Heaven's Shadow Read online

“Hey, Tea!”

  In her life, Tea had fantasized about meeting an alien, but never ever had she expected the E.T. to recognize her and say her name!

  The reunion was noisy, chaotic, and brief. “No, I’ve been breathing Keanu’s air for almost two hours now,” Zack said, as Taj kept insisting that he get back into his suit again.

  He did allow Tea to recharge his backpack from hers, giving him two hours of consumables for the trip back through the membrane. “Thank you,” he said, finally looking into her eyes—granted, through her faceplate.

  Tea wanted to say, How come you’re not screaming? How can you stand this? But in the circumstances, the best she could offer was, “What can I do?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a very large extra spacecraft in your pocket, would you?” Zack shook his head. “We need the rover.”

  “Copy that, but . . .” Tea looked at the relatively benign terrain, then back up the slope toward the Beehive and the passage beyond.

  Zack was doing the same thing. “It should fit.”

  “Speaking of fits, isn’t that what Houston’s going to throw if we drive the rover in here?”

  “No doubt, but I have to tell you . . . the one thing I’m really enjoying about this mission is that we don’t have mission control hounding us every minute.”

  This was the Zack Stewart she had grown to admire, and love: smart, confident, direct.

  “I’ll take Taj and we’ll go get Buzz.”

  All through this, Megan Stewart stood with arms crossed. Tea wasn’t convinced it was Megan Stewart, but if so, what the hell was going through her mind?

  I don’t know which is worse, Houston or Bangalore. It’s like a giant cone of silence has descended on both centers. Something is majorly wrong with the Keanu missions and NO ONE IS TALKING.

  POSTER JERMAINE AT KEANU.COM

  The Johnson Space Center cafeteria had been hard-hit by the extra-large mission control staff and the press contingent. Soups and sandwiches were gone; entire display cases, normally filled with pie and cake, were empty. Nevertheless, Rachel and Amy were able to grab several snack bars, bags of M&M’s, and sodas. “God, they only have Cheetos,” Amy said. “I want SunChips.”

  “You’ll take Cheetos and like them, young lady,” Rachel said. Both started giggling, then suppressed it as the Latina cashier shot them a glance.

  “God, be careful!” Amy said.

  “They know me,” Rachel said, with more hope than certainty. “They just don’t get many fabulous girls here.”

  That started them giggling again, until Amy’s phone sang to her. She grabbed it as Rachel led her to a table as far from the cashier as possible.

  As they sat, Rachel said, “I thought you had it off.”

  “Just turned it on a minute ago.” Amy had already fallen into that dead-eyed zone of the distracted. Knowing there would be no significant conversation for the next several minutes, Rachel turned her Slate back on.

  She had never seen its screen so full. Her personal inbox was jammed, her Facebook was overloaded, and her newsfeed updated every couple of seconds.

  And every news story was about Keanu, Destiny, the accident involving astronaut Yvonne Hall, and the NASA cover-ups of everything! “God, everything on my screen is blinking.”

  “Mine, too,” Amy said.

  Rachel turned to her personal messages. She felt the need to connect with her friends about more important things than this stupid mission her father was on.

  “Luvng your escape!” one friend wrote.

  “420@JSC! Wicked!” said another.

  Rachel turned to Amy. “I thought you said you had it off until a minute ago.”

  “Okay, I had it on silent.”

  “Amy!” Rachel grabbed her friend’s phone. Not only was it transmitting their words, the camera was on, too. “You had it on the whole time!” She clicked it off.

  “Look, it’s nothing. You remember Tracy wanted to come. I just let her listen!”

  “She did more than listen. I think she put us on the Web!”

  “So what? Half the planet is on the Web. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Amy, God . . .” Rachel struggled for words. Sometimes Amy could be so shallow. “People are searching for JSC and Keanu and probably my name, too. So a lot of people know exactly what we’ve been doing and saying.” She got a sick feeling. “I think some of these headlines came from your phone.” She held her phone and its news feed up to Amy’s face.

