Heaven's Shadow (17 page)

Can someone explain to me why we’re doing this crazy mission? Especially
since
NASA
clearly didn’t know what it was getting into?
Couldn’t we have spent three billion dollars closer to home?

POSTER TRACEE34 AT HUFFPOST.COM

Her PPK still clutched to her chest, Yvonne listened to Tea’s side of two and sometimes three conversations. One was the open channel with Houston, the other the encrypted one. Then there was the link to
Brahma
and cosmonaut Dennis Chertok, her savior, who had now returned to the Coalition craft.

There was even a fourth . . . Tea’s regular call every minute or so for “Zack, Pogo, from
Venture
, do you read?” That conversation was one-sided, and increasingly pointless. Yvonne wondered if Zack and Patrick, and Lucas and Natalia, were even still alive, because as far as she could tell, Keanu was a hostile environment.

She wanted off.

From the encrypted comm, she knew that the planners in Houston were preparing
Venture
for a departure—“R plus ten hours,” R being the moment the explorers returned.

That was one scenario, she knew, the one assuming her condition didn’t worsen. It allowed the crew to have some kind of rest before managing a liftoff from another planet, and a life-or-death rendezvous with the
Destiny
mother ship.

There was an R plus six, and even an R plus two. Knowing how difficult a rendezvous would be—and, frankly, remembering that the shorter the gap, the worse her health—Yvonne was hoping the choice would be R plus ten.

That would bring the
Destiny-Venture
crew back to Earth within three days . . . carrying samples from this NEO starship-or-whatever-the-fuck-it-was. They could be astronaut heroes.

And Yvonne could forget about what was in her PPK.

Given the effects of the tranquilizer Dennis had given her, she wasn’t sure she really believed it, anyway. A bomb—an honest-to-God suitcase nuke, the kind she’d heard about in spy movies.

It had happened eight days before launch, the day the crew was to move into the trailer at Johnson Space Center where they would be kept in medical isolation, and would start sleep-shifting to accommodate liftoff at a ridiculous hour.

Yvonne had just parked her car and was pulling her travel bag out of the trunk when her cell phone rang. There was a text asking her to stop by Building 30 on her way to the trailer.

She had walked into a hallway to find her father waiting for her.

Gabriel Jones had divorced his wife, Camille, when their daughter Yvonne was thirteen years old. The young space scientist had been caught having not one but two extramarital affairs, one with a fellow researcher, the other with the producer of a Discovery Channel series in which he had starred. “He just found a more exciting life.”

Or so the former Camille Hall told her daughter. Watching her father from afar—there was financial support, but damned little additional contact over the years—Yvonne concluded that her mother’s bitterness was justified:

Gabriel Jones had let fame and power go to his head.

Worse yet, he lacked real human feelings. “Oh, he can turn on the tears like a faucet,” Mom would say. “But it’s all show: nothing inside.”

Which he had proved conclusively on that occasion. Yvonne stared in stunned silence as her father, the head of the Johnson Space Center, showed her a suitcase and told her it contained a small nuclear device known as the W-54C, with a yield of 2 kilotons and a blast radius of a kilometer. It was to be detonated if the
Venture
landing on Keanu proved to be dangerous to Earth. “We’re talking some kind of contamination.”

“Glad to hear you’ve got this all thought out. ‘Some kind of contamination.’ Christ.”

“Don’t swear.” That was typical of Gabriel Jones, too. He was like one of those Baptists who was against sex because it was too close to dancing.... “It will be thought-out. You will have a set of orders. This is only a last resort.”

“Not so good for me, though, is it, Daddy?”

He had stared at the floor. Typical; she could not remember ever meeting his gaze. “Two things. The circumstances that would cause you to use this are so horrendous that death would be preferable. Imagine you were on an airplane plunging toward the ground—”

“God, you really are a cold, sick son of a bitch!” Before he could protest, she said, “Why me? If anything should be the commander’s job, this is it! Or it should be Downey. He’ll follow orders.”

“Downey is dogged and he’s capable and does what he’s told, but he also has a streak of . . . well, he might be
too
quick to pull the trigger.

