The Orion Plan

by Mark Alpert

  Instead, he saw a tank of cloudy yellow water on the other side of the wall. It was only half full, and the mucky surface of the water was at Hanson’s eye level. A yellowish vapor billowed above the surface, and higher up was an array of grow lamps. Their blinding light poured down on the muck, which clumped together in greenish islands. Smaller bits of scum floated in the water below and settled on the tank’s spongy bottom. But there was nothing else in the water—no fish, no sea monsters, no swimming aliens. The tank looked dirty and disused, like something you’d see at an abandoned aquarium.

  Now Hanson was even more confused. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “This is my cradle.” The voice still came from the wall, even though no loudspeakers were visible. “But perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an incubator. I’ve lived inside it since I was born sixteen hours ago.”

  “What the hell? There’s nothing in there but pond scum.”

  “The First People are multicellular organisms like you, but the organization of our cells is looser, more decentralized. They’re not held together within a membrane like your skin. The cells are able to exchange signals and act in concert while floating in the oceans of First Planet.”

  Hanson scowled. He didn’t believe it. It was too absurd. He glanced at the sack propped against the wall, which now looked very dark against the yellow brightness behind it. Then he looked over his shoulder at the Special Tactics soldiers, who were still banging away at the panel. They were big, extraordinarily strong men, so maybe there was a chance they could knock it down. He couldn’t sacrifice them if there was still some hope.

  “Look, Naomi? I’ve heard enough. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Similar species live on this planet. Slime molds, for example. They’re colonies of microbes that cooperate when they need to find new food sources or reproduce. On First Planet, the microbial colonies flourished and evolved. And one species was more successful than all the others because it grew intelligent. They became the First People.”

  “Really? You’re saying a bunch of microbes built a spacecraft?”

  “The cells in our colonies can manipulate objects on the molecular level. So our first tools were nanodevices that we used to enhance our environment. We built structures on the planet’s ocean beds and along the coastlines. And eventually, after thousands of years, we built power plants and computers and rockets and space probes.”

  Hanson looked again at the pair of soldiers. One of them looked back and shook his head. They hadn’t even made a dent in the panel. The general’s slim hope was disappearing, but he decided to make one last effort. He stepped up to the transparent wall and rapped his knuckles against it. Although the wall looked like glass, it felt like steel. “Enough!” he shouted. “Let us out! Right this second!”

  All at once, the water in the tank seemed to come alive. A billion sparks flashed in the muck, glittering like diamond chips. In less than a second the lights died and the water turned murky and scummy again. But Hanson jumped backward and pulled his arm away from the wall. Something was definitely in the water. And it was looking at him.

  “Don’t touch it.” Her voice sharpened. “And don’t tell me what to do. I don’t recognize your authority.”

  Hanson took another step backward. He lowered his right hand, bringing it closer to the radio transmitter in his pants pocket. “Listen carefully, Naomi. The secretary of state is waiting for us outside. If you don’t let us out of this building soon, the truce will be over. And that means you’ll die.”

  “You’re going to fire your Tomahawk cruise missiles? From the USS Florida, your SSGN submarine?”

  He winced. She knew about the assault plan. She’d eavesdropped on their communications, just as he’d feared. But there were other things she couldn’t know. He’d taken precautions. “Yes, we’ll fire the missiles. We’ll turn this whole block into a crater. But it doesn’t have to go that way. We don’t want a war, and neither do you.”

  “But war between us is inevitable. Haven’t you realized that yet?”

  Hanson glanced at the sack again. Then he put his right hand in his pocket and gripped the radio transmitter there. But he didn’t push the button. His heart was hammering. “You’re wrong. It’s not inevitable.”

  “Look at the water in my cradle. Its color comes from dissolved arsenic compounds. Although my biochemistry is roughly similar to yours, it requires high concentrations of certain chemicals that are poisonous to Earth’s life-forms.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Over the next year, my machinery will spread around the planet and make it suitable for the First People. The tendrils are already mining for arsenic, and soon they’ll spread the compounds in your oceans and atmosphere. Nearly all of Earth’s native life-forms will go extinct, including the human race.”

  Hanson tightened his grip on the transmitter. He noticed that the pair of soldiers had stopped pounding the metallic panel. They’d heard what Naomi had just said. Breathing hard, they stepped toward the transparent wall, their bruised and bloody hands clenched into fists. To their credit, they didn’t look afraid. Their faces twitched with fury. And as Hanson stared at them he felt the same fury in himself, the same righteous, murderous rage.

  He turned back to the wall. “You bitch! You think you can steal our home? You think you can just take it away from us?”

  “The action is justified. Your species is destroying the Earth’s ecosystems. For evidence, just measure the air temperature outside this building. Your carbon emissions are warming the planet so rapidly, it will become uninhabitable for nearly all forms of life within a few hundred years. I will halt that process and put the Earth on a better ecological path.”

  Hanson shook his head. The rage was still rising inside him. He moved his index finger to the button on the radio transmitter. “No, we won’t let you! We’ll fucking tear you apart! And then we’ll send rockets to your First Planet and kill every last one of you!”

  Sparks flashed again in the cloudy water. They looked like a billion tiny eyes.

  “That’s impossible, I’m afraid.” Naomi’s voice turned low and quiet. “There’s no one left on First Planet to kill.”

  Hanson shivered. He didn’t understand.

  At the same moment, the Special Tactics men lost their patience and charged at the wall. They started beating their fists against it, grunting and cursing. Soon the transparent sheet was covered with bloody hand marks. Their efforts were futile, of course. They couldn’t damage the alien’s incubator.

  But Hanson could.

  The sack moved a bit, leaning away from the raging soldiers. Although the boy inside the steel mesh couldn’t hear anything, he could probably feel the vibrations of the wall behind him. Hanson looked at his men one last time, his brave doomed warriors. Then he whispered, “Forgive me,” and pushed the button.

  And nothing happened.

  He took the transmitter out of his pocket and tried again. He pointed it at the hidden antenna in the sack and pushed the button a third time. He ran right up to it, jammed the transmitter against the antenna and stabbed the button over and over. But still nothing happened.

  “Fuck!” Hanson stumbled away from the wall, dizzy with disbelief. He could barely stand. “Fucking Christ!”

  “Emilio Martinez is stronger than you.” Naomi’s voice was triumphant. “Without any help from the Emissary, he took control of the nanodevices inside his body. He ordered them to cut the wire in his arm, the one that connected the radio receiver to the explosive.”

  Hanson’s legs buckled. He fell to his hands and knees, his stomach heaving. The Special Tactics men heard the noise and turned around. But before they could dash toward him, a thick black wire stretched upward from the floor at their feet. Its tip speared one of the soldiers in the chest and burst out of his back, erupting between his shoulder blades. Then it swung to the left and plunged into the other soldier’s skull.

  Hanson vomited on the polished
floor. By the time he looked up again, the wire had pulled out of the soldiers’ corpses. Slick with their gore, it stretched toward the sack.

  “Emilio Martinez has served me well.” The wire’s tip pierced the sack’s mesh, then began to slice through it. “Now he’ll perform another service. One he’ll enjoy, I think.” The mesh fell off in strips, uncovering Emilio’s head and his naked torso. Then the wire started to cut the plastic sheath binding his arms. “I know your assault plan. I know which combat units and naval vessels you’ve assembled. But I don’t know the exact position of the USS Florida. And that information is important, because the submarine carries one hundred and fifty-four cruise missiles.”

  Hanson shivered again, more violently this time. The floor was so cold.

  “I believe you delivered certain orders to the submarine commander by courier to prevent me from intercepting them.” The sheath cracked and dropped to the floor. Then the wire slashed the lower part of the sack and cut the bindings on Emilio’s legs. “But I’m sure my nanodevices can extract the information from your memory. My technology is much quicker and more efficient than your interrogations.”

