Read A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 for Free Online Page B

trying to keep it under wraps.
         “We’ve got plenty of time to destroy or divert it,” they’d told her. “There’s no reason to alarm the public unnecessarily.”
         Hannah and Sarah had an uneasy feeling. Their superiors, after all, worked for the federal government. And the federal government, especially in those days, wasn’t exactly known for telling the truth.
         Or for watching out for anyone’s backs other than their own.
         In the end it turned out that their suspicions were well founded. Their superiors had no intentions of protecting anyone other than themselves and their political cronies in Washington.
         They eventually paid the ultimate price, along with the Washington insiders who thought themselves insulated from an outraged public.
          Hannah and Sarah saved many lives by going to the media to announce the imminent collision with Saris 7, thus giving the common people time to prepare for the worst.
         And that would have been the end of it, had Hannah not been severely injured in a helicopter crash.
         Hannah was treated by morphine while in her initial stages of recovery.
         Morphine was a very effective painkiller.
         But those who’d ever used it could attest that it was a very powerful narcotic as well. Some patients experienced deep sleep and wild dreams. Others hallucinated.
         Hannah didn’t experience any adverse effects during her waking hours.
         However, when she slept her dreams were very vivid.
         And one dream in particular had been much more vivid than the others.
         And also terrifying.
         Actually, it wasn’t a dream inasmuch as it was a recollection. A recollection of a meeting she’d had with Sarah and several other astrophysicists after Saris 7 collided with the large meteor and broken into two.
         They’d been pondering the possibility of Cupid 23 following the same path through space that its mother, Saris 7 did. It sometimes happened that way. There was even a term for it: flightpath duplication.
         What it basically meant was that sometimes when a meteorite broke into pieces, it still followed the same path as before. The smaller piece frequently got sucked into the same path as the larger piece, as the larger piece created a vacuum and gave it an easier path to follow.
         It was not unlike two people trekking through heavy snow. The first person did the bulk of the work, forcing the snow out of the way and giving the follower a set of footprints to walk in.
         One of NASA’s concerns following Saris 7’s breakup was that Cupid 23 might follow Saris 7 into the earth just as the earth was recovering. A one-two punch, they called it. It was just a theory, and they had no hard proof to make the theory plausible. But it made sense.
         The trouble was everyone in the scientific community got so freaked out by Saris 7 and possible ways to stop it that Cupid 23 got swept into the background. They simply put it out of their minds to focus on the problem at hand: stopping Saris 7.
         Saris 7 wasn’t stopped, and did its damage. Nearly all the scientists who knew about Cupid 23’s existence were dead now. Or, like Hannah and Sarah, survived and got on with the hard new business of staying alive, and forgot all about Cupid 23.
         That was, until the nightmare Hannah had while she was recovering.
         Now it was foremost in her mind.
         She didn’t want to discuss the matter with anyone other than Sarah. It would unnecessarily alarm them, and might even make them panic.
         And it might be an unnecessary concern. After all, the thought that flightpath duplication might occur between Saris 7 and Cupid 23 was only an unsupported theory.
         Yes, they’d seen it happen when other meteorites broke into pieces. But those cases were different. They involved a much smaller trailing piece, that wasn’t a