The Orion Plan

by Mark Alpert

  “You think those lines stand for the black cables?”

  “Yeah, the tentacles. It’s happening right now, they’re spreading fast. And some of them are moving northwest. They’re coming this way.”

  Sarah bit her lip. She believed him. And if Joe was telling the truth, it was very bad news. It meant the Emissary had broken its promise to stop spreading its machinery. “But why are the cables extending so far? Are they tapping into more power grids? Getting ready to attack us?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe I can find out. Maybe the answer’s already in my head.”

  Joe looked down at the floor again and closed his eyes. He shut them so tightly his jaw quivered. He leaned all the way forward, and for a second it looked like he was going to tumble off the toilet. Then he muttered, “Fuck!” and stamped his foot on the floor.

  “I can’t do it.” He opened his eyes but kept his head down. “I can’t see anything else.”

  “Why not? The Emissary’s not interfering anymore, right?”

  “But her devices are still in my brain. I think she programmed them to block my thoughts and lock up the information, even when she’s out of range.”

  Sarah frowned. She didn’t know what to do. She felt like she should warn somebody—Tom, the White House, the military—but what would she tell them? That Joe Graham the homeless guy believed the Emissary was deceiving them? And the evidence was a map he saw in his head? Would anyone at the White House take it seriously, even for a second?

  Ah, screw it, she thought. She decided to call Tom anyway. But before she could reach into her pocket for the disposable phone, Joe looked up at her.

  “There’s another way to see the plans,” he whispered. “But so far I’ve been afraid to try it.”

  She leaned closer. “How?”

  “I’ve known about it all along, ever since I left the city. That’s why I hung on to the whisky all this time.” He stretched his hand toward the sink and grabbed the liquor bottle. “I need to get drunk.”

  “Huh? Are you kidding? What good will that do?”

  He took the bottle out of the sink. The label had a picture of a rearing horse. “Alcohol messes up the devices. It prevents them from connecting to my brain. That’s why the Emissary made me stop drinking. She changed my biochemistry so booze would disgust me.”

  Sarah stared at Joe’s head, trying to picture it. Although she was no expert in neuroscience, she knew the brain was highly sensitive to certain chemicals. “So you think alcohol will stop the nanodevices from blocking your thoughts? And you’ll be able to see the hidden information?”

  “That’s right.” He twisted off the bottle’s cap and grimaced. Holding it at arm’s length, he thrust the bottle at Sarah. “But I need your help with this. I can’t do it by myself.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute.” She pulled her hands back, refusing to take the bottle. “What do you want me to do? Pour the stuff down your throat?”

  He nodded. “Please. Help me.” His voice cracked. “I have to know what’s in my head.”

  Sarah felt queasy. The idea of pouring whisky down a drunk’s throat was repellent to her. It was like handing a loaded gun to someone contemplating suicide. But what choice did they have? They needed to learn the Emissary’s plans. Everything depended on it.

  She grabbed the lapels of Joe’s jacket and flipped them over his shoulders. That would restrain his arms. Then she took the bottle from him. “Okay, lean back.”

  * * *

  For the first time in Joe’s life, getting drunk was a struggle. He gagged as Sarah brought the bottle to his lips and filled his mouth with the warm whisky. It was vile, nauseating, like liquid rot. He spluttered and choked, and half of it ran down his chin. He managed to swallow the rest, but an instant later he lunged for the sink and vomited it up.

  So they tried again. This time he swallowed a little more and kept it down. The whisky roiled inside him, burning his stomach, but after a few seconds its warmth spread to the rest of his body. When Sarah brought the bottle to his lips for the third time, it didn’t taste as foul. Joe took a long pull, swallowing at least a couple of ounces. After that, he didn’t need Sarah’s help. He grabbed the bottle from her and tilted his head back.

  It didn’t take long for him to finish it off. By the end he didn’t even notice the taste. In just five minutes he reversed all the bioengineering the Emissary had done to his brain. It’s a testament to the power of alcohol, he thought. The stuff was stronger than any alien technology.