  Emilio flexed his arms and grimaced. He rubbed his bare legs, kneading the life back into them. After a few seconds, he rose to his feet and reached for the black wire, grasping it near the tip. A foot-long section of the metal broke off in his hand like an icicle. He gazed at it for a moment, then stepped toward Hanson.

  The general couldn’t stop shaking. Another wire came out of the floor and curled around his waist. It tightened and pulled him down, forcing him to lie flat on his stomach, with his head turned to the side. The cold floor burned his cheek.

  Emilio knelt beside him and pointed the black icicle at Hanson’s forehead. At its tip was a gleaming, curved blade.

  The boy smiled. “Hola, pendejo. Remember that promise I made? What I said I was going to do to you?”

  Hanson remembered.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Through the windows of the Amtrak train Sarah recognized the countryside. They were in the central part of New York State, somewhere between Utica and Syracuse. The landscape to the north of the railroad tracks was mostly flat, but the view to the south was full of rolling, wooded hills. They were about fifty miles away from Cornell University, where Sarah had gone to college and grad school, the happiest years of her life.

  She sat in the rear of the train car. Joe sat near the front, ten rows ahead. For the past five hours she’d stared at the back of his head and his unkempt hair. When Sarah had boarded the train at the Yonkers station and followed him into the car, she’d felt certain that sooner or later he’d turn around and notice her. But in all that time he’d hardly moved.

  Maybe he was asleep. He definitely had reason to be tired. After leaving the apartment building in the Bronx yesterday, he’d sprinted for miles, running right out of the city and into the suburbs of Westchester County. He got so far ahead of Sarah that she almost lost him, but after a while he slowed down and turned to the west. He jogged past houses and gas stations and supermarkets until he reached the Hudson River. Then he staggered into a waterfront park, sat down on a bench, and started weeping.

  He spent the whole night there. Every hour or so, he pulled the liquor bottle out of his jacket, but he never once took a drink, at least as far as Sarah could tell. She watched him from the parking lot, about fifty yards away, convinced that at any moment he was going to jump into the river and let the current take him under. But when dawn finally came he got up from the bench and started walking north, following the train tracks that paralleled the Hudson. He went into the Yonkers station and bought a ticket. (Sarah, standing a few yards behind him, noticed he used cash.) And when the 7:44 A.M. train to Buffalo arrived, he got on board.

  Sarah napped a little in her seat, always waking up before each stop just in case Joe got off the train. But he didn’t get off at Poughkeepsie or Albany or Utica. She was starting to think that maybe he wouldn’t get off at Buffalo either. He could stay on this train and go all the way west to Denver or San Francisco. Sarah sensed he was trying to run as far as he could from whatever he’d seen in that apartment building.

  Luckily, Sarah could use her credit card to buy sandwiches in the train’s lounge car, and she could use her disposable cell phone to stay in touch with Tom. In their last phone call he’d said a team of officials had gone to New York to negotiate with the Emissary. They apparently didn’t trust Joe to be their translator, and Tom said there was no need to follow him anymore. But Sarah was determined to keep at it. The man was unique, a link to another world. It was certainly worth a few hundred dollars to see where he went.

  She looked out the window again. They were passing warehouses and truck depots now, maybe twenty miles from Syracuse. Sarah remembered the city from her grad-school days; its train station was the closest one to Cornell, and she’d often traveled by train back then because it was cheaper than flying. In recent years she’d gone back to Cornell a few times, mostly because the school’s astronomy department managed the Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico. Arecibo’s giant antenna could send powerful radar pulses into space, and Sarah sometimes used it to track asteroids and comets that came close to Earth. She enjoyed working with the astronomers at Cornell, but the visits were always bittersweet. They reminded Sarah of how hopeful she’d once been.

