Heaven's Shadow (25 page)

Zack had confessed, “I had nothing to cover him with.” And Tea had nothing, either. Human decency suggested that she should cover him with earth (a term that seemed increasingly inappropriate), but although “trees” had risen, there was nothing like loose soil here . . .

“Any suggestions?”

Taj was with her but completely distracted by the environment. “We cremate our dead,” he said.

“Yeah, well, Zack might have been able to light that one fire . . . I don’t think we’re equipped for a funeral pyre.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that. I’m more worried about how we get him back.”

Tea had not allowed herself to think that far into the future—a realization that alarmed her, since her whole career was based on her ability to project, plan, prepare. But Taj’s point was logical: Don’t leave your dead on the battlefield. “Then we’ll need a plastic bag.”

“There might be something inside the rover. An equipment bag, perhaps. Shit!” Taj batted at something around his head . . . an insect or bird, Tea couldn’t tell, but it was just large enough to be an annoyance.

Tea took several swipes at the creature and nailed it on the fly. She bent to examine the carcass. “Now, that is weird.” She stood up. “It has edges. Looks like a flying Lego.”

“I don’t care about the bug!”

“Come on, Taj, try to relax—”

The vyomanaut turned on her. “I might tell
you
to get serious! Do you realize the danger we face?”

“Yeah, well, we all knew the job was dangerous when we took it . . .” She needed to keep busy; during almost every waking moment of her previous spaceflights, she had had switches to throw, experiments to operate, toilets to fix, food to prepare. So far, the Keanu mission was way too light on operational activities. She began collecting big “leaves” to cover Pogo’s remains.

“Tea! This is not a joking matter! It’s not just our lives—all of Earth is at risk!”

There was no way out of this. Taj was squatting, head turning right and left, as if he expected to be attacked by a wild animal at any moment. Tea knew she would have to engage him . . . the last thing she wanted to do. “Okay, how?”

“These creatures we’ve found. Think of what they represent.”

“You mean, beyond that old ‘advanced technology that’s indistinguishable from magic’?”

“It’s
extremely
advanced technology! And it isn’t benign, it’s aimed at us. If, in addition to traveling from one star to another, the Keanu entities can generate creatures from our lives . . . Tea, there’s no weapon on Earth that can touch them.”

“Fine, conceded. Whoever built this place and runs it is completely out of our league. But I still don’t see the threat. What could we possibly have that they want? Resources? Water? Plutonium?” She opened her hand to the dynamic environment around them. “They can cook up a whole jungle in an afternoon! They could probably snag a comet and turn it into anything they need, metal, cellulose, fuck, I don’t know . . . magic beans.”

Taj had closed his eyes. He was rocking gently on his haunches. “I don’t assume hostility. Indifference is just as bad. Keanu’s magic might harm us in the same way a human foot crushes an anthill. That is my fear . . . that anything could emerge from this place.”

“Or any
one
.” Tea had not thought of it until this moment, but who- or whatever built Keanu had somehow crafted “undead” from the lives of Zack, Lucas, and Natalia, but not from Taj’s or hers.

Not yet, anyway. Was that still to come? Or had the window closed?

Taj got up and stretched. His movement drew Tea’s eye, forcing her to look beyond him deeper into Keanu’s interior.

Where she saw a structure. At first it looked like a geological formation—a literal pile of rocks, possibly sandstone—hidden in the foliage. But the more she stared at it, the more it looked artificial. The term
human-made
came to mind, but she suppressed it. Still, in its tapering lines, it could have been an Egyptian pyramid or a Mayan temple—

Goddamn Keanu twilight. She spread a last covering of leaves over Pogo’s remains, then immediately started walking toward the structure. “What’s the matter?” Taj asked.

“At your one o’clock, about half a click out.”

“Dammit,” Taj said. “I suppose we have to check that out.”

“Unless you’ve got something better to do.”

It proved surprisingly difficult to reach the structure, which Taj immediately began calling the Temple. “I wish we had the science gear with us,” he said. “We might be able to see what it’s made of. . . .”

