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  And without her helmet, he could not easily hear her.

  Was it responsible? At the moment only Natalia was exposed to the Keanu environment—and by extension, Brahma. The Venture was still safe, and so were Tea and Yvonne.

  Idiot: Whatever contaminants you would breathe with helmet off are already coating the exterior of your suit! Besides, the gravity was still increasing . . . Zack was finding it hard to move.

  Not that he was eager to go far. He could see Natalia slowly circling the dead Sentry, occasionally raising her camera, then shifting to her spectrometer.

  But Zack was intrigued by what he was seeing in the Beehive cells. They were continuing to swell and discolor. At moments he thought he could see shapes inside several of them.

  That was disturbing: the color of the cells was exactly like that of the bubble that had disgorged the Sentry.

  God, what if there was some link between the Beehive and the Sentry? Zack was torn between an immediate desire to head directly toward Natalia . . . and a horrid fascination for what was happening here.

  Shit. His suit was hampering his ability to get close enough to see.

  With one last glance at Natalia, happily performing her alien autopsy, he embraced the decision he had actually made moments earlier.

  If the environment within Keanu was changing to suit humans—an idea that was now inescapable—then logic said it would not harm him. It certainly wasn’t harming Natalia.

  He stopped the airflow inside his suit, saving it for the return trip through the membrane, then cracked the neck seal of his helmet.

  He was immediately struck by the smell of Keanu, a combination of wet soil and fragrances he could not identify, but which were not unpleasant. Something was growing here—with a hell of an accelerated incubation period.

  He took in a deep breath. Actually found it invigorating. “Hey,” he called to Natalia. “You were right.”

  Startled by the sound of his voice, she looked up. “I still feel good.”

  “See anything interesting? Is it man or machine?”

  “Both, I think . . .” She stopped, staring past Zack in a way he didn’t like.

  “Do you see something, Natalia?”

  “Yes.” He could barely hear her. “The Beehive.”

  There was no escaping it. He turned.

  Several of the smaller cells in the Beehive were now transparent . . . and the shapes within them could be clearly seen. Zack saw a rise nearby that would allow him to get closer, and he began scrabbling up the slope.

  Within moments he was incredibly close—he could have reached into the nearest cell if he’d wanted.

  Not that he wanted to touch anything. The shapes inside were large, greenish-brown sacs, pulsing, as if alive.

  Natalia joined him. “What do you think they are?”

  “Well, it looks as though we’ve been watching life evolve,” Zack said, “only a few billion times faster than we’d expect.”

  “Evolve into what?”

  “Whatever it’s supposed to be.”

  “What could that be? Not more Sentries, I hope. Wait—” Natalia was pointing into a different cell, where the “evolution” of one sac seemed close to completion. “My God, do you know what it looks like?”

  “Yes,” Zack said. The sac now looked like a cellophane-wrapped human body.

  “I don’t like this!” Natalia announced.

  Zack was torn between a similar emotion, and a sense of wonder so powerful it was almost sexual. This was why he’d studied stars and planets . . . why he’d become an astronaut.

  To learn the secrets of the universe . . . to see new marvels.

  The Russian astronaut backed away, crawling down the slope away from the cells. “Natalia . . .” Zack heard his own voice quaver. Almost every part of his being was ordering him to run! Hide!

  Zack looked back at the human-shaped sac . . . two legs, a torso, two arms, a head. It was shorter and smaller than the Sentry. It was Zack’s size.

  The hands had a thumb and four fingers.

  The shape literally writhed, its hands clawing at the translucent material covering its “face.” Zack had to suppress the impulse to help it....

  He needn’t have worried. Suddenly the “face” was clear.

  It was not only a humanlike face, it was a face he recognized.

  Zack Stewart had seen more impossible sights in the past eight hours than most humans saw in a lifetime. Hell, more evidence of alien life than any humans had seen all through history.

  But what he saw in that Beehive cell was so unexpected and impossible that by contrast the wonders of Keanu’s interior were a strip mall in Houston.

  The face he saw clearly now, brown eyes opening, mouth gasping, was that of his dead wife, Megan.

