Sedulity (Book One) Impact by David Forsyth Read Free Book Online

hose and removed the breathing apparatus.
His scorched hands were shaking and he gulped air in ragged breaths. Now that
he had a moment to take stock of the situation, the reality of what he had just
gone through began to sink in.  He shivered and shook with nervous tension, or
possibly the onset of PTSD. Nothing in his life offered any form of comparison
to what had just happened.
    Armando looked around the ruins of the Sky Lounge in
disbelief.  Then he turned towards the gaping holes where the windows had been
and stared at the still glowing horizon. Something didn’t seem right, and not
just the faux sunrise. No the horizon itself was moving, growing, climbing into
the sky. Was it another blast wave sweeping over the ocean? He didn’t think he
could survive another one of those. But this looked different than the wall of
compressed and superheated air that he had witnessed before. This time the
ocean itself was rising like a rolling foothill, building into a gigantic wave
that was bearing down on the ship at high speed.  “Dios e diablo,” he muttered
in shock.
    ****
    “Bridge crew! Man your posts!” Captain Krystos barked. “What
do we have on radar?”
    “We don’t have any radar, sir,” a crewman replied. “It must
have been torn off or burned out.”
    “Right,” the Captain said. He took a pair of binoculars out
of a wall cabinet, handling them gingerly because they were hot to the touch.
Focusing on the horizon, his breath caught in his throat. The night was clear,
aside from the massive and glowing mushroom cloud spreading along the horizon,
but that horizon was rising to obscure the lower portion of the cloud.
“Tsunami?” he asked no one in particular.
    “Impact displacement wave,” Kevin clarified. “There will
probably be Tsunamis too – caused by earthquakes and eruptions along the entire
Pacific Rim, or Ring of Fire – but this one is from the asteroid hitting the
ocean. It’s like stomping your boot in a puddle.”
    “How big will it be?” the Captain asked.
    “Who knows?” Kevin replied. “How deep is the ocean here?”
    “Several thousand meters,” the Captain said.
    “Good,” Kevin said in relief. “Then it probably won’t break
on us. But it’s big and moving fast.”
    “What do you suggest we do?” Captain Krystos inquired.
    “Keep going towards it?” Kevin said as more of a question
than answer. “Ride up and over it? I don’t think we have any other option.”
    “Right,” the Captain agreed, then he turned back to the
Bridge crew. “Full speed ahead, all engines. Steady as she goes on 90 degrees
true. Is the public address system working?”
    “I think so, Sir,” Mr. Crawford answered. “And Sir? We are
showing multiple fire alarms on decks four through fourteen.” Those were all
the decks of the superstructure above the line of the hull, from the lifeboat
deck to the top of the ship. Most of those upper decks were lined with balcony
staterooms that may have been gutted and ignited by the blast wave.
    The Captain nodded calmly and picked up the microphone.
“Attention please. This is your Captain speaking. All hands prioritize fighting
fires and render assistance to any passengers in distress. Secure all
watertight doors. I repeat, secure all watertight doors. The ship has made it
through the initial blast wave, but we are facing another major event…” His
words trailed off as he failed to come up with a proper description of the
danger. “All hands and passengers should stay away from windows and open decks,
find a secure position, and brace for another impact. God willing, we will make
it through this one too.”
    ****
    Amanda huddled with Emily under an emergency light in the
stairwell lobby. A knot was forming where she had hit her head, but the worst
seemed to be over. However, she could smell smoke and hear screams echoing up
the stairwell from where the other passengers had fled. A wave of heat had
passed through the lobby and fire alarms