Heaven's Shadow (10 page)

Not bad,
Zack thought. Yvonne edged away from the lander. “How’s traction?” he asked.

“Not great,” she said, but quickly corrected herself, “but workable. Sliding works better than stepping.”

“Cross-country skiing,” Zack said, making his own descent to the pad. They actually had two sets of ski poles available in the equipment bay. Might be wise to break them out early. “Wish you could all be here,” he said, stepping off the pad. Yvonne had been too kind . . . in spite of the ankle weights and the cleats on his EVA boots, he almost fell right on his back. Fortunately he didn’t, sparing himself and NASA an eternal You-Tube moment.

The flight plan called for them to spend twenty minutes doing a “walkaround,” getting a feel for the surface—which was crunchy, making Zack happy that he weighed probably five kilograms—and learning how to move.

Apparently determined to break the mold of the taciturn space explorer, Yvonne chattered incessantly about the light, the surface, the view.

Happy to let Yvonne carry the burden of commentary, Zack shuffled as close to the lip of Vesuvius as he dared. It turned out to be only seventy meters away—from the windows of
Venture
it had seemed much farther. It was another reminder that Keanu was
small
.

“Yvonne,” Zack said, “let’s press to step two.” Step two in the flight plan was to deploy the experiment package mounted in a small bay in
Venture’
s side, next to a larger one holding the folded rover.

“Give me a minute, boss,” Yvonne said.

Turning, Zack could see that she was still heading toward the lip of Vesuvius. Well, who could blame her?

Suddenly he felt a jolt, losing his footing like some cartoon character. When he stabilized, he could still sense the sickening, wavelike rumbling of an earthquake.
“Venture
, can you feel that?”

“Yeah!” Tea said. “I think it’s Vesuvius—!”

Not good. “Yvonne,” he radioed, “get back here now!”

Too late. He could see her directly in front of him—no more than ten meters distant—but beyond her bloomed an expanding cloud of white.

“Oh God—!” Yvonne screamed.

The blast of superheated steam blew the
Destiny
astronaut off her feet, launching her into the sky in the general direction of the
Brahma
landing site.

As she flew over Zack, she was cartwheeling.

This is
Destiny
mission control at eighty-one hours, twenty minutes mission elapsed time. The communications team here is troubleshooting an apparent problem with the
Venture
lander’s Ku-band antenna, which has caused a temporary loss of video coverage of the historic
EVA by astronauts Hall and Stewart. We are in voice contact with the crew and all is proceeding according to flight plan. Video coverage is expected to resume shortly.

NASA PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMENTATOR SCOTT SHAWLER,
MOMENTS AFTER YVONNE HALL’S ACCIDENT

“Okay, it’s calmed down . . .” Shane Weldon’s voice was strained in Harley’s headset. “What is your team thinking?”

“We’re only getting macro data.” The moment Yvonne Hall had been blown off the surface of Keanu, Harley Drake had wheeled himself out of the Home Team and next door to the family holding room, with its limited audio and video feed. Not limited enough, apparently: Patrick Downey’s wife, Linda, and two tween children were huddled in a corner, flanked by a priest as well as their CACO.

Meanwhile, Rachel Stewart sat, stunned, in the company of her friend Amy Meyer. Rachel stood as Harley approached. “Zack hadn’t gotten the package set up yet,” he told Weldon, through his headset.

“So you’ve got fuck-all.”

“I’m on it,” he said, making reassuring gestures to Rachel. “What about Hall?” Yvonne Hall had no family members in the room, but her father was Gabriel Jones, head of the Johnson Space Center. The relationship wasn’t secret—hundreds at JSC knew of it. But neither the director nor his astronaut daughter talked about it or acted as if they had more than a passing acquaintance. Harley could only imagine what was going through Jones’s mind. . . .

“She hit the ground pretty close to
Brahma
. They’re still getting data from her suit. Zack’s on his way.”

“That’s good.” He mouthed
Yvonne’s okay
to Rachel and gave her a thumbs-up as he clicked off.

“What, she’s okay?” Rachel said, clearly not believing him.

“Sorry, I should have said
alive
. I’m more worried about you.”

Rachel shot a glance at her friend, who was sobbing. “Well, I’m freaking out.” Her manner contradicted her words; she looked nervous, but in control.

Harley touched her hand. “If you’re not a little freaked out, you don’t understand the situation.”

“Tell me again why my father thought this would be a good idea?”

“Maybe when I come back.” Over the past year, he and Rachel had become pals of a sort, bonded by their mutual tragedy—and by, of all things, a shared fascination with Keanu. (Rachel had liked the extrasolar NEO right up to the day her father was assigned to explore it.) “Weldon is demanding that I explain the structure of the universe . . .”

“Yeah, you better go back. Feel free to fix this.”

“On it.” Harley was not your standard CACO—he had another hat to wear for
Destiny-7
. He had declined the assignment when Zack first asked. (“Christ, don’t you remember the last time I was your CACO?”) But
Rachel
had insisted . . . and it was Rachel who made it possible.

He pivoted his chair and rolled back to the Home Team.

Having a T1 thoracic spinal cord injury, which was what Harley Drake had experienced for the past two years, sucked in a broad-spectrum way. To begin with, there was the pain and general humiliation. Then there was the horror of lost sexual functioning . . . loss of bowel control . . . giving up flying . . . having to learn to deal with a chair.

But the thing that sucked most for Harley on this day was feeling nailed to one spot. Yes, he was digitally ept, Bluetoothed, and eager to multitask, but he missed being able to stand, to move around, to talk with his hands. He was like the Sundance Kid from that old Western—“I’m better when I move.”

Maybe that was why he was so slow to realize what was obvious from the Keanu data.

He returned to the din of the Home Team room, with its conference table covered with laptops and hard copies, resuming the messy business of wrangling seven verbal, loud, entitled specialists. They ranged from seventy-five-year-old Wade Williams, a popular astronomy writer (one of JSC Director Jones’s idols, which was the only reason Harley tolerated the arrogant, half-deaf shithead), to thirty-two-year-old Sasha Blaine, a brilliant new Ph.D. from Yale noted as much for her startling figure as for her impressive IQ. There were also other contributors available on Skype . . . hell, Harley felt more like a drill instructor than a project leader. “All right, people! Goddammit!”

That outburst didn’t shut them up, but it reduced the decibel level so that Harley could be heard. It was probably fortunate that his mobility
was
limited, or he might have smacked someone.

“This isn’t a fucking seminar. We’re working critical, real-time mission support, and next door we’ve got a mission manager who really wants an answer to the question—what is going on with Keanu?”

“Does he want the
right
answer or
an
answer?” Williams said in a Georgia drawl. Glenn Creel, Williams’s snarky little buddy on the team—the guy was a television writer, for Christ’s sake—actually gave him a high five.

“Okay, Wade,” Harley said, reaching for patience and not really attaining it. “Do we have
any
kind of answer? Anything that might keep the crew from further danger?” No one offered. “Then let’s review the bidding,” Harley said.

“We’ve had four eruptions on Keanu since
Destiny-Venture
made its orbital insertion burn. What do we know about them? Sasha?”

Sasha Blaine, the tall, nervous red-haired woman from Yale, was undisciplined but had at least demonstrated the ability to understand the team’s priorities. “Each venting took place at a different location on Keanu, each with varying duration and apparent force—”

“What about the frequency?” Williams said. “Time between events—increasing, decreasing?”

“Counting down to the destruction of Washington, D.C.?” That was Williams again.

Blaine simply took the question seriously, then dismissed it. “The gaps were two hours, one hour thirty-five minutes, one hour fifty-one minutes. No obvious pattern.”

“Wait!” That was Lily Valdez, a professor from Irvine. “Are we seeing increased angular momentum?”

The Home Team chatter died in silence. “Anybody?” Harley said. This was not his area.

“Yes,” Sasha Blaine said. “Prior to the, uh, recent events, Keanu had a very slow rotation, on the order of sixty days—”

“—Which was out of family for NEOs,” Williams said.

“—Not that there is much of a family for extrasolar NEOs,” Harley said, unable to resist. He nodded at Blaine. “Setting aside what we had . . . what we do we have?”

“It looks as though its new period will be twenty hours.”

“Something less than a day.”

