Heaven's War (9 page)

“What the hell?” she said.

“I guess everyone got tired of carrying dead weight,” Harley said. “Hey, though, check this out.”

The creep from the White House, Brent Bynum, was pawing through them like a hobo in a restaurant Dumpster.

“Brent,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”

“One of these things has to work.”

Harley glanced sideways at Sasha and Rachel, as if to say,
Stupid son of a bitch
. “I’m sure they all
work
. Even if everyone left their little machines running during the trip, they’re still good for days yet. But, Brent, think this through: where’s the fucking network?”

“I know, I know,” the White House man said. “But we’re not that far
away! If we could get to the surface, we could see Houston and Washington!” Harley was pretty sure you couldn’t—you could barely make out the shape of North and South America. “How far does line of sight work?”

“Not that far,” Shane Weldon said. Rachel had thought so, too, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Who knew what kind of magical, state-of-the-art PDA a White House staffer carried or knew about? Everyone was talking about the Tik-Talk, which had a walkie-talkie capability, but that item had been too expensive for Rachel; she had no idea what it could do. Maybe a Tik-Talk
was
capable of picking up signals at this distance—especially if some unit of the U.S. government kept an antenna pointed at Keanu.

For that matter, maybe they’d kept it pointed at the object as it shrank in the sky.

Gabriel Jones returned. “We’ve all had the same experience…scooped up and brought here. Their bubble thing dissolved, too. They know nothing that we don’t…. Pillay says we should just keep going, and I agree.”

The combined group surged forward, reminding Rachel of refugees fleeing a natural disaster like a volcano or maybe a tsunami. Which, of course, they were. Jones and Pillay took the lead, with Bynum at their heels.

Harley seemed tired and overwhelmed; Rachel couldn’t believe he would pass up the chance to take a verbal shot at Bynum, who, to Rachel, was moving
exactly
like a golden retriever.

Then she realized that Harley wasn’t exhausted…he was taking in the breathtaking vista.

They had entered a space that reminded Rachel of the time her parents had taken her to the old Astrodome…multiplied by a hundred. It was a roofed enclosure, longer than it was wide. “This is big enough to hold a city,” Sasha said.

“Big enough to hold a war,” Weldon added. He was growing increasingly pessimistic.

Rachel hoped that Shane Weldon would cheer up. Certainly she was feeling a little better, now that she realized she was entering a parklike landscape. There was soil, there were rocks, there were greenish growing
things not far off. Smallish trees…or given the odd perspective, maybe not so smallish.

The roof was hundreds of meters high, likely higher, and covered with the same squiggly tubes that had given light in the tunnel, but many more of them.

Harley squeezed Sasha’s hand, then Rachel’s. “In spite of our differences, I think we all have one thing in common,” he said. “Look!”

Every one of the humans, Houston and Bangalore, was staring up, openmouthed, in exactly the same way.

As they marched over a low rise, they gained improved perspective. Not only did the habitat stretch at least ten kilometers in front of them…so far that Rachel could not see the other side…but one structure was in clear view, looking like an Aztec temple rising above a jungle.

Rachel’s appreciation of the alien building was short-lived, however. She heard a growing clamor off to the right, where most of the Bangalores were bunched up and breaking like a wave around a rock.

Two humans were approaching…one was a young girl Rachel had never seen before. “How the hell did those people get ahead of us?” Sasha said.

“They don’t look Indian,” Weldon said.

“They’re not,” Harley said.

No, they were not. Rachel recognized that walk, that oh-so-typical posture! It was her father.

She screamed and pushed through the crowd, heading for him.

The fighting had stopped.

At least, for now, and for Jaidev Mahabala, good. One side of his face was swollen and sore; he had a split lip; his left eye was half-closed. He looked awful, and for a man who took pride in his appearance—said pride already hit hard by the awful stench and misery of the flight from Earth to Keanu—it was emotionally as well as physically painful.

Not that there was ever likely to be a reason to restore his prior appearance: slim, dark-eyed, the carefully cultivated stubble, the close-fitting shirt and tailored trousers. Jaidev’s life had effectively ended when he was enclosed in the Bangalore Object.

But he had hoped that getting into a scuffle over food would have paid off with
something
. A Power Bar or even a drink of warm American beer.

Nothing…except bruises.

His participation in what began as a mad scramble for rations—one of dozens Jaidev had witnessed—had ended with a nasty punch delivered by Daksha Saikumar, a fellow
Brahma
enviro systems engineer. Daksha was a decade older than Jaidev’s twenty-nine, so hairy and slow that unfriendly colleagues dubbed him “the Gorilla.” Jaidev had never considered Daksha a friend, but he had never expected him to shove him aside, then complete the maneuver by striking him in the face.

Jaidev had been left to wander the fringe of the refugee crowd in search of something potentially edible.

All he—and several other members of the Bangalore group—had found was a large, shallow pool of muddy (looking) water, which everyone drank from even as Daksha sniffed in disdain, naming it “Lake Ganges.”

It was the latest in a series of humiliations. Jaidev couldn’t even blame the worst of them on the Bangalore Object.

He was from an IT family; everyone, his father, mother, an older brother, and two older sisters all worked in the Corridor in Chennai, though on a lower level. (One brother ran a call center.)

Jaidev had built on the family experience and earned a position at nearby Sathyamba University, a lucky move, since it allowed him to get out of his father’s house and into the hostel.

(The school had a fleet of buses available to students, too. Odd how those crowded, hot vehicles reminded him of the vesicle….)

