Heaven's Shadow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One - “TO FIND THE SEA”

  KEANU APPROACH

  TWO YEARS AGO

  KEANU APPROACH: TERMINAL PHASE

  Part Two - “LONG, GENTLE THUNDER”

  TWO YEARS AGO

  KEANU STAY

  SEVENTY-THREE DAYS EARLIER

  KEANU STAY

  Part Three - “SOME FRAGRANT NIGHT”

  Part Four - “IN THE WIDE STARLIGHT”

  Part Five - “FOR THE DEAD ARE FREE”

  Acknowledgements

  HEAVEN’S WAR

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Phantom Four Films and St. Croix Productions, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goyer, David S.

  Heaven’s shadow / David S. Goyer & Michael Cassutt. p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-51654-6

  1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Space flight—Fiction. I. Cassutt, Michael. II. Title.

  PS3607.O925H43 2011

  813’.6—dc22

  2010054263

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Michael Engelberg

  Dramatis Personae

  ZACK STEWART, astronomer and astronaut, commander of Destiny-7

  MEGAN DOYLE STEWART, journalist

  RACHEL STEWART, their daughter

  AMY MEYER, Rachel’s friend

  SCOTT SHAWLER, NASA public affairs officer, the “voice” of the Destiny missions

  TEA NOWINSKI, Destiny-7 astronaut

  PATRICK “POGO” DOWNEY, Destiny-7 astronaut

  YVONNE HALL, Destiny-7 astronaut

  TAJ RADHAKRISHNAN, vyomanaut, commander of Brahma

  NATALIA YORKINA, exobiologist and Brahma cosmonaut

  LUCAS MUNARETTO, engineer and Brahma cosmonaut

  DENNIS CHERTOK, aerospace physician and Brahma cosmonaut

  HARLEY DRAKE, former astronaut, head of the Home Team

  GABRIEL JONES, director of the NASA Johnson Space Center

  SHANE WELDON, former chief astronaut, now Destiny-7 mission director

  BRENT BYNUM, deputy national security adviser, White House staff

  JOSH KENNEDY, Destiny-7 flight director

  LINDA DOWNEY, Patrick Downey’s wife

  JILLIANNE DWIGHT, crew secretary, Johnson Space Center

  KONSTANTIN ALEXANDROVICH FEDOSEYEV, Russian, now a Revenant

  CAMILLA, a Brazilian child, now a Revenant

  VIKRAM NAYAR, lead flight director at Bangalore

  THE HOME TEAM

  SASHA BLAINE, Yale astronomer

  WADE WILLIAMS, popular science and sci-fi author

  GLENN CREEL, creator of Cartoon Network’s Escape Velocity

  LILY VALDEZ, professor at University of California, Irvine

  STEVEN MATULKA, president of the Planetary Society

  JASMINE TRIEU, astronaut, capcom

  TRAVIS BUELL, astronaut, Destiny-5 commander, capcom

  JAMES and DIANE DOYLE, Megan Doyle Stewart’s parents

  TOBY BURNETT, Wackenhut security officer at JSC

  LEE SHIMORA, Destiny-7 Stay-3 flight director

  Part One

  “TO FIND THE SEA”

  Near-Earth Objects are comets or asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.

  NASA JET PROPULSION LAB, NEAR-EARTH OBJECT PROGRAM FAQ

  What if it comes from farther away?

  POSTER ALMAZ, JULY 7, 2016

  KEANU APPROACH

  Blue planet Earth and its seven billion human beings lay 440,000 kilometers below—or, given the arbitrary terminology of orientation in space, off to one side. If the sheer magnitude of the distance failed to provide a mind-boggling thrill, Zack Stewart could, by looking out the window, cover his home planet with his thumb.

  That small gesture got the point across: He and his three fellow astronauts were farther away from Earth than any human beings in history.

  Farther than the Moon.

  Yet . . . they were still dealing with its politics, dragged down as completely as if trailing a 440,000-kilometer-long chain with anchor.

  It irritated him. Of course, the fact that he had now been without sleep for thirty hours meant that everything irritated him. He was forty-three, a compact, muscular man with considerable experience in spaceflight, including two tours aboard the International Space Station. And now he was commander of Destiny-7, responsible for four lives and a multibillion-dollar spacecraft on a mission unlike any ever attempted.

  He knew he should be pacing himself. But the stress of preparing for today’s unprecedented maneuvers—440,000 kilometers from Earth!—had robbed him of sleep. Mission control in Houston had been uploading scripts for burns that would adjust Destiny’s flight path, but the computer code was too fresh from some Honeywell cubicle and kept crashing. NASA called these commands e-procedures. To Zack, the e stood for error.

  The process reminded him of the time he had tried to load Windows onto a laptop in Antarctica . . . with dial-up. Then as now, the only choice was to grind slowly through it.

