Heaven's Shadow (38 page)

But instead of dissipating like the debris from past events, a small object fell away from Keanu. “What the hell is
that
?” someone said. Harley could not have phrased the question any better.

“Keep watching, everyone,” Weldon said.

Then it happened again, though this time the eruption seemed to come from Keanu’s south pole. But the result was the same . . . a bright object that, like its predecessor, separated from the NEO.

Within seconds, both objects had left Keanu behind. The Maui scope smoothly tracked with them; Keanu fell out of frame, leaving two white blobs on the screen.

Several people began talking at the same time, all asking the logical questions.
How big are they? How fast are they moving?

And Harley’s new favorite, “Where are they going?”

“People, please!” Weldon said. “We don’t actually know much more than you do.”

Into the sudden silence, Harley said, “Is there better imagery?”

Weldon simply nodded, then jerked his head to one of the operators.

One of the objects suddenly filled the screen. “It’s still nothing but a blob,” Bynum said.

“Correct,” Weldon said. “We have other sites besides Maui tracking this, and no one has seen any edges or definition on this thing. At the moment, all we can say is that it’s a blob moving at thirty-two thousand clicks an hour.”

“Two blobs,” Jones said.

“Were they simply fired, like bullets?” Sasha Blaine said, speaking up. “Or are they accelerating?”

“We haven’t seen any maneuvering yet,” Weldon said. “So far, we’re treating it like a launch.”

“What could those things be?” Bynum said.

He looked genuinely baffled, and for once Harley couldn’t blame the man. “I can only think of two things,” Harley said. “Pure mass, like ice or rock, or a vehicle, which could be a spacecraft or a missile.”

“If it’s a missile, is it a counterstrike?” Bynum said.

“You’d have to look at it that way.”

Even a chunk of rock could be a devastating weapon. Harley had fond memories of a Robert Heinlein novel he had read as a kid in which the Moon had gone to war with Earth—and won it by pounding the home planet with . . . rocks.

“First orbital data,” Weldon announced. “From NORTHCOM.” He fumbled for reading glasses and bent to his screen, Jasmine Trieu, Gabriel Jones, and others pressing on him. “Apogee is four hundred eighty thousand—Keanu distance. Perigee thirty-six thousand. Inclination TBD.”

“Don’t we have assets at thirty-six thousand kilometers?” Bynum said.

“Only most of the world’s communications satellites,” Harley told him. “And a few intel birds, too.”

“What if they attack those satellites?”

“We lose a lot of capability,” Harley said. “I’d love to hear a size for these things.”

“Are they even the same?”

Hearing this, one of the controllers pushed back and took off his headset. “Maui thinks both are on the order of one hundred meters wide, roughly spherical.”

Harley turned to Sasha. “So if it’s a chunk of rock a hundred meters in diameter, and it’s traveling at orbital velocity, how much damage does it do if it hits Earth?”

“I don’t have to run numbers,” she said. “It’s just a meteorite. Nasty and capable of doing tremendous damage if it hits a city, or different but equally awful stuff if it’s a water impact.”

Travis Buell stood up. “Shane, I’ve got Bangalore on the line and they say it’s urgent.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Jones said. “Put it the fuck up there.”

The main screen split, the left half showing Vikram Nayar, the
Brahma
flight director, looking at least twenty years older than his age.

“I’m getting word from Maui,” another controller said. “Maneuvers!” The message was unnecessary; both blobs had dropped off the screen. Harley didn’t think the remote-tracking hardware had suddenly gone tits up.

On screen, Nayar was looking at a piece of paper that had just been handed to him. “We have more useful information on the objects,” he said, finally. “Their trajectories are diverging. But both objects are going to impact Earth.”

Weldon rubbed his head. “When and where?”

“In four hours, the first predicted impact will be on the Indian subcontinent at approximately twelve point five degrees north, seventy-seven degrees east.”

