The Orion Plan by Mark Alpert

of this thought changed the tone of Joe’s dream. Karen stopped laughing and faded away. Annabelle vanished too, except for her right thumb, which detached from her hand and grew unnaturally long, even longer than the sofa. It also changed color, turning dark brown, then black. It became a thin black snake, but with Annabelle’s blue eyes. The snake stared at Joe for a second, watching him curiously. Then it lunged forward and sank its fangs into the crook of his neck. His right arm went numb and a bolt of pain tore across his chest. It was real pain, too intense to be part of a dream.
    He woke up again and saw a long thin tentacle on the rock slab. It was shiny and black, made of the same metallic stuff as the satellite. It stretched across the slab, one end rising out of the muddy ground and climbing over the edge of the rock, the other end tapering to a needlelike tip just a couple of feet from Joe. As he watched in horror the tentacle pulled away from him, its tip retreating until it slid over the edge of the rock slab and disappeared into the mud.
    Joe sat up, panting. The pain in his chest was already ebbing and his right arm was coming back to life, but his terror grew stronger. He raised his left hand to the side of his neck, to the place where the snake had bitten him.
    He felt blood on his fingers. And a tiny puncture wound.

 
    SEVEN
    Sarah was frustrated.
    She sat in the kitchen of the restaurant the Air Force was using as its command post. She’d found a relatively quiet spot, far from the dining room where the colonels and captains were working, and propped her MacBook on a stainless-steel counter. For the past four hours she’d plotted interplanetary trajectories using a NASA program on her laptop. She was trying to figure out how the Ikon, the huge Russian spacecraft launched three years ago, could have accelerated to 80,000 miles per hour while putting itself on a collision course with Earth. Unfortunately, she hadn’t made much progress.
    A dot at the center of her laptop’s screen represented the sun. The orbits of the planets were concentric circles around it. The trajectory of the Ikon was a red arc that started from Earth and ended at the spacecraft’s last reported position, on the other side of the sun. That’s where the craft was when the Russians said they lost contact with it. Last but not least, a blue line represented the final approach of 2016X, the mystery object that had fired the probe at New York. Sarah had tried to connect the red trajectory with the blue one, but all her attempts had failed. The Ikon simply hadn’t had enough time to make the necessary maneuvers across the solar system.
    She looked at her watch: 1:32 A.M. Aside from a brief nap she’d taken during the flight to New York, she’d been going nonstop for almost twenty-four hours, and she was dead tired. She wondered if she should join the Air Force officers in the dining room and give General Hanson a progress report. He might find it useful to know that the underlying assumption of their search effort—that Object 2016X was a Russian military spacecraft—seemed highly unlikely.
    In the end, though, Sarah decided to stay put. She continued staring at her laptop’s screen and thinking. So far, Hanson’s search teams had found no trace of 2016X. Neither the soldiers on the riverbanks nor the specialists in the Coast Guard boats had detected any suspicious debris. Of course, the search was only nine hours old and there was a lot of territory to cover. But Sarah also wondered if the Air Force radar experts had drawn the wrong boundaries for the impact zone. All their estimates were based on the assumption that 2016X had been a conventional spacecraft. And Sarah was starting to question this assumption.
    She wanted to try something else. She scrolled through the software on her laptop until she found Earth View, another NASA program. Sarah hesitated for a moment before