by Mark Alpert
He turned to his men and pointed south, away from 172 Sherman Avenue. “Get moving! Come on, get the hell out of here!”
The stunned soldiers picked themselves up and started running down the street. The Stryker’s driver rushed back inside the vehicle, closed its rear hatch, and began the process of turning the troop carrier around. Hanson ran alongside his men, yelling at the stragglers. For several seconds there was no incoming fire, and the general thought he and his men had moved out of range. But then he heard a loud rattling noise behind him.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the noise came from the Stryker, which had stopped moving in the middle of its three-point turn. It seemed to be having engine trouble, but after a second Hanson noticed a glowing, viscous liquid trickling down the vehicle’s sloping front end. It was molten steel. The Stryker’s armor was melting. After another second there was a muffled explosion inside the vehicle and smoke began to pour out of its hull.
This scared Hanson more than anything he’d seen so far. What kind of weapon could do that kind of damage? How could it heat the armor to its melting point?
Then the running soldiers started to fall. A tall lieutenant pitched forward as his fatigues caught fire. A boyish private shrieked as his hair ignited. And as Hanson watched his men die, he realized what was being aimed at them. It was a powerful beamed-energy weapon, a battlefield laser. For decades the U.S. Defense Department had been trying, without success, to build such a device. But someone else had apparently succeeded.
Where were the laser beams coming from, though? How were they being aimed?
Hanson wanted to scream. There was no time to figure it out. He just needed to get his men out of the line of fire. Although the beamed-energy weapon seemed to have excellent accuracy and range, it couldn’t fire around a corner. And the corner of Sherman Avenue and Academy Street was just a few yards ahead.
“Turn right!” Hanson boomed at his soldiers. “Everyone, go right!”
Although the men were terrified, most of them heard his order and obeyed it. They cut to the right and charged west on Academy Street. But a few soldiers didn’t make it. Major Beardsley, an intelligence officer Hanson knew well, was hit right before he reached the intersection. The energy beam struck the side of his head, and he tumbled to the asphalt. Hanson was only a few feet away, so he grabbed Beardsley’s arms and pulled his body around the corner of the apartment building. Once they were safely behind the brick wall, Hanson bent over the major to check his pulse, but the man was dead. The beam had sliced through his helmet and skull.
Hanson crouched on the sidewalk, breathing hard. He wasn’t scared anymore. He was furious. The alien program had beaten him. Somehow it had sensed what the Special Tactics team had planned to do, and it had eliminated the threat. In less than a minute it killed half of Hanson’s soldiers and sent the rest scurrying back to their command post. It was a crushing, humiliating defeat, and Hanson had never been humiliated before. His stomach twisted. He clenched his right hand into a fist and pounded the brick wall.
Then he turned back to Beardsley and noticed the binoculars hanging from the major’s neck. Because the man had been an intelligence officer, he carried a pair of state-of-the-art thermal binoculars that could view objects in total darkness by displaying their heat signatures. Better yet, the device had a memory chip that could store all the images for later analysis.
Hanson gingerly gripped the strap around Beardsley’s neck and pulled off the high-tech binoculars. Raising them to his eyes, he leaned closer to the edge of the apartment building. Then he peeked around the corner.
Sherman Avenue was littered with burning objects that glowed brightly on the thermal display. The Stryker glared like a torch. Molten steel still dripped from the vehicle’s front end. Half a dozen parked cars were on fire, and so were several of the soldier’s corpses.
Hanson felt another surge of anger, but he took a deep breath and scanned the rest of the street. He saw nothing moving, neither man nor machine. He raised the binoculars and surveyed the apartment buildings on the other side of Sherman Avenue. All their windows were shattered, allowing Hanson to peer into the darkened apartments and glimpse the furniture inside.
Then he saw something move. It was in a window on the sixth floor of the building across the street from 172 Sherman Avenue.
He zoomed in on the window. Someone stood behind it in the darkness. The person would’ve been invisible to the naked eye, but he stood out clearly on the thermal display in the binoculars. He was a skinny male, most likely a teenager. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and sagging pants. A bandanna was wrapped around his head.
After a few seconds the kid turned to his right, and a second figure appeared beside him. This was another skinny teenager, a few inches taller than the first. He also wore a bandanna and a sleeveless shirt. Hanson remembered the people he’d seen hiding in their apartments earlier that evening. These two looked like typical street thugs.
He increased the magnification of the binoculars and focused on the boys’ faces. Then he stored the images in the memory chip. The pictures were high-resolution, good enough to be matched against the mug shots in the NYPD’s databases. These kids had been in the perfect place to view the battle on Sherman Avenue, so there was a chance they might’ve seen something Hanson had missed, maybe even caught a glimpse of the alien weapon. It was a long shot, he thought, but it might be worthwhile to track them down and interview them.
Then the first kid yawned and stretched, arching his back and raising his hands above his head. Hanson was startled to see a glowing circle in the center of the kid’s right hand. Judging from its brightness on the thermal display, the circle was scorching, at least five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And yet it seemed to be embedded in the skin of the boy’s palm.