There was something troubling about all these numbers, but Harley was damned if he could see what, especially with Williams in full honk. “I’m more worried about these eruptions,” the writer was saying. “They’ve all been in the same hemisphere, so that’s one data point. Is there any other correlation?”

“I don’t know if we have enough information to suggest a pattern,” Harley said. “We noted only a dozen ventings over the past two years—”

“—and now we’ve got four in the past few hours,” Williams said, unnecessarily.

“Four
so far
,” said Creel.

Harley’s head hurt. He was missing something obvious—all of them were.

Just then Sasha Blaine said, “We’re getting data from DSN,” and Harley’s headset chirped. He turned away from the eruption of chatter around the table to hear: “Harley, Shane. Two of the guys on
Brahma
went EVA and reached Yvonne. She’s alive with a suit leak. They’re taking her back to
Venture
.”

“Could be worse,” Harley said. He knew that this was Weldon’s way of asking for an answer. “Wait one, Shane—” He lowered the headset and said, “What now?”

This time the Home Team room fell into silence. Everyone present, or on-screen, looked directly at Harley. “What?”

“Look at this.” Sasha Blaine turned her laptop screen toward him.

Until this moment, Harley had convinced himself that the events on Keanu would have some geological explanation—indeed, the likely trigger for the increased eruptions was tidal stress caused by the NEO’s close encounter with Earth. It might even explain the change in the object’s rotation.

But no longer. Harley looked at the figures for Keanu’s trajectory and said, “This sucker’s in orbit now, isn’t it?”

“Correct,” Williams said. “Today’s eruptions were much more powerful than any seen earlier . . . strong enough to act like rocket burns.”

As Harley let that info-bomb detonate inside his brain, he heard Weldon: “We’re all waiting, Home Team. Do you have something? Anything?”

Harley looked at the faces around him, especially Sasha Blaine, who gestured as if to say,
What are you waiting for?

“Okay, flight. New data shows that Keanu is not a Near-Earth Object. It just burned into orbit, perigee 470,000 clicks, apogee five hundred, inclination seventy-eight degrees, new period circa twenty hours.”

“What does that mean, Harley?”

“It means that Keanu is an autonomous, powered vehicle of some kind. Until we come up with a better word, I’d call it a starship.”

Does anyone else think it’s suspicious that
Destiny
has all these
Ku-band problems just when the EVA started? Coincidence? I don’t
think so.

POSTED BY CESSNA MAN AT
NASA.JSC.GOV
@ 83:42 MET
DELETED @ 83:44 MET

“Where is she?” Zack said. “Someone speak!”

He had a general idea . . . he had seen Yvonne flying away from him, away from Vesuvius Vent toward
Brahma
. But the combination of short horizon, residual vapor, undulating ground, and restricted helmet vision made it impossible for him to know where she had landed.

Or, for that matter,
if
. The gravity on Keanu was so low that a human could reach escape velocity by running. The eruption that had caught Yvonne might have been strong enough to launch her into orbit.

Assuming, or hoping, that that hadn’t happened, Zack turned his back on Vesuvius and, keeping the
Venture
lander to his left, began hopping, sliding, and shuffling in the same direction Yvonne had flown.

There were voices on the control loop—Tea and Pogo as well as the capcom—but no information.

“Quiet down, everybody!” Zack snapped, using what Rachel would have called his grown-up voice. “Yvonne, do you read?”

He waited, afraid he would hear more screaming, but just as afraid he would hear nothing. “Yvonne . . .”

Then he heard harsh breathing, the sound of a mouth literally on a microphone. And a moan. “Copy. Zack?” Yvonne, alive!

“Can you tell me where you are?”
And please don’t say halfway around Keanu.

“Ah . . .” She was clearly in pain. “Down, somewhere.” Another moan. She was probably shifting to look at her surroundings. “Beyond
Brahma
. I can see the top of it.”

“Then I can reach you in a few minutes.” He tried to pick up the pace and fell flat.

Aboard
Venture
, Tea heard him. “Zack, what’s up?”

He managed to push himself upright. Fortunately his suit was so rugged that he had few worries of damaging it. “Me, again. Yvonne,” he called, “are you hurt?”