“That’s Bangalore, isn’t it?” Sasha Blaine said to Harley. His gratitude for her speed at recognizing the importance of the information was short-lived, because Nayar then said, “On the order of thirty minutes later, second impact North America, twenty-nine point eight degrees north, ninety-five point five degrees west.”

“That’s pretty close to us,” Josh Kennedy said, his voice failing for the first time.

“The impacts are too coincidental to be accidents,” Nayar was saying. “Although these figures are imprecise and could be off by many kilometers, it appears Bangalore and Houston mission control are the targets.”

“We have to assume we are,” Weldon said. He turned to Gabriel Jones. “You’d better order an evacuation.”

“Where do I tell people to go?” Jones said. “If this is a big rock and JSC is ground zero, that mass and velocity—hell, it’s going to take out all of Houston.”

“If JSC is ground zero, anywhere is better than here,” Harley said.

“We have ten thousand people just at the center!”

“That’s why you’d better get started,” Weldon said.

“Fine.” Jones nodded at the mission control team. “You guys, too.”

“We can’t,” Josh Kennedy said. “We’ve got a spacecraft to land.”

Jones was adamant. “You could all die here!”

But Weldon said, “Our crew will die without that vehicle. We can’t let that happen.” He smiled. “Besides, Gabe, we’ve been through this before. Hurricane Horace, remember? Shelter in place.”

Harley surely did; a decade back, during his ASCAN year, Hurricane Horace had aimed itself directly at Houston, right in the middle of one of the last shuttle missions.

Mission control was operating the International Space Station at the same time, though those functions were shared with Russia. But the shuttle could be directed only from Houston.

And as the city—and ninety-nine percent of the staff at Johnson Space Center—took to the highways heading for higher ground, a skeleton team remained in Building 30 . . . sheltered in place.

Horace ripped through the Houston area, causing massive damage on the city’s west side. JSC was spared a direct hit, though roofs were torn off, windows were broken, and power lines were ripped away. The shuttle continued to have support.

But this would be a greater challenge. Building 30’s walls were brick and mortar, capable of withstanding severe weather. They would be little protection against a kinetic energy strike, which would unleash incredible amounts of heat and energy. This time, the mission controllers involved in a shelter in place stood a good chance of dying.

Not that you could tell, from the hushed atmosphere.

“Well, then, God bless you all,” Jones had said, wisely realizing the futility of his argument.

Weldon was approaching him. “Harls, you better get back to your team.”

“Yeah, time for the great minds to earn their meal money.”

“I was thinking you should offer them the chance to get out of here.”

It had not occurred to Harley that his group of academics and quasi scientists might not be eager to take part in shelter in place. “Right.”

Blaine pushed him and his chair toward the door. Once they were in the hallway, Harley said, “Assume these are hostile. Are they kineticenergy weapons?”

“Are they going to change direction at the last moment and strike Washington or New York? Wade Williams will be so happy—it’ll be like his movie.”

“He’ll just have to take his happiness on the road.”

Blaine stopped and looked down at him. “What about you, Harley?”

“You know, there were two things I liked to do before my accident and only one of them was flying. I haven’t been able to do either since, and it doesn’t look as though I’ll start any time in the future. So I’ll take my chances here.”

“That’s brave of you,” Blaine said. “What about Zack’s daughter?”

Oh God,
Harley thought.
Yes, what about Rachel Stewart?

That conversation had consumed much of the intervening hour. It started in the visitors’ gallery; progressed to the hallway, where Sasha Blaine left them to return to the Home Team; then ended back in mission control.

The bottom line: Rachel Stewart wasn’t going anywhere. “This is the only place in the world where I can be in touch with my father,” she said.

“There won’t be much contact if it turns into a giant smoking hole in the ground.”

“If that’s what the Keanu-ites are doing, my father won’t have a chance, either.”

Harley Drake was a big believer in the right of any human being to make his or her own giant fucking mistakes, and the younger said human being learned that, the better. Some vestige of adult responsibility made him question the convenience of that either-or judgment. After all, the important lesson might well be that your decision got you killed. But no matter how he examined it, he still came back to the same conclusion: If Rachel wanted to stay, she should stay.

