Heaven's War (26 page)

It seemed to have trouble walking and seemed fatter than a human, with thick masses around its waist.

But then it raised its right hand.

And Dale heard a muffled but all-too-human voice, complete with Aussie accent, saying “It’s me! Makali!”

Zack immediately tried to free Makali from the second skin, but she pushed him away. “Don’t!”

“When I found Megan she had to get out of that—”

“It’s different,” Makali said. She turned and pointed to the Membrane. “I was out there, in vacuum! It’s some kind of protective suit. I can breathe. I can see.” Each statement was accompanied by broad gestures. “I’m pretty comfortable.”

“How the hell did you get into it?” Williams said.

Makali pointed at the reincarnation pod the croc had torn open. “I crawled in there and kicked through to the next one. Fell into it, actually.” Dale heard a terrible coughing sound, then realized it was Makali laughing. “I thought I was drowning!”

“What did you see on the other side?” Dale asked.

“Not much; I didn’t get far: a big, symmetrical cavern.” She nodded at Zack. “Rover tracks.”

“How long do you propose to stay in that outfit?” Zack said.

“As long as it will support me,” Makali said. “I’d like to go back through the Membrane.”

“Not by yourself, you aren’t. Sorry. We can try this some other time—”

“Can you feel that?” Wade Williams was holding his hand at the opening of the shattered pod. “Airflow.”

“Going in or going out?” Dale said, not liking the first thought that came to his mind.

“Out.”

Zack stepped up. So did Dale. Everyone felt the same thing…air being sucked from the tunnel, the Beehive, and possibly the habitat, into the open space of the tunnel beyond.

“We need to seal this,” Zack said.

“Fuck that,” Dale said. He had no interest in any of this, or in remaining here in a very dangerous place. But Valya shrieked again, and Dale knew that this was not her standard startled shriek.

This was terror.

Two freshly revenanted cows were thundering toward them down the narrow passage, driven toward them by, from the sounds of it, the croc.

The creatures were all stuck at the moment, thrashing, fighting, eating and being eaten.

And in the process destroying the passage. Dale could feel his ears pop, a very bad sign in a chamber separated from vacuum only by what appeared to be a meter of vegetative material mixed with rock.

“What do we do?” Valya said. The shriek had gone out of her; she was plaintive, almost helpless.

“Everyone pick a pod,” Zack said. He turned to the nearest one and began clawing at it.

“What are you suggesting?” Williams said.

“Do what I did!” Makali shouted. She was already helping Valya, though her efforts were hampered by the thick skinsuit “gloves” she wore.

And it was getting hard to hear. Dale’s ears ached.

He needed no further encouragement. Shoving the Tik-Talk into his waistband, he commenced his own clawing at the nearest pod large enough to hold a human-sized item.

“We’re going to die in these things!” Williams said, unnecessarily.

“Possibly,” Zack snapped. “But you’re going to die for sure out here.”

The last sounds Dale heard, other than the horrific squeals and crunches of two animals in mortal combat, was a series of rips and gushes as four reincarnation pods spilled open, followed by the thud of whatever lay inside hitting the ground.

“Good luck, everybody!” he shouted, and dived into the dark, moist suffocating space.

After four days of life in the Keanu habitat, Zhao realized that he had finally found the one environment he hated more than India.

It was a shame that he had had to travel four hundred thousand kilometers to experience it. The light was wrong; the companions were not of his choosing; the food was limited to non-existent. There was nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to study. He could perform calisthenics if he wished, but he enjoyed more structured physical activities like golf and tennis. There were few potential sexual partners and zero potential sexual venues and opportunities.

He had no tasks, no useful work.

And he was the only criminal around.

He had not been mistreated; far from it. He had been treated exactly like everyone else…which, of course, was a form of mistreatment.

He had taken his turn with the gathering of food, though always in isolation. Even if he hadn’t carried a virtual mark of Cain, as the only Asian in the population, he stood out. The Houston group shunned him; the Bangalores simply pretended he didn’t exist.

The only benefit was that this position allowed him the opportunity to observe.

Observation one: The activation of the Temple under Nayar, Jones, Weldon, and Drake was proceeding in almost comic fashion.

Zhao had managed to join the throng that surged into the Temple once its walls and floors had rearranged themselves to more human proportions. Unlike most of the others, he had stuck around. His initial impression—marvelous! If he hadn’t already been impressed with the Architects’ mastery of molecular manufacturing, he would have thought their mechanical engineering to be the most fascinating thing he had
ever seen…allowing for some obvious anomalies that hinted at a system on the verge of a breakdown. (But he should withhold judgment on that issue; what, really, did he know of these Architects and their motives?)

No, for the better part of an hour, he simply lurked in the corner of the main floor of the Temple, amused by the sudden, inexplicable changes in lighting and bursts of loud noise. It all reminded him of a long drunken evening with a potential source in a Hong Kong nightclub.

There were even blasts of suddenly cold, then hot air. At one point Zhao could have sworn that he smelled bacon frying.

Each environmental shift was accompanied by not-so-distant torrents of profanity in American English and Hindi from the floor above.

Zhao was trying to concoct a reason for going upstairs when Harley Drake wheeled in from the outside. (He had been one of the original “explorers” of the upper floors but had been called away an hour ago on some strangely urgent matter. Gabriel Jones had gone with him.)

Now he was here, alone; his companion, the large American scientist Sasha Blaine, was not with him. Drake pushed himself to the ramp…attempted to climb the slope by sheer muscle, and failed. He tried again with the chair’s motor, and that, too, was inadequate.