  Part Three

  “SOME FRAGRANT NIGHT”

  The Crew Systems Division wants it known wide and far: WE DID NOT AUTHORIZE Commander Stewart’s actions with the rover. During training, there was ONE discussion between engineers and crew regarding rover mass and center of gravity. Flinging the entire vehicle into a crater was NOT DISCUSSED OR CONDONED.

  DRAFT MEMO FROM CHIEF, JSC CREW SYSTEMS

  “Someone’s emerging!”

  Harley Drake looked up as Sasha Blaine shrieked. “Calm down,” he told her, trying to make sense of the image on the screen that showed a suited Brahma crew member on the camera side of the membrane. Intelligence and outside-the-box thinking were sometimes a piss-poor substitute for operational cool. “Which one is that?”

  More subdued, Blaine settled back into her chair. “No stripes on the suit, so it’s got to be Lucas.”

  “He must be talking to Brahma.” Harley reached for his headset and within seconds was plugged into the cacophony of voices—Lucas and Taj and Vikram, the Bangalore flight director, Tea and Kennedy, all were talking over each other. So much for coolheaded mission control ops. . . .

  Meanwhile, all around him, the Home Team swelled in numbers. (During the dead time with no link from the astronauts, several had wandered off in search of food. For all Harley knew, some had simply gone home; there was no penalty for early withdrawal.) With each arrival, the chatter inside the room rose geometrically.

  Which was why Harley barely heard the words, “Pogo is dead!”

  “Everybody shut up!”

  The room went quiet, and everyone was able to hear Josh Kennedy’s voice. “Break, break, Lucas: Say again.”

  Finally the link was silent, except for the vague hiss and crackle of the basic wave. “I repeat, Pogo Downey is dead.”

  Another beat of silence, and then the questions exploded from both mission controls. Harley eventually realized that Something Big and Mobile had shown itself inside Keanu, and that someone—it was unclear who—had shot at it, and Pogo had been cut down.

  The other members of the Home Team were plugged in now, too, listening but unable to speak. Their faces showed their disbelief and horror at not only what had happened, but how fast.

  Though he had a scientific bent, Harley Drake had only a dim sense of the painstaking and tedious accretion of data points that most often led to big breakthroughs. Even in space ops, things happened slowly.

  Today was different. First the news that Keanu was likely artificial. Then the stunning series of jabs—the ramps and passages, the membrane.

  Now a regular goddamn torrent of new marvels was gushing over them. These alien markers. The huge inner chamber. “Sounds like Burroughs’ Hollow Earth,” said Williams, to annoying titters from around the table.

  Air pressure inside this chamber? Variable gravity? A source of illumination?

  Fractal corals. Water. Wind. Weather.

  And, oh yes, some kind of hostile entity.

  Images of the environment began appearing as thumbnails arrayed around the main picture on the big screen.

  But Harley couldn’t appreciate them. He kept thinking about Patrick Downey—good old Pogo—dead! “Home Team for Josh,” he said i
nto his mike, hating to interrupt the ops, but not hearing the information he needed.

  It took Kennedy a moment, but he said, “Josh for Harley: Speak.”

  “I hope this is still encrypted.”

  There was a long beat. “Wait, yes,” the flight director said. “Our feed is. Don’t know about Bangalore.”

  “No matter. Somebody’s got to get to Linda Downey immediately.”

  “Shit, yes. On it. Thanks!” On another screen, this one showing the live feed from inside mission control, Harley could see Kennedy tapping the incoming capcom, Mr. America Travis Buell, on the shoulder and pointing him out the door—

  To tell Linda Downey she was now a widow.

  Harley suddenly remembered his own role as CACO: Rachel Stewart would need reassurance, too. “I’m going to the family room,” he announced to the Home Team, as if anyone cared. All were too busy oohing, ahhing, and otherwise babbling over the wonders and horrors from Keanu.

  Before Harley could disconnect his headset, he heard: “Harls, Shane.”

