared to “Stone” and he would leave it at that. If asked to explain beyond that, all he’d give you was a stare equal to Stone’s look of command.

Stone was squinting, watching as best he could—considering his inebriated state—the second hand sweeping around on his wristwatch until it finally hit midnight. Then, very portentously, he announced, “This year, Hopps, I’m quoting from—and this one took me awhile—the great, late Coach John Wooden.”

“Who?” said Hopper.

“John Wooden!” Stone sounded surprised, even a bit hurt that he had to explain it further. “Great college basketball coach! Maybe the greatest coach ever!”

“Greatest coach?” Hopper regarded him with a raised eyebrow that was pretty much all the dubiousness that he could muster at the moment.

“One of ’em,” said Stone.

Hopper considered that, clearly not accepting the proposition. “If he was the greatest coach, why’d he coach college? Couldn’t cut it in the big show?”

Stone was offended at the notion that his younger brother would challenge him on this point. “ ’Cause he was a purist and an educator. And,” he added as if this was the slam dunk of his claim, “a man of honor.”

“So he was broke,” said Hopper.

Stone raised his voice to drive home his assertion. Because when one is having trouble convincing someone of the rightness of one’s belief—and facts are being thrown
in one’s face that would seem to undercut those beliefs—it was always best to up the volume. “He was one of the
greatest
men who ever
lived
.”

“Broke.”

Stone was both offended and dismayed at his brother’s attitude. “No, actually, Hopper,
you’re
broke,” he said pointedly. “John Wooden died rich in respect, and golden in reputation.”

Hopper snorted, as if Stone’s extolling of Wooden’s virtues was simply proof of what Hopper was saying. “But real low in cash.”

“For someone who only cares about how inflated a person’s wallet is, you’ve done a pretty piss poor job of living up to—” He stopped himself and shook his head. This was clearly a pointless discussion. Hopper was never going to get it; all he’d do was dig in to the notion that nothing mattered but money, failing to realize that holding that up as an indicator of a man’s value reflected rather poorly on his own sense of worth. “Light your cupcake and raise your glass,” he said with grudging acknowledgment that it was time to move on.

Hopper wasn’t looking at him. He was staring in his general direction, but not actually paying attention to his brother. Stone turned in his seat, and when he saw the subject of his brother’s scrutiny, he moaned inwardly.
Oh God. Not her. Anyone but her
.

A gorgeous young woman was seated at the bar, arguing with the bartender, a big Hawaiian named Akau. The woman was a knockout of a blonde, with sculpted features and piercing blue eyes that a man could take a headfirst dive into and never want to emerge. Add to that the fact that she not only had a body that wouldn’t quit, but a body that no one would ever think of firing once it was in their employ. A couple of island boys were standing off to the side, eyeing her with a drunken longing, although it was impossible to determine whether
they would wind up hitting on her or just admiring her from afar.

She was pointing at a sign hanging just beyond the bartender’s head. “Sign says ‘food till close,’ ” she said with the triumphant air of a lawyer who had just proven her point in a court of law. She gestured around the still-active bar. “This is not closed. I want a chicken burrito. I just drove from North Shore.”

“Kitchen closed,” said Akau, regarding her with a bored expression, clearly not the least bit interested in diving into her eyes or any other part of her. He just wanted to be left the hell alone.

Like a dog with a bone in her teeth, the blonde wasn’t about to let it go. “You can’t stick a burrito in a microwave?”

“No,” he said flatly. He picked up a glass that was already clean and started wiping it.

Stone was determined to drag Hopper’s attention, kicking and screaming, back to their underwhelming—but still sincere—birthday celebration. He made an effort to straighten the candle and then lit it. He snapped his fingers in Hopper’s face, startling his brother back to the real world, a world that the gorgeous blonde was not, in any way, shape or form, going to be a part of. “So,” Stone said before his brother could refocus on the girl. He had removed a small folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and was reading from it. “In the great Hopper family tradition, I, on the day now of your twenty-sixth birthday—”