Heaven's Shadow (42 page)

NASA PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMENTATOR SCOTT SHAWLER

The digital clock in mission control showed twenty minutes until burn. Harley heard confirmation that uploads had been completed, that every antenna but one had been retracted—and that the big circular solar arrays were going to be rotated sideways. (Seen nose-on in its nominal configuration,
Destiny
looked like a hat from the Mickey Mouse Club.) “They’ll be edge-on to line of impact during the snowplow,” Shane Weldon had said, briefing not only Gabriel Jones and Brent Bynum, but Harley as well. “That will minimize damage, we hope.”

“What if we lose both arrays?” Jones asked. Harley knew that
Destiny
depended on Houston for guidance updates in the best of times, in a mission that followed a flight plan. This situation was far more challenging.

“Then the crew is going to have to get off Keanu in a huge hurry. They only have a couple of days’ battery power if they can’t use the arrays.”

Bynum made a face. “What the hell is a ‘snowplow’?”

“That’s pretty much what
Destiny
will be doing.” Weldon said, unsuccessfully keeping contempt out of his voice. “Sounds better than
crash-land
, don’t you think?”

Harley agreed, but talk of the landing made him ask about the equally tricky business of taking off from Keanu. Weldon turned to Josh Kennedy for this answer: “The gravity is so low that once we fire the main engine,
Destiny
will just pop off the surface. It should be clear of any surrounding terrain in a few seconds.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought it through.”

“I sure as fuck hope so,” Kennedy said, startling Harley with the uncharacteristic profanity.

Neither Kennedy nor Weldon needed any distractions, so Harley backed away. He knew his presence in mission control was not vital—except to him. He lived for the real-time tension of a critical event, whether it was launch or docking or touchdown . . . and in this case, the first-ever attempted “snowplow” of a vehicle that was never designed for it. This controlled adrenaline rush was what he remembered about flying jets. Mission control was the one place he could experience that rush again, if only for a few moments. . . .

But he no longer belonged here. He had been put in charge of a back room—a vital, unique resource. And whether or not he had been the ideal choice to lead it, it was his job.

As was keeping an eye on Rachel Stewart, who had been slumped in a chair in the visitors’ gallery. Gabriel Jones had found her. Harley was afraid that could prove to be awkward for the girl, a suspicion confirmed when he entered the gallery and heard: “—Remember that daddies are human, too. We’ll be selfish, we’ll be distant, we’ll be off chasing some dream of our own, but it doesn’t mean we don’t remember our daughters, that we don’t love them—”

Eyes closed and face wet with tears, the man was kneeling next to Rachel, holding her hand. Rachel’s eyes were wide and her face sent Harley a clear message:
Rescue me!

“Gabriel,” Harley said, as gently as he could. “Bynum says he has a question for you.” This was an outright lie, but a useful one.

Sniffing, forcing a smile, Jones rose, patting Rachel on the shoulder. “Take care, young lady. And know that we are doing everything we can to get your daddy home safely.”

The moment the door closed behind Jones, Rachel turned to Harley. “God, that was creepy.”

“He just lost his daughter.” Harley knew that Gabriel Jones had lost his daughter years ago. “You’re not a middle-aged man or colleague. He could be . . . weak and emotional with you.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It wasn’t for you.”

Sasha Blaine and the other members of the Home Team were as wilted as Rachel Stewart—or, for that matter, as Harley. As he wheeled his powered chair down the corridor to his domain, passing two of the other back-room groups, both with doors open, both deathly silent and populated by exhausted people, Harley realized he was hitting his own redline. He needed a whole list of things, from a bath to a decent meal, but number one was rest.

Maybe once
Destiny
was safely down and Tea and the other survivors got aboard . . .

First, of course,
Destiny
had to land. Snowplow. Slide into home.

Then? Zack Stewart. The moment Harley entered the room, Sasha turned to ask him, “When will we be able to use
Destiny
to link with Zack?”

“Not until that thing’s safely on the surface,” Harley said. “And maybe not even then.”
Destiny
likely made a better relay satellite in orbit. On the ground its systems would be trying to punch or receive signals through denser rock and soil.

