Heaven's Shadow (6 page)

“Hovering,” Pogo said, just as Zack was about to note that
Venture
was at forty meters with zero rate of descent. Instead he said, “Will you look at that!”

Twice as far across as a football field, Vesuvius Vent lay in front of them, a big black hole in the ground, its bottom lost in shadows.

“Do I turn on the windshield wipers?” Pogo said, stunning Zack— and no doubt millions of people listening, for years to come—with his coolness.

“Just set her down,” Zack said, entirely unnecessarily. “Fuel at eleven percent.” They’d burned almost ninety percent of
Venture’
s liquid hydrogen and oxygen, but had enough for a safe landing. (Fuel for takeoff was in separate tanks and fed a separate ascent engine.)

Gently, the snowy field rose to greet them. Zack could see individual rocks now—again, none tall enough to be worrisome.

“Ten meters.” He wasn’t bothering with rate of descent now. “Making some steam!” The invisible but hot four-lobed plume of
Venture’
s engines was vaporizing Keanu surface snow. Wisps of vapor rose, reminding Zack of Lake Superior on a winter day.

“Shutdown,” Patrick announced, as the RL-10s quit abruptly, and the shuddering and vibration inside
Venture
ceased.

“Contact!” The traditional blue indicator lit—

—Then went dark. “Shit!” Patrick said.

Zack could feel it in his stomach, the roller-coaster sensation. “We’re bouncing!”

Suddenly they were shaken by three quick booms—Pogo manually firing the small reaction control rockets spaced around the
Venture
cabin. “Keep her upright!” Zack shouted.

“Coming down again—”

Zack watched
Venture’
s squat, four-legged shadow rushing to meet them. There went the contact light—

“Goddammit!” They bounced again.

“It’s lower this time,” Zack said, almost convinced himself.

Sure enough, this time
Venture
settled and slid.

And stopped, safely upright on the surface of Keanu, fifty meters from the well-defined edge of Vesuvius Vent.

“Houston, Vesuvius Base here—
Venture
is on the surface and, ah, tied down.”

He patted Pogo on the forearm. He could see his pilot grinning, making a quick sign of the cross. Only now did Tea and Yvonne speak, letting out whoops of relief.

Then Weldon finally responded.
“Venture
, Houston. As they said the first time, you’ve got a bunch of people about to turn blue here. Next time, drop the anchor.”

Zack pointed to Pogo, who said, “Copy that, Houston. Tell ops I want credit for three landings.”

For the next few minutes, they ran through the postlanding checklist, making sure not only the two main engines but the RCSs were shut down, that
Venture
was level and not settling into a pool of water now turning back to ice. “I think we’ve got rock under the pads,” Yvonne said. “That’s a good thing.”

They also removed helmets and gloves, though two of them would be donning them again for the first steps on Keanu.

Zack stepped away from forward position and slipped past Tea and Yvonne. The
Venture
cabin was cramped—it would be very close quarters for the weeklong mission—but designed to be divided in two.

He pulled the privacy curtain, creating a vague “room.” With his gloves off, he reached for the keyboard to tap out a private message to Rachel: MADE IT—INFLIGHT MOVIE TERRIBLE BUT HAD A WINDOW SEAT XOXO DAD.

He hit send. Then the tension of the past several hours, the past four sleepless days, the past two years, slammed him like a sudden squall. He buried his chin in his chest and shook with sorrow over the miracle of what he’d just lived through . . . the looming challenges ahead of him . . . and the fact that his wife would never know any of it.

Worst of all, that it was her accident that gave him this opportunity. She had to die so he could risk death.

Megan . . . we made it.

When he thought back two years, he still found himself angry—at God, at the universe, at whoever or whatever was in charge. He was crying from sorrow, but also from fury.

“Zack, how are you doing?” It was Tea, having slipped behind the curtain, speaking so quietly that Patrick and Yvonne couldn’t hear.

The typical male response would be to shrug off the question with a noncommittal answer. But he and Tea knew each other too well. “Been better.”

“It’s been a tough road.” She patted Zack’s arm, then turned away, leaving him in this brief bubble of privacy.

