Heaven's War (32 page)

“This is really starting to freak me out,” Rachel announced.

She and Pav and Zhao had walked, by Zhao’s estimate, half a kilometer down the lightless shaft. Discovering that the Indian boy carried a Slate, Zhao invented a game: Every two hundred paces, which had to be counted by Rachel, then Pav in turn, the trio would stop and flash the Slate’s light.

They had accomplished five such illuminations, none of which revealed anything different, just a smooth, rocky floor and walls that curved enough to confirm that they were in a cylinder.

Zhao was growing a bit unsettled himself, given the bizarre circumstances…being essentially walled into the tunnel by a nine-year-old girl…theoretically chasing a dog—a
reborn
dog, let’s not forget—with limited resources, to wit: a Slate, a bottle of water, and a candy bar he had bartered from Xavier Toutant.

All in the company of the only two teenagers in the population, both of them children of the
Destiny
or
Brahma
astronauts.

Looking at it from Pav’s point of view, or Rachel’s, the situation was even more unsettling, given that they knew him as either a spy or a killer.

Rachel said, “Shouldn’t we be finding a cross-tunnel or some other way out by now?”

“In a human-built mine on Earth, yes,” Zhao said. “But I don’t think we can
expect
anything here.”

“Well,” Pav said, “Keanu is what, a hundred kilometers across? If we’re walking in a straight line, eventually we’ll get to the other side.”

Zhao forced a smile, even though he knew the teens couldn’t see it.
Stay in character,
he thought.
Follow your training.
He didn’t feel the need
to point out that while this shaft seemed straight, it likely wasn’t…that it would not be a vector through the sphere that was Keanu, but could just as easily be an arc, curving and curving….

Well, that was a pointless mental exercise. Even if Pav were correct that following this shaft might lead to the other side of Keanu…they couldn’t walk a hundred kilometers without food and water.

They couldn’t walk twenty.

“My hunch,” he said, offering fake optimism, the kind you gave a prisoner undergoing interrogation, “is that we will find a branch or a turn or an exit once we’ve reached the end of our habitat.”

“Shouldn’t we be pretty close to that by now?” Pav said. He was a young man—inked, wired, impatient. Zhao knew quite a few like Pav, not just from his time in India, but in posts in China, too. He found them all difficult to control past a few hours.

Not that he was expecting to have to control Pav past a few hours. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “Pav, your turn to count.”

Both teens started walking again.

Rachel was a greater challenge than Pav. Zhao knew what buttons to push to keep a bright, immature teen male in line. He knew of no equivalent training buttons that would produce predictable results with a bright, immature teen female, especially an entitled American.

Especially an entitled American teen female whose father was in her life and affecting her behavior.

Or an entitled American teen female whose dead mother had been recently in her life.

They had reached 140 in Pav’s count when all three of them stopped.

“Do you feel that?” Rachel said.

“It was like I was being pulled toward the wall!” Pav said.

He was quite agitated, and Zhao couldn’t blame him; he had felt something, too…a tingling that started with the soles of his sneaker-clad feet and shot up one side of his body. “Light, please,” he said.

The Slate flashed and held, and Zhao was surprised to see that the shaft was no longer cylindrical, but squared off; that the surface looked shiny, white, and polished, like the tiles in a new subway station; and that there was a branch leading to their right…what Zhao took to be the direction away from the human habitat. The main shaft continued.

“When did everything go so weird?” Rachel said. Her voice held her usual teen sneer, but Zhao could hear the hint of panic.

He touched her shoulder firmly. “Kill the light,” he told Pav. “I didn’t notice a specific change—”

“—Unless it was that zap we got,” Pav said, finishing Zhao’s statement, which Zhao found annoying.

“Now I know what’s freaking me out,” Rachel said. She had moved close enough to Zhao that he could feel her trembling. “This isn’t a tunnel, it’s a pipe.”

“What’s the difference?” Pav said.

Zhao was struck by Rachel’s insight. How had he missed it? “People and machines use tunnels for access. Pipes are for the transfer of fluids—” He didn’t have many phobias, but drowning in an enclosed space in the dark would top the short list.

“The walls were dry,” Pav said, clearly trying to make a case they all wanted made.

“For now,” Rachel said, almost hissing.

“The question,” Zhao said, “is whether this new branch is less like a pipe than what we just walked through.”

“I vote we take it,” Rachel said, already edging toward it.

“So we’ve given up on the dog?” Pav said.

“We haven’t heard or seen him in the past hour,” Zhao said. “I think—”

Just then he and the other two felt the strange tug and tingle again.

Only this time they were slammed against the wall and instantly dragged toward the new branch shaft like metal filings to a magnet. They were left hanging halfway up the wall…then released, sliding to the floor.

It wasn’t painful, though their clothing likely prevented scrapes, but it was frightening.

Fortunately, it lasted only a few seconds. Pav was the first to regain his feet, and he helped Rachel, then Zhao. “That,” the young man said, “was officially weird.”

Rachel turned to Zhao. “So what was that?”

Zhao realized that he could see Rachel and Pav. The new shaft was bathed in a blue, actinic light, but distorting. “Look!” Pav said.

As Zhao and Rachel watched, with considerable horror, the shape of the shaft ahead of them deformed, a wave passing away from them like a silent tsunami.

“To answer your earlier question,” Zhao said, “or your next, I have no idea.”

“Whatever it was, the first time it felt like it was headed up the shaft, the way we came,” Rachel said. “This time it came back—”

“—And made a turn and went down this tunnel,” Pav said.

“It looked like—God, this is going to sound stupid,” Rachel said.

