Heaven's Shadow (5 page)

RACHEL STEWART ON HER SLATE

KEANU APPROACH: TERMINAL PHASE

“Houston, we’re at fifteen thousand . . . coming up on powered-descent initiation in five.”

Zack waited for Shane Weldon’s reply as he stood—tethered, since
Venture
was still in microgravity—at the forward control panel next to Pogo. He was still in his helmet, wearing gloves, feeling like a child bundled up for a day in deep snow.

Houston and Weldon seemed more remote than ever, their signal hissing and breaking up. “Copy that,
Venture
. . . still go for . . . descent at 78:15:13 MET.” Mission elapsed time . . . had it really been seventy-eight hours since the
Saturn VII
lit up, rattling Zack and his crew into Earth orbit?

Tea and Yvonne were strapped in directly behind, but effectively invisible and, for the moment, silent.

The last word from mission control on that subject had been, “We’ve got the Home Team on it,” the Home Team being a panel of Keanu specialists led by Harley Drake, who was no doubt phoning and e-mailing all over the world, contacting a broad spectrum of experts on NEOs and venting.

And what was Rachel thinking? What had she heard? Zack had not spoken to his daughter since launch. They had exchanged text messages—her preferred means of communication—during the first sixty hours. Nothing since then. She had sent them; he could see a queue in his personal message file. But he had had no time to compose even a two-word reply.

Well, he would send her the first message from the surface of Keanu.

Which was now closer than ever. They were under fifteen thousand meters altitude, roughly the same as an airliner crossing the United States. Three minutes until the twin RL-10 engines on
Venture
lit up, slowing the vehicle enough to drop out of orbit and head for touchdown—

“Houston, from
Venture
. Any word on our Coalition neighbors?”

“Venture”
, Weldon said, after more than the usual lag, “
Brahma
is in a lower, more circular orbit . . . plane diverges from yours . . . twenty degrees. Data coming to you.”

The gravity gauge burn had put the combined
Destiny- Venture
vehicle in a wide, looping orbit around the NEO. Within twenty minutes, on Houston’s orders (encouraged no doubt by Tea’s report), Zack was injected with a sedative, zipped into a sleeping bag, and stashed in the
Venture
airlock. While he dozed, Patrick, Yvonne, and Tea completed the tedious work of configuring
Destiny
for a week—or a month—of uncrewed autonomous flight while transferring gear, food, water, and other supplies into the lander.

Zack had been awakened for the separation maneuver, which Tea and Yvonne handled, half an hour ahead of the terminal burn.
Destiny
had been left behind, and now the four-legged collection of tanks that was
Venture
flew on its own.

Meanwhile, the crew of
Brahma
completed its burn, winding up in a relatively circular orbit that had the advantage of allowing them more frequent landing opportunities.
Destiny
’s crew, in going for broke with the gravity gauge and jumping to a far more eccentric orbit, would have the first chance to touch down . . . but if unable to start descent this goaround, would have to wait another day.

While Brahma would swoop in ahead of them.
And it would be Zack’s old space station comrade, the excitable-yet-capable Taj, who would take the first steps on Keanu.

“Three minutes,” Zack said. “Kids, you okay in the backseat?”

“Yes.” “Fine.” Both voices were so clipped and tense that Zack could not tell them apart.

“Okay, there’s the
Brahma
data,” Pogo said, pointing a thick gloved finger at the display. It showed an image of the big ball that was Keanu and two rotating planes representing the orbits of the two spacecraft, along with columns of constantly changing figures.

“Houston on Channel B,” Zack said, clicking to the encrypted link. “Did you or the Home Team happen to note one of those venting episodes when
Brahma
did its burn?”

“Now there’s a good question,” Pogo said.

The lag stretched beyond the normal six seconds. Finally a new voice came on the line. “Zack, Harley. The answer is
no
. . . and
yes
—”

“Fucking A!” Yvonne blurted, clearly annoyed. Zack wanted to smile. Pogo Downey had the classic military mind—get ’er done, give me an answer. Yvonne, an engineer by training, had even less appetite for nuance.

