The attack on the Goya is the point at which the effort to suppress evidence of the staged meteorite discovery becomes an armed assault on the people who can expose it. A gunship targets the ship and the investigators’ attempted escape, killing the Coast Guard pilot and Xavia, damaging the Goya, and destroying Corky Marlinson’s boat. The attack leaves Rachel Sexton and Michael Tolland fighting not only to preserve their evidence but to survive long enough to make it matter.

Causes and Context

The attack follows the investigators’ growing certainty that the discovery cannot be trusted. On the ice, Norah Mangor insists that the glacier is solid and that her measurements had confirmed it, but a water sample taken from a melt pool produces a refractometer reading she cannot explain. Her resistance to the result underscores that the scientific evidence is shifting even as the group tries to understand what has happened. Rachel later warns Marjorie Tench that the meteorite appears to have been inserted from beneath the ice shelf and that the President is about to endorse erroneous data.

The fraud’s political stakes are considerable, but the people who know about it do not all share the same knowledge. William Pickering tells Rachel that the information she has faxed from the ship is dangerous because its release would make the White House and NASA appear complicit. He insists that President Zachary Herney and NASA believe the meteorite is authentic. Pickering’s account distinguishes the deception surrounding the discovery from the President’s understanding of it: the assault occurs amid a conspiracy, but the evidence does not support treating every political figure as a knowing participant.

The Attack Begins

The Goya’s immediate danger becomes apparent when the Coast Guard pilot reports that all onboard radar and communications have gone dead. Rachel orders everyone to the helicopter, but the expected escape is interrupted: a gunship comes in low from the southwest and fires across the ship’s deck. Rachel takes cover beside the transparent dome of the Triton submersible as the helicopter passes over the Goya and banks away.

On its next approach, a narrow red laser beam searches the deck and settles on the waiting Coast Guard helicopter. Rachel sees the targeting beam and lunges into the path of Corky and Tolland, knocking them down before they reach the aircraft. A Hellfire missile follows the beam and destroys the helicopter. The Coast Guard pilot and Xavia are killed, while the survivors are left on the Goya with no immediate escape by air. Rachel’s attempt to protect her companions succeeds in keeping them away from the blast, but it also marks the end of the group’s presumed exit route.

Resistance and Damage to the Goya

The gunship continues to threaten the ship as Corky tries to get away in a powerboat. Its machine guns hit him, injuring his right leg, but he manages to climb aboard and start the boat’s 250-horsepower Mercury engine. As the helicopter targets the craft with a laser, Tolland fires a flare gun toward the aircraft. The flare forces the helicopter to veer away at the moment it launches a missile, diverting the missile from Corky.

The missile instead strikes the base of one of the Goya’s four main struts, about thirty feet below Rachel and Tolland. The blast damages the support, shifts the ship out of balance, and leaves the spiral stairway to the lower deck barely attached. Tolland urges Rachel to descend with him. The Goya is no longer a secure platform or a reliable means of escape: the attack has damaged the structure on which the survivors’ choices depend.

Corky’s Escape and the Attack’s Outcome

Corky’s attempt to escape by powerboat does not end the pursuit. After looping back toward the Goya, he is targeted again by the gunship. He uses urine to soak duct tape and a rag, then covers himself with the rag; the account presents this improvised measure as part of his attempt to evade the attackers’ targeting. With a high-float life vest on, he moves to the rear of the speeding boat as a red laser dot appears on its floor.

Tolland does not see what happens to the boat, but hears it explode. Corky’s craft, identified as a Crestliner Phantom 2100, erupts in flames and is destroyed. The escape attempt thus ends not in safety but in the loss of another means of flight, while the assault’s toll extends from the dead aboard the Coast Guard helicopter to the ship’s damaged support and Corky’s ruined boat.

Consequences and Significance

The attack makes the conflict over the meteorite more than a political dispute or a contest over scientific credibility. Rachel and her companions have evidence that could expose the fraud, but transmitting and preserving it places them in immediate danger. The loss of the helicopter and powerboat, together with the damage to the Goya, progressively narrows their options and separates the act of learning the truth from the safer, public act of proving it.

That danger sits alongside a sharp distinction in responsibility. Pickering explains that he and others staged the meteorite discovery as a desperate attempt to protect NASA, while Herney and NASA did not know the meteorite was inauthentic. In that light, the violence aboard the Goya does not erase the political argument that motivated the deception; it exposes the human consequences of turning a scientific claim into a covert operation and then trying to keep its evidence from reaching the public. The President’s eventual decision to acknowledge the truth rather than persist with the false account offers a striking contrast to the assault: the evidence that survivors struggle to preserve can still lead to public admission rather than further concealment.