The LOP, detecting their approach, stopped in its tracks, ten feet out from the side of the vessel. Hanging there, Dom’s seemingly self-levitating form was in full view.
“What the fuck . . .” said one man, in Russian-accented English. He took several steps closer, his eyes wide as dinner plates. The second man awkwardly craned his head around so that he too could see what had so astonished his cohort.
Hannig couldn’t help but smile seeing the two humans’ reaction. His smile faltered, suddenly cognizant of the fact that he was racking up more and more violations. If more humans caught any sense of the situation, he would be at huge personal risk.
They dropped their load of furniture and simply stared, both unable to speak. Hannig said, “LOP, continue on, bring the human inside.”
From their perspective, Hannig figured it would seem as if the prone body was floating on air, as Dom’s head and shoulders moved through the rear entry hatch. Then the body would simply disappear right before their eyes.
“Hurry! Get him up onto the MedBed,” Hannig ordered the LOP.
Hannig had already prepped the space for surgery. He was surprised the human had survived this long, but it was still uncertain if he could be saved.
Chapter 8
Dominic Moretti
I blinked, still drowsy. Flat on my back, I yawned, slowly becoming more conscious. I remembered. Replayed the scene, hearing that loud concussive sound. That lone gunshot rang out in my ears over and over again. I remembered the simultaneous flash from the gun’s muzzle. I remembered what it had felt like to be shot in the chest—in the heart. It occurred to me that people do not typically survive gunshots to the heart. Am I dead? I took in the surrounding illumination, a nice, soft blue. Soothing. But there again, wouldn’t heaven be that way—soothing, something like this? For some reason I thought of home and my parents.
A face loomed over me. A face I recognized. Not a particularly pleasant one to look at. “Hey . . . it’s you,” I said, my words coming out slurred.
The melted-wax-like face changed expression. It seemed to be smiling. “Yes, it is me, Dominic. You can call me Hannig.”
“Where—Where am I, um . . . Hannig?”
“You are within a small spacecraft. And at the moment, I am doing my best to save your life. So please, lie still while I work.”
I felt a series of tugging sensations in and around my chest area. I lowered my eyes, glancing downward. I watched as Hannig stuck several pointed objects into the area around the bullet wound on my chest. They were teardrop-shaped, each about the size of a felt-tip marker, and filled with fluids of different colors. As soon as Hannig pricked my skin, they started emptying into my body, and less than a minute later they were just transparent shells, which Hannig promptly removed. I felt a tingling in my chest, but it disappeared in a moment. I suddenly felt on the brink of fainting, and I gave Hannig a quizzical look.
“I just injected you with several different types of Bio-Mechs.” Hannig said, as if that somehow explained what was happening.
I furrowed my brow further.
“Sorry, I meant protein Bio-Mechs. No? Oh, that’s right, you don’t call them that. What’s the term you are using these days? Um, nanobots? Yes! I injected you with different kinds of bio-molecular nanobots, and they’re going to repair you from within.”
I vaguely remembered having read something about nanobots.
“The first kind is a chimeric protein,” Hannig continued. “It combines parts of an antibody that’s programmed to latch exclusively to your heart cells, and a transmembrane domain that’ll insert an apoptosis trigger into those cells. It’ll make them commit suicide. In other words, they’re wiping out your heart, or what’s left of it. It was ruined anyway, there was no repairing it.”
My eyes widened.
Sensing my alarm, Hannig continued. “But don’t worry, some of the other sets of molecular machines that I injected are going to give you a new heart. They’re pretty interesting, you see. Some of them have been designed to self-assemble into a heart-shaped scaffold, made of a kind of degradable polymer, right where your damaged heart used to be. I also injected you with cells from a culture that I started minutes ago, from tissue that I harvested from the inside of your mouth. Those cells are going to adhere to the polymer scaffold and differentiate into heart cells, giving you a heart that’s genetically just like your old one. I also injected you with proteins that know how to connect your new heart to your old vascular system, like millions of tiny molecular plumbers, right? And there are some minuscule devices that use spin-transfer to generate electrical currents that’ll enormously accelerate the healing of your wounds. They’ll also prevent your pain receptors from firing.”
