Heaven's Shadow
Authors: David S. Goyer,Michael Cassutt
Table of Contents
KEANU APPROACH: TERMINAL PHASE
Part Two - “LONG, GENTLE THUNDER”
Part Three - “SOME FRAGRANT NIGHT”
Part Four - “IN THE WIDE STARLIGHT”
Part Five - “FOR THE DEAD ARE FREE”
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goyer, David S.
Heaven’s shadow / David S. Goyer & Michael Cassutt. p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-51654-6
1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Space flight—Fiction. I. Cassutt, Michael. II. Title.
PS3607.O925H43 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010054263
To Michael Engelberg
Dramatis Personae
ZACK STEWART
, astronomer and astronaut, commander of
Destiny-7
MEGAN DOYLE STEWART
, journalist
RACHEL STEWART
, their daughter
AMY MEYER
, Rachel’s friend
SCOTT SHAWLER
, NASA public affairs officer, the “voice” of the
Destiny
missions
TEA NOWINSKI
,
Destiny-7
astronaut
PATRICK “POGO” DOWNEY
,
Destiny-7
astronaut
YVONNE HALL
,
Destiny-7
astronaut
TAJ RADHAKRISHNAN
, vyomanaut, commander of
Brahma
NATALIA YORKINA
, exobiologist and
Brahma
cosmonaut
LUCAS MUNARETTO
, engineer and
Brahma
cosmonaut
DENNIS CHERTOK
, aerospace physician and
Brahma
cosmonaut
HARLEY DRAKE
, former astronaut, head of the Home Team
GABRIEL JONES
, director of the NASA Johnson Space Center
SHANE WELDON
, former chief astronaut, now
Destiny-7
mission director
BRENT BYNUM
, deputy national security adviser, White House staff
JOSH KENNEDY
,
Destiny-7
flight director
LINDA DOWNEY
, Patrick Downey’s wife
JILLIANNE DWIGHT
, crew secretary, Johnson Space Center
KONSTANTIN ALEXANDROVICH FEDOSEYEV
, Russian, now a Revenant
CAMILLA
, a Brazilian child, now a Revenant
VIKRAM NAYAR
, lead flight director at Bangalore
THE HOME TEAM
SASHA BLAINE
, Yale astronomer
WADE WILLIAMS
, popular science and sci-fi author
GLENN CREEL
, creator of Cartoon Network’s
Escape Velocity
LILY VALDEZ
, professor at University of California, Irvine
STEVEN MATULKA
, president of the Planetary Society
JASMINE TRIEU
, astronaut, capcom
TRAVIS BUELL
, astronaut,
Destiny-5
commander, capcom
JAMES
and
DIANE DOYLE
, Megan Doyle Stewart’s parents
TOBY BURNETT
, Wackenhut security officer at JSC
LEE SHIMORA
,
Destiny-7
Stay-3 flight director
Part One
“TO FIND THE SEA”
Near-Earth Objects are comets or asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.
NASA JET PROPULSION LAB, NEAR-EARTH OBJECT PROGRAM FAQ
What if it comes from farther away?
POSTER ALMAZ, JULY 7, 2016
KEANU
APPROACH
Blue planet Earth and its seven billion human beings lay 440,000 kilometers below—or, given the arbitrary terminology of orientation in space, off to one side. If the sheer magnitude of the distance failed to provide a mind-boggling thrill, Zack Stewart could, by looking out the window, cover his home planet with his thumb.
That small gesture got the point across: He and his three fellow astronauts were farther away from Earth than any human beings in history.
Farther than the Moon.
Yet . . . they were still dealing with its politics, dragged down as completely as if trailing a 440,000-kilometer-long chain with anchor.
It irritated him. Of course, the fact that he had now been without sleep for thirty hours meant that
everything
irritated him. He was forty-three, a compact, muscular man with considerable experience in spaceflight, including two tours aboard the International Space Station. And now he was commander of
Destiny-7
, responsible for four lives and a multibillion-dollar spacecraft on a mission unlike any ever attempted.
He knew he should be pacing himself. But the stress of preparing for today’s unprecedented maneuvers—440,000 kilometers from Earth!—had robbed him of sleep. Mission control in Houston had been uploading scripts for burns that would adjust
Destiny’
s flight path, but the computer code was too fresh from some Honeywell cubicle and kept crashing. NASA called these commands
e-procedures
. To Zack, the
e
stood for
error
.
The process reminded him of the time he had tried to load Windows onto a laptop in Antarctica . . . with dial-up. Then as now, the only choice was to grind slowly through it.