  She was still thinking about her grad-school days when she heard shouts coming from the front of the train car. Turning away from the window, she saw Joe standing in the aisle and swinging the liquor bottle through the air.

  “No! Get out! Get out of my head!”

  His face was flushed and sweaty and crazed. He turned his head this way and that, his eyes tracking something only he could see. He bounded down the aisle, chasing the invisible thing, and swiped the bottle at it. An old woman sitting nearby let out a scream. Another passenger dashed down the aisle in the other direction and called for help.

  Sarah sat up straight, her adrenaline surging. She had to do something. Once the train conductors showed up, they’d either toss Joe off at the next stop or arrest him. She jumped out of her seat.

  “What’s going on, Joe?”

  For a second he just looked at her, uncomprehending. Then his eyes widened and he rushed toward her. “Dr. Pooley! It’s the Emissary! I have to get her out!”

  “Okay, calm down. You—”

  “She won’t let me think!” He gesticulated wildly, waving the bottle like a club. “She keeps saying, ‘Go back, go back to Manhattan!’”

  “Listen to me, Joe. If you don’t—”

  “She’s angry now. She can’t take control of my muscles because her radio signal’s weaker here, because we’re so far from the city. And because she’s losing control, I’m starting to see more.”

  Before Sarah could respond, one of the train conductors entered the car and bustled down the aisle. He was a fat, bearded man in a blue uniform, with a radio hanging from his belt. Frowning, he pointed at Joe. “Hey you! Put down that bottle!”

  Joe spun around, and his face turned pale. He lowered the liquor bottle and tried to hide it inside his jacket. “I … I didn’t…”

  “Drinking alcohol is prohibited in this car. Have you been drinking, sir?”

  “No … no, I…” Joe shook his head, unable to continue. He looked terrified.

  Sarah’s heart went out to him. He’d clearly had some bad experiences with men wearing uniforms. And in this case, he was innocent: the liquor bottle was nearly full, and so far she hadn’t seen him take a slug from it.

  She leaned toward Joe, grasped the bottle under his jacket, and pulled it away from him. Then she turned to the conductor. “I’m so sorry about this. We’re on our way to a rehab clinic, but my husband sneaked a little something in his suitcase. I took my eyes off him for a minute, and then this happened.”

  The conductor stared at her, still frowning. Sarah gave him an earnest, pleading look, the look of a long-suffering wife trying to do the rig
ht thing. And after a few seconds, it worked. The conductor stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Ma’am, you have to watch him. He can’t go running around the train.”

  Sarah nodded. “I’ll take him to the bathroom. He’ll be all right, I promise.”

  She shifted the bottle to her left hand and wrapped her right arm around Joe’s waist. Then she steered him down the aisle, away from the conductor. Together, they lurched toward the bathroom at the end of the car. Sarah opened the door and noticed that the space was uncomfortably small. But she dragged Joe inside anyway and latched the door behind them.

  The toilet’s lid was closed. Joe sat down on it with a thump, while Sarah put the bottle in the stainless-steel sink. Fortunately, the bathroom had no window, and the door was a thick sheet of aluminum. They were surrounded by metal.

  She bent over and patted Joe’s shoulder. “Okay, you should feel better now. The Emissary’s signals can’t get through.”

  He looked down at the bathroom’s floor, staring intently. Then he nodded. “You’re right. I don’t hear her.”

  “What did you mean when you said you’re seeing more? More of what?”

  He raised his head. The lines on his face seemed deeper in the fluorescent light. “The Emissary put information in my head before our meeting at the stadium. But I couldn’t see some of the things she put there. Because they’re plans, I think. Plans for the future that she didn’t want to reveal yet.”

  “And you can see those plans now?”

  “Not all of them. But I’m getting glimpses. Especially after … in the last few hours.” Joe clenched and unclenched his hands. “I saw a map of New York City, and there were lines coming out of Manhattan. They went in all directions, to Long Island and New England and New Jersey. Some of them went all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean.”