  “They shouldn’t be covering stuff up.”

  “Yeah, fine. But, you know, what’s also bad is that everyone knows we were blazing!”

  “Rachel, with all the crazy shit that’s going on here, I still don’t think anyone cares!”

  Rachel suddenly saw a person who might care. “Quiet,” she told Amy, and nodded toward the main entrance, where Jillianne Dwight had just entered with a uniformed member of the JSC security team. “Leave your stuff.”

  “But I’m still hungry—”

  Rachel yanked Amy to her feet and practically dragged her toward the side exit. There were still dozens of people in the cafeteria. Maybe they wouldn’t be spotted—

  They emerged into the muggy JSC night on the wrong side of the building. Darkness was good, however. And not a single person was visible. “Where are we?” Amy said.

  “If we keep going, we’ll be in the astronaut building. My dad used to have an office on the fourth floor.”

  “Could we?”

  “No, it’s locked.” Rachel walked as fast as she could without breaking into a sprint. Her plan was to go all the way around the astronaut building, then back to mission control. Fortunately, the grounds at JSC were easy to navigate . . . nothing but concrete walkways and a few flower beds. Her father had told her it was designed like a college campus because if NASA ever got closed down, that was what the center would become.

  Whatever. She only wanted to be sure she and Amy didn’t get caught. “Do you still have the pot?”

  “Yes, of course! Oh, shit—”

  Rachel looked for a place to throw it. “Around this corner—”

  They made the turn and ran straight into three men, two JSC cops and a blond man in a short-sleeved white shirt. Rachel tightened her grip on Amy’s upper arm, as if to say, Ignore them and keep going.

  “Rachel Stewart!” It was the blond man.

  “What?” Rachel remembered him. Bynum, the guy from Washington.

  “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You found us.”

  He turned to the guards. “Take their phones.”

  For the next several hours—possibly as many as ten—the Venture crew will be in a communications blackout created by the new rotation of Near-Earth Object Keanu. The same orbital mechanics affect the crew of Brahma. Mission control continues to be in contact with the Destiny spacecraft, however, and it is possible that at certain times telemetry and voice may be relayed. We will, of course, continue to post whatever data we receive as we receive it.

  NASA PUBLIC AFFAIRS, AUGUST 23, 2019

  Tea and Taj had been gone only half an hour when Zack noticed that his charges were beginning to yawn. “Oh my God,” Megan said.

  She was so immediately unsteady that Zack got worried. “Are you feeling faint?”

  “No, just . . . tired.” She sank to the ground where she was. The girl slid close to Megan. In moments, both were, to Zack’s eyes, sound asleep. “That was very strange,” Natalia said.

  “Have you ever seen a baby fall asleep?” Zack said gently, afraid he might wake them, and just as afraid he might provoke Natalia. “They go and go and go for hours, then they’re like little machines when you switch them off.” Just saying it reminded him again of Rachel. What was he going to tell her? How was he going to explain this?

  “Well,” Lucas said, “they are only a day old.”

  “I think we need a fire.” Without further discussion, Zack left Lucas to keep watch, then began to forage
in the immediate vicinity. Natalia joined him—more, it seemed to Zack, to avoid being anywhere near the revived pair than because she wanted to help. “Why do you need a fire, anyway?” Natalia said. “It’s warm enough in here.”

  “At the moment,” Zack said. “But we don’t know what it’s going to be like when the glowworms go dark—”

  “—Assuming they do go dark.”

  “Whether they do or not, fire gives light, it helps with cooking, and it provides protection.”

  “You think a flaming torch is going to help you fight off that thing that killed Pogo?”

  “No. But it might be a hell of a distraction. And there’s a scientific question to be explored, Dr. Yorkina.”

  “The ability of the human mind to focus on the irrelevant during times of stress?”

  Zack laughed. “Okay, a second scientific question, which is, can we actually build a fire inside Keanu? We’ve got oxygen, but do we have tinder?”

  He stopped and waved at the new growth: spindly, leafy structures that resembled trees. At the moment they reminded him of the pathetic potted sticks that dotted the raw real estate development he had lived in at age seven.