  “Don’t you sleep?” On a normal space mission, even one to deep space, mission control teams were required to go home and rest up between shifts. Shane Weldon should have been home for dinner three hours back, in bed by now. But then Harley should have left the Home Team, too.

  “Based on what I’ve seen today, I may never sleep again.”

  “I hear you—”

  “There’s a shitstorm headed your way now, Harls. Our White House friend Bynum has lit up the board. We’re simultaneously embargoing all transmissions—”

  “Shane, I’ve got to get to Rachel.”

  “Got it. Just a heads-up. Call me if you start to drown.”

  The Home Team was closer to the family room than mission control. Still, given Buell’s head start, he shouldn’t have arrived just when Harley did.

  Harley knew the veteran astronaut; he was usually conscientious. “What the fuck is taking you so long! It won’t be fun, but this is your new job—”

  “I know, Harley!” Every astronaut knew. Back in the 1960s, Ted Freeman had been killed in a Saturday morning T-38 crash . . . and a reporter reached the widow with the news before NASA did. Nobody wanted that to happen again. Buell waved his cell phone. “They just told me Jones is coming. . . .”

  “What, so he can drown her in tears? Get in there and do what you were told.”

  To his credit, Buell opened the door immediately, though the suddenness of the gesture and the clearly troubled look on his face was a blatant warning to everyone inside: Bad news was coming. “Ah, Linda, I have to talk to you.”

  Downey’s wife slowly rose to her feet, reaching for one of her children as she did. Harley was right behind Buell, projecting a calmer manner, he hoped. “Rachel, step outside with me. Everybody else, too.”

  Rachel and her friend Amy shot out of the room as if jet-propelled, so fast they almost collided with Gabriel Jones and one of his staffers as they arrived.

  “Sorry, folks!” Harley used his chair to block the door, allowing the other friends and family to exit around him.

  “Harley—” Jones had his best fatherly face on.

  But Harley exited the room and closed the door behind him. “It’s being handled.”

  He turned to Rachel. “Your dad is fine.”

  Of course, to the others—friends and family of Patrick Downey—Harley might just as well have shouted, “Your man isn’t!”

  Harley was anticipating another blast of questions; instead, he saw shock, disbelief, fading hope. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jones said, having to settle for breaking the news to someone other than the widow, “there has been an accident on Keanu. Colonel Downey has been lost.”

  Harley shook his head. There was never a good place to hear news like that, but some places were better: to learn in a hallway that your brother, father, next-door neighbor was just killed in some freak space accident....

  As the sobs began to swell around him, he rolled to Rachel, who was huddled with her friend. “Outside,” he told them.

  The moment they exited the building, into the humid Houston evening, Harley told Rachel about the membrane, the markers, the Beehive, the entity that had apparently attacked and killed Patrick Downey.

  “So you don’t really know my father is okay!” Rachel was oscillating between hysterical anger and plain old hysteria.

  “Word from Lucas was that your father and Natalia are still safe and sound.”

  “But they’re inside! That’s where something just killed Mr. Downey!”

  “Come on, Rach—you know your father. He wouldn’t have stayed if it were still dangerous.” Even as he said it, Harley knew that was a mistake. “Anyway, his suit’s going to run out of oxygen soon. He and Natalia will be back in sight before you know it.”

  Rachel was hugging Amy. It was clear she really wanted to believe Harley.

  She just didn’t.

  It is with profound regret that I must report the death of Destiny-7 astronaut Patrick Downey. He was killed a short time ago when his EVA suit failed during an excursion to the interior of the Near-Earth Object Keanu. His loss is a constant reminder of the risks astronauts face in exploring other worlds. Colonel Downey was born in Bend, Oregon, and graduated from the United States Air Force Academy. He served with honor in Afghanistan and Pakistan before joining NASA in 2011. I offer my condolences to his widow, Linda, and his children, Daniel and Kerry.

