Heaven's War (30 page)

“Twenty meters high, five across at its widest,” Dale Scott said. Of course, Makali thought; he had worked closely with the
Brahma
teams. “It looks as though the crew cabin is sort of intact.”

While the lower or left half of the spacecraft showed severe damage, crushing, and melting, the conical nose looked scorched, but whole.
“Makes sense,” Williams said. “The return capsule’s designed to withstand the heat of reentry. Heat from a pocket nuke wouldn’t be an order of magnitude worse in this environment.”

“How comforting,” Valya said, not hiding her sarcasm.

“I want to go inside,” Scott said. “If the interior is intact, I guarantee you there’s food and water, enough for a crew of four for a week. Some tools, who knows what else we’d find that might be useful.”

Makali hadn’t been thinking of useful supplies, either, but of sheer curiosity. “There are two hatches, right, Dale?”

Scott was loping around the nose of the craft. “Correct. The EVA hatch on the lower deck, and the side hatch on the return vehicle.”

“Stupid question, but are they locked?”

“Not the EVA hatch. But there might have been a guard on the return vehicle, something you’d enable only on reentry. You know, to keep someone from blowing the thing in flight.”

Makali was searching for the EVA hatch, a squarish piece of metal a meter and a half on each side. “I can’t remember,” she said. “The
Brahma
crew was not aboard when the bomb went off, so that hatch would be open?”

“Correct,” Scott said.

“Got it,” Zack said. He was on the opposite side of the wrecked spacecraft. Makali circled around the left, skirting the twisted legs and shattered propulsion module. Valya followed her.

Williams was with Zack. They were pointing to a slab of crumpled metal on the underside of
Brahma
. “There’s the EVA hatch,” Zack said, “open—

“—and completely inaccessible,” Williams finished.

Makali had to agree;
Brahma
had fallen on the side where the hatch lay open, crushing it and burying it. “It might be possible to push it back,” Williams said.

“Maybe,” Zack said. “But that material looks jagged and we’re wearing…skin.”

“Hey, good news and bad news, friends,” Dale Scott said. He was at the
Brahma
’s front end. “I found the return vehicle hatch.”

The rounded nose of
Brahma
, and the silvery skin, looked singed on one side, the one facing
Venture
and the blast. Other than that, and the
fact that the vehicle was on its side, it looked intact, much as Makali remembered it from pictures.

Of course, none of those pictures showed it with its circular hatch open, flopped to one side like a small access platform. “Didn’t you say it was locked?”

“Only a possibility,” Scott said.

“Locked or unlocked, why is it open now?” Williams said.

“From the blast?” Zack said. “Or from being tipped over?”

“Not the hatch I knew,” Scott said.

The five of them were circling the nose and the hatch, as if wary of going closer.
The hell with this,
Makali thought. She skipped right up to the hatch, which was almost at eye level. Her skinsuit wouldn’t allow her to pull herself up to it, but low gravity meant that she could hop fairly high, high enough for a peek inside.

“The cockpit looks intact,” she said. “And some of the displays are still lit.”

“How is that possible?” Valya said.

“
Brahma
’s batteries were good for another week,” Scott said. “If the cockpit is still intact, it means that the force of the blast probably wasn’t severe enough to sever the connections.”

“Are we going to talk about this all day?” Makali said. “Or is someone going to give me a boost so I can get inside?”

Even though she had more than a layperson’s familiarity with the
Brahma
cockpit, Makali’s entry was quite disorienting. Had
Brahma
been in its nominal, upright position, the hatch opened to the right, allowing ingress and egress to the middle two of four couches. But those two couches folded under the other two for orbital or landing operations.

When Makali stepped through the hatch, she found herself looking up at the commander’s couch and its folded companion, and trying to stand on the other pair. The control panel was to her right. The “floor” of the spacecraft, and the access hatch to the lower, airlock deck, were above and to her left. The immediate left was taken up with the bulkhead covering
Brahma
’s ascent motor. Which was, she suddenly realized, filled with toxic fuels. She hoped there were no leaks.

The cockpit seemed dark, deserted, and cramped. Of course, the lower deck doubled as a habitation area, a fat doughnut surrounding the ascent stage. This was where the four
Brahma
travelers rode through launch, maneuvers, and touchdown on Earth.

Had they finally gotten home? The three surviving
Brahma
astronauts had joined
Venture
crew member Tea Nowinski aboard the
Destiny
orbiter, which, if Makali remembered correctly, had been crash-landed onto the surface here…and safely launched toward Earth.

She knew the crew members, some better than others. The Indian commander, Taj. How horrifying to have him survive the mishaps on Keanu, to return home and find that his son had been snatched away. Lucas Munaretto, so handsome and charming—and so unsuited to the rigors of spaceflight.

Makali barely knew Natalia Yorkina. But she had been good friends with Dennis Chertok, the oldest and most experienced member of the
Brahma
team—and its only fatality. Poor Dennis! So focused, so driven, so knowledgeable. He had spent almost two years in space on half a dozen different missions going back almost thirty years, every one of them marked by some equipment failure that he had been able to solve.

She wished he were here now.

“Looking for anything in particular?” Dale Scott was two steps behind her.

“Well, your food and water would be a good start.”

“Most of that would be below.” He edged into the cockpit with her, wrenching himself around to reach the access hatch. “It’s open, but—”

Makali could see past him. “Damaged.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I can even fit in there.”