My head was spinning, and I couldn’t tell if it was from all the technical mumbo-jumbo, or the blood loss, or both. There was an awkward silence.
“Here,” Hannig said after a while, pointing to a hovering image that seemed to float to the left of my head. “On this display you can see how the old heart is disappearing, and how the new one is growing. It’s similar to a Terran medical ultrasound, but you don’t have to be close to the scan source, and the computers do a super-fast deconvolution of the returning signal, which allows for a much better image resolution.”
That appeared to be a gross understatement. The image was so vivid and colorful that I had to raise my head to check that my chest wasn’t fully open. It wasn’t. In fact, the only opening on my chest was the bullet hole, and it was visibly starting to heal.
After another minute or so of watching in awe as the new heart continued to form, I looked up to Hannig. “I just have one question. Well, actually two,” I said. “With an injury like this, shouldn’t I have already bled out? And either way, how am I still alive, since the old heart’s dead and the new one isn’t ready yet?
“Good point,” Hannig said, absentmindedly. “In fact, when I found you, I pumped into your veins and arteries a kind of gel that’s saturated with glucose and oxygen, and loaded with a molecular group that’ll absorb all the carbon dioxide waste product from your cells’ metabolism. With that, you can live for a few hours without any blood circulation at all. Once your new heart is ready, we’ll substitute a more fluid artificial blood for the gel. And in a few days, your own body will be producing enough blood again to replace the artificial version.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“It’s true.
“And I’m inside of a . . . spaceship?”
“Oh. Yes! Would you like to see it?” Hannig did not wait for an answer. “System, adjust MedBed angle to negative thirty degrees.”
Immediately, I felt the platform beneath my ass alter its angle. When it came to a stop, with my feet lowered a bit and my head raised, I could now see far more of my surroundings. It was a relatively small room, just a compartment, really. I was not a scientist, certainly no great academic. But I knew that what was around me was clearly alien technology. I swallowed. I could feel the tiny mechanical bots still working within my chest cavity.
“We still have some work to do, Dominic. To make you well again. Best you not dwell on, well, the specifics, of what I am doing. I would like to know more about you. I have never spoken, directly, to a human before. I am quite interested in humans. Perhaps you can tell me more about yourself. Tell me about your family, your parents.”
I felt drowsy. Hannig had given me something. “Um . . . well, my dad, Giuseppe Moretti, he’s sixty-five, and now retired. He was always a faithful union employee, worked at Maxwell House Coffee here in Lower Manhattan. My mom, I think she’s sixty-one now, she takes care of him . . . it’s pretty much a full-time job. She loses her patience with him. With his . . . situation. She calls me a lot, tells me I should visit more.”
I paused, collecting my thoughts. It felt strange, laying my life situation out in a story like this, but maybe whatever he’d given me was having some effect, because the words kept flowing freely.
“So yeah. My dad had w
orked at the Maxwell House plant for thirty years, performing basic maintenance on factory machinery. Few years back, late in the workday, he informed his manager he’d be fixing one of the old temperamental coffee-bean sifters. It was a machine so large you literally needed to crawl inside the thing to make whatever repairs were needed. Apparently, his manager had neglected or forgotten to tell anyone else that my dad was inside there. Another worker turned the machine on, inadvertently, and the hatch closed.
“My dad tumbled around and around inside that empty steel vessel for close to an hour. When they finally realized someone was inside, they hit the emergency shut off. Somehow, Dad was still alive, and they rushed him to the hospital. He was in a coma for like three weeks—head trauma from all the repeated blows to his head. There was brain damage too, due to the lack of oxygen in the coffee cistern.