  PRESIDENT’S REMARKS ON COL. DOWNEY’S DEATH,

  AUGUST 22, 2019, AT WHITEHOUSE.GOV

  Zack Stewart had little time to ponder the mind-blowing impossibility of seeing his wife’s likeness inside a Near-Earth Object two years after her death in Florida. At least three other Beehive cells around “Megan” were active, too, each one extruding another human-shaped object. To the extent he could see faces, he recognized no one else. Which made him doubt his instant conclusion that he was looking at Megan.

  What the hell, he could be suffering from shortage of oxygen, or too much. Either one would likely result in hallucinations, and suggested that the smart, immediate move was to put his helmet on and get the hell out of this chamber.

  “Bozhe moi!”

  From his time on the ISS, Zack knew a lot of Russian: “My God!” Natalia was farther along the face of the Beehive. From Zack’s point of view, she was a funny-looking creature in the thick suit topped by her smallish head in its skull-hugging communications cap. At the moment, with her face to her hands, she looked even odder.

  Zack half-jogged, half-slid toward her. “What is it?”

  She pointed at one of the other swollen pods. “Zack, I know that one!”

  “What do you mean?” He didn’t want to influence Natalia by telling her what he thought he’d seen.

  “It’s my coach. Konstantin Alexandrovich! He taught me to ski and shoot!” Zack remembered that Natalia had been an Olympics contender in the biathlon as a college student.

  “It’s just an illusion.” He was trying to convince himself at least as much as he was trying to convince her. “Your brain is superimposing familiar images on alien structures.”

  “He was not familiar! Konstantin died in January. I haven’t seen him in ten years.” Natalia uttered a worried whimper, like a dreamer in midnightmare, and backed away.

  Left alone, Zack forced himself to be analytical and scientific. This pod thing was indeed human-shaped, just like the Megan-thing. And, yes, clearly possessing a face. Obviously a human male. Closed eyes, nose, mouth.

  Some of the thin film covering the face suddenly split open, exposing a “mouth” that displayed what any reasonable observer would call teeth. And a couple of them looked shiny, like steel.

  Like old Russian dental work—

  “Zaacck!”

  Hearing his name, Zack turned. Natalia was a few meters away, sitting on the ground, eyes closed, hugging herself. “What is it?”

  “What?” she said, looking startled.

  “You just called me.”
>
  “I did not.”

  “Then—”

  Zack had no need to complete the question. He could see the Megan-thing less than a dozen meters away . . . still lying on its side in its Beehive cell, but using its hands—and they were clearly hands now—to claw away the brownish covering.

  Revealing a pink face underneath, skin as pure as a newborn baby’s.

  And those brown eyes, open wide again, blinking in confusion and terror.

  And a mouth, white teeth, tongue.

  The Megan-thing coughed and wheezed, less like an asthmatic trying to catch its breath. More like a newborn after the first slap.

  Now it—she—looked at him. “Zack,” she said. The voice was Megan’s.

  Zack disconnected his gloves, dropped them, and began clawing at the second skin that still bound the thing to the cell.

  She was warm to the touch. Although her hair was cropped, even in her writhing struggles she looked and felt . . . familiar.

  Zack pulled her free. Gently in the low gravity, both of them settled to the slimy mud of Keanu, the Megan-thing still largely covered in her second skin, essentially in Zack’s suited lap.

  Then the Megan-thing began to thrash like a panicked drowner . . . and scream.

  I can’t be more specific because I could get fired. But STRANGE SHIT IS HAPPENING UP THERE—!

  PARTIAL POST BY POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM

  “How are you doing, Venture?”

  “I’m maintaining, Houston,” Tea Nowinski said, on fifth thought. Her first through fourth thoughts had been How the fuck do you think I’m doing? In actual fact, she had been trying to use the bathroom, a procedure dreaded by all space travelers, with good reason. But with Yvonne sedated, in dreamland, and the comm links quiet, Tea had figured she had fifteen minutes to uncover the noxious little chamber behind the curtain—

  She had almost completed this mission-critical task when Houston called.

  The Venture cabin, in spite of its oddball height, now seemed cramped and crowded to Tea. That might have been due to Yvonne’s hammock, which would normally have been stowed this time of day. The radio hissed and crackled constantly. There were pumps and motors.