He took a breath and wiped his eyes. They had made the landing; now they had to explore a whole new world.

Oh, yes, and wait for whatever
Brahma
might pull.

Well, he had been able to establish one important scientific principle: Tears don’t fall in a NEO’s gravity field.

Part Two

“LONG, GENTLE THUNDER”

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou return.

GENESIS 3:19

TWO YEARS AGO

Tropical Storm Gregory was approaching the Houston area the day Megan Stewart was buried. The hot rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sweeping across the roiled waters of Clear Lake, obscuring the headquarters building at the Johnson Space Center, turning streets into rivers of slick menace.

It also transformed the procession from St. Bernadette’s to the cemetery from a stately ceremony into a ragged retreat. Zack felt a surge of sympathy for the more casual mourners, such as parents from Rachel’s school who felt obligated to attend the services but whose empathies would be sorely tested by hot rain blowing directly into their faces.

Not that the ceremony would be underattended. Zack had had no idea how many people would turn up, but St. Bernadette’s had been jammed. Not with just local friends, but workers from JSC and people Megan had worked with over the years: editors, producers, even a few characters who had been
subjects
of various profiles and interviews. Zack was not the type to judge the success or failure of a funeral by the number of attendees, but . . . there it was.

Of course, the shocking and public nature of her death contributed. The headline had made every news outlet.
“Moonbound Astronaut’s Wife Dies in Florida Car Crash.”
The story had a media throw-weight equal to the overdose death of some Hollywood actress/model/whatever. Megan herself would have approved of the perfect storm of tragedy and notoriety.

None of which was much comfort to Zack, to Rachel, or to Megan’s parents.

James Doyle, Megan’s father, was a thick, ruddy man of seventy who looked like a career cop with a history of alcohol abuse, but was, in fact, a retired insurance salesman with a history of alcohol abuse. He had summed it up for Zack: “No matter how bad things are going, they can always get worse.”

Zack’s own parents were not present, though the circumstances—Dad’s increasing frailty, Mom’s lack of comprehension—were not happy, either.

Now James Doyle sat across from Zack in the limo thoughtfully provided by the funeral home. He was vainly trying to comfort Megan’s mother, Diane, a slim, vital woman of Scottish descent in her midsixties, clearly the one Megan took after.

In the seat ahead sat Megan’s brother, Scott; his wife; and their seven-year-old son. Their grief was either overwhelmingly numbing or under control. But thank God they were here. The challenge of having to face them, to comfort them and be comforted, had allowed Zack to compartmentalize his own grief and put it aside.

For the moment. He had yet to break down over the loss of lover and wife.

Or his loss of the Moon.
He would have traded that adventure, every glorious moment of it, to have Megan back.

As the car rolled down the Gulf Freeway toward Forest Park Cemetery, Zack thought about the casket in the hearse ahead of them.

Megan was inside. Megan with the deep brown eyes and that wicked smile. The athletic yet feminine build. The slim legs that still, after eighteen years of intimacy, had the magic to stir him. The walk that had caught his eye at Berkeley.

The throaty laugh and perfectly pitched voice that, he realized after many years, was the single trait he found most attractive in her.

All stilled and silenced.
Boxed for shipping.

At the hospital, he had forced himself to look on her battered body. Not as horrible as he feared—the only visible damage a bruise on the right side of her face. But Zack could not believe it was Megan . . . the collection of bone, muscle, and blood on the gurney was too still to be his often-jittery, constantly mobile wife.

Enough. Time to act like an astronaut—don’t look back, look at the problem directly in front of you.

Which was Rachel. She had escaped serious physical injury in the crash, but the shock and trauma would be with her forever.

In the first hours afterward, she had acted irrationally, speaking only to demand her Slate and, when Zack failed to produce it (the unit was still in the wreckage of the car, wherever that was), sinking into a sullen stupor that stretched over three days. She went through the motions of her precrash life—she ate, she dressed, she continued to experiment with makeup. There was nothing robotic about it, nothing overt enough to trigger a diagnosis of depression. She was merely . . . subdued. When addressed, she would respond, but usually with a single word.