  The worst part was, he felt good. He felt great. The tiny, stinking train car bathroom had become the best damn place in the world. He closed his eyes and leaned back, trying to find a more comfortable position. The rocking of the train was gentle and slow. He could probably fall asleep now, right here on this toilet. He was so goddamn tired.

  “Joe? Is it working?”

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. Sarah Pooley loomed over him, her breasts swaying under her T-shirt. Thanks to the information that the Emissary had collected from the Internet, Joe knew a lot about her; he’d seen her Cornell transcript, her NASA employment records, all her research papers about asteroids and meteorites. She was spectacularly brilliant, and she had a nice figure too. Her jeans clung to her hips, making a lovely curve.

  “Hey!” She bent over and looked him in the eye. “You’re drifting off, Joe. Try to concentrate, okay?”

  He nodded. It was time to think. The machines in his mind were paralyzed, and he could see all the information the Emissary had given him. But there was so much damn stuff cluttering his head, it was hard to find what he wanted. Despite his best efforts, he kept thinking about Sarah. And then he thought about Karen, because she used to have a nice figure too. They’d had a good life for a while, no doubt about it. But then she had to go off with that asshole, that Craig fucking Williams. It was his fault, not Joe’s. It was all his damn fault, everything that went wrong. If it wasn’t for him, Joe would’ve never gotten so angry. And Annabelle would still be alive.

  He stared at the floor again, the speckled beige linoleum. No, he wasn’t going to think about that. Not now, not ever. With a tremendous effort of will, he pushed those memories aside. Then he focused as hard as he could on one of the images the Emissary had put in his brain, a picture of a planet with brown continents and blue oceans.

  It was First Planet. The Emissary had projected the same image on the ceiling of the dome she’d built in Yankee Stadium, but as Joe gazed at it in his mind’s eye it grew larger and more detailed than the picture she’d shown to Sarah Pooley and Tom Gilbert. The colors were also different in the close-up view—near the coastlines of the planet’s continents, the water looked more yellow than blue. At the edge of the planet’s largest continent, Joe spotted an oval bay where the color of the water was particularly bright and the coast was dotted with hundreds of black domes. The image was so detailed he could see the black tentacles that stretched between the domes and the yellow water. It was obviously a city of some kind, but it seemed to be abandoned. Joe didn’t see any of the First People who’d built it. The only signs of life were bits of greenish scum floating in the water.

  Then Joe unlocked the crucial fact the Emissary had hidden. The greenish scum was the First People. The bay held thousands of them.

  He felt nauseous again, but not from the whisky. A deluge of information about the First People flooded his mind. He could see what they looked like, where they lived, how they reproduced. Each individual was a swarm of trillions of floating cells, which could stretch for miles across the open ocean or bunch together in a shallow cove. The cells on the surface used photosynthesis to make a nutrient-rich syrup that drifted down and fed the rest of the swarm. Other cells clumped on the seabed and sucked minerals from the mud. They coordinated their activities through chemical and electrical signals, working together like a huge floating brain, forming thoughts that ricocheted through the water. And when one swarm of cells encountered another, their thoughts intermingled in a g
luey yellow froth. The water was yellow because it was full of arsenic. What was poisonous to humans was an essential nutrient for them.

  Joe closed his eyes so he could see First Planet more clearly. The swarms occupied every ocean on the world. Because the First People could exchange thoughts so effortlessly, their society was incredibly close-knit and productive. In time, they colonized the continents too, using nanotechnology to build holding tanks that could transport them overland. And when they built their first spacecraft a thousand years ago, they put the tanks inside them. Joe saw it in his mind’s eye, a fleet of enormous spacecraft, each loaded with hundreds of metallic boxes. Then the picture faded and in its place he saw Second Planet.

