Pinnacle Event

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Alone in the water, below the gray rain clouds, Octavius crept forward at barely five knots. Had the captain still stood on her deck, scanning the horizons, he would have seen nothing but the waters of the Indian Ocean stretching away, empty under the low sky. Abandoned by her crew the night before, the ghost ship moved in a broad circular path, her death spiral. There was no one to hear the engine thumping below, the computer humming in the deckhouse, the flag of the Comoros snapping from the stern in the stiff breeze. Silently a stream of data moved up from the computer to the satellite dish and then into space. Images from the cameras, the readings from the engine room, automated pilot data, all shot the thirty-three thousand kilometers to the Thuraya satellite in encrypted packets that took a quarter second to travel that distance.

Data packets came down, as well. Automatically decrypted on arrival in the laptop in the deckhouse, the final message was brief. It was routed down a fiber optic cable to the device in the hold. The 512-bit code caused the device to activate the detonation sequence, beginning with an electrical charge to the high-intensity conventional explosive. That explosion caused a bright flash and sent a large, bullet-shaped package of highly enriched uranium shooting down a tube into a hole in the uranium mass.

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