by Mark Alpert
She expanded his chest again, then forced him underwater. Although the river was utterly opaque, he saw bursts of color against the blackness, red and green splotches that flashed across his field of vision. Joe was bewildered for a moment—what’s the hell’s going on now?—but then he realized that the splotches weren’t real. They were hallucinations, distress signals from his oxygen-starved brain. The Emissary had pushed him beyond his limits. He couldn’t stay conscious much longer.
Then he felt something curl around his right arm. A smooth, cold rope looped once around his wrist and a couple of times around his forearm. His stomach clenched and churned in terror, but his right hand gripped the cold line. The Emissary closed his left hand around it too, and then Joe felt a tremendous tug. The rope grew taut and began pulling him through the water.
He moved like a torpedo, swift and straight. The river currents battered his head and torso as he plowed through them, and his arms felt like they were being yanked out of their sockets. After several seconds the rope angled him upward and raised him to the surface of the river. He opened his mouth and gasped for breath as his body skimmed over the waves. The rope was pulling him as rapidly as a towline pulls a water-skier. He’d already gone far beyond the reach of the correction officers’ spotlights, and when he glanced to the right he noticed that the patrol boat was no longer heading his way. Instead it cruised toward the circles of water illuminated by the spotlights, which swept back and forth in a vain effort to find him. He’d slipped away from his pursuers, and now they couldn’t see him. He was gliding fast and low across the river, invisible in the darkness.
There was just enough ambient light, though, that Joe could see the reflections off the wet, gleaming line. It wasn’t really a rope. It was black and metallic.
After another minute he approached the Bronx shoreline. The metallic strand pulled him toward a muddy riverbank next to an abandoned warehouse. As he neared the shore, the Emissary unwound the tentacle from his arm and relinquished control of his body. Joe waded the last ten feet under his own power and collapsed on the bank, lying on his back in the mud. He turned his head to the left and noticed that the tentacle stuck out of a small hole in the mud a few yards away. He stared at the strand as it withdrew into the hole. Within seconds it vanished.
Joe closed his eyes. He was spent. He didn’t want to get up. He wanted to lie there forever.
What’s wrong, Joe? You’re free. The correction officers will assume you drowned.
He shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and pointed at the hole where the tentacle had disappeared. “This place is miles away from Inwood. Are your machines all over the city now?”
Yes. Now we’re ready for the next phase. You’re going to help me make contact.
SEVENTEEN
General Brent Hanson marched down Payson Avenue with one of his GPR search teams. A burly Air Force corporal pushed the ground-penetrating radar machine down the middle of the street, and a tall lieutenant trailed behind him, carrying a flashlight and a sheaf of blueprints. Twenty other search teams were in the area surrounding Inwood Hill Park, all of them using the radar systems to peer below the streets and sidewalks. Luckily, they could do this job without worrying about interference from curious bystanders or journalists. Hanson had already evacuated the neighborhood.
The cover story he’d used, predictably enough, was terrorism. At 4:00 P.M. that afternoon the Department of Homeland Security had announced the arrest of a dozen fanatical Muslims who’d intended to bomb several targets in Manhattan. The leaders of the terrorist group, however, had escaped arrest and were believed to be hiding somewhere in Inwood. These fanatics had all the materials needed to build a powerful bomb, one that could destroy an entire apartment building, so the government had ordered the immediate removal of all the residents living between Dyckman Street and 218th Street.
Hanson had come up with this story. He was proud of it because it had the ring of truth. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the military officials had been lying when they’d said the soldiers in Inwood were on a training mission. The locals were sure the government was hiding something, probably a terrorist threat, and they all proclaimed, “I told you so!” when Homeland Security admitted they were right. But it never occurred to them that the government’s second story was also a lie. And this lie was very convincing: between 4:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M., twenty thousand people fled the neighborhood. Most went to emergency shelters that the city had set up, but many took up watch at the edges of Inwood, standing behind the police barricades on Tenth Avenue and waiting for the military to either capture or gun down the terrorists.