“Maxwell House’s lawyers eventually settled the case. My mom and dad got a check for three million dollars with the understanding that there was no admittance of fault and no further damages could be pursued. The doctors say my dad’s brain will never be the same. Some memories will never return, and his motor skills won’t either—in fact, they’ll deteriorate. Walking is already problematic. I guess it could have been worse though. At least he can move at all.
“Oh, and he’s on these strong anti-seizure meds as well as something for his headaches. So my parents live off the settlement money. Mostly the interest from it. They’re careful, not ones to live extravagantly. The plant closed later that same year, so that felt like a minor victory. You know, they’ve lived in that little condo since 1968?”
I knew I was rambling, but it felt good to talk. It was keeping my mind off of whatever Hannig and his alien devices were doing to me.
“My mom used to work as a receptionist in a dental office, but she quit when my dad had his accident. She still belongs to a bridge club . . . the other women come to their place once a week to play cards—it’s a group of eight women from the neighborhood.” I closed my eyes, and I must have drifted off to sleep for a few minutes.
When I awoke, Hannig was still there. I couldn’t remember the last words I’d said; it took me a few moments to even remember where we were, what my situation was. I tried to look around the small compartment but my neck was too stiff. A hundred questions rushed my mind at once.
“How many of you are there . . . Who else is here?”
“I am alone on this vessel.” He turned to look at me.
More lucid, now, I felt I was getting a full look at him for the first time. The angles of his alien limbs were all backward and wrong, but at the same time, were seemingly fitting for the strange being. I suppose the alien, so strange and different-looking, could be considered scary. But those large, penetrating eyes seemed to so readily convey his thoughts and emotions. All I perceived was humility and kindness there—I trusted him.
“Why are you here? I mean, here on Earth?”
He gave the equivalent of a shrug. Perhaps it was an intergalactic universal gesture. “I am not the first, nor will I be the last, ‘alien,’ as you would call me, to visit Earth.”
“Go on . . .” I said, waiting.
Hannig looked to be carefully considering his next words. “I am an Observer. That is what you would call my job. It is something I have done for most of my adult life. I am deployed to worlds such as yours to help make certain determinations. To make recordings and send them back to my homeworld.”
“What for? Why do you care what we do here on Earth?”
“Dominic, you may find what I have to say . . . hard to believe.”
I glanced down at my chest. “Really? You think?”
“Oh, well, maybe not.” Hannig seemed to momentarily connect with how absurd this situation must be for me. A bemused smile briefly touch his lips. He continued, “This space, your solar system, is positioned within the outer boundaries of Khantam Lom territories.”
“Khantam Lom?”
“Where I come from. My people are deciding if Earth is worthy of our protection.”
“Protection? From who? Why do we need it?”
“Because another alien race, the Wikk, will arrive here, in this part of space, soon.”
“So . . . Guessing that’s not a good thing, right?”
“No, Dominic. That will not be a good thing.”
I let that sink in, as whatever technological miracles were taking place within my chest cavity further progressed. A sharp, stabbing pain caused me to reflexively clench my jaws. I thought about Hannig’s words. Other aliens headed for Earth. What that might mean. Sure, it would be easy to dwell on my current, highly precarious, wellbeing—or lack thereof. But something told me things were about to get a whole lot worse, and not only for me.
Chapter 9
Officer Lori Tedesco
Lori’s radio chirped. She quickly muted it; Anna was still dealing with what she’d been told. A box of tissues sat on the woman’s lap. Her tears hadn’t let up. Truth was, things didn’t look good for Anna’s husband. Above and beyond the blood found in two of the apartment units, there were other things Lori hadn’t shared with her.
A neighbor, who had insisted on remaining anonymous and off-the-record, had described hearing a gunshot. Soon after that, she’d looked through her door’s peephole, and seen what she described as “a really big man” being lugged along the hall and then down the stairs by four guys. She thought she heard them leave through the back on the first floor. Blood had been found on and in one of the building’s dumpsters. But no body. The forensic team had added that area as part of a potential crime scene.