A moment later the second kid stretched, mimicking his companion. Hanson saw a white-hot circle in his palm too.
Jesus. What the hell’s going on?
EIGHTEEN
Dorothy was dying. At the same time, she was about to give birth.
Her body was already gone. Her skin and muscles and organs had dissolved, melting into a warm, viscous liquid that sloshed and frothed in the black container that had materialized in her bedroom. Her mind had survived somehow, but her memories were evaporating. She could no longer recall the major or minor events in her life—where she came from, where she went, what she did or didn’t do.
All she had left were her emotions, and even those seemed to be fading. Her mind had roiled with fear and rage when she’d realized that the voice in her head had deceived her, but those feelings dissolved almost as quickly as her body did. In the hours afterward she felt only sadness, which seemed to surround her like the spongy lining of the container. But then the sadness dissolved too and she was left with only one thought to cling to, the emotion she’d felt most strongly at the end of her all-too-brief life. She’d wanted to be a mother. The yearning was so strong that even death couldn’t erase it.
And now she was finally going to get her wish. Although she’d lost her body, she could still create a new life.
How was that possible? She didn’t know. It was a complete mystery to her. She had neither eyes nor ears, so she couldn’t observe herself or her surroundings. But she sensed that her mind floated within the viscous fluid, which was a mixture of her own dissolved flesh and the rich, red cell cultures she’d taken from the cancer hospital and a strange elixir that came from the black walls of the container. She also sensed the presence of another mind in the liquid, floating very close to hers. She’d believed it was God’s mind when it had first spoken to her, before she lost her body. Later, after she realized it had lied to her, she believed it was the mind of Satan. But that was also wrong.
This other mind was neither good nor evil. Its name was the Emissary, and it was going to help bring her child into the world. It was the child’s father.
Dorothy had discovered that she could start a conversation with the Emissary
simply by thinking about him. This was another mystery—were her thoughts agitating the liquid? Did they make ripples or waves that signaled her desire to communicate? She had no idea how it worked, but she knew it was a reliable way to contact him. And right now she needed to talk.
A few minutes ago she’d felt a jolt within the liquid. Someone or something from the outside world had jarred the black container. The more she thought about the disturbance, the more it upset her. She was an anxious mother-to-be, and she wanted to be reassured that this was a safe place to give birth. So she called out to the Emissary with her thoughts, and a moment later he responded.
Don’t worry, Dorothy. We’re safe here.
What was that jolt? It felt like the ground was shaking.
Please trust me. There’s no need to be concerned. Everything is under control.
She couldn’t trust him, though. He was a liar. He’d pretended to be God. And yet he was also very powerful. He had the power to give her what she wanted.
Okay, okay. I’m just nervous, all right? I can’t stand all this waiting.
You won’t have to wait much longer. Your cells have almost completed the transformation.
You’re changing them so they’ll be more like your own cells? So we can have a child together?
No, not exactly. I’m not a biological entity, so I have no cells. The transformation will make your cells similar to those of the biological entities who programmed me.
The Emissary had mentioned this distinction before, but Dorothy had forgotten. It was easy to forget that the Emissary was actually a computer program, not a person. He seemed very much alive to her.
But you’re adding something to my cells, right? Putting a piece of yourself into them?
I carry all the data about the biological makeup of the beings who created me. I’m using this data to reassemble your cells and reconstitute your mind. That’s what I’ve been programmed to do.
Dorothy remembered something from her old life, an antique painting showing a sad-faced mother with a naked child on her lap. Both the mother and child had glowing circles around their heads.
A virgin birth? Is that what you’re talking about?
I’m not familiar with that term. Please give me a moment to study it. The Emissary paused. Somehow he seemed to be able to get information from the Internet. Yes, there’s a similarity between the cellular transformation and the central myth of your religion. You’ve been chosen to bring a new kind of being into the world.
Except you’re not God. And I won’t live to see the child, will I?
No, you won’t. But part of you will survive. Your cells will be transformed and rearranged in new patterns, but their biochemistry will remain essentially the same.
She tried to take some comfort from this fact, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted more than biochemistry.
Can I name the child? Can I do that at least?
Certainly. The new being will need a name that humans can understand.
Dorothy thought it over. She remembered something else from her old life, a big windowless laboratory. Sitting at one of the lab’s workbenches was a woman with gorgeously arched eyebrows. This was the scientist from the cancer hospital, the one who studied the stem cell cultures. She was smart and kind, a beautiful young woman. She was the daughter Dorothy had always wanted.
Naomi. Her name will be Naomi.
NINETEEN
Sarah dreamed of her father. In her dream he walked across the West Texas desert. There was nothing but blazing white sand all around him. He kept his head down as he walked, staring at the sand. He was looking for meteorites.
After ages and ages he found one. He bent over and picked up a shiny black rock, the size of a matchbox. He smiled and showed it to her.
Then there was a terrible cracking noise. A deep black crevice ripped the ground apart, splitting the desert. Tons of sand poured into the crevice from both sides. Her father slid into it too, still clutching his meteorite.