What’s more, the gawkers at the barricades got further confirmation of the cover story when they saw the soldiers pushing the GPR machines down the neighborhood’s streets. The military had used the same radar system in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was excellent at detecting buried explosives. So when the television reporters spotted the GPR teams they naturally assumed the soldiers were looking for a bomb.
In reality, though, tonight’s search was much more difficult. Hanson wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. Only Sarah Pooley and the Con Edison inspector had actually seen the strange conductive cables. Hanson’s men had done their own inspections of the Con Ed manholes and found no slender black strands tapping into the power lines.
This failure frustrated Hanson. He needed more proof to convince his superiors. He already had some strong evidence—the sample Dr. Pooley had collected, plus her trajectory analysis proving that the probe couldn’t have been launched from Earth—but that wasn’t enough for the generals on the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the bureaucrats on the National Security Council. They weren’t going to start believing in aliens until they could see, hear, and smell them.
The GPR teams began their search at 10:00 P.M. and Hanson crisscrossed the neighborhood with them, walking beside his men as they looked for anything unusual lurking underground. The streets were dark because Hanson had ordered Con Ed to cut the power to the area. The blackout order was consistent with the cover story—the military was supposedly making things difficult for the hiding terrorists—but it was also a precautionary measure. If Dr. Pooley was right and there really was an alien entity beneath the streets of Manhattan, Hanson wasn’t going to let it siphon any more electricity from the power grid.
By 1:00 A.M., though, none of the search teams had detected anything unusual, and Hanson grew impatient. He stepped closer to the corporal who was pushing the GPR machine and the lieutenant who was analyzing the results. The machine looked a bit like a lawn mower—its lower part had four wheels, and suspended between them was a heavy rectangular unit, about the size of a briefcase, which contained the antennas. As the corporal steered the machine down the street, the unit’s transmitting antenna fired radio waves downward. These waves penetrated the asphalt and concrete and dirt, and some of them bounced back to the street. Another antenna in the unit received the reflected waves and measured how long it took them to return. The data revealed the shape and depth of the underground structures.
The long handle that the corporal used to push the machine also supported a ten-inch-wide screen that displayed the GPR signals. Whenever the corporal spotted something new on the screen he stopped pushing and let the lieutenant compare the data with his blueprints. Because his schematics showing the locations of all the ordinary structures beneath the street—the water pipes, sewer mains, power lines, and fiber-optic cables—the lieutenant could tell if the GPR was showing something that wasn’t supposed to be underground. The problem, though, was the sheer quantity of cables and pipes below their feet. Every few yards the search team had to stop the machine and consult the maps. It was driving Hanson crazy.
The next time they stopped, Hanson nudged the lieutenant aside and looked at the screen himself. On the display was a mishmash of wavy bluish lines, a confusing jumble of parabolas and hyperbolas. But Hanson was a radar expert—he’d studied the subject at MIT and now oversaw all of
Space Command’s satellite-tracking stations. Looking at the screen, he could tell right away what the GPR had detected: a twelve-inch water pipe located about six feet below the street. He’d seen similar signals many times over the past three hours. There were lots of water pipes in the neighborhood.
Hanson tapped the screen to get the attention of both the corporal and the lieutenant. “This is part of the water system, a distribution main. Don’t bother stopping when you see this kind of signal.”
“Yes, sir!” The lieutenant nodded. He was young, no more than a year or two out of the Air Force Academy, but he seemed eager and intelligent. The name written on his fatigues was MEKLER. “Sir, is there a range of sizes for the objects we’re looking for? A minimum and a maximum?”
That was a good question. Hanson had no idea. “You should look for anything out of the ordinary, anything that doesn’t appear in the blueprints. But as I mentioned in the briefing, you should pay special attention to any cables that are half an inch in diameter.” This estimate was based on the observations of Dr. Pooley, who’d said the conductive strand was about as thick as her pinkie.