A little girl dressed in a plaid skirt and pressed white blouse came and sat down next to Anna. “Momma, why are you crying?”
Anna appeared to be trying her best to switch emotional gears. She smiled. “Don’t you look pretty, baby! Did Nonna help with your hair?”
“Uh huh. Am I going to school today, Momma?”
Anna looked somewhat perplexed. “Of course. Why—”
“On the news. Some schools are closing.”
Anna’s mother, still holding Val’s hairbrush, came into the room. “Things are not good on the television. No school for Val today. She should stay inside.”
Anna looked confused—she still wasn’t getting it. She shook her head.
Lori said, “I heard about it on the way over here. It’s really something. If it can be believed. A spaceship out there near Saturn.” She quelled the urge to roll her eyes at even the mention of it. She thought of her father, the one person who had had more influence on her way of thinking than any other. He was the most skeptical individual she’d ever met. How many times as a child had he said, “Show me why,” or “Prove it to me”? Just last week at a family dinner, she’d brought an open-and-shut case where a millionaire bond trader’s wife had been found dead in her secret lover’s bathtub. “It has to be the husband!” she’d said.
Her father shrugged, “And you’re one hundred percent sure of that, huh? Critical thinking, Lori . . . that’s what’s important to reach logical conclusions. Conclusions need to be based on the evidence. This skill comes into play when identifying and examining crime-related clues. Don’t be so ready to convict this husband character. Be skeptical of the easy explanations.”
“So? What does that have to do with Val’s school? With anything?” Anna asked, bringing Lori back to the here and now.
Lori said. “It has to do with people buying guns and bullets for those guns, and topping off the gas tanks in their cars, and stocking up with supplies. By this afternoon, most stores shelves will be empty. As exciting as it is that there may be proof of alien life . . . people are also scared. Which reminds me, I really need to get going.”
Anna kissed Val’s cheek. “Go watch cartoons for a while, okay baby?”
“Momma, it’s all news about the aliens. Every channel, the same thing.”
“Well then go color for a while . . . ok?”
Anna waited for Val to leav
e the room before looking back to Lori. “What, people are thinking we may be attacked? Or invaded?”
Lori shrugged. “I’ve thought about that myself. Strange that there’s been no contact from these supposed little green men. No ‘hi there, just dropping by your neighborhood.’” Lori stood. “Sorry, I’ve always been cynical. Guess I’m having a hard time with all this alien stuff.” She was about to leave when she realized she’d done absolutely nothing to console this poor woman. She tried to look more upbeat and forced a smile. “Look, things are getting beyond crazy out there. And I’ve stayed longer than I probably should have. But I want to keep you up to date on your husband’s—situation.” Lori put a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Let’s stay in touch.” She put one of her NYPD business cards on the coffee table.
Off in the distance, a clattering of automatic weapon’s fire foretold of desperate times coming. While hurrying to the door, she unmuted her radio. “Come again, dispatch . . .”
Chapter 10
Hannig
The human was still asleep in the aft living quarters. The surgery had been a success—the replacement organ was beating strong within the man’s chest. But Dominic was little more than a distraction for Hannig right then. There were far bigger issues for him to deal with. First, the arrival of the Wikk ship, now orbiting Enceladus. It was all happening sooner than he’d expected. Second, Hannig had received new orders: he was to abandon the Earth post. Any intervention there had been deemed unnecessary. Humanity simply was not worth the effort.
Currently, Hannig’s Watcher Craft hovered high above Manhattan. Too many people were shooting off pistols and rifles at arbitrary targets, like street signs, parked cars, sides of buildings, and, most recently, each other. He’d deemed it best to rise above the chaos. One of the view screens—a twenty-four-hour cable news broadcast—was describing the growing mayhem below. The police were setting up street barricades.
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