Heaven's War (5 page)

One thing that Valya couldn’t help noticing: the surprise on the woman’s face when Valya spoke. True, she’d been a real outsider in Bangalore. Although she was of average height and weighed more than she wanted (at age fifty-three she was finding it depressingly easy to put on pounds), she had blue eyes and blond hair and spoke Hindi with a Russian accent.

Russians had never been popular in India.

In spite of her linguistic skills, her isolation from the other bubble victims was no surprise. Valya had gotten to know very few of the team at Bangalore. To this point, all her
Brahma
-related work had taken place in Moscow.

As well it should have. She was a linguist, not a space person. Yes, she had grown up on the fringes of the space program—her father, Anton Makarov, worked in the Energiya factory, where spacecraft were built; he was essentially a plumber. Valya’s mother was a secretary in one of Energiya’s sister organizations.

From both parents their daughter had learned about the overwhelming and unproductive role of the Communist Party—never dealing with ideology, but only with bonuses and perks—and the inside politics of any organization larger than a football team.

Rather than follow her family, and her contemporaries, into aerospace engineering and a sure job at Energiya, Valya had chosen to study languages at Moscow University.

Part of it was her desire to make money as a translator. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union threw itself open to European and American business
interests in a desperate attempt to remain Communist. The effort had failed; by 1992 the Soviet Union had fallen apart.

But the market for translators never slackened. Valya had made a better than decent living—in hard, non-Russian currency—by knowing not only English, but French, German…Spanish, and Portuguese. Over the years she had added some Arabic and Hindi and had a reading knowledge of Chinese (she spoke the Cantonese version).

It was this broad-based knowledge that had brought her to work for the Indian Space Research Organization, to help translate strange signals. Her skill had likely made it easier for her to fall into a relationship with Dale Scott.

On balance, then, she would have to conclude that language had ruined her life.

After a few hours, however, with the bubble clearly in space, the bodies no longer flailing, the long wave of panic having receded, Valya was able to hear.

Somewhere inside the bubble, machines were at work. There was a definite hum, and occasional insane series of mechanical clicks.

Turning her head, she saw dark rectangular shapes at the nearest “pole” of the bubble. They seemed to be the source of the noises.

No matter. By this point, perhaps two hours into the situation, Valya’s overriding thought became…
Now I need to urinate
.

Before it became an emergency, however, she found herself joining a collection of humans—none of whom she recognized—at the south pole of the bubble, where it became apparent that the object was equipped with life support mechanisms. One unit displayed obvious nipplelike structures, and some desperately thirsty people were lapping away, happily wiping their mouths. “Water!” one of them proclaimed.

Water. Good.

Valya surmised that a similar unit next to it dispensed food of some kind. At the moment, a pair of Indian men in the standard white shirts and slacks were examining the device, fingers probing, hands tapping around the edges. A heavyset young Chinese man joined them for a few moments, too, before giving up.

Thank God for engineers,
she thought.

Then a different man joined them—American, in his fifties, a bit stocky, yet looking somehow less rumpled than the others. He conversed briefly with the two Indians, seemed to reassure himself of something important, then saw Valya…and smiled. “Hey, baby! Happy to see me?”

When the Bangalore Object struck, Valya had just reached Dale’s car in the parking lot. Like most of the several thousand employees of Bangalore Control Center, Valya commuted by bus, a trip that often took an hour, one way, from the city center.

But Dale Scott was American. His belief in private transportation bordered on the religious. He was proud of the fact that he had bullied ISRO into leasing a car for him. “Driving it is still a bitch,” he said. “What they need is what they used to have in Russia…a lane right down the middle of the fricking road for VIPs.”

Valya remembered such a road, running near Energiya. “What makes you think you’d be a VIP here?” she teased.

“I’ve spent four years teaching these folks how to operate in space, and now they’re on their way to Keanu. Without me, Vikram Nayar would be just another space wannabe instead of the rajah of
Brahma
.” One of the things Valya had liked about Dale, his good looks aside, was his confidence that, now and then, slipped into arrogance.

It had hurt him with NASA, she knew. His astronaut career had stalled seven years back. But, for some reason, it had endeared him to the Indians Valya had met. Certainly her stock had risen considerably when they learned she was dating Dale, the unspoken observation being,
He could have all the younger women he wanted!

The same thought had occurred to Valya, of course, who assumed that, in fact, Dale likely
was
having all the younger women he wanted. They had only met two weeks before the
Brahma
launch, hardly time enough to develop a real relationship. She had been flattered by his attention and certainly enjoyed making love with him but wondered how much of the shared attraction was transient—or fueled by a common language.

No matter. Barring a miracle, they had both left behind a world in which relationships existed. Now their goal was day-to-day survival.

She realized, however, that the affair with Dale had probably saved her life. When the shocking news came that a pair of objects had been fired from Keanu toward Earth, and that one of them was targeting Bangalore Control Center, Valya had not known what to do, where to run.

Valya had spent the last two days at the center, working frantically and not productively, trying to translate some of the signs, symbols, and signals received from Keanu. The new imagery from the
Brahma
crew on the NEO had not been shared with the linguistic team dealing with the earlier radio signals. Valya knew there was additional material, but in true ISRO fashion, it wasn’t being shared.

In fact, she was close to leaving the center when Dale appeared in her tiny office and said, “We’re going, now.”