“The GPR doesn’t work well for objects that small, sir.” Lieutenant Mekler sounded apologetic. “If the cable is buried more than a few feet underground, I don’t think the machine can detect it.”
“Just do your best. Stay alert and keep your eyes on the screen.”
Mekler shouted, “Yes, sir!” and snapped off a smart salute. The corporal also saluted, but less enthusiastically. Then they resumed their survey of the underside of Payson Avenue.
None of the soldiers below the rank of colonel knew the true nature of their mission. Hanson had told them the same cover story about the fanatical Muslims, so his men thought they were hunting for a bomb. He disliked lying to them, but he didn’t have a choice. This was a national security crisis of the highest order. It was the most serious threat the United States—or any other country—had ever faced. And, for good or bad, Hanson was in charge of facing it. He had to strictly control the information about the threat.
He took a deep breath as he followed his men down the street. It was strange to see New York City this way, so dark and empty. The neighborhood wasn’t entirely deserted—Hanson had glimpsed a few shadowy figures in the windows of the darkened apartment buildings—but the streets were deathly quietly, and the silence exhilarated him. He tilted his head back and gazed at the night sky. It was so much clearer with the streetlights turned off. Even though the quarter-moon was up, he could see dozens of stars.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d always known this day would come. His whole life he’d been waiting for it to happen. Hanson felt a little dizzy as he stared at the stars overhead. Something marvelous and alarming had emerged from the darkness, and soon enough he would confront it, the terrifying unknown.
It was his destiny.
* * *
When Brent Hanson was a boy he’d dreamed of becoming an astronaut. He was too young to witness the Apollo missions—that program ended when he was only two years old—but he was eleven when the space shuttle Columbia shot into orbit for the first time. He watched the launch on an old black-and-white TV in the kitchen of his trailer home. It was April 12th 1981, three seconds after 7:00 A.M. His mother and her boyfriend were still asleep in their bedroom.
In 1988 Hanson entered the Air Force Academy to pursue his dream. He did everything he could to improve his chances of being chosen for one of NASA’s space-shuttle crews. After graduation he became a fighter pilot. A few years later he went back to school on Uncle Sam’s dime and earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. By the age of thirty-three he was one of the youngest lieutenant colonels in the Air Force and a prime candidate for the astronaut corps. He submitted his application to NASA and passed the preliminary screening.
Then two setbacks happened in quick succession. On February 1, 2003, during its twenty-eighth mission, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while reentering the atmosphere. The disaster doomed NASA’s shuttle program and limited the agency’s need for more astronauts. A month later the United States invaded Iraq, and the Air Force put out a call for experienced airmen to lead its fighter squadrons into combat. Hanson had to make a choice. For the good of his career he became a squadron commander and abandoned his dream of spaceflight.
It turned out to be a rewarding choice, at least career-wise. He rose swiftly through the ranks. After ten years he was promoted to lieutenant general and assigned to lead the Fourteenth Air Force, the biggest unit in Space Command. At first the job seemed a perfect fit for him, but soon the Pentagon slashed his budget, leaving Hanson unable to do anything ambitious. Worse, he had to deal with personnel issues, bureaucratic squabbles, and hundreds of petty problems. The Air Force promoted him again three years later, putting him in charge of all of Space Command, but the only part of the job he really enjoyed was visiting the airmen at the Space Operations Center at Vandenberg. He went there whenever he could, often late at night. He liked to chat with the radar specialists and stare at the jumbo screen showing the thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth.
That’s why Hanson was still on duty when Sarah Pooley sent the alert about Object 2016X. He recognized her name immediately. Twenty years ago he’d read about her studies of the Martian microfossils. He knew NASA had punished her for sticking to her guns, and that she’d spent time in a mental-health clinic afterwards. In other words, she was brilliant but erratic, which is why Hanson didn’t take her too seriously when she rushed into the operations center three nights ago. But that had been a mistake. He shouldn’t have underestimated her. She was the first to recognize the uniqueness of 2016X. She was far better equipped to analyze the object than any of the experts on Hanson’s staff.