  It looked strangely beautiful from a distance, with its purple oceans and orange continents, but as the image enlarged in Joe’s mind he saw the First People’s colonies. They started as black dots along the coastlines but gradually spread across the continents and islands. Joe felt like he was watching a time-lapse video in which hundreds of years of Second Planet’s history were compressed into a few seconds. The Emissary had told the truth about the first part of this history: the First People hadn’t intended to destroy Second Planet, but wars and epidemics devastated it anyway. The Second People died by the billions and their world turned completely black, covered by the First People’s colonies and power plants. After two hundred years only a small tribe of Second People survived. They retreated to burrows so far underground that the First People lost contact with them entirely.

  That was where the Emissary’s story had ended. Now, though, Joe saw the rest. After another three hundred years the Second People returned to the planet’s surface. During the centuries they were in hiding, the small tribe had grown into a billion-strong nation and dug a network of deep burrows across their world. What’s more, they’d used the First People’s technologies to build their own nanodevices and beamed-energy weapons. Their army launched a surprise attack on the colonies on the surface and massacred all the First People who lived in them. In just a few days, the Second People recaptured their planet.

  But they didn’t stop there. Their thirst for revenge was too great. They started building a space fleet, and after fifty years it was strong enough to challenge First Planet’s spacecraft. For the next century the two fleets fought each other in the depths of interplanetary space. The First People won the early battles because of their technological prowess, but the Second People never stopped attacking. They had a powerful advantage: they were bred for violence. The Second People had warred among themselves for millions of years, so the lust for battle was in their nature. The First People, in contrast, had always lived in peace. They were smart and industrious and efficient, but they couldn’t compete with the Second People’s ferocity.

  When the First People finally realized they couldn’t win, they offered to surrender all their spacecraft and retreat to their home world. They even promised to pay reparations for the damage they’d done to Second Planet. The Second People accepted the terms of the surrender. They took possession of the First People’s fleet and space stations. Then they immediately violated the agreement and launched a massive assault on First Planet. Orbiting weapons fired energy beams at the planet’s surface, scorching the continents and boiling the oceans. Gigantic spacecraft landed near the coastlines and disgorged millions of soldiers, a vast force of armored worms that tunneled into the soil and destroyed all the remaining defenses and refuges. They didn’t stop until they’d killed every last one of the First People. That was simply their way. For the Second People, victory meant annihilating their enemies.

  But just before the First People went extinct, they did two things. First, they scrubbed their computers of all information about the interstellar probes they’d launched hundreds of years before. Second, they sent a final radio message to the probes, giving new instructions to the artificial intelligence programs that ran the spacecraft. They were ordered to resurrect the First People. Their highest priority, overriding all others, was to create a new home planet for their species.

  Joe opened his eyes, jolted back to full consciousness. Trembling, he looked up at Sarah. The horror on his face must’ve been obvious, because when she gripped his shoulder he felt her hand trembling too.

  “Joe? What is it?”

  * * *

  By the time Sarah got the gist of the story, she felt the train slowing. They were coming into the Syracuse station. After a few more seconds the train lurched to a halt. Then she heard the noise of the train doors opening.

  She spun around and unlocked the bathroom door. Then she grabbed Joe’s arm and pulled him off the toilet. “Let’s go! We’re getting off!”

  A jingling alarm sounded, warning that the train’s doors were about to close. Sarah burst out of the bathroom, pulling Joe behind her, and barreled down the aisle of the train car. The doors started to close, but Sarah lunged into the narrowing gap between them. She slammed into the rubber edges of the doors, forcing them to reopen. Then she and Joe stumbled onto the station’s platform and ran for the exit.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Naomi could feel the tendrils stretching under the Atlantic Ocean. Their tips had extended more than two hundred kilometers to the southeast, and their sensors sent back a steady stream of data about the water’s temperature and salinity.

  The information was encouraging. This ocean would make an excellent home for the First People once the proper mix of chemicals was added. Naomi took a moment to imagine the bliss of spreading herself across its surface and descending to its depths. Then she anticipated the even greater bliss of bearing children in its waters.