“What about the mission?” she heard herself saying, though she was already in motion down the hallway.

“Fuck the mission, it’s over, anyway.”

They had run for the parking lot, a cramped collection of multicolored automobiles behind the control center. Seeing the jammed vehicles—Indians were worse than Russians when it came to respecting the rights of other cars in a parking lot, and Russians would happily block you in for a day if it suited them—Valya had said, “We’re never going to get out!”

But Dale had simply grinned his crooked grin. “Oh, we’ll get out if I have to steal a car.”

They had barely reached his Mercedes, however, when they realized they weren’t going to get away. They could see and hear the approaching object.

Dale reached for her—to shield her, she thought—but the blinding impact slammed both of them to the pavement. A blast of heat washed over them—it wasn’t hot enough to melt metal, or flesh. Either that, or it didn’t last long enough. It was possible that the jammed vehicles sheltered them.

When Valya was able to stand…helping a stunned Dale to his feet…she was confronted by the most bizarre thing she had ever seen.

A giant white sphere rotated where the main control building had stood. The ground story looked largely intact…Valya thought she could
actually see people in those windows, trying to get out of the destroyed building. A couple of them jumped—not as far or as horrifying as footage from 9/11, but bad enough.

“Don’t look,” Dale had said.

“I’m not a child,” she had snapped.

“Point taken. The plan still holds, though. Let’s get out of here.”

“We’ll never move these cars—” Several vehicles had been jammed together by the shock wave, fused into a giant flat mass of battered automobile.

“Let’s just move ourselves.”

They had managed to cross a hundred meters, beyond the parking lot to a park that was now a collection of windblown debris and shattered trees, when the light around them changed.

Neither of them could help turning. They saw the bubble expanding toward them, scooping them up.

During the next several hours in the bubble, perhaps a day, they never clung to each other. Dale would park her in some new spot along the wall, then go swimming off. “Nayar is here,” he said during one of his departures.

Valya didn’t care. She barely knew the man. And, like most Indian men of his generation, Vikram Nayar, the
Brahma
mission director, was unused to working with women in a professional capacity. He showed it by ignoring her.

After Dale’s fifth or eighth return from errands, Valya finally said, “Why don’t you stay put? What can you possibly be trying to accomplish?”

“Actually, some of us are trying to organize these people, find out what they’re carrying.”

“You haven’t asked me.”

He smiled that crooked smile. “I know what you’re carrying.”

Valya immediately sensed something different. Granted, their circumstances had changed radically. And their relationship was only weeks old. But that voice, that posture, meant a kiss, a touch, a pat on her behind.

But now, here? Nothing. Valya touched his arm. “You’re through with me.”

She knew him well enough to see that her blind shot had struck home. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You won’t touch me. You won’t spend time with me. If it weren’t a little crazy, I’d think that you’d found someone else—”

Naturally he seized on that. “Given the circumstances, that is indeed a little crazy—”

“Don’t deny it.”

He didn’t. He floated for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m married.”

It took Valya a moment to register this information. Then, to deal with her own irrational surprise. She had never considered it! She knew he’d been married before—her one moment of due diligence had been to access Dale’s official NASA biography, which called him “married.” But that was years out of date, untouched since Dale’s unceremonious exit from the American agency.

Then there were the snickering glances from co-workers about Dale’s other, younger, prior women. Somehow it had all lulled her into…well, not asking the question.

She started laughing.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake…it’s not as though—” He wisely left that sentence unfinished. “Why is this funny?”

“
Now
you tell me?
Here?
”

He couldn’t resist joking. “Well, there’s never a good time—”

“Shut up! Leave me alone!” Her anger was as shocking as her surprise at the revelation. Clearly she was hungry, exhausted, frightened…at the edge of sanity, most likely. Or over it, because it was very unlikely that Dale Scott’s being married made any difference. None of them would be seeing Earth again.

She swam away, taking up a perch a few meters away, beyond the cluster of life support machines. After a few moments, Dale launched himself clear across the forty-meter-wide bubble to the opposite side.

Sometime during the second day, Valya returned from an unquiet doze to note a change in the background noise of the bubble. She clutched at her purse as she realized that the clicking and thumping had ramped up.

Dale, apparently feeling that her anger had subsided, was swimming toward her. “Don’t freak out,” he said, making her feel a lot like freaking out.

Through the milky walls, one thing became clear:

Keanu was closer! She and Dale and a hundred others…they were all falling toward it!

“Hey, kid.”

Xavier Toutant was startled by the harsh voice behind him. After an hour of tugging and sweating, he had managed to pry open one of the jammed cabinets inside the back two thirds of the big diesel Fleetwood Freightliner 2020—not that he would have known the name, but it was plastered on the side of the recreational vehicle. It was dark; this whole weightless thing made you feel like an idiot even trying to open a door. Every time you pushed, you were the object that gave.

Now there was some other fool floating in here…white, thin, balding, midthirties, wearing a pair of slacks and a dress shirt that had suffered some major distressing. Even in the shadowy interior, Xavier could see that his face was red and his eyes small and mean. “Ass eyes” was what his uncle Clare would have called them.

“What are you doing in here?”

There were several possible responses, ranging from
None of your fucking business
to his usual noncommittal shrug. But Xavier had been upside down and dizzy and hungry for two days.