“Forget it,” she said. “It would be great to have extra goodies, but they’d be gone in an hour.”

They both straightened up. Then, gingerly placing their feet on the sides of the couches, they moved away from the hatch and toward the control panel. “So, who
did
open that hatch?” Makali said.

“No fucking idea.”

“There must be something we can take, something that will be useful.”

“It’s a spacecraft, lady. Especially this module. It’s all instruments,
controls, computers, comm, none of which is useful in our present situation.” He pointed to a panel mounted above them. “Since it’s technically a wreck, I suppose we could take the cockpit recorder….”

“There’s a
black box
?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s not as though anyone expected
Brahma
to crash, or if it crashed, to be found. It was just a data storage device, all the uplinks, maneuvers, imagery.”

“I want it.”

Scott looked at her as if she were raving. “Why?”

“When we get back to the habitat, it will give me something to do.” That wasn’t the answer, of course. The black box held data, and data was her life. Especially data on exo-environments, possibly on the postblast environment. She had been nursing dark thoughts about the radiation levels here—

Scott braced himself in order to reach above his head and detach the recorder unit. “Whoa,” he said.

“What?”

He gestured at several cabinets directly in front of him. Because of her need to brace in midcockpit, Makali had not been able to see them before this.

Two cabinets had been ripped open, their covers literally torn from the hinges. One contained clothing that, she could now see, was dumped below her in the dark bottom of the cockpit. The other cabinet had been cleaned out.

“What do you suppose happened?” Makali said. “Is that damage from the crash?”

“Could be, but look lower.”

Below the vandalized cabinets was another damaged area…a third door that looked as though it had been punched in. It was jagged and some pieces were missing…and there was a film of frozen red or orange fluid on it.

“I think,” Dale said, “that someone opened the hatch and did some damage in here.”

“And to himself,” Makali said, deciding without any justification that the red fluid was blood.

Scott handed her the recorder unit. It was just too big to fit
comfortably in Makali’s hand. Scott could see that as well. He must have learned something from his abortive ISS mission, because without being asked, he tore some netting from a corner of the cockpit. “You’ll need this,” he said, adding a tool kit and several pieces of cable and clips from another cabinet. “I don’t know how helpful it will be—

Just then Zack’s rounded, skinsuited head rose above the open hatch. “Come out here. We found something.”

“So did we.” He told Zack about the cabinets and the possible blood.

“Yeah. I think you need to exit, now.”

Head bowed, Wade Williams was carefully searching an area directly in front of the
Brahma
nose, moving deliberately. He reminded Makali of a beachcomber using a metal detector to search for coins.

“So, what do you have?” Scott said.

“Tracks,” Williams said. Zack had told the others about the possible “incursion” into the
Brahma
cockpit. Zack’s description made her think of a black bear attack on a campsite.

In the glare, with the diminished acuity of the skinsuit “eyes,” the tracks weren’t easy to see, but they were unmistakably present: a series of long scrapes on the thin layer of ice and snow. Each one was half a meter long. “Bipedal, I judge,” Williams said. As a sci-fi writer, he was in heaven. “And a big fella.”

He was following them away from
Brahma
, to where the ice and snow-covered regolith gave away, again, to the white plates. “They’re hard to see on the white stuff,” he said, “but still present.”

Scott was still examining the most visible tracks. “I’m not sure it’s just one creature,” he said. “There’s a scattering of other markings, too.”

“Two sets?” Valya said. She sounded alarmed.

Zack walked over for a second look. “Well, we know that at least two nonhuman life forms exist on Keanu—the Architects and the Sentries. Who’s to say there couldn’t be others?”

“Who’s to say this is two different creatures?” Williams said. “Maybe it’s just your Architect.”

“I hope so,” Zack said. “I’ve got unfinished business with that guy.”

“So let’s find him,” Makali said. “
Follow
him.”

She pointed straight ahead.

“Where?” Valya said.

“Mt. St. Helens,” she told her. “The next vent.”

“How far is it?” Williams said.

“Check me on this, Zack, but ten, maybe fifteen kilometers.”

Zack had frozen into apparent immobility. He knew what Makali was proposing. “At least.”

“A bit of a hike,” Williams said. “Of course, we still don’t have any way back into our habitat, and don’t know how long these suits are good for—”

“This is officially fucking crazy!” Scott said. Perhaps he was being protective of Valya, or maybe he was just using common sense. “I agree that going back through the Beehive seems not too promising, but I have a hard time believing that the next best option is to hike overland to some other vent. Suppose it gives us access to another habitat—suppose that habitat is filled with the creatures that ransacked
Brahma
! How is that good?”

“There are no good options,” Zack said. “So we make the best of what we’ve got.”

“Which is?”

He pointed at the plates on the surface leading in the general direction of Mt. St. Helens Vent. “Follow the blinding white road.”

“It’s kidney failure,” he said.

It was the first time he had uttered those words to anyone. Not to his chief of staff at JSC, not to his girlfriend or his mother.

Certainly not his daughter.

No one.

The diagnosis was recent, of course. The definitive word had been delivered to him at Baylor only, what, less than a month ago?

“How advanced?” Harley Drake said. The HB mayor had found him slumped against a rock a kilometer from the Temple, in the direction of the opposite wall, beyond Lake Ganges.

How had he gotten there? Jones wasn’t sure.

“Far enough. Stage four, they call it. I’ve got elevated creatine levels, family history of diabetes and high blood pressure.