Heaven's Shadow (45 page)

“Speaking of breakfast,” Sasha Blaine said. “What was the latest on the material this thing seemed to be ingesting? It appears to be sucking up water, mud, and even some vegetation.”

“There might be some small absorption, right, Brent?” Weldon said, looking at the sodden, sullen White House man. “But nothing major. We don’t feel as though Earth is about to be sucked into some kind of mini–black hole—”

“—At least, not this particular moment,” Bynum said.

“Can we just go?” Rachel said. The entire party was now on the causeway, but they had not moved forward. Rachel was happy not to have been arrested, and grateful for the helping hands . . . but she felt she had to get to the Object as soon as possible. Or she’d lose her nerve.

Harley took Rachel’s hand. “Okay, we’re going—”

“No.” Brent Bynum stepped in front of them, a pistol in his hand. “This is a hostile entity. None of us should be this close. I authorized it so we could gather data.”

“Brent—” Weldon stepped forward.

“Stop right there!” Bynum screamed. To Harley the White House man looked unhinged. He could hardly blame him. “I’m . . . responsible!”

“No,” Harley said. “I’m responsible. You and Shane told me. You had me sign the documents. I’m the official in charge of alien encounters. And I say we go.” Bynum was wavering, unsure.

“Look,” Harley said, “as far as the White House is concerned, I’m still in charge—and I’ll be blamed.” He held out his hand. “And take a step back, Brent. We’ve been reacting, not acting.” Harley pointed to the Object looming in the near-distance. “Would that thing be here if we hadn’t set off a goddamn bomb on Keanu? Give me the weapon. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Bynum seemed happy to be rid of it.

As Harley dropped the piece into his lap and placed his hands on his wheels, he couldn’t help noting that he was shaking.

And that everyone was immediately trying to forget what just happened.

Within moments, the party had carefully advanced across the bridge, with Sasha Blaine looking over the railing for signs of Object-related sucking. “So far, so good.”

“Look,” Harley said. Off to their right, on the other side of the lagoon, still well north of the Object, half a dozen lights bobbed in the darkness. “I hope they’re on our side.”

“This might just be the most dangerous fucking thing I’ve ever done,” Weldon said.

“I certainly hope so,” Harley said, to general laughter.

Let’s review the bidding. There might be intelligent life on Keanu, which is no longer a NEO but likely a starship . . . at least one astronaut is dead, two others are missing . . . and both JSC and Bangalore have lost contact with the landing craft. And now two “objects” have slammed into the Earth’s surface.

Am I missing anything? Has the entire universe gone insane?

POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM

You’re actually missing quite a lot. Stand by.

POSTER JSC GUY, SAME SITE

“Two minutes, we’re go for pop-up. Enabling RCS two and four. Go for main at plus two ten.”

Tea Nowinski was strapped into the left-hand couch of the
Destiny
, with Taj to her right. Behind them—and, once
Destiny
translated to a nose-up, tail-down orientation, below them—Natalia and Lucas were simply stretched out on a “bed” of netting that held the discarded EVA suits. It was not the most comfortable situation, but the g-forces associated with a launch from Keanu’s gravity field would be minimal. “About like a fast elevator,” Jasmine Trieu told her. Tea didn’t even need the straps at her seat. But she wanted them; they were a physical reminder that her vehicle was about to change locations.

“We show six-eighty on cabin pressure,” Tea reported, knowing Houston could see the same figure, but just to remind the team of that looming problem. She could not get a handle on the leak. Pressure wasn’t dropping in some straight line, suggesting some blockage somewhere.
Destiny
’s environmental system was pumping air into the cabin to compensate. That couldn’t go on forever, of course. They had to get off Keanu, and back to Earth.

“RCS is go, main engine is go,” Houston radioed, after the lag, which Tea now judged to be the most irritating thing she had ever experienced in her life. The reaction control system was a series of four small quads of rockets positioned equidistantly around
Destiny
’s service module. They were usually fired when
Destiny
needed to reorient itself.

Today, in this most unusual operation, they would actually lift the spacecraft off the increasingly unstable surface of Keanu. “We’d like to have clearance from the ground before we light the main,” Josh Kennedy had told her.

“If you like it, we like it,” Tea had responded. She saw the logic; even though the thrust of
Destiny
’s main engine would quickly lift the vehicle off the surface, there was no real way of predicting just how soon . . . it might scrape the ground for fifty or two hundred meters before getting airborne, certainly causing more damage.

“One minute.”

“I hope we don’t get any more movements,” Taj said.

“No negative thoughts, okay?” Tea told him.

There had been concern about whether the RCS quads had come through the snowplow intact, or through that shocking movement caused by either melting snow or some other external factor. Quad number one faced downward at the moment, buried in Keanu snow. JSC’s data showed that it was still intact—no fuel leaking, at any rate—but no one could know whether the small nozzles had been bent, and if so, how they would perform.

Fortunately, the pop-up burn didn’t require quad number one, but rather numbers two and four.

“It will be nice to see home again,” Natalia said, trying to correct for Taj’s gloom.

“For some of us,” Lucas said.

“Thirty seconds,” Tea said, knowing she sounded snappish, not to mention a couple of seconds ahead of the actual count. She couldn’t help it. Ever since buttoning
Destiny
’s hatch, all she could think about was the horrifying truth that she was abandoning Zack. A colleague. A good man. A man she loved.

It didn’t matter that he’d ordered her to do it. Who cared that she really had no choice? He was going to die, and for the rest of her life she would know it was her fault.

“Fifteen.” She brushed tears out of her eyes, then put her hand on the controller.

It didn’t seem to take long at all. Twin
whumps!
sounded in the cabin and Tea felt herself being lifted and, more annoyingly, flung forward. “We’re up, Houston!” She thumbed the pickle switch on the controller, activating it and firing a burst from a smaller reaction rocket on
Destiny
’s nose . . . Houston had warned her that
Destiny
might go a few degrees nose-down when the RCS—aft of the combined vehicle’s center of gravity—ignited.

It had, and Tea’s immediate action seemed to correct it.

Destiny
’s main engine lit at that moment, delivering a substantial bang and jolt. The RCS shut down at that point. And they were off.

Tea had a window, but all it showed was the black of Keanu’s sky. She looked instead at the instruments, especially the altimeter, which showed them already at fifty meters . . . seventy-five . . . “How high were those mountains?” she asked.

“Now who’s the pessimist?” Taj said. He was craning to see out one of the other windows.

Before the burn reached its one-minute point, Tea knew they were clear. Not necessarily safe . . . there were still several tricky maneuvers to perform to put
Destiny
back on an Earth-return trajectory, at which point the concern would be the small matter of guiding the giant gumdrop command module through the searing, deadly plasma of reentry.

And, oh yes, before the air ran out.

But they were off Keanu. Away from whatever the hell was going on down there. Away from the vaporized bodies of lost comrades—and of two spacecraft.

Away from Zack and his reborn wife.

It had to be.

At three minutes plus, the main engine shut down. Tea radioed the news, then waited for Houston to tell them: “
Destiny
, copy shutdown. Pleased to inform you, you are now in orbit around planet Earth. You are free to maneuver to attitude.”

Tea grabbed the controller again and fired a small tweak. She wanted to see where Keanu was. . . .

Not far, as it turned out. The altimeter showed
Destiny
at fifteen thousand meters and climbing rapidly. That was high enough to show the NEO as a crescent.

“Got your camera, Taj?” Tea said. She thumbed the radio switch. “Houston, are you seeing this?”

She didn’t know how to describe it. Keanu’s surface appeared to be melting . . . giant ripples swept across the surface, like waves on a lake . . . Entire sections of the ice were breaking up, like chunks of Antarctica during the Big Melt. There were small eruptions, too, shooting geysers into the sky . . . likely with debris.

Something was happening down there, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to be close to.

“And, Houston, we would welcome, uh, separation data.”