  He pushed away from the forward right window of the Destiny spacecraft and turned toward the lower bay ten feet away, where Pogo Downey had his 20/15 eyes pressed against the lenses of the telescope. “See anything yet?”

  Pogo, born Patrick but rechristened in flight school, was a big, red-haired Air Force test pilot wearing a ribbed white undergarment that made him look like a Himalayan snow ape. “Nothing.”

  “There should be something.” Something, in this case, would be a faint point of light against a field of brighter lights . . . Brahma, a crewed spacecraft launched toward Keanu by the Russian-Indian
-Brazilian Coalition . . . Destiny’s competitors. “We’ve got two tracking nets looking for the son of a bitch,” he said, as much for his own morale as for Pogo Downey’s edification. “It’s not as though they can hide.”

  “Maybe Brahma’s pulling the same stunt—your gravity whatever.”

  “Gravity gauge.” Destiny was about to make an unscheduled and unannounced burn that put the American spacecraft closer to Keanu than its Coalition challenger. “The wind is at your back, your opponent is in front of you. For him to attack, he’s got to tack against the wind.” Pogo still seemed unconvinced. “Didn’t you ever read Horatio Hornblower? Where they mention weather gauge?”

  “I’m not a big nautical fan, in case you haven’t noticed.” Pogo was fond of referring to astronauts with Navy backgrounds as pukes.

  “Okay, then . . . it’s like getting on their six.” That was a fighter pilot term for getting behind—in the six o’clock position—an opponent.

  Now Pogo smiled. “Does that mean we can take a shot at them?”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Zack said, not wishing to broach that particular subject at this time. “Besides, they can’t pull the same stunt. Brahma’s too limited in propellant and they’re too nervous about guidance.” The Coalition craft relied on Indian and Russian space tracking systems that were far less capable than the NASA Deep Space Network available to Destiny. “Just keep looking,” he told Pogo, then floated back up to the main control panel.

  The Destiny cabin had twice the interior volume of the Apollo spacecraft, which still wasn’t much, especially with the tangle of cables and the two bulky EVA suits.

  “Gotcha!” Pogo used a touchpad to slide a cursor over the image, clicking to send the image to Zack’s screen. Only then did the pilot turn his head and smile crookedly. “RCS plume. Dumb bastards.” The Air Force astronaut’s contempt for the competing vessel, its crew, and its politics was well known. It had almost cost him a seat on this mission.

  “Everybody’s got to tweak their traj,” Zack said. He actually sympathized with Brahma commander Taj Radhakrishnan and his crew. An experienced flight control team would not need to fire reaction control jets—RCS—at this stage. But the Coalition had flown only three piloted missions total, and this was the first beyond low Earth orbit. Its control team, based in Bangalore, was naturally cautious.

  Now the fuzzy image of Brahma appeared on Zack’s screen, trajectory figures filling a window. “Houston, Destiny, through Channel B,” Zack said, touching the send button on his headset. Without waiting for an acknowledgment, he added, “We have Brahma in the scope.” Destiny’s 440,000-kilometer distance caused a four-second lag for each end of a conversation. That was going to be increasingly annoying.

  Sure enough, mission director Shane Weldon’s reply was out of sync. “Go ahead, Destiny.” It took several seconds to give Houston the information that Brahma had been spotted, and for Houston to confirm that the burn was still go.

  Zack relinquished the left-hand pilot seat, then floated down to the telescope. To hell with Brahma . . . what he wanted to look at was Near-Earth Object Keanu.

  Three years ago, a pair of amateur astronomers—one in Australia, the other in South Africa—had spotted a bright Near-Earth Object high in the southern sky . . . literally over the South Pole.

  The NEO was designated X2016 K1—an unknown (“X”) body sighted in the first half of July 2016—but, to the horror of professional astronomers, quickly became known by its more popular name, Keanu, after the actor who had played the iconic Neo in the Matrix movies.

  Within days, as Keanu’s size (more than a hundred kilometers in diameter) and trajectory (originating in the constellation Octans and heading sunward, passing close to Earth in October 2019) became clear, imaginative elements in the space community began to talk about a crewed mission to the NEO. A spacecraft already existed: NASA’s Destiny, designed for flights beyond earth orbit, to the Moon and Mars—and to Near-Earth Objects.

  But with budgets tight and benefits uncertain—what would a crewed mission learn that a fleet of uncrewed probes couldn’t discover for a tenth the cost?—enthusiasm for the idea faded away as Keanu grew in brightness in the southern sky.

  Until the Russian-Indian-Brazilian Coalition announced that it was diverting its first planned lunar landing mission to Keanu. The first flag planted on its rocky, snowy surface would not be the Stars and Stripes.

  That announcement triggered a frantic amount of replanning by NASA comparable to its fabled 1968 decision to send Apollo 8 around the Moon ahead of the Soviets. “It’s going to be like NASCAR,” Pogo Downey liked to say. “Only this time we might actually be swapping paint.”