  But that was for the future. Right now she had to confront the submarine.

  Although the human species was remarkably backward in many respects—they knew practically nothing about nanotechnology and even less about bioengineering—they’d developed a few impressive military technologies. The USS Florida, for example, ran so silently underwater that it was almost impossible to detect the submarine amid the vast expanse of ocean. But Naomi had obtained its approximate position from the dissected brain of General Hanson. The vessel was cruising along the edge of the continental shelf, near a geological feature on the seabed called the Babylon Canyon. As the tendrils neared that position, their magnetic sensors detected the submarine about two hundred and fifty meters below the surface.

  Naomi gave the order to attack. Three of the tendrils reshaped their tips, turning them into rotating drills. Propelled by hydrojets, they shot through the water, rocketing toward the vessel from below.

  The first tendril smashed into the Florida’s screw propeller, shearing it right off its drive shaft. The second pierced the submarine’s hull and slashed the ballast tanks. The third hit the vessel with such force that it speared through all four decks and shattered the submarine’s nuclear reactor.

  Seawater rushed into the ballast tanks and the nose of the Florida tilted downward. The tendrils continued to rip the submarine’s hull, peeling off the steel and flooding more of the vessel. They snapped the antennas off the conning tower and crushed the launch tubes holding the Tomahawk missiles. The Florida tilted more steeply and sank toward the depths, its hull crumpling under the pressure. The one hundred and fifty humans aboard died within seconds.

  Naomi ordered the tendrils to secure the vessel to the seabed and start the process of shrouding it. She needed to construct a watertight cover to stop the nuclear fuel from leaking into the ocean. This was going to be her home, after all.

  She’d been observing Hanson’s other military units for hours—her sensors had intercepted the data transmissions from the surveillance satellites overhead—so the tendrils were already in position to attack. Three of them breached the hull of the USS Bainbridge, a Navy destroyer in New York Harbor, and in less than a minute the ship was underwater. A dozen tendrils that had tunneled across New Jersey erupted from the ground at McGuire Air Force Base and lashed the F-22 fighter jets on the tarmac, pounding them
to bits. Closer to Naomi, the tendrils burst through the asphalt of Dyckman Street and struck the armored vehicles and ground troops assembled there. And closer still, on top of the apartment buildings along Sherman Avenue, four of the young humans who’d been recruited by the Emissary—Carlos, Diego, Miguel, and Luis—crouched on the rooftops and pointed their weapons at the government officials in the street below.

  The first beam vaporized the secretary of state and the director of national intelligence. The second incinerated the national security adviser, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and a dozen of their underlings. The soldiers in the troop carrier tried to return fire, but the human named Carlos blasted the armored vehicle and melted its guns. His companions fired their beams at the remaining underlings, and Naomi’s sensors picked up a strange noise coming from the young humans under her control. They were screaming. As soon as they saw what their weapons could do, they shrieked in horror and struggled to turn them off. But they couldn’t. They had no choice.

  Once the officials were dead, Naomi ordered the youngsters to start scanning the skies. At the same time, she linked their minds to her radar sensors. If any jet or missile neared the airspace over Manhattan, the radar would alert the boys and direct their fire at the target. Within minutes the sensors spotted a Predator drone over the Hudson River, three kilometers away. Luis stood up and fired his weapon at the distant aircraft. The drone burst into flames and corkscrewed into the river.

  In case a missile slipped through her air defenses, Naomi had taken precautions. She’d braced every floor of 172 Sherman Avenue with thick sheets of metal, constructing so many layers of shielding around her cradle that only a nuclear weapon could penetrate them. What’s more, her tendrils had dug a kilometer-deep shaft below the building, and very soon she would lower her cradle into the bedrock of Manhattan. She’d be completely invulnerable then, even to a nuclear attack. And because the tendrils had also built underground power plants that used the Earth’s geothermal energy to generate electricity, she no longer had to rely on the humans’ power lines. Naomi had everything she needed. For all intents and purposes, the war was already won.