“Shit, Taj, we’ll
be
there in another ten minutes.” This Taj—hypercautious, stodgy, reliant on instruments—was easier to take than the paranoid version on display forty-five minutes earlier. But only slightly.

On approach, the Temple turned out to be larger than Tea had originally judged, and much farther away. For the first time she felt misgivings about her impulsive approach . . . maybe Taj was right. This structure looked old and weathered, but the
Destiny
and
Brahma
explorers would have noticed something
this
big. Zack had originally reported that the interior of Keanu—prior to “sunrise” when the glowworms illuminated—was bare rock. He had not mentioned a three-story ziggurat within five kilometers. And he wasn’t the type to let it slip his mind....

“Why don’t we hold up right here?” Tea said, as they reached the edge of the clearing surrounding the Temple.

“I concur,” Taj said. His thoughts must have paralleled hers, because he moved left along the boundary of the clearing, eyes fixed on the ground.

“How new does it look to you?” Tea said.

Taj picked up a handful of stalks that reminded Tea of reeds . . . if reeds happened to be the color of blood. “They appear to have been chopped off.”

“So this clearing is . . . new?” Tea was relieved, though that implied other dangers.

“As new as everything else, I think.”

Now Taj regarded the Temple itself. “It is more rectangular than pyramidical,” he said.

“Is that a good or bad thing?”

It sounded like a joke to Taj, and he showed his irritation again. “It’s just an observation. Feel free to add your own.”

Architecture was not one of Tea’s specialties. She could tell a skyscraper from a bungalow, sure. She might go so far as to say she could tell Federal style from Art Deco, and she had vague memories of hearing the term
Bauhaus
. “Taj, to me it just looks like a fucking pile of sand-colored bricks.”

“The same. But resembling a cube. Given the proportions of the gates and ramps . . .”

“Don’t start reading more than you should.”

“I was just wondering . . . a human building that height would have three or four levels. How many does our Temple have?”

“I guess that’s one of the things we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

They continued around the perimeter, with Tea growing increasingly agitated. “I don’t see any doors or windows.”

“Neither do I.” Taj offered one of his rare smiles. “We must be careful about anthropomorphizing the structure. We call it a temple and look for temple-like openings. It might just be a solid pile of rocks, like a giant cairn or grave marker.”

“Don’t try to cheer me up, okay?” Taj had identified Tea’s biggest concern. Like all of them, she kept slapping familiar names on what she was seeing—ramps, trees, temples—without any real knowledge of what these objects were.

That seemed like a great way to get yourself in trouble. But then—

“What do you think?” Tea said. “Could that be the entrance?”

Embedded in the surface of the Temple that faced away from the Beehive was the biggest, most complex marker they had yet seen. Below that was an opening.

“Yes. And it seems to have the same proportions as the membrane passage,” Taj said, raising his camera.

“What do you think? Shall I see if anyone’s home?” Tea said.

“Let me.”

“Actually, no. My idea. My risk. Besides, you’re
Brahma
commander. . . . I’m slightly more expendable than you.” Before he could argue, Tea was several steps away, heading directly for the big marker and the door.

“Do
not
go inside!”

“Not planning to!” she called, picking her way carefully across the surface, which was nowhere near smooth. It was ridged and tufted, like a Kansas wheat field after harvest. Anthropomorphizing again, Tea thought it looked as though some machine or entity had cleared this area—hastily?

She stopped about ten meters from the opening and clicked off several images. “I don’t see a door,” she called to Taj. “None of those magic beads, either.”

“Can you see inside?”

“Nope. It’s all shadows.” But she did feel something strange . . . a tugging at the camera. She loosened her grip, and the unit almost flew out of her hand. “Whoa! I think there’s a big magnet in there!”

“Come back here now!”

Taj didn’t have to tell her twice. She clutched the camera to the front of her EVA long johns, turned, and hopped quickly over the ruts back to where she started.

She realized that the feet of her undergarment were going to be filthy, which was all going to wind up back inside the boots of her EVA suit. Bad protocol there.