For that matter, it might not have antennae at all. It could go deaf, dumb, and blind. And the same would apply to poor Zack.

Well,
Harley thought,
let’s burn that bridge when we come to it
.

On the Home Team screen, the feed from one of
Destiny
’s forward onboard cameras now showed a clearly defined image of a snowy, rocky landscape, with actual mountains or, at the very least, high hills dead ahead. “It’s like flying,” Sasha Blaine said.

“Too low,” Harley said. “If I could feel my feet, I’d be pulling them up.” Like most people who heard one of his little jokes about his infirmities, Blaine pretended she hadn’t heard it.

Nevertheless,
Destiny
was low. Jasmine Trieu was saying, “Altitude fifty meters, down at ten . . . ten seconds to snowplow.”

Harley realized that because of lag,
Destiny
had already made it—or smashed into the surface.

Suddenly the picture went blank. “Oh shit,” one of the Home Teamers said.

Wade Williams spoke up. “Do they have telemetry?”

Harley had been thinking the same thing, concentrating on the figures on the bottom and side of the screen showing altitude, rate of descent, and a dozen other factors. The screen flickered—a momentary loss of communication, or a sign that
Destiny
had ripped open as it spread itself across the landscape of Keanu?

But then figures returned to the screen. Altitude and descent showed zero. Other figures seemed nominal; at least none of them was red.

“They made it,” Sasha Blaine said.

“Houston, this is Tea!” The astronaut’s voice was barely recognizable through the crackling and hissing in the speakers, but her joy was impossible to hide. “We saw it all, baby! Perfect landing about half a kilometer east! I think you lost one of the solars, but the other one is still intact! We’re heading there now!”

Harley was seeing imagery from some camera on
Destiny
, a view of the surface of Keanu, but tilted ninety degrees.

The denizens of the Home Team room remained silent . . . possibly uncertain of the protocol, more likely just exhausted beyond belief.

“Feel free to applaud,” Harley said. He rolled to the door and opened it. Distant cries of “Woo-hoo!” could be heard. For the first time in two days, Harley Drake felt that Tea, Taj, Natalia, and Lucas had a chance to make it home.

There was going to be life after Keanu.

For some of them, anyway.

LOTS of traffic on Slates, pads, PDAs. White House bombarded by
queries from Roscosmos, ISRO, AEB, just to name the most obvious.
Probably UN and Vatican, too. Somebody tell ME what’s going on out
there!

POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM

Rachel Stewart watched the successful
Destiny
snowplow with vague interest that bordered on resentment. It was great that Tea Nowinski and the others had a way home. But what about her father? Where was he? What was mission control going to do for him?

And no one was talking about her mother anymore.

Besides, there was something else going on that struck her as more interesting.

The main viewing screen in the center had shown the
Destiny
landing, and now switched between several semiuseless views of either tilted landscape or blackness. Rachel could see the camera team at work at its console. Everyone was desperate to actually see Tea and the others on approach.

Okay. But on the smaller screen, four different news feeds were visible, and no one but Rachel was paying attention.

Too bad. Because Mr. Weldon and Mr. Kennedy and even Dr. Jones and that Bynum guy would have seen that the Bangalore Object was not only rotating, but actually sucking up whatever happened to be around it.

The Houston Object was still hidden, partly from the debris cloud . . . but also by the Gulf Coast’s gift to summer, a tropical downpour.

Nevertheless, the shots of various talking heads—all of them with their eyes wide, all waving their arms—told Rachel that something freaky was happening.

For a moment she regretted burying her Slate in her mother’s grave. But only for a moment.

She decided she wanted to see and hear better. So she slipped out of the gallery and brazenly walked onto the floor of mission control, taking up an empty seat at one of the forward consoles on the right side, where she had an unobstructed view of the news feed.

She was a fourteen-year-old girl. Her simple presence in mission control was an anomaly . . . but because she’d been hanging around for the better part of two days, she had grown transparent. None of the remaining men—and the one woman—noticed her at all.

Weldon did tune in to the news out of Bangalore. “Anybody have any idea what in God’s name is going on there?”

Capcom Travis Buell, who, after losing connection with Bangalore, had become the designated TV watcher in the center, said, “They’re calling the Bangalore site some kind of sinkhole.”

Weldon, Jones, and the others surrounded Buell at that point, so Rachel couldn’t hear what they were saying. But it was clear they were agitated: Bynum kept pointing toward one of the walls, with Weldon more gently indicating another corner.

They were talking about the Houston Object.

The TV news heads were still going on about Bangalore. “—as if it’s collecting material,” one of them was saying. “No one has been able to get close enough to say for sure, but the rotation is creating some kind of vortex, for want of a better word. It looks as though soil, grass, debris, air . . . it’s all being sucked into it.”

A second head—the anchor, Rachel remembered—took that very badly. “If it’s sucking up material, what’s to stop it from sucking up, say, a whole chunk of India?”

“Well, unless it’s a chunk of super-dense matter—”

“—Or a baby black hole—” a third head said.

“—Which we’ve never seen—”

“—Any more than we’ve ever seen a hunk of super-dense matter—”

The anchor lost it. “People, come on! This isn’t a lunchroom debate at Caltech!”

The first, more reasoned head then said, “Unless it’s some exotic matter, it can’t absorb or ‘suck up’ more than a few tons or dozen tons. It doesn’t appear to be some kind of, I don’t know, doomsday weapon.”

The second head couldn’t resist: “Come on, David, we don’t know what the hell this is.”

It wasn’t anything specific anyone on TV said. Maybe it was a combination of four images hitting her eyeballs combined with fatigue and those cryptic words from her mother. But Rachel Stewart suddenly knew that she had to get out of mission control.

She slid off her chair and, still invisible, left mission control.

She wasn’t entirely sure she could walk to the impact site. She was a bit fuzzy about its actual distance from mission control, but she knew it couldn’t be more than a couple of kilometers. She had walked distances as great as a single click in her life, on occasion, when forced. So how hard could it be to do two? Even in the suffocating heat of a late-afternoon thunderstorm?

“Don’t be like this.”

She turned and saw that Harley Drake, wheelchair and all, had followed her back to the Home Team. “Like what? Independent?”

“Just stop arguing.” Harley was red-faced and in a bad mood. Fine. Rachel knew he wouldn’t really yell at her. Her own father didn’t do that. Mom, well, yes. This was all about Mom.

And maybe there was a better way to get Harley to give permission. “Don’t you want to see what’s going on out there?” She turned to Sasha Blaine, who was a few feet away, concentrating on her Slate and quietly trying to pretend she could not hear everything. “Sasha, how about you?”

Blaine looked at Harley before answering—as if asking permission to speak. “Frankly, I’m dying to go out there.”

“What if it’s radioactive?” Harley said, though he didn’t sound convincing.

“The local fire and police will have the place surrounded, anyway, won’t they?” Blaine said. “If it’s dangerous, we won’t get close.”

“You’re putting a lot of faith in some overworked men and women in a very unusual situation.”

Blaine indicated her Slate screen. “There are people all over the Bangalore Object. They haven’t started vomiting or losing their hair.” Rachel couldn’t see much . . . the feed was from a phone, and Blaine’s screen was small. Nevertheless, it showed dozens of men in white shirts—the uniform of Bangalore, from what Rachel knew—moving debris with their bare hands.

What was most surprising was that the slowly rotating whitish dome of the Object was literally a few feet from them.

Harley looked around the Home Team, whose members had broken into their normal pairs and triplets, conferring, arguing, talking on phones.

Then he faced Rachel and Sasha. “Fine, whatever you want. I need air, anyway.”

The rain had let up for a few moments, though dark clouds to the south and east promised a new downpour. “We’ll take my rig,” Harley said, with no argument from Sasha or Rachel.

“Good. My rental is a kilometer away.” And Harley’s van was in one of the handicapped spots right outside mission control.

As Rachel walked around the van to the other side, Harley advised Sasha Blaine, “Watch out for my junk.”