Aurora Quest

Jeff Thomas had come up on deck and leaned on the rail close to Mac, who couldn’t help noticing the smear of bright blood just beneath his swollen lip.

“What can I do, Nanci?” he asked.

“Keep out of the way until we hit. The Lord alone knows what’ll happen then. But try to make yourself useful. Don’t just save your own skin, Jeff, will you? You do recall what happens to folks who do that?”

The ex-journalist flushed and turned away to look at the approaching shoreline without answering her.

“Shouldn’t we lower the sail?” called Mac. “Going in at a hell of a lick.”

“No. Faster the better,” she replied. “Farther we dig in, the easier and safer to get off.”

“Rocks!” screamed Pamela, high in the bow, pointing with her hand to a spot about fifty yards ahead of the vessel and a touch to the left.

Mac moved the wheel to take the Eureka Belle a couple of points to starboard.

“Don’t take too much way off her,” ordered Nanci, watching the spinnaker.

He didn’t answer, keeping his eyes on his oldest daughter, who gave him the thumbs-up to show they were safely clear of the submerged obstruction.

“Looked like a garage roof,” she shouted back to him.

“Steady as she goes.” Nanci Simms was standing at the rail and looking up at the low, rain-washed hills around them. The Port Royale was in her hands.

“Aye, aye, skipper,” he muttered, resenting the bossy tone in the woman’s voice.

A flurry of sleet made him blink. As the coast rushed toward them, Henderson McGill wondered what he was doing there. It had crossed his mind a few times since the Aquila had come splintering in from deep space that he might be living through a complex and barely believable nervous breakdown. That one day the drugs would work and he’d snap out of it and find himself between clean sheets in an Air Force veterans’ hospital. With both wives and all seven children smiling at him.

“No fucking way,” he said, bracing himself ready for what he knew would be a substantial crash.

“Eighty yards,” called Pamela. “Fifty.”

Jeff Thomas was crouched behind the bulwark on the port side, his eyes fixed behind him at Nanci Simms. He was rehearsing in his mind the different ways he might eventually choose to slaughter her. When the time was right.

The impact was surprisingly gentle. The earth was soft and muddy, and the bow of the ship drove into it, gradually decelerating until it was stopped. The vessel stood motionless, leaning just a little to the port side, with the sails flapping helplessly and noisily on the yards.

Sukie cried briefly, but Paul picked her up and carried her to the rail, showing her the misty land.

“Collect everything and we’ll move,” said Nanci. When nobody seemed to be responding, she raised her voice, “Let’s go. Anyone watching the coast for twenty miles either way will have seen this tub running around here. The rowboat might already have attracted attention. There could be Hunters of the Sun already crawling around out there. We stand out like a dead dog on a snowbank.”

A bank of rain swept down over them, cutting visibility to less than fifty yards, clearing away again as quickly as it had come. Nanci paced the sloping deck, looking worriedly at the dreary landscape, paying particular attention to a trestle bridge that carried the highway over what had once been a creek and was now a part of the Pacific Ocean.

“Hurry up!”

“Dancing as fast as I can,” snapped Jeanne. “If you lent a hand, instead of standing there like Lord God Almighty, we’d be ready quicker.”

Nanci ignored her and continued to watch the land.

“How do we get over the side?” called Pamela, back in the bows. “Quite a big drop to the shore.”

“We clear of the water?”

“Yeah, Nanci.”

“Bound to be a rope ladder on the boat someplace. Mac, see what you can find.”

He climbed down the steep companionway and felt his way through the darkness.

He could hear feet moving on the deck, just above his head. There was the faint whisper of the small waves, breaking on the new shore. As Nanci, Jeff and his family walked from side to side, the boat shifted slightly, its stern still surrounded by the ocean. Mac was no judge of tides, but he guessed that if it were coming in, then the Eureka Belle would soon be fully afloat again.

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