Heaven's Shadow (41 page)

“We made our choice,” Weldon said. He patted Jasmine Trieu and Travis Buell on the shoulders and talked to the comm team behind them. “Make sure you keep checking their frequencies. Taj and his folks need us now.”

“And we need divine help,” Kennedy said.

Sasha Blaine entered mission control, bringing the entire Home Team with her. “This will be cozy,” Harley said.

“He told us to come.” Blaine nodded toward Shane Weldon.

“I was kidding,” Harley told her. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Weldon was saying, “It puts a few more walls between you and whatever happens outside.”

Williams, Creel, Matulka, and Valdez had at least been confined to the visitors’ area. (Harley wondered if that shiny glass would be transformed into knifelike shards in the next few minutes.) Rachel was standing with Harley and Sasha. “Maybe we should all hold hands,” the girl said.

Blaine was quick to comply, and she made sure Harley couldn’t escape her grasp.

But Harley remained engaged in the operational aspects. He couldn’t help it; he didn’t do emotion and sentiment. “What’s on the networks?” He knew they had covered the Bangalore strike . . . they had surely heard that Houston was next up.

“On screen,” Weldon said. Four different images showed Houston from a variety of angles. There was a shot from an office tower downtown, two from news helicopters (one of them north of the Johnson Space Center), and one from a traffic airplane flying east along I-10.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Travis Buell said, clearly exasperated. “A cloudy day.” The images were indeed obscured by low clouds. The aircraft shot bobbled as its pilot fought through choppy air.

“You want it sunny when you die, Travis?” Weldon snapped, triggering a wave of hysterical laughter.

Buell didn’t care for the comment. “I just want to see what’s going on!”

“What’s going on,” Harley said, “is that a blob from space is about to whack us. Anything beyond that is just guesswork.”

The young astronaut didn’t care for that response, either. He pushed back, disconnected his headset, and, elbowing his way past another controller, walked out.

“One minute to projected impact,” Jasmine Trieu said.

“You can spare us the countdown, thank you, Jazz,” Shane Weldon told her.

“There it is!” Rachel’s voice.

The fixed camera in downtown Houston had tilted up—there was a bright sphere just like the one that had destroyed Bangalore mission control, falling fast. Weirdly, it was headed away from the camera . . . which was downtown.

But toward JSC.

Harley felt Sasha Blaine’s grip tightening. He reached for Rachel’s hand, looked into her eyes. “Here we go.”

The plasma blob flashed through the other screens, then vanished.

Nothing happened.

Then the whole building shuddered, as if belted with some giant hammer. But only once, and for a fraction of a second. The lights dimmed and the screens flickered. But they, too, stayed on.

After a moment, someone said, “Is that all you got?” But there was no laughter.

Harley looked at Sasha and Rachel. Both of them were wide-eyed, hopeful. Then everyone looked at the television images on the big screen.

Allowing for unsteady mounting—the cameras seemed to be getting buffeted by some kind of shock wave or wind—all showed images much like Bangalore: a small mushroom cloud rising above a landscape.

Weldon was shouting. “Does anybody know where, exactly, that thing hit?”

Kennedy had an answer. “KTRK is saying NASA Parkway in Sea-brook.”

“Can we do better?”

He could. “Look at the KHOU feed.” On the screen a Google Map of the JSC area showed a big fat X to the east of the center itself.

“Did they miss?” Rachel asked, giggling.

“No,” Sasha Blaine said. “They hit the target dead-on.”

Weldon was not a shouter, especially not at people who didn’t work for him. Today was an exception. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Blaine swallowed, like an actress thrust onstage in an unfamiliar play. “Bangalore took a direct hit and was destroyed. Its relay antennae were on its roof.

“Houston’s plasma bomb hit two miles east, at the corner of this facility. Where your antennae are.”

There was silence in mission control. Finally one of the communications operators said, “She’s right. That impact was directly on the antenna farm. We’re in backup mode.”