Besides . . . if the Keanu Plasma Thing was what it appeared to be, Rachel and Harley would be no safer sitting in a traffic jam on the 8 Beltway.

And here . . . the main screen displayed a computer-generated image of
Destiny
, flying tail first, sharing space with several ground-based images, one showing a small white dot . . .
Destiny
as seen from Hawaii. Two others showed what it now called the Objects, now completely diverged. One was being imaged from Hawaii; the other, if the bug in the screen corner told the truth, from a facility in Russia.

“Getting word from Maui,” one of the trajectory flight controllers said. “They can put a definitive upper limit on the diameter of the Keanu Objects, which appear to be the same size. Well under two hundred meters.”

Hearing that figure, Harley felt sick. In his years as an astronaut, and especially the past two years as an accelerated student of events astronomical, he had spent a good deal of time examining the Arizona meteor crater, primarily because he’d visited it for training, and just because it was so cool.

Which was why he knew that the big hole in the ground outside Flagstaff was something like 150 meters deep and close to a kilometer across . . . and that the impact—which vaporized vegetation and living things for tens of kilometers around—was triggered by a hunk of space rock around fifty meters in diameter.

One quarter that of either of the Keanu Objects. The damage if one of them struck wouldn’t just be four times greater, but some geometric multiple of that, comparable to a good-sized nuclear weapon.

Meaning that JSC and Building 30 stood no chance.

If an Object struck nearby, that is. There was still time for the both of them to change course . . . or to be much smaller than this two-hundred-meter figure, or to turn out to be less dense than iron.

The activity at the consoles never changed, though the pace of door openings and closings increased, with Brent Bynum the most frequent visitor, usually trailed by one of his deputies and several of Jones’s, all of them either talking into cell phones or touching Slates.

Harley wouldn’t have believed it possible, given Bynum’s expression when Keanu launched its Objects, but the White House man was even grimmer. “DOD is screaming. They want to shoot them down.”

“—Because putting a nuke on
Venture
was such a brilliant move,” Weldon said. Harley couldn’t tell if the flight director really thought it was stupid—or futile. Or just didn’t want to be distracted from the upcoming
Destiny
landing.

“Don’t worry, Shane,” he said. “Even if it was the best idea since the shitless dog, even if the president authorized them to shoot, they can’t.”

Bynum wasn’t so sure. “They’ve taken out satellites. And we have all these missiles—”

“Our missiles are offensive weapons that can’t be retargeted for exoatmospheric intercepts, at least not in the next couple of hours. We do have some anti-ballistic missiles, about a dozen of them in Alaska and California. They were put there a decade ago when we were nervous about North Korean or Chinese birds. But even if the Objects came across the northern Pacific, where our ABMs might see and hit them, they don’t carry nukes. And I don’t think they’re capable of locking onto a target that’s plasma.”

“I guess that’s a relief,” Bynum said, though his expression remained grim and pale. His phone buzzed again, and he left.

“I knew there was a reason I wanted you in here,” Weldon told Harley, “rather than back with the freaks and geeks.”

“I thought it was just because you didn’t want to die alone.”

Harley was impressed by the way Weldon and Kennedy and their teams never wavered from the immediate task before them: configuring
Destiny
for a crash landing on Keanu.

It helped that they had reestablished contact with Tea Nowinski, and with Taj, Lucas, and Natalia. All four were now on the surface, in suits; they had been forced to leave the rover on the ramp. Zack Stewart’s situation was still unknown. There had been a brief burst of communication, but nothing since.

Just then Shane Weldon turned to Harley. “Mr. Drake, I think your kids need you.”

“What’s going on?”

Weldon tapped his headset. “Blaine says there’s a problem. Get those people straightened out and out of here, then hurry back. I want you around when Bangalore gets it.”

Leaving Rachel in mission control, Harley powered for the door. What now?

I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.

MARK TWAIN, FROM HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY