Heaven's Shadow Read online

  “Zombies? That’s a pretty strange flavor of smoke. It doesn’t even make sense. Zombies are mindless flesh-eaters, not people.” Weldon pushed his chair back from the table. He was about to walk out.

  “It would be helpful if we had the raw intel,” Harley said to Bynum. “Not just your summary. Assuming anybody wants my Great Minds to go to work on this.”

  Bynum blinked. His body language tipped Harley to his answer, which was, “You aren’t cleared for the raw intel.” As the others in the Vault immediately protested, Bynum held up his hands. “I’m not cleared for it, either! Sorry. Maybe Dr. Jones can make a request. I’m just the messenger.”

  Now Weldon was on his feet. “Well, Mr. Bynum, you know what happens to messengers.” And he walked out.

  Obviously hoping to forestall a mass exodus, Jones said, “This situation may resolve itself before any other action takes place. Where are we in our loss of signal?”

  “Six hours yet,” Harley said. The number caused audible groans around the Vault.

  “Then I suggest we all use this time to take stock, recharge, and be ready, because when we have comm again, we’ll have to hit the ground running.”

  Harley marveled again at the way a string of empty words could motivate a group of human beings. Jones had told them nothing, yet the team in the Vault—Weldon excepted because of absence, and Harley because of habitual pessimism—rose with something like enthusiasm, ready to go forth and do battle.

  Harley had to get his Home Team up to speed. When communication was reestablished with Venture, they were going to have to provide answers. And right now they barely understood the questions.

  As he left the Vault, however, there was a JSC security guard waiting for him. “Mr. Drake? Are you responsible for Rachel Stewart?”

  Keanu is a starship: how did the word get out? Impossible to say, though some day some Ph.D. in media will be able to reconstruct it. At the moment, the primary suspects are sources within the Bangalore and NASA mission control centers. All it would take is one text message.

  HUFFINGTON POST NEWS WATCH, AUGUST 23, 2019

  The fire sputtered and never reached the roaring stage, no matter how much leafy stuff they piled on it. But it gave them a bit of light, as well as a bizarre shadow against the Beehive wall . . . which turned out to be rover Buzz on approach.

  All five of the astronauts were going without helmets now. “This troubles me,” Taj said. “We’re exposing ourselves to this environment.”

  “What choice do we really have?” Zack said. “If we had to rely on our consumables, we’d be back on the surface by now. Besides, it doesn’t matter what our bodies are exposed to. Our suits are totally contaminated. Venture has tools for dealing with lunar dust, not Keanu’s organisms.”

  “This does nothing to cheer me.” Taj shuffled off, taking his Zeiss camera.

  Tea and Zack pulled a few food items from the rover. The vehicle also gave each of the astronauts a bit of privacy. “Thank God,” Zack said. “My diaper is beginning to chafe.”

  “So sexy,” Tea said.

  But there was nothing in the way of clothing or blankets. “The rover wasn’t designed for camping,” Tea said.

  As the newly undead continued to sleep, Zack ordered Natalia and Tea into the vehicle for a rest. “We’re going to need our energy for recon.”

  Taj was back in earshot by now. “What recon?”

  “We’ve got a whole new world here. We ought to take a look while we can.”

  “Zack, Keanu’s in orbit now. Let the next crew do it. They’ll have the proper equipment.”

  “NASA can’t mount another visit for at least a year, and I don’t think the Coalition can, either.”

  “What difference does a year make? This thing has been traveling for ten thousand times that!”

  “It hasn’t been alive, like this,” Lucas said. He raised his arm toward the landscape, now looking more like an Amazonian rain forest . . . except that the “trees” were no more than a few meters tall. All of it bathed in the near-twilight cast by the strange little glowworms. “It’s like . . . the Garden of Eden.”

  Taj grunted. “Which makes us what? The Serpent?”

  “Hardly,” Zack said. “The environment seems optimized for humans.”

  “For a while, at least,” Taj said. “It clearly wasn’t optimized for the Sentry.” He nodded at the sleepers. “I wonder if our . . . newly alive could eat anything that’s growing in here.”

  “Speaking of them,” Lucas said, “what do we do with them? No matter what kind of exploring we do, we have to leave in a day or so!”

  Zack had been worrying about this. “Well, Venture has room for one passenger. And Camilla is only half the weight penalty of a full-grown human—”

  “Are you insane? You can’t be thinking about taking these two back to Earth!”

  “You bet I’m thinking about it—”

  “Just because one of them looks and sounds like your wife? Zack, you’re too tired to be making these decisions!”

  Zack was very tired, but he’d been in similar states of exhaustion several times in his life. He believed it helped him think more clearly. He took Taj by the arm and turned him toward the sleepers. “For the record, I’m not at all sure who or what that person is. But all the evidence tells me it’s my dead wife, somehow restored to life by some pretty goddamned advanced technology. So, allowing for that, what do I do? Leave her?”

  “For the next mission, yes.”

  “How is she supposed to survive? She and the girl?” Zack pointed back to the Beehive. “Or the rest of them.”

  “I think my commander believes Keanu will provide,” Lucas said.

  Taj was usually a serene individual—Zack had never seen him truly angry. But at that moment the vyomanaut shot his Brazilian crew member a look of such loathing that Zack got to his feet, afraid that he had to prevent a fistfight. “I am trying to protect my mission and my crew!”