As the other controllers resumed breathing, and working, Harley turned to Sasha Blaine. “You’re pretty smart for a girl.”

Sasha Blaine kissed him. “I’m just happy we’re still alive!”

Even as Harley pondered the insanity of a personal relationship with Sasha Blaine, especially one conducted in Rachel’s presence, Weldon was once again on task. “Okay, everyone, we have obvious comm problems. Let’s find a workaround. We need to be able to talk to
Destiny
.”

Then he turned to Harley and Sasha. “If they weren’t trying to destroy us, what the hell was the point?”

Sasha shrugged. Weldon had accepted her completely, a rare honor for someone who had not trained “the MOD way.” “Maybe just to show they could.”

“Well, then, are we supposed to surrender now?”

Harley ceased to listen. He had his eyes on the big screen.

So did Rachel Stewart. “Harley, what’s that?”

One television camera showed a close-up image of the shattered Bangalore mission control center . . . the smoke had cleared and showed what appeared to be the plasma blob from Keanu still intact.

And rotating.

Gabriel Jones and Brent Bynum entered, along with their retinue. “Are you watching this?” Bynum asked.

Jones had regained his equilibrium. Once again, Harley was impressed by the way NASA people allowed sheer professional curiosity to trump personal tragedy. The speculations came quickly. Maybe it was a sample return craft, like one of NASA’s Mars probes. Someone asked, “What if it gets bigger?” Another man wondered if the Object in India was burrowing deeper—

Shane Weldon was shaking his head. “It would disappear, wouldn’t it? If it were trying to burrow into the Earth?”

“And why would it do that?” Harley couldn’t help asking questions, either, though he directed his at Rachel and Sasha.

Sasha was looking at the screens and the news footage. None of the four feeds showed anything but a vapor cloud over the Houston impact site. “Do you suppose our Object is rotating, too?”

“I wish you guys would take this discussion somewhere else,” Josh Kennedy said. “We’ve got a spacecraft to land.”

Live so that thou mayest desire to live again—that is thy duty—for in any case thou wilt live again.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Entering the Temple was like entering a cathedral, something Zack had done at Chartres, during his one and only trip to Europe. This alien structure had similarities, at least by Zack’s frazzled standards. For example, here was a nave, a smaller, narrower room that led to the chamber containing the altar. Or was that the transept? For one of the few times in his life, Zack told himself he really should have paid more attention to medieval architecture.

Stick to your training. Concentrate on what you can see, hear, feel, identify.

The floor was made of the same material as the doors and walls. As he walked, slowly but directly, into the nave or transept, Zack realized that sounds were deadened.

It was dark, but not like the total darkness of an underground cave. It was more like the let-your-eyes-adjust near-darkness of a warehouse. Somewhere some light was present . . . and not just behind him, where the door remained open.

He looked at the Zeiss unit. It was a camera . . . Holding the instrument two inches off the ground, he flicked it on. Yes!
And there was light!

Another advantage. He could not only sneak up on the Architects, he could blind them.

Things were just getting better and better. All he had to do was find Megan, and her captors.

Assuming they were captors.
So, Zack, don’t assume—

He was at the threshold of the main chamber. He glanced back . . . the giant door was now about the size of his hand held at arm’s length. A long way to run. But what was the point in running? He had only one choice—

Forward. Into the larger chamber.
This is exploration, right?
Going where no one has gone before? Hell, most space exploration would have to be via remote vehicles, given lack of oxygen (like Mars), or extreme surface pressure (like Venus) or too freaking hot (Venus again) or too much gravity (Jupiter and beyond). And those were just the solar planets . . . five thousand extrasolars, some of which he had discovered himself, only expanded the envelope of deadly environments.

He could have been doing this like some tele-operator in a sci-fi movie. Which at least had the advantage of being somewhat safer—

The immediate difference was the air. It was cooler, blowing somehow.

And smelled . . . just like the Beehive. Zack put out his left hand, found the wall.

It
felt
like the Beehive. Moist to the touch.