The only problem was, he couldn’t trust her. She was too independent, too unstable. Even after he persuaded her to sign a contract with the Air Force, he still questioned her loyalty. He knew she’d ignore the contract’s restrictions if they got in her way. So Hanson ordered one of his men—his longtime aide Colonel Gunter, a good ol’ boy who was adept at playing dumb—to secretly install a spy-software package on her laptop. This allowed Hanson to see all her notes and monitor her movements.
He was baffled at first when she neglected her assigned duties and arranged to meet the Con Edison inspector. But at the same time, Hanson couldn’t help but admire her bravery. She wasn’t afraid to investigate the outlandish notion that 2016X was an alien space probe. And because she had no fear, she was free to explore all the possibilities. By the time she collected her otherworldly sample from the Con Ed manhole and gave it to Dr. Philip Clark for testing, Hanson was convinced she was right. That’s when he notified his superiors in the Pentagon and shared the startling facts with them. Although the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs were skeptical, they agreed there was enough evidence to justify taking the first steps of Contingency Plan Orion.
The Defense Department had contingency plans for every imaginable catastrophe, from global pandemics to supervolcanoes. The Orion Plan detailed how the U.S. military should respond to the discovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. The plan authorized Hanson to take extraordinary measures to keep the discovery secret, including the fabrication of a cover story. And the plan gave him the authority to arrest Pooley and Clark and anyone else who might contradict that story. Just to be on the safe side, he also arrested Gino Torelli, the Con Edison inspector.
Hanson had exchanged a few words with Sarah during her arrest, but she was furious and uncooperative, so there was no point in continuing the conversation. Colonel Gunter took the suspects to the Federal Building downtown and locked them in detention cells normally used by the FBI. It was a shame, really. Hanson could use Sarah’s help right now. She could probably offer some good advice on how to locate the alien machinery underground. But she’d already proved she couldn’t follow the rules. She’d violated her confidentiality agreement when she talked to Philip Clark, so what was to stop her from
telling the whole story to The New York Times? No, she had to be detained until the crisis was over, and Hanson would have to find the alien machinery on his own.
He looked up at the night sky again. He tried to analyze the problem as Dr. Pooley would, breaking it into smaller parts and considering all the variables. He pictured Sarah in the Con Edison manhole, staring at the slender black strand she’d discovered. She’d written in her notes that the strand had pulled away from the power line right after Torelli pointed his voltage detector at it. Perhaps this was simply a coincidence. But in her notes Sarah had mentioned a more disturbing possibility: perhaps the alien cable had somehow noticed that Torelli was observing it. Maybe the strand had disconnected from the power line and retreated from the manhole because it didn’t want to be observed.
If that was true, Hanson thought, the implications for the GPR search weren’t good. If the alien machines could sense the ground-penetrating radar, they could delve deeper underground to avoid detection. The search would be futile.
Hanson concentrated harder. He needed to think like Sarah. That was the only way to tackle the problem. He saw her in his mind’s eye again, but now she was hunched over her laptop, her dark brown eyes fixed on the screen, her delicate fingers tapping the keys. She was a beautiful woman, but not in the way that a movie star or a fashion model was beautiful. She was more like an exquisite sports car, a Maserati or Lamborghini that had been engineered to perfection.
Hanson’s concentration faltered. Although he admired Sarah, she also agitated him. He’d had this problem with other women over the years; as soon as he found someone he wanted, he started to despise her. That was why he’d never married. He avoided relationships because they always turned into sickening struggles. Better to focus on work, the task at hand. Although Sarah’s advice might be useful now, in the final analysis Hanson was glad he’d locked her up. Her presence disturbed him.