At least, that was Zack’s perspective. How reliable were his judgments?

Zack could not make words come out of his mouth.
Take a breath.
He had to be strong not only for Rachel, but for Megan’s parents, who sat across from them, their faces furrowed with concern. He patted his daughter’s hand and tried to be calm and businesslike. “Have you got your poem?”

Rachel’s eyes widened in apparent horror. Emotion! Zack wanted to cheer. “Oh my God, I think I left it home!”

Before Zack could react, Rachel’s face reset to cold and stoic. Her voice, however, was rich with teenage condescension. “Do you
honestly
think I’d screw this up?”

By the time the cortege reached the grave site, the wind and rain had stopped. The cemetery was bathed in a gauzy sunlight that Zack found both peaceful and unusual.

As the casket was being wrestled into place, another car arrived from a different direction.

For an instant, Zack hoped it would be Harley Drake. Harley had been badly injured in the accident, likely crippled, alive but still unconscious. Zack wanted Harley to wake up and be well, because he was his friend—and because he wanted to know what happened.

But out of the car stepped chief astronaut Shane Weldon and Zack’s newly former
Destiny-5
crewmates: Tea Nowinski, Geoff Lyle, and Mark Koskinen.

And Zack’s replacement, Travis Buell. The new
Destiny-5
commander—Zack’s backup these past two years—was a slight, almost scholarly-looking man of forty. Crew trainers used to joke that Zack looked like an Army helicopter pilot, while Buell seemed more professorial. And Zack had been willing to accept the observation. Buell seemed to live in the realm of ideas rather than physical action. In Buell’s eyes you could see the light of true belief, whether in the biblical Jehovah, the perfection of the United States of America, or the necessity of making a manually controlled landing at Shackleton as opposed to one flown by computer. These all happened to be issues he and Zack had sparred over for two years. Even at this distance, in these circumstances, Zack could see the righteous fire in the man.

A step behind the
Destiny
crew came Taj Radhakrishnan, dapper in a London Fog while the astronauts wore hideous yellow plastic raincoats over NASA flight suits. Tea broke from the others and went directly to Zack. “Sorry we’re late,” she said. “They almost waved us off.” Of course . . . the storm that marred Megan’s funeral would affect air travel in the area, especially for small NASA jets coming into nearby Ellington Field.

They had not seen each other since the press conference. Now Tea wrapped her surprisingly muscular arms around him. “God, Zack, I am so sorry.”

On her best days, Tea Nowinski was the astronaut equivalent of a movie star—blond, blue-eyed, terrific figure—the all-American girl. Half the astronauts in the office thought that she and Zack were having an affair. Not that the idea hadn’t crossed his mind. They were indeed attracted to each other. But there were several reasons why the relationship remained professional and platonic. For one, the intimacy required of
Destiny
crews destroyed any vestige of romance. As Harley Drake used to say, “Once you’ve seen your buddy use the toilet on the ceiling, you never look at him the same again.” That went double for any male astronaut lusting after a female colleague.

For another, Tea had a history of passionate, troubled involvements with men, including a recent fling with an Air Force weather officer she had met at the Cape. Watching her dial through an unusually broad range of emotions—from pure joy to hysterical fury—thanks to some petty error on the part of Major Right Now was another disincentive.

And, truly, chasing other women was simply not in Zack’s personal tool kit, crowded out by genuine affection for his family and the sheer overwhelming, all-consuming responsibility for the first crewed lunar landing of the twenty-first century.

At this moment, Tea was simply a mess . . . runny nose, blotchy skin, streaming tears. “Hey,” Zack said, knowing how forced he sounded, “doesn’t this violate your quarantine?” The
Destiny-5
crew should have been locked down, isolated from stray germs.

Instead of snapping a profane reply—her normal response to any facetious question—Tea simply blinked back more tears and knelt to embrace Rachel, who was several steps behind Zack, flanked by James and Diane. Zack noted that although Rachel’s expression remained blank, her posture snapped rigid. Was that caused by annoyance at being hugged by a relative stranger?