He jerked his head back. A tiny point of light arced rapidly from the north: a satellite, he thought—or a meteor. He could barely see it now. The point had almost lost itself among the stars when it suddenly brightened to blowtorch intensity, throwing two distinct flares southward at least three degrees. The flares lighted the entire sea in stark, eerie pewter, and then went out. The much dimmer object passed directly overhead. He made a mental note of the position—about four o'clock high— and was working on which constellation it had appeared in, when the object brightened again about twenty degrees farther south, much smaller, barely a pinprick. He had never seen a meteor like it—a real stunner, an on-again, off-again fireball.

"On the bridge! Heads up!" he yelled. "Hey! Everybody, look at this!"

The prick of light fell slowly enough to track easily. In a few minutes, it met the horizon and was gone, leaving tiny patches of green and red swimming in his vision.

Where it had struck, a column of water and steaming spray arose, barely visible in the moonlight, radiating a halo of cloud about ten degrees above the horizon.

"Jesus," Samshow said. He started for the bridge to ask if anyone else had seen it. Nobody had replied to his shout. He was halfway up the steps when a horrendous gonglike shudder rang through the ship. He paused, startled, and finished his climb to the bridge.

The first officer, an intense young Chinese named Chao, glanced at Samshow from the controls. The bridge and most instrumentation were illuminated in dull red, not to impair night vision. "Big storm coming," Chao said, pointing to the ship's status display screen. "Fast. Typhoon, waterspout. Don't know."

Four men leaped onto the bridge from three different hatches, and voices squawked on the intercom from around the ship.

"A meteor," Samshow explained. "Went down just like that, made a big spout about thirty kilometers due south."

Captain Reed, twenty years younger than Samshow but even more gray and grizzled, came onto the bridge from his cabin, nodded curtly, and gave him a dubious glance. "Mr. Chao, what is this coming?"

"Blow, Captain," Chao said. "Damn big storm. Coming fast." He pointed to the enhanced radar images. Clouds rushed at them in a blue and red scythe. The storm was already visible through the glass forward.

David Sand came from belowdecks huffing, red-faced, and swearing. "Wait, whatever that was, it's just screwed up everything. We have a—Jesus Christ!" He recovered from the sight of the approaching front and began swearing again, "it was going just fine, and now there's a jag on the graph."

"Jag?" Captain Reed asked.

"Extremely short wavelength anomaly. Deep decline, zero for an instant, then a slow increase—it's ruined! We'll have to recalibrate, maybe even send all three tubs back to Maryland."