Zhao was curious. “What did it look like, Rachel?”

“Like a little ball—as small as a marble—was being sucked through the wall of the shaft.”

“I didn’t see that,” Pav said.

“Well, I did.”

Rachel laughed. “This is funny?” Pav said.

“No, just…I played with marbles when I was little. You had steelies and agates. My favorite was a cat’s-eye because it had all these different colors—”

Zhao wasn’t ready to concede the idea that a small particle somehow distorted gravity—but on further reflection, why not? Based on its mass and density, Keanu’s gravity should be a fraction of what it appeared to be (about half Earth normal, one of the Bangalores had calculated). “Something is adding or changing gravity,” he said. “It could be we just saw it. Your cat’s-eye.”

“We sure
felt
it,” Pav said.

“Poor Cowboy,” Rachel said. “Even if he didn’t get squashed, he probably got thrown around….”

Rachel trailed off. Zhao felt a moment of disorientation, as if he had suddenly been picked up, spun, and dropped, all in less than a second.

Something was happening again, and not just the flyby of some gravity marble—

He felt heat on the back of his neck.

“Now what?” Pav was saying.

Zhao turned…a wall of yellow goo was rushing at them, a gelatinous mass the size of a subway train, and leaving just as little room for escape.

If he hadn’t been wrapped in the cocoonlike skinsuit, forced to work with Zack Stewart and crazy Makali, tagging along with his ex and with an ancient sci-fi writer, with no real knowledge of his destination or how long he would have life support—

Dale Scott would have enjoyed the trek to Mt. St. Helens, which was the next vent—one of the Keanu features given terrestrial names by clever, unimaginative Earth-based astronomers.

The path was blessedly smooth, better than any road or sidewalk Dale had seen, even allowing for the fact that his most recent exposure to roadways was in Russia and India, where the standards fell considerably short of, say, Beverly Hills.

He decided that the closest thing to this white Keanu surface material was a basketball court, specifically the parquet of the old Boston Garden. (His father had taken him there when he was eight. He’d never forgotten the smooth, solid-but-yielding beauty of that floor.)

The sky was the black of space, though lots of it. Dale had seen that sky, of course, but only through small windows. He had never walked out in it, in the open. By raising his head, he could see stars, a very strange sight over a sunlit landscape. Thank God the crescent Earth lay behind them; he would have found it distracting and, given his chances of ever walking on it again, sad.

Physically, he was still feeling fine. In another time or place, he would have been eager to dissect the skinsuit to see what techno-magic allowed it to provide a breathable atmosphere (he assumed that the same sort of nanobuilt gear that developed in the vesicle was wrapped around his waist right now) while keeping him from being thirsty, hungry, or tired.

He and the others had reported feeling a series of pinpricks up their
spines and in their stomachs; Dale was pretty sure the suit was giving him water and calories that way, and possibly even the Keanu equivalent of an energy drink.

As for other life support matters, he hadn’t tried to urinate yet, but then, he hadn’t felt the urge, either. Given the challenges of elimination in even the most advanced human space suits, which Dale knew better than almost anyone (EVA suits had been his first tech assignment as an astronaut), this was the true innovation, worth millions or tens of millions on Earth.

But he wasn’t going back to Earth.

At least, not yet. Not that he could see. Given that, he was doing okay.

He just wished he could touch his medallion, the lucky item he wore around his neck.

Because this wasn’t an ordinary medallion. No, sir, no St. Christopher medal for him. This was a genuine 1974 Incredible Hulk medallion he had bought with his allowance when he was eleven.

He had displayed it in his room for the next three years, next to his comic books and action figures. He was ashamed to admit that he liked the Hulk, the green-skinned alter ego of mild-mannered professor Bruce Banner when circumstances demanded…rage and muscle, not brains and timidity, not because of the Marvel comic books, but because of the CBS TV series.

Whatever. Nobody but Seth Bryant ever asked him, and Seth was a comic book snob and geek. Dale Scott was, to the rest of the world, a jock.

Who relied on the Hulk to keep him safe.

That was necessary around the Scott household, because John Jeremy Scott was a blackout alcoholic—a fact Dale realized when he was eleven. Until that time, he had just thought J. J. Scott, a police officer in Anaheim, was tough because he had to be. He would yell and stomp around the house and break things—not always, not even very often, but enough—and, when Dale was younger, slap him when he got out of line.

From the time he got the Hulk, however, Dale never got slapped. Not once, up to the day his father finally moved out.

And Dale discovered that his Hulk was gone! Stolen from its place of honor on his shelf.

He didn’t have to wonder who (his father) or why (because J. J. Scott
was always doing nasty things and once had teased Dale about spending his time watching the Hulk on TV).

But Dale had his revenge. After J.J. moved out and then moved in with some other woman, he settled in Fullerton, not far from Anaheim. He shared custody of Dale and Dale’s sister, Chelsea, though he wasn’t very rigorous about keeping to the schedule—a relief to both children.

The one time Dale found himself in J.J.’s apartment, he had sneaked into the master bedroom…and found the Hulk medallion sitting in the top drawer of a clothes chest.

Dale had pocketed the medallion and escaped clean with it, though he lived in trembling fear that J.J. would discover the theft—or, rather, the recovery—and turn on him in one of his terrible rages.

Dale feared that right up to the night, two years later, that J.J. Scott died in an off-duty auto accident…drunk.

He had had it put on a chain, so he wouldn’t lose it, and the Hulkster had accompanied him to Cal Poly Pomona, then to the Navy and flight training and grad school, to Iraq twice, and test pilot school and NASA, and even aboard the International Space Station.