  Natalia forgot her own miseries and fears long enough to play along. “Well, even if these are wood, or something resembling cellulose, it will all be green. I can’t imagine it will burn easily.”

  “There’s another reason I need a quest for fire,” he told her. “Frankly, it gives me something to do while they sleep and the rover gets here.” He stripped some of the leafy material off one of the new growths. It felt dry, but not flimsy. It also had substance.

  Within minutes he had an armful. “So,” he said, as casually as he could, “what happened between you and Konstantin? Was he—?”

  “It was not he, it was it. And I killed it.” She admitted her action as casually as if saying she had crossed the street.

  “Mind telling me why? Did it attack you?”

  “I was afraid it would.”

  Zack could only nod. What were his options? Arrest her? She wasn’t even a member of his crew. “And then you ran.”

  “I was in a panic.” Only now did she look at him. “I still am.”

  “I guess we all are,” he said. “What about Megan and Camilla. Are they its?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not afraid of them.”

  “I will be cautious around them, but no . . . not like Konstantin.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the human Konstantin was a brute! Any replica of him was certain to be just as dangerous. Were you afraid of your wife when she was alive? Should we be in fear of that little girl? I don’t think so.” She stood, arms filled with vegetation. “We should get back now.”

  Zack had no better alternative.

  “I gave them water and food,” Lucas said, as soon as Zack and Natalia returned.

  “Good thinking,” Zack said, kneeling to arrange his collection of Keanu kindling in the classic Boy Scout fire stack.

  At any other time, Lucas would have smiled. Now he just looked embarrassed. “Even if that stuff will burn, how are you going to ignite it?”

  “Well, we know there’s oxygen here, or none of us would be breathing.”

  “Are you sure about them?” Natalia said, nodding at the sleeping undead. “That they’re breathing like us?”

  Zack chose to ignore the comment, shredding the leafy stalks as best he could, creating a pile of lighter material that would, he hoped, be more receptive to flame. Then he stood up. “Now, all we need is a spark.”

  “Don’t Young Pioneers rub two sticks together?” Natalia said.

  Lucas chose to be supportive. “We could try to get sparks off a couple of rocks, maybe. . . .” He presented Zack with a pair of likely candidates.

  Zack thanked him and took one of the rocks. “First, though—” He pulled his backpack over to the protofire and opened a valve. “A little extra O2 flow . . .”

  Then he pulled the geological hammer from the bag on his suit. With the hammer in one hand and the rock in the other, he knelt and held them just over the kindling, in the stream of fresh oxygen flowing from his backpack.

  Once, twice. “I’m not seeing a spark,” Natalia said.

  “Your observation is noted,” Zack said, really wishing she would go away. The two hits had been unsatisfactory. For the first time since conceiving this procedure forty minutes ago, he began to doubt it would work.

  “Let me,” Lucas said. He took the hammer and rock from Zack’s hands, got into position, and swiftly chipped a chunk of the rock away so cleanly it gave off visible sparks.

  Three more swift chips, and a spark ignited the kindling.

  Lucas immediately bent down to adjust the O2 flow as the leafy Keanu vegetation proved that it would burn, at least for now.

  He sat back, looking surprised and still smug.

  Zack wanted to hug him. “You are officially the World’s Greatest Astronaut.”

  Did I think I was discovering an alien spacecraft? Are you insane? I don’t believe in UFOs or close encounters or anal probes. No. I just thought I’d found something big and new . . . ice and rock from deep space. Christ, what a stupid question.

  COLIN EDGELY ON TODAY, NINE NETWORK, SYDNEY, 23 AUGUST 2019

  “Something’s going on up there,” Brent Bynum told Harley, Shane Weldon, and Gabriel Jones.

  They were gathered in the Vault again, along with a half dozen other staffers and horse-holders. There was no preliminary chat, other than several quick expressions of sympathy to Jones on his daughter’s health. The director had simply said, with uncharacteristic understatement, “She’s stable and the mission is proceeding.”