Tea’s message overlapped with Jasmine Trieu’s answer to the first, about the imagery. “What does it look like to you,
Destiny
?”

“I think the place is coming apart!”

Part Five

“FOR THE DEAD ARE FREE”

We are such stuff as dreams are made on
And our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
THE TEMPEST

Following the Architect was like chasing Frankenstein’s monster through a blizzard . . . Megan clung to Zack’s hand as they both ducked flying debris and tried to keep the giant creature in sight.

It wasn’t easy. The light was low, the equivalent of the moments before sunset. The wind was strong and gusting and would have forced them to shield their eyes even absent clouds of tiny particles.

“I hope Camilla’s safe,” Zack said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“She was scooped up the same time I was,” Megan said. “I assume she was taken to the Temple, but I just don’t know. I keep feeling we should stay and search for her.”

“Me, too,” Zack said, “but finding her won’t solve the immediate problem. Might just make things worse for all of us.”

The Architect led Zack and Megan out of the Temple and across the by-now-familiar scorched cornfield, then took a sharp turn into what seemed to be a huge ovoid tunnel. The Big Smart Alien, as Zack dubbed him, was no longer staggering—perhaps he’d found his legs again after centuries or millennia in storage.

“Any idea where this leads?” Zack shouted to Megan.

“Another chamber.” Megan spoke without waiting for that instant prompt from the Architect, though once she spoke, she realized the chamber was called the Factory. For building what?

That answer, if it came, was lost in a stumble.

She had been having a tough time keeping up with Zack. Yes, the terrain was rugged. Yes, she was exhausted. But the third stumble was convincing....

Her legs were failing. Worse than that, her eyes were, too. It was as if—horrible thought—she were aging several years every few minutes.

She was too weak to frame the question . . . too busy clinging to Zack as they entered the passage to the Factory chamber.

The airflow here was compressed—it was literally a wind tunnel. “The wind is in our face,” Zack said. “Which means pressure behind us is less than where we’re going.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t see a lot of good in it, no.”

“We could stop.”

“What’s the point? There’s no food, no water, no answers back there. Only with your friend Gargantua up there.”

Making matters slightly worse, the surface was rugged, not just ridged and uneven, but rough and even sharp in places. Megan was barefoot. Zack was in his stocking feet. They were going so slowly now that they were losing ground. “We can’t take much of this . . . it’s like walking on coral,” he said.

Distracted by the struggle to simply remain upright, and conscious, she didn’t reply. “Are you still in touch with him?”

She forced herself to say, “Ask me something.”

“Well, not that I can do anything about it, but just for science: How the hell is the human race supposed to help the Architects in their war? Half of those who came here are dead . . . The rest have gone home.”

“Others may join you.”

“Others? Here? How?”

“The, uh, transfer device is already active,” she said. “I’m sorry, but that’s the phrase in my head.” She stopped and turned to him. “Okay, they’ll bring humans here. Then they’ll carry them back to their world.”

“Won’t that take thousands of years?”

“Yes.”

“We don’t live that long.”

She thumped him on the chest. “No. It’s your descendants.”

“I don’t like the idea of condemning fellow humans to a life sentence aboard Keanu.”

“They will have the opportunity to affect the future of intelligent life in the galaxy for the next hundred thousand years. Isn’t that worth some sacrifice?”

“Are these people volunteering, or being drafted?”

“I don’t know. I’m . . . I’m sorry.” Her head slumped. “I really don’t feel good.”

He slid his arms around her and held her close. She was trembling. “Look, maybe I can get a message to Houston . . .”

“I think you left your radio behind.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“I don’t think it matters.” Either Zack misunderstood—and how could he understand something that Megan herself was not ready to face?—or he was focusing on the practical. He turned her so they could resume forward motion, however slowly. “What happens if I say no to this big recruitment the Architects are making?”

“You’ve already said yes.”

“How?”

“By your actions.” She could see the answers now, though she took no real joy in the discovery. “The decision is made.”