The other bit of luck was that his specialty at Sathyamba was mechanical and production engineering rather than telecommunications or computing.

What struck his parents and sibs as an unproductive career detour turned out to be a direct route to study in the United States at Cornell, where he was first exposed to computational synthesis and advanced 3-D printing—processes that promised to revolutionize manufacturing. He had taken part in the development of so-called gray goo…material designed to serve as the building blocks of any substance or structure, mechanical or biological. They called this stuff
plasm
,
p
reliminary
l
ithographic
as
sembly
m
aterial.

It was Jaidev Mahabala the plasm specialist who was able to work briefly for the U.S. space program, then his country’s.

Right up to the week of the
Brahma
mission.

For the last readiness meeting in advance of the launch, thirty members of the Bangalore team flew to Rio de Janeiro.

Jaidev had done his work at the Brazilian Space Agency well; his team had been responsible for crew equipment and consumables. All of the final reports were accepted.

Leaving them all free to play. Leaving Jaidev, alas, free to get drunk in a gay bar on the Avenue Viera Santo near Ipanema Beach.

And to be arrested with a male prostitute.

Jaidev had embraced his homosexuality once out of his family’s
home, making full use of the Internet to find other friends in Chennai, and especially visitors to the tech zone.

It had been fun—and continued to be fun during his time in the United States. He kept hoping to find someone special, someone he could commit to…and had decided to make that his number one personal goal at the conclusion of the
Brahma
mission.

The arrest had destroyed that plan. Rather, he was free to pursue personal goals, because the day the Object struck, he had been called into Vikram Nayar’s office and informed that he was being “transferred” away from the control center to an ISRO office in Ladakh, or someplace equally remote.

He’d been fired.

Word of the scuffle must have reached the new “leaders,” since a group of them came running to Lake Ganges. Most of them were Americans: people such as Gabriel Jones, Shane Weldon, and even Zack Stewart, all known to Jaidev from
Brahma
.

Stewart, Weldon, and Jones saw that there were no Houston types in the group and drifted off to consider the uses of the water supply.

Nayar was left to chastise the rest, all of them quieter. Even Daksha’s temper had cooled and he was now subdued, possibly shamed. It didn’t stop Nayar. “Look at you! Have you forgotten where you came from? Everything you learned? Two days and you’ve become beasts!”

“We need food,” one of the men said.

“You’ll get whatever any of us gets,” Nayar said. “Try to act as though you deserve it. Better yet—be proactive and start searching. Do something useful instead of lying around like this!”

“Vikram!” It was Shane Weldon calling from across the lake. “We need to get back!”

Nayar had turned away from the Bangalores in disgust, finding himself directly in front of Jaidev.

The
Brahma
mission director was surprised. “I didn’t know you’d been taken, too.”

“Bad luck,” he said. “If only you’d fired me an hour earlier.”

Nayar grunted; he was not noted for having any sense of humor. But
his criticism had suggested something to Jaidev, who had been hearing stories of Keanu’s changing environment, of Revenants, of mysterious “goo” or soil that seemed to have the ability to transform itself. “Sir—”

“What do you want?”

“The materials in this place seem to be a very advanced form of plasm—nanotech assembly material,” he added, seeing that Nayar, like many his age, was unfamiliar with the term. “I’ve got some hands-on experience with it. Why not let me see what I can do with it?”

“What do you honestly think you can do?” Nayar said. “This is an alien environment, designed by beings thousands of years more advanced than we are!”

“Designed
for us
,” a voice said to Jaidev’s right. Daksha.

“You said we should make ourselves useful. I think I can be useful.”

Daksha joined them. “Me, too.”

“Into the Temple, then,” Nayar said. “Both of you.”

The director turned away, clearly expecting nothing.

Nevertheless, Jaidev felt better. He had taken one step toward improving everyone’s lot…and redeeming himself.

But first…Daksha. “What do you know about plasm?”

“Beyond the name itself? Nothing.”

Jaidev stared at the man. To think that fifteen minutes earlier, Daksha had struck him. “Will you work for me?”

“You’re the expert.”

“Come on, then.” Jaidev Mahabala didn’t expect to find lithographic molecular knowledge in this group, so one pair of helping hands was as good as the next.

Besides…what better way to plot a bit of revenge than to have his assailant at his mercy?

The hours after landing and “merger” of the two groups were consumed by greetings, shouts, jostling, complaints, and what Harley soon judged to be unreasonable joy.

How had their situation changed? There were now two more human refugees, since Zack had no tools and damned little useful information that the Houston and Bangalore groups didn’t already possess.

Brent Bynum said as much to Weldon and Jones. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said as they trudged toward the Temple, Harley wheeling with help from Sasha and feeling every meter in his shoulders. “I’m sick happy that Stewart survived. He’s the only one who knows what happened here.

“But unless he’s got an alien spacecraft gassed up and ready to go, he’s in the same damn fix we are.”

Harley had more important things to consider. He had not intruded on the painful reunion between Rachel and Zack. Given Megan Stewart’s death in an accident that was Harley’s responsibility…throw in this mysterious rebirth…well, there was nothing he could offer. Best to stay away.

Especially when Harley heard Zack tell Rachel that Megan was dead…
again
. The girl had collapsed, understandably. Harley wondered how Zack could be on his feet, much less coherent.

Then he wondered what had gone wrong. He realized he had a growing list of questions.

But now Rachel was on her feet, wiping her eyes, nodding, forcing a smile, in every way proving her strength and resilience.