  The lack of sentiment allowed Weldon, in perfect Weldon style, to say, in answer to Bynum, “No shit, Sherlock.”

  He smiled sideways at Harley, who did not return the smile. While he had no fears about annoying Bynum, he also knew that a meeting ran better, which is to say faster, when the guy who called it was happy.

  Bynum could not be happy, of course. None of them could. The realization that the Venture crew was out of direct contact with Earth and mission control for any period of time would have been a major problem in a normal mission; given the tragic and bizarre information that had already reached Houston, it was a disaster.

  The only thing to do was to work it through. So Harley said, “Can you, ah, clarify that for us?”

  “Yes. Excuse me.” Bynum bowed his head and clasped his hands for a moment, as if previewing his remarks. Harley wondered, given the incredible circumstances, what information could possibly be sensitive enough to justify such caution. “Brahma is not affected by the loss of signal.”

  Weldon reacted first. “That’s impossible!”

  “That was our position, too,” Bynum said, “given the rotation of Keanu and other factors.”

  “What are you telling us?” Weldon said. “You can’t punch a radio signal through a NEO.”

  “Correct. Brahma is sending a signal around Keanu.”

  Now Harley found the energy to speak. “And just how in the hell did they manage that?”

  Bynum turned toward him. The man was impressively calm and low-key. “This will be easier if I start with the image.”

  On cue, one of his assistants enabled the screen at the end of the table . . . which showed a white rectangular shape trailed by a small white blob. “This is a long-distance image of Brahma taken yesterday from Hawaii. I believe it’s about thirteen hours before Destiny landed, but I’m assured that figure is irrelevant.”

  Harley knew the Air Force had a satellite surveillance station in Hawaii equipped with telescopes that peered up at satellites. He also knew that it was impossible to get much of an image on a bird even at geosynchronous orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers up. This would have been at ten times the distance. “They must have had some impressive upgrades at Maui,” he said.

  “Who cares?” Harley snapped. “They dropped a satell
ite?”

  “Correct,” Bynum said. “A microsat designed to loiter in—what do you call it?—a super-high Earth orbit—”

  “That makes sense,” Weldon said. “It just hangs there on the far side of Keanu. Brahma can pop signals to it. Signals get relayed to Bangalore.”

  “It looks bigger than a microsat,” one of the staffers said.

  “That’s due to the sun and imaging,” Bynum said. “It’s apparently only a meter across.”

  “Makes it hard to hit the horns,” said another man in the room. “Horns” were the antennae on the satellite itself.

  Weldon was completely taken with the concept. “The satellite is only a couple of kilometers from events on Keanu. What’s trickier is getting that signal to Bangalore.”

  This time a different staffer joined in. “Why worry about getting the signal to one spot on Earth? Just aim it toward commercial comsats in geo.”

  Harley was already tired of this space ops chat. “People, we’re losing focus here! Forget how they did it.” He turned to Bynum. “The point is, they have comm that we don’t. And you guys intercepted it, and I bet you cracked whatever encryption they put on it.”

  “Correct,” Bynum said.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. What have they learned? What have they said?”

  For the first time Bynum looked uncomfortable. “Some very strange things. Apparently there are people inside Keanu.”

  That bit of news silenced the Vault. “Did you say people? Not aliens? Not extraterrestrial life-forms?”

  “No. People. Human beings . . .” Bynum trailed off and merely looked uncomfortable.

  “Well,” Weldon said, “that explains where all this space zombie crap is coming from. Bangalore leaks.”

  “Which means that the rest of the world is somehow cleared for Bangalore’s data,” Harley said. “Just not NASA. The people who could use it.”

  “Bangalore has released nothing,” Bynum said. “The only information out there is rumor and fantasy.”

  Gabriel Jones cleared his throat. “But we all know, Mr. Bynum, that in circumstances like this, where there’s smoke . . .” To Harley Jones, he looked exhausted. Well, all of them did—except Bynum, whose shirt seemed to be starched. Did anyone still do that anymore?