“Tea’s out because she’s involved with Stewart. Her judgment will be colored by that.”

“I guess that’s why Zack doesn’t have the package, either.”

Here her father looked uncomfortable. “Stewart is brilliant and flexible, all the things we want in a mission commander. But, as you said, he’s involved with one of his crew.

“He’s also too convinced of his own intelligence. No matter what scenario we could come up with, all of our war-gaming showed that Zack would keep trying to the bitter end and beyond! He would be too slow to realize—”

“—That the patient was terminal?”

Gabriel Jones smiled tightly. “Exactly.” Then he said the worst thing anyone had ever said to Yvonne: “You’re your father’s daughter.”

She had walked away at that point.

But she had allowed the device to be stowed in her PPK.

And now, her leg shattered, her career destroyed, with very little knowledge of what was happening to Zack and Pogo and the others inside Keanu . . . Yvonne Hall swung in a hammock, cradling it.

Praying she would not have to use it.

Remember these from Hynek and others?

Close Encounter of the First Kind—sighting of an alien vehicle.

Close Encounter of the Second Kind—physical evidence of an alien vehicle.

Close Encounter of the Third Kind—contact with alien beings.

Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind—abduction of human by alien beings.

Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind—two-way contact between humans and alien beings.

Close Encounter of the Sixth Kind—death of humans caused by alien beings.

So where are we now? Close Encounter 5.5?

POSTER ALMAZ AT KEANU.COM, AUGUST
22, 2019

“What do you think? Are they some kind of plasma? Or just the thirtieth-century alien equivalent of neon lightbulbs?” Zack was looking up at the ceiling, at the items he could not help calling
glowworms
.

“Got to be plasma,” Pogo said.

The last twenty minutes had stretched and twisted to the point where time had no meaning. The strange glowworms had crawled into what seemed to be semipermanent positions on the ceiling, several hundred meters over what appeared to be the chamber “floor.”

As they moved, the environment continued to change radically. The light brightened, giving Zack and his team a better view of their surroundings: the walls of the Beehive, the forest of corals, and the vast distance across. In fact, the other side of the chamber could not be seen.

It started to rain, too. Not a gentle, midwestern summer sprinkle, like those Zack knew from childhood . . . this was windblown and gusting, like a tropical storm.

Like the rain that fell during Megan’s funeral.
The four of them could only stand there, sprays of water spattering their suits and helmets. “At least now the outside of my helmet looks like the inside,” Natalia said.

There was no immediate danger; astronauts trained for EVAs wearing these same suits in huge water tanks. The danger would come when they took these suits into the frigid, two-hundred-degrees-below-zero environment beyond the membrane.

Worry about that later.
Meanwhile, the experience of hearing rain rattling on the helmet—well, Zack would have found that unnerving.

Except that by now
everything
was unnerving. The very ground began to rattle and shake. The coral structures began to crumble. “Is like earthquake,” Natalia said.

“It’s more like being on a ship at sea,” Zack said. He’d experienced both: Earthquakes were sharp jolts that struck without warning, but swells at sea built . . . you could actually feel them approaching.

And these Keanu waves endured for a minute or more. “I feel heavier,” Lucas announced.

“Me, too,” Pogo said.

“Well, we’re getting a sort of sunrise,” Zack said. “Maybe the artificial gravity machine is coming online, too.”

“I hope the standard setting isn’t equivalent to Jupiter,” Natalia said. Zack had been kidding, as usual, but Natalia’s statement was sobering; the size of the passageways already suggested that the Keanu-standard life-forms were larger than humans, which suggested more massive creatures suited to . . . well, 2.5 times Earth gravity, for example.

He surely didn’t want to walk in three or four times Earth gravity.

Now that he thought of it, he doubted they could get far, even if Keanu developed gravity equal to Earth’s surface, where each suit weighed more than the astronaut.

And how the hell would they get out of Vesuvius? Those ramps would need to reach pretty close to the top. . . .