But even Tea Nowinski, usually the mediator, the finder of middle ground in any group, joined the chorus. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Okay, everyone!” Zack used the command voice. “Hey, Harley . . . interesting news.” He wondered if the sarcasm traveled across the 440,000-kilometer distance. “Care to elaborate?”

“We can tell you this much, my man. There has been a second eruption on Keanu, but it took place approximately half an hour
after Brahma’
s burn. There was no apparent commonality. In fact, there has been a third event since then.”

Zack found that news fascinating—and soothing. “So it’s possible the first venting was a coincidence? That we’re just looking at some kind of volcanism.” Keanu had been venting ever since it was first observed—indeed,
Venture
and
Brahma
were both targeted to the same spot on Keanu’s surface, a circular crater nicknamed Vesuvius that had been the source of several plumes of steam over the past two years.

Harley confirmed Zack’s thinking. “So far that’s the most logical theory.”

“Yeah, well,” Yvonne said, “the other theories are freaky . . .”

“Good to know,” Zack radioed. “We’ll keep our eyes open.” He set aside the question of what—if anything—was strange about Keanu to wonder instead what
Brahma
would do when it arrived. What was that missile-like thing it carried? It didn’t appear in the
Brahma
schematics available on the Web.

“Venture
, we show one minute to PDI,” Weldon said from Houston. “Everything’s looking good from here.”

“Is it okay if I say that I can’t fucking believe we’re still going to land?” Tea said.

In spite of the apparent anger, the whole exchange was pro forma, its very familiarity allowing the crew to feel as though they were back in their Houston simulator and not attempting the first piloted landing on a Near-Earth Object.

It was ten times the challenge faced by Armstrong and Aldrin on the first lunar landing—yes,
Venture
had far better guidance systems, but the Apollo crew had been aiming for a world that had always been in the human mind . . . had been studied for centuries, and in the years prior to their launch, been probed a dozen times.

Keanu had been unknown until three years ago. It had since been the subject of exactly two distant flyby space probes. (There wasn’t a government or corporation on Earth capable of conceiving, funding, building, and launching a probe to Keanu in less than five years, by which time the NEO would be long past its closest encounter and heading back into the interstellar darkness from which it came.)

Zack Stewart’s
Destiny-7
and
Venture
crew would indeed make the first human contact with this world.

“Thirty seconds,” Pogo said.

It didn’t seem to take that long for the numbers to reach zero. With a rumble that Zack found startling—he had never experienced a burn from the
Venture
cabin—the twin RL-10s ignited, ramping up from twenty percent of thrust to a full one hundred.

Zack was technically the commander of the
Destiny-7
mission, something he found especially absurd at the moment. Hot pilot Pogo Downey was flying this landing.

Of course, Pogo wasn’t actually flying it yet. True, hundreds of hours of simulations had prepared him to manually steer
Venture
to a flat spot on the surface of the Moon . . . and several dozen hasty, postdecision sims had concentrated on the challenges of accomplishing the same thing in Keanu’s lesser gravity.

But
Venture’
s incredibly sophisticated and rugged guidance system was really making the decisions, its radar pinging the surface of Keanu, recording range and rate of descent, then making the delicate adjustments in the tilt of the engines, whose combined axis of thrust—tweaked by the smaller reaction control jets spaced around
Venture’
s exterior—determined where the vehicle was going.

Two booms rattled the cabin. “RCS,” Zack said quickly. He could actually hear the startled gasps of Tea and Yvonne on the communications loops.

He grinned to himself. He hadn’t been selected as commander for his ability with a joystick. As much as he joked about Tea’s “big sister” mentality, he had an even more acute case of wanting everyone to be happy. This personality trait had guided his professional life—he couldn’t count the number of people with whom he’d nursed violent disagreements who took his low-key assents and gentle arguments as signs of genuine friendship. If he had to work late hours, fine. If an apology was called for, he would make it. If being charming was what a situation required, he could be very charming.