Zack wiped his hand on his undergarment—which would, he realized, never be remotely clean again.

Then he pressed the front of the Zeiss to his thigh and clicked it on.

He aimed at the wall . . . well, no surprise; it looked like part of the Beehive, but with what appeared to be several large cells as opposed to many small ones.

These were large enough to have held Sentries. Was it possible he had just walked into their incubator? Not the smartest move he could have made.

But it was difficult to tell. He didn’t want to wave the light—
yeah, don’t give up that element of surprise
—so he could not get true perspective.

He clicked off the light and turned back to the chamber proper. Zack’s spider sense told him it used up about a third of the Temple’s interior.

Well, there was no sense in waiting.
Sometimes you just have to go off the high board or jump out of the airplane.

If only he could feel more like a diver and less like a soldier approaching Omaha Beach on D-Day. . . .

Vulnerable and blind, he stepped farther into the main chamber. He had ruined whatever night vision he had by flashing the Zeiss lamp.

Nevertheless, he knew there was something in front of him, something quite large.

He could smell it—some kind of scent, almost floral, but thick and, with each careful step, more intense.

Now he
heard
it, too. Over the increasingly draggy scrape of his own soles on the floor, there was a deep, slow hiss that sounded like a whale breathing. There was also a chittering sound from up near the ceiling.

As if the whale had a hummingbird flying around its head.

Stop anthropomorphizing. Deal with what’s really here.

Because it was here. If it was possible to see something blacker than pitch black, that was what Zack was doing: a large
thing
sat no more than five meters in front of him.

What the hell. He raised the camera. Thumbed the light switch.

The first image he registered was of ceiling and walls, which for an instant seemed to be teeming with maggots. As Zack’s eyes adjusted, he realized that he was seeing swirling dots and squiggles in no recognizable pattern.

What immediately consumed his attention, however, was a creature close to ten meters tall sitting—this was exactly the word—on a bench or chair. It had a head and four arms, but only a pair of legs. The face was too high up, too much in shadow, for Zack to count eyes or noses.

Assuming it had eyes or a nose.

Was it covered in armor? Or a space suit? Possibly. Maybe it was just . . . clothing. Zack always wondered why most sci-fi aliens went naked....

He had to assume this was an Architect.

And, if it noticed Zack at all, it was being patient—or totally indifferent.

Zack had no time for that. “Down here!” He waved the light, expecting the next few seconds to be his last, wondering, foolishly, if he would be resurrected on Keanu.

Fucking hell if the big creature didn’t turn right toward him, rotating its upper torso and face—which was either some kind of shiny, almost waxy and ill-defined collection of planes and reflections . . . or a mask.

A pressure suit mask? No, the Architect was wearing the same kind of second skin that had covered Megan and Camilla!

It was a Revenant, too!

Revenant or not, the Architect moved with frightening speed. Things this big did not, in Zack’s experience, move that fast. Which suggested a hellacious physical structure, including extremely fast-twitch musculature.

Just the one swift move, however. Then the Architect held all four arms close to its chest. The posture, for no good reason, reminded Zack of an Asian bow . . . the kind of gesture one might see performed by a solicitous waiter or shopkeeper.

As if the Architect wanted to know,
What do you want?

The human race’s chance for a well-managed First Contact had been missed when Zack and crew encountered the first Sentry. It was too late to trot out the classic “We come in peace.” (Zack was no longer sure why humans had come to Keanu. To beat other humans, maybe.) Now he had to be practical, forceful. To hell with nuance—

“Give me back my wife!”

This is
Destiny
mission control. The uncrewed
Destiny
orbiter is currently
at thirty-eight kilometers altitude, still on the far side of Keanu.
Mission manager Shane Weldon and lead flight director Josh Kennedy
have confirmed that, given the sporadic contact with astronauts Nowinski
and Stewart and the corresponding lack of contact with the
Venture
lander, they will attempt to “snowplow”
Destiny
onto the surface
of Keanu. . . .