“Did you feel that?” she asked Taj. “It was as if the camera was being pulled out of my hands.”

“I felt nothing.” He gestured at the camera. “I hope that effect didn’t erase the images.”

Tea hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that was the reason for the Temple’s magnetism.

Or not. How could she have any real idea? Nothing here was as it should be!

Taj was saying, “We’d better get back. However we’re going to deal with Keanu, it’s got to be easier as a team.”

Has anyone considered the possibility that Keanu—now proven to be
an ALIEN SPACESHIP—visited Earth one or more times PRIOR to this?
There is a suspicious periodicity to such major human events as the
building of the Great Pyramids, discovery of writing and end of the last
Ice Age, all approximately 3,500 years apart! Just saying!

POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM, AUGUST 23, 2019

Okay, new rule: post first,
then
drink. Not the way you have it, Jermaine.

POSTER ALMAZ, SAME SITE, MOMENTS LATER

“We’re calling them
Revenants
,” said Sasha Blaine, as the footage of an impossibly alive Megan Stewart froze on the screen.

Harley Drake raised his head and tried to reconnect with the chaos in the Home Team.

He had been thinking about Pogo Downey. He had lost colleagues and close friends before—a buddy who hit the ground in an F-22 during test pilot school, and another who was shot down by a SAM over Yemen. Those were just close friends; other second-tier acquaintances had died, too.

And, of course, there was Megan Stewart.

So he was quite familiar with the sensations experienced on hearing the news, the ashen looks on faces, the constant headshaking and confusion, and the rituals.

Except for those associated with death in space. He had joined NASA too late for the horrors of
Columbia
, when seven astronauts had been killed as their orbiter broke into pieces, burned up, then scattered itself across Texas and Louisiana thanks to an undetected breach in its thermal protection system.

Pogo’s death would be the top story on every news site around the world. What was it they said about Lincoln? “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Now Patrick Downey belonged to the Web pages.

All of them knew flying in space was risky—that you had, in essence, a one-in-fifty chance of being killed. You were actually far safer working in a coal mine for twenty-five years, or serving consecutive combat tours.

But knowing that didn’t make it easier. A friend was suddenly gone. Bad, but worse yet—killed by some unknown entity.

That was the true horror. . . . What in God’s name was running around loose inside Keanu that was capable of killing a man?

And wanting to?

There were reports that this thing, the Sentry, had died, too. Which was another problem. Better to have captured it, interrogated or studied it.

Harley was afraid for his friends on the mission. “Sorry,” he said, “what the hell does that mean?”

“
Revenant
is a French word,” Wade Williams said, winding up for another giant info-dump, “meaning a visible ghost or an animated corpse!”

But before he could take another breath, after which he would be unstoppable short of violence, Steven Matulka, one of the more socialized members of the Home Team, a generation younger than Williams, slapped his hand on the table. “For God’s sake, Wade!”

In the immediate silence, Harley noted the shocked look on Wade’s face—Matulka was a protégé of the older writer; this might have been the first time in a twenty-year relationship that the younger man had spoken up—and several bowed headshakes around the room. Sasha Blaine had her hand over her eyes.

“Speaking of rope in the family of the hanged man?” Harley said, offering a nod of thanks to Matulka. “Don’t worry, I’m not that sensitive.”

“It’s not that accurate, anyway,” Matulka said, with a by-your-leave gesture to Harley. “Megan Stewart’s earthly remains are here in Texas, so
corpse
is the wrong word.

“
Ghost
doesn’t apply, either. According to the data we’ve received, those beings are corporeal. Flesh and blood.”

“I’ll give you flesh,” said Williams, unwilling to cede the stage for long. “Don’t know about blood!” It wasn’t as witty as he’d hoped. The room was silent again.

“I’ll give you
this
,” Harley said. “
Revenant
sounds better than
zombie
. So, fine, use it. But you seem to be grabbing the shovel by the wrong end here. You’ve managed to come up with useful names for all these new things—”

“It’s a hard habit to break,” Blaine said. “If you name something, you own it.”