Then he looked at Zhao. “Could you push me up there?”

“No problem.” No problem at all!

The upstairs was a disappointment—not for lack of wonders. It was filled with strange shapes and structures, including an object that had to be a table (rectangular, perhaps a meter wide by two long, and three centimeters thick) made of the same substance that made up everything “artificial” in the habitat, from Temple walls to…well, what looked like appliances or electronic gear on this floor.

There were even three stools…crude and basic, more like dumbbells laid on their sides. But the right height.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Harley said.

“Someone is looking out for us, it seems.”

Nayar and Weldon, accompanied by a woman from the Houston group, were busy touching various surfaces on a control panel. Nayar was using a pen and the margins of a magazine to record positions and
results: which lights went on or off or changed color, which temperature changes were triggered. “Goddammit,” Weldon said, “I wish we had a few pieces of clean paper so we could write this stuff down.”

“Is there any logic to it?” Drake asked. “I did some cockpit design for
Destiny
; we kept falling back on grouping systems.”

“Sadly, no,” said Nayar. “Of course, we’ve just begun our survey. For every panel or button we’ve found to be active in some way, there are two that are inert.”

“So far, you mean,” Drake said.

“Noted,” Weldon said. “Besides, we’ve got three upper floors to go through.” He indicated the “counters” and “consoles.” “They’re all packed with stuff like this.”

“Do you suppose any of it links to guidance, navigation, or propulsion systems?” Zhao said. He hadn’t exactly intended to speak up, finding fly-on-the-wall mode to be useful. But he had not given up on the idea of returning to Earth. He completely approved of Zack Stewart’s mission to examine the vesicles and learn whether they were useful, and he was all in favor of finding some way to control Keanu itself.

Besides…he had worked with Nayar and the ISRO team. It would not surprise them to hear from him.

Weldon was another matter, however. He looked at Zhao with irritation. Nevertheless, all he said was, “We haven’t forgotten—”

A pair of Indian engineers, one slim and Zhao’s age, the other fat and older, came down from the floor above. As if presenting a gift to a feudal lord, one of the men carried an object that looked like a super-sized candy bar…only blue.

He gently set it on the table. “We believe this is nutritious,” he said. Jaidev, Zhao remembered; that was his name. He was deadly serious, but not a bad engineer.

Drake, whose nose was close to the table already, leaned over and sniffed at it. “Doesn’t smell bad.”

The second engineer—Daksha—was openly enthusiastic. “In texture and aroma it reminded me of military food. Meals Ready to Eat.”

“Where did you get it?” Nayar said.

Jaidev turned to his compatriot. “Directly above. We were testing buttons and revealed a cabinet with a faucet.”

“Did it work?”

Jaidev frowned. “While we were trying, one of the machines activated, and this popped out.”

Weldon was clearly skeptical. “Blue food?”

“Whatever,” Drake said. “There it is. What do we do with it?”

“Someone probably has to taste it,” Zhao said. And before anyone could protest, he picked up the bar and bit into it.

The engineer had been right; the texture was much like that of an energy bar. The taste was undefined; nutty. As he chewed, Zhao said, “This
is
one of the things prisoners are for, isn’t it?”

“Nobody likes an asshole,” Drake said. “Even a brave one.”

“Think of all the time I’ve saved you, searching for a volunteer.”

Nayar was all business. He
would
have suggested Zhao as the test subject. “Well?”

Zhao was considering that exact question. His stomach was quite empty; what little food he’d had for the past four days had been unfamiliar, close to inedible. So initial conditions were challenging.

Yet, for the first minute or two…the blue bar rested happily inside him.

Then—

“Excuse me—”

He ran as fast as he could down the ramp and out the front of the Temple, where he vomited in front of Gabriel Jones and Sasha Blaine.

Weldon had followed him, less out of concern, Zhao felt, than out of curiosity.

Fortunately, it was only a single episode. Unlike the many times he had suffered food poisoning—another affliction he associated with warm climates—Zhao felt fine again, and quickly.

Weldon was busy explaining the experiment to Jones and to Sasha Blaine, who was cradling the sleeping baby in her arms.

Which led Zhao to his second great observation of the day: Something bad had happened in the general direction of Lake Ganges. A drowning? Zhao couldn’t be sure, but it was clear from the tones and body language that someone had died.

Two deaths now.
If this trend continued, in three months they would all be dead. Of course, that was pessimistic; things rarely progressed on such straight lines.

Still, it wasn’t promising—

Jones was louder now. “Have we heard from Zack?”

Weldon said, “Harley got a squawk from Dale about half an hour ago, something about watching out for more animals from the Beehive.”

“It just gets better and better,” Jones said.

Harley Drake and Vikram Nayar had emerged from the Temple, Nayar pushing. The blue food bar lay in Drake’s lap.

“You’ve recovered,” Drake said.

“What are you going to do with that?” Zhao said.

“Throw it in the garbage, I guess.”

“Let me try it again.”

“Are you just a glutton for punishment?”

The same thought occurred to Zhao. “I’ve eaten nothing but crap for four days. I’d have probably thrown up anything new.”

Drake was reluctant, but Weldon saw the wisdom of another taste test. “If he’s right, we gain a lot,” he said. He didn’t add, nor did he need to, that if Zhao was wrong, he wouldn’t miss him. He smiled. “Bon appétit.” And handed him the bar.

Zhao took another bite roughly the same size as before. He used every trick of feedback and disassociation he knew—and his training in Guoanbu had equipped him with many such techniques—to suppress the urge to vomit.