And, if the greater good could be served by a display of temper, he could boil over with the best of them.

After his second space station tour, one of the NASA doctors had told Zack he rated highest among every astronaut studied in one key interpersonal factor: not technical skills (though his were superior) or even emotional control (though he obviously stayed on an even keel).

He simply
played well with others
. Shared his toys. Helped pick up. Did more than his portion of dirty jobs.

Making the first landing on Keanu was, in many ways, a dirty job. Training time was short, danger was great, the crew had been shuffled at the last minute. And there was a good chance of conflict with the
Brahma
crew.

NASA wanted the people of Earth to be happy. And who better to keep them that way than Zachary Stewart? Not only was he an experienced space flier who had spent two years training on
Destiny-Venture
, he happened to be the astronaut office specialist in all matters Keanu. Best of all, he actually knew—and liked!—the rival
Brahma
commander.

“Coming up on pitchover,” Pogo said, the first words he’d uttered since the start of powered descent.

Although there was no sense of motion—nothing like the banking of an aircraft—the view out the forward window changed, black sky giving way to Keanu’s gray-and-white horizon.

It was as if
Venture
had clambered to its feet—which, in technical terms, it had. Within moments they were heads up,
plus Z
in NASA terms.

“What’s that?” Pogo said.

Since burning into orbit around Keanu,
Destiny-Venture
had made two low passes, but both on the night side, where visibility was almost non-existent. Now, for the landing,
Venture
was heading toward the sunlit side, like a transatlantic airliner flying toward the European dawn.

Only this dawn showed a
giant geyser flaring thousands of feet
into the black sky. Unaffected by winds—Keanu had no atmosphere—it looked like a perfect tornado funnel out of Zack’s childhood nightmares.

He had to force himself to say, “Houston, are you seeing what we’re seeing?”

Houston was receiving the same image, of course, from
Venture’
s cameras, but controllers wouldn’t experience the same awe and majesty . . . or barely contained terror.

“I hope that’s not from Vesuvius,” Zack said, and immediately saw the answer to his own question, as the plume slid off to the left—clearly from another vent, which Weldon calmly confirmed.

As Buzz Aldrin had, while Neil Armstrong flew the first lunar landing, Zack concentrated on his job as commentator. “Okay, Pogo, there’s three hundred, down at twenty.” Three hundred meters altitude, down at twenty meters per second, both figures diminishing at different rates. “The field below looks smooth.” They could see their landing zone from the forward windows, whose lower halves were angled inward. But glare from Keanu’s snow and ice washed out the view—better data was coming from a radar image in the head-up display, which showed scattered boulders, though so far none big enough to topple
Venture
.

“Copy that,” Pogo said, in a voice that was basically a grunt. Zack had once flown in a NASA T-38 jet that Pogo had to land in bad weather. All during the approach, the pilot had fallen essentially silent, his eyes locked on displays, hand on the stick.

Scope-locked.

Venture’
s landing on Keanu was different from that dark, threatening approach to Cape Canaveral in a T-38—the computer was still flying the vehicle, something pilots never liked.

“Two hundred, down at fifteen. Horizon looks close.” Now, at a height of less than two hundred meters, the NEO still looked
round
! For a moment, Zack had the feeling
Venture
was edging sideways up to a giant white ball. He literally had to shake his head.

His twitching must have been visible even in the thick EVA suit. He felt a reassuring pat on his shoulder. Tea. There was no way to acknowledge it—which she must have known.

“Coming up on one hundred, down at ten,” Zack said. “Electing manual.”

According to the flight plan, manual landing was the backup mode, but Zack and Pogo had privately decided that human eyeballs and reflexes were better suited to the delicate task of accomplishing a safe landing than a computer. Zack’s words gave Pogo the go-ahead to click the “pickle switch,” making his hand controller come alive, while also telling Houston that this was a decision, not a systems failure.

“Venture
, go for manual.” Zack knew that Shane Weldon would agree with the decision. Besides, if they were wrong, they were dead.