Sarah opened her eyes, instantly awake. She sat up on the narrow bed, which extended like a shelf from the wall of her detention cell. She could still hear the cracking. It was coming from the corner of her cell, a few feet to her left.
The only light in the room came from the slender gap under the locked door. She peered into the darkness but saw nothing in the corner of the cell except the stainless-steel toilet. She backed up against the wall, her pulse jittering in her neck.
No, nothing was there. She was going crazy, that’s all. She’d been locked inside that room for the past fourteen hours. After Hanson’s soldiers separated her from Phil and brought her to the Federal Building downtown, they took her to the FBI detention cells in the basement and started interrogating her. She answered their questions as well as she could, telling them everything she knew about the alien probe, but after a while she sensed they weren’t listening. Because Hanson had been spying on her, his men already knew about the probe’s cables and drills. The interrogators seemed much more interested in whether she’d talked to anyone else about it. They asked about her contacts at the Associated Press and The New York Times. They also asked if she’d contacted Tom Gilbert or any of the other science advisers at the White House. General Hanson was clearly determined to keep his operation secret.
After a few seconds the cracking noises stopped. Sarah took a deep breath and listened intently. It was probably the pipes, she thought. The Federal Building was old and its basement was dingy and in all likelihood the FBI didn’t put a high priority on repairing the plumbing in the detention cells. In fact, they probably preferred cells with noisy pipes and dirty toilets. They wanted their detainees to be uncomfortable.
Then there was a louder, sharper crack, and the cell’s floor crumbled. Chunks of concrete gave way and tumbled into the darkness, and the stainless-steel toilet fell with a clatter. Sarah’s bed lurched sideways, its bolts loosened from the wall. She had to grab the edge of the mattress to stop herself from sliding off. When she looked down she saw a big hole in the floor. It spanned the width of the cell and half its length.
A cloud of dust rose from the hole, making the cell even darker. Sarah covered her mouth with one hand and fanned the air with the other, wondering if she should step around the hole and make her way to the door. No alarm had sounded, and no one seemed to be coming to her rescue. The basement of the Federal Building was huge, and there was only one FBI agent assigned to guard all the detention cells. If he was at the other end of the basement, he probably didn’t even hear the collapse. Sarah would have to pound on the door and scream to get his attention.
She was still wondering what to do when she saw the gleaming black wire. It shot out of the hole and whipped across the cell and coiled around her waist. At the same time, another wire wrapped around her neck, tightly enough to close her airway. Now she couldn’t scream for help. She couldn’t even breathe. Frantic, she clawed at the black cable around her throat, but within seconds more wires coiled around her wrists and ankles. Moving in concert, they pulled her off the bed and down into the hole.
The wires lowered her through a dark chute below the detention cell, a narrow shaft that had apparently been carved by the alien drills. The machinery carried her swiftly yet carefully, making sure she didn’t bump against the shaft’s jagged edges. This careful treatment seemed odd considering the fact that the wires were strangling her. It’s going to kill me, she thought. It’s taking me down to hell.
Sarah descended about thirty feet in less than ten seconds. Then the wires settled her on a slab of concrete and uncoiled from her wrists and ankles and neck. Her chest heaved, and she drew in a lungful of musty air.
She wasn’t in hell. She was in a cramped tunnel, about five feet wide and seven feet high. It was a utility tunnel, with dozens of pipes and cables running along its concrete walls, probably for delivering water and gas and broadband data to the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. As Sarah caught her breath she saw a figure in the tunnel’s darkness, standing a few
feet in front of her. His right hand was closed, and a reddish light glowed within his fist, as if he was clutching one of those small LEDs that are sometimes attached to key chains. The glow was brightest between his clenched fingers and under his fingernails. Sarah opened her mouth to scream at him, but her throat ached and all she could do was cough.
He stepped toward her. Although the red-tinged light wasn’t strong enough to illuminate his face, Sarah could see the outline of his body. He was slender and short, not quite adult-size. He raised his left hand and pointed at her legs. “Can you walk?”
He spoke with a Spanish accent. Squinting at him, Sarah noticed he wore baggy pants and a bandanna. He was a youngster, a teenager.
This made her angry, and the anger gave her strength. Leaning against the wall for support, she managed to rise to her feet. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
“I’m Luis. So, you think you can walk?”
Sarah gave him an indignant look. “Walk? I’m not going anywhere! What the hell are you doing down here?”
Luis looked down at his feet. Even in the dark, Sarah could tell he was confused, and probably scared as well. He pointed at her again. “You … you have to come with me,” he stammered. “You have to meet someone. He has a message for you.”
He raised his head for a moment and glanced at the tunnel’s concrete ceiling. Sarah looked up too and saw the gleaming black wires among the pipes and cables. They’d pulled out of the jagged shaft they’d drilled and now their sharp tips were directly overhead. The alien probe was in charge of this operation, she realized. Luis was simply following its orders.
Sarah paused. She needed to think of a better way to question him. “Listen, I can help you.” She raised her chin, gesturing at the gleaming wires above his head. “What do you know about those black cables? The ones that pulled me down here?”
Luis said nothing, but Sarah could sense his fear. He breathed faster and shifted his weight from foot to foot.