  In search of an edge, NASA’s great minds had cooked up several disinformation gambits. At this moment, the two other astronauts in Zack’s crew, Tea Nowinski and Yvonne Hall, were talking on the open loop, visual and audio of their preparations from the Venture lander being fed through the NASA Deep Space Network. Meanwhile, Zack and Pogo did their dirty work on an encrypted loop transmitted via military satellites.

  The last-minute gravity gauge prank had been forced on the Destiny crew when bad weather at the Cape allowed Brahma to launch a day ahead of them.

  Much as he enjoyed the challenge of spoofing the Brahmans, it killed Zack to be looking for another spacecraft instead of the hundred-kilometer-wide bulk of Keanu, now less than two thousand kilometers away.

  And invisible! Both Destiny and Brahma were approaching Keanu’s dark side, just as several of the early Apollo missions had sneaked up on the Moon—the crew hadn’t even seen the cratered surface until moments before making the burn that put them into lunar orbit.

  If the gravity gauge maneuver echoed the age of sail, so did this night-side approach . . . it was like sailing toward a rocky coast on a moonless night in fog . . . undeniably dangerous.

  And ten times as complicated. Zack was not a specialist in orbital dynamics, but he knew enough about the mind-boggling complexities of the intercept to make his head hurt.

  Destiny and Brahma were falling toward Keanu a thousand kilometers and twenty-four important hours apart. Without this added burn, Destiny would arrive a day later.

  Arrive where? Keanu was actually approaching Earth from below, almost at a right angle to the plane of the ecliptic, where most planets of the solar system orbited. Both Destiny-Venture and Brahma had had to expend extra fuel to climb away from Earth’s equator toward a point where Keanu would be in 4.5 days.

  Complicating matters further, Destiny- Venture was now slowing down after having been flung out of Earth orbit by the powerful upper stage of its Saturn VII launcher.

  And Keanu itself was speeding up as it fell toward its closest approach to Earth, passing just outside the orbit of the Moon—the brightest thing humans had ever seen in their night sky.

  In order to sneak past Brahma, Destiny had to essentially hit the brakes . . . to fire Venture’s engines directly into the path of flight. The burn would cause the vehicle to take up a lower orbit around Earth, where it would then be going much faster than Brahma.

  The cost in fuel was immense, eating up six thousand of the vehicle’s nine thousand kilograms of gas. Destiny-Venture would have zero margins for error in landing or eventual liftoff. But if it went as planned, twenty-four hours from now, Zack’s crew would be on the surface of Keanu in time to welcome the crew of Brahma as they landed.

  At which point, Zack fervently hoped, everyone’s attention would turn to exploration of this unique body and the arguments would be over its nature and not issues as pointless as who got there first.

  “Thirty minutes,” Pogo announced, startling Zack out of a momentary reverie—or nap. One more like that, and he would have to hit the medical kit for Dexedrine.

  He blinked and took another look into the scope. The fuzzy white blob that was Brahma seemed to swell, then fade in brightness. The Coalition vehicle was cylindrical, so even if rotating it shouldn’t be waxing and waning. “Pogo
, do you see a hint of a halo around Brahma?”

  “Sorry, got a different screen up at the moment—”

  “How’s the prank coming?” Yvonne Hall emerged from the docking tunnel between Venture and Destiny in her heavy white EVA suit, minus the helmet.

  “Careful!” Zack said. “We’ve got half a dozen different mikes going.” He waggled both hands with index fingers extended. “You never know what’s going to get fed where.”

  Yvonne’s eyes went wide. An African American engineer who had worked with the Saturn launch team at the Cape, she was clearly not used to being corrected. It was another reminder to Zack that Yvonne, Patrick, and even Tea were not originally Zack’s crew.

  “Hey, sports fans.” Tea joined them, a candy bar and a bag of trail mix in hand. Blond, athletic, the all-American girl, she was one of those types found—and, Zack suspected, deliberately selected by NASA—in every astronaut group, the big sister who wants everyone to play nicely. “Do we need any snacks before the burn?”

  Yvonne took the trail mix and pulled herself toward Pogo’s floating EVA suit. “Any time you’re ready to don your armor, Colonel Downey . . .”

  Meanwhile Tea launched a candy bar at Zack. “Here,” she said. “Take a bite and get dressed.”

  Zack allowed Tea to literally tow him and his suit through the access tunnel. He tucked and tumbled, orienting himself properly inside Venture’s cabin, a cylinder with a control panel and windows at the front end, and an airlock hatch on the back. “What’s our comm situation?”

  “You’ll love this.” Tea smiled and touched a button on the panel, allowing Zack to hear NASA’s public affairs commentator. “—Due to tracking constraints at the Australian site, direct communications with Destiny-7 will be unavailable for the next fifteen minutes. The crew is in no danger and will accomplish the burn as scheduled—”