But he
was
feeling heavier. He took a few tentative steps. Goddamn it, this was the end. “Everybody, grab your stuff. We’re pulling out.”

“No!” That was Lucas, but Natalia and even Pogo uttered similar protests at the same instant.

“We’re in uncharted territory, people! Our mission is to get back alive. I’m worried about—”

He stopped, no longer sure of what he was saying. His eye was drawn to the strange landscape of Keanu’s interior. It was a giant cave, of course, but lit by squiggly yellow shapes that hovered over a green, purple, and pink countryside, if one stretched the definition of countryside to include “vegetation” that looked more like structures found on a coral reef. And you accepted a sky that was reminiscent of a giant sports arena. (The chamber’s upper reaches—its ceiling—were lost in mist and shadow.)

And windblown rain. There was a strong breeze blowing from Zack’s left, the direction of the membrane. If it had been the other way around, he’d have been worried about a leak.

Wait . . . Something was moving out there. “Uh, does anyone—?”

“We see it, too!” said Lucas.

What looked like a scaled-up version of the bubble bearings in the membrane—only three meters wide and high—was rolling across the ground toward them, changing directions to avoid the corals, sloshing and spilling fluid, leaving a trail of moisture that was visible even on the moist soil.

“Any thoughts?” Zack said. “Is this the Keanu version of a tumbleweed? No means of locomotion.” The rolling bubble seemed to be blowing in the wind.

“What if it’s alive?” Pogo said.

“Then get ready for First Contact,” Lucas said.

“We are not prepared for anything like that!” Natalia said. She was on the verge of panic.

“Everybody hold position. Act like professionals.”

The rolling bubble turned toward them. Now Zack could see that it was opaque with dark shapes, like curdled milk. Pogo backed away, out of Zack’s limited peripheral vision, saying, “It’s fighting the wind, Zack!”

“So it is.” All he could think to do was raise the camera. Running wasn’t an option.

Another astronaut rule was, when in doubt, do nothing. You’ll only make it worse.

Closer and closer . . . “It is coming right at us,” Lucas said.

“Give it room! Everybody back away!” Zack said. Commanders got the goodies on missions—the first steps. They should also get first shot at the bad stuff. “Let me be the target.”

Natalia and Lucas scuttled off to the right, putting a crumbling coral tower between them and the rolling bubble.

Which was now less than fifty meters away.

“I sure hope this thing is friendly,” Pogo said.

“Let’s make the assumption for now. . . .”

The argument ceased, because the bubble sloshed to a halt . . . ejected an object almost the same size. The bubble then dissolved into a whitish puddle on the ground.

The ejected item looked like a sow bug, but only for a moment, as it came to a stop, then unfolded itself.

And stood up. Zack tried to remain calm and scientific. Bilateral symmetry, check. It had two legs and two arms as well as two sets of different types of appendages around its middle. It looked heavier and thicker where the middle pairs attached.

A head of sorts, check. But nothing resembling a face or a nose or eyes . . . just various openings, one of them ringed with cilia that seemed to flex rhythmically . . . breathing?

But was it animal or machine? At this distance, in this light, it was difficult to tell . . . the creature’s skin was shiny, but was it wet metal, or slime? It appeared to be a harness of some kind, dripping with fluid the same color as the dissolved bubble.

“Looks like it’s standing guard,” Natalia said. Which was true: As soon as it unfolded to full height—half again as tall as any human—the creature seemed to freeze in position.

“Maybe it’s a sentry,” Zack said. He hated having to anthropomorphize his Keanu experience, but it was the only way to make sense of things. Besides, the builders, owners, or inhabitants might have stationed someone to check passports here at the entry to the NEO’s interior.

For a moment Zack was face-to-face with the creature. Twenty-five meters of distance, and at least one of height separated them, not to mention however many eons of evolution. But it seemed to Zack that the Sentry was taking his measure—

“Rain seems to be stopping,” Lucas said. Zack had been concentrating so totally on the Sentry that he’d stopped paying attention. But yes, the windblown gusts had stopped . . . the entire chamber glowed with a sheen of moisture that reflected the golden light from the glowworms.