  “We both are,” Zack said, using a voice he had perfected in refereeing fights between Megan and Rachel. “This situation is unusual—”

  But Lucas wasn’t ready to give up. “You both keep looking at this like it’s a malfunction in a sim! This world is sending us a message! It welcomed us! It has changed its environment to suit humans! It has revived and rebuilt the dead! And even if one of them were someone we knew, it would be significant. Three makes it mind-blowing, possibly biblical!”

  Zack was happy to hear Lucas say it—it saved him from doing so.

  “Ah, yes, this could be God’s work. But tell me, my friend, how does a Catholic explain this?” Taj said. “As I recall, you believe that eventually humans will be raised up body and soul after Jesus returns.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus has not returned.”

  “Not that we know of,” Lucas said. He smiled. “We haven’t quite finished exploring Keanu.”

  “You guys are loud,” Tea said, joining them.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” Zack said.

  “And miss all the excitement?” She brought a drink box from inside the rover and offered it to Zack. She had drinks for Lucas and Taj, too. “Hydration?”

  “Sorry,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t be. No one should be sleeping when there’s a whole dang planet to explore.” Tea caught herself and nodded toward the two bodies around the fire. “Except for them.”

  “You should be part of this debate,” Taj said. “I’d wake up Natalia if she didn’t need the sleep. We’re trying to understand what we face. Our Brazilian friend cites Jesus as a possibility.”

  Never much of a Lucas fan—certainly not a player in his World’s Greatest Astronaut game—Tea couldn’t help being sarcastic. “As in ‘Jesus, take the wheel?’” she said, singing a phrase from an old country song. “Is he driving the Chariots of God?” She turned to Zack. “Am I remembering that right?”

  “Chariots of the Gods, plural,” Taj said, sneering. “And that was a popular explanation for the
Pyramids, how they’d been built by alien visitors. Not really applicable here.”

  Lucas refused to be baited. “I’m not suggesting anything like that. But given what I’ve seen today, how can any of us rule anything out?”

  “But surely this violates your beliefs,” Taj said.

  “Catholics don’t believe that after death they will simply regain their bodies. That never made sense. Which body? The one that was filled with cancer and killed you? The body that was torn apart in a plane crash? After death, we will be transfigured. We will become something new.” He stood up, and pointed to Megan and Camilla. “Very possibly we will become like them. Which suggests to me that if you didn’t believe in God, now would be an excellent time to consider it.” He smiled his beautiful smile.

  Zack could tell Taj was holding something back. “Come on, Taj . . . everything is on the table here.”

  “There is, in my tradition, a version of what might be happening here. The Vedas, our sacred Sanskrit texts, mention the akashic records—a library of all human experience. What if that exists? What if the universe is nothing more than a giant akashic record . . . and these aliens somehow access it.”

  “And you think my religion is crazy,” Lucas said. He got up and headed for the rover.

  As they watched him go, Taj shrugged. “Saying it isn’t the same as believing it. And even if he’s convinced himself, at least he has a strategy: He will treat these things as transfigured humans. It’s more than I have.”

  Tea knelt by Zack. “Talk to me, because I’m worse off than Taj here . . . I’m totally lost.”

  Zack looked at the two sleepers. “Speaking to them as if they are revived humans is fine. But when it comes to actions? I’m still not sure this isn’t some kind of ruse.”

  “So they’re artificial.”

  “It would make sense. But why would anyone make duplicates of specific humans—”

  “To make us trust them.”

  Zack pointed to the sleeping Megan. “I would trust that creature more if it didn’t claim to be my wife.”

  Tea touched his hand, the only physical contact they’d had since she had buttoned him into his suit.

  “Zack,” Taj said, “we still haven’t agreed on a plan.”

  Zack stood and stretched. “I don’t know yet. For the moment, I want to see about Pogo. Whatever we do, I don’t just want him . . . left over there.”

  Tea stood, too. “What do you say, Taj? This sounds like a job for you and me.”

  She didn’t give Taj the chance to argue.

  Yeah going to be stuck in frkng msn control til this is over Feel free to get me out!

  RACHEL STEWART TEXT TO ETHAN LANDOLT, AUGUST 19, 2019,

  WITH NO RESPONSE

  “Are these girls under arrest?”

  Harley had followed the guard to the ground floor of Building 1, where he found Rachel, her friend Amy, and a very distraught Jillianne Dwight, all kept company by a nervous official in a blue jacket. His contractor badge identified him as BURNETT, TOBY. He appeared to be about thirty.

  “No, but they were in a restricted area—”

  “Where were you?” Harley said to Rachel.

  “The cafeteria.”

  “Actually,” Burnett said, “they ran from the cafeteria. I suspect they were trying to get into Building Four-South.” Burnett’s tone suggested that this was some kind of temple. Well, Harley knew, to most of the starstruck JSC employees, the astronaut office was the holy of holies.

  Not to Harley, however. “Her father’s an astronaut. She’s probably been in that building more than you have, Toby.” He wasn’t going to give Mr. Burnett time to argue. “Give them their phones.”

  “No, Mr. Drake, I don’t think we can do that.”

  Harley had never quarreled with JSC’s private security guys. But he was beyond patience now. “Think again, Toby. Unless you can hold up a document showing that these young women—minors—waived the right to personal possessions by entering this facility—at the invitation of the director, by the way, not on their initiative—you’re on thin ice. Actually, you’re on no ice at all. I don’t care what seems to be going on here, this is a civilian center. You can’t hold their phones, and you can’t hold them. So get over yourself and let them go.”

  But Burnett wasn’t bending. “Mr. Bynum said to hold them.” Harley sighed. He knew Burnett’s type: impressed by power and authority, but also smug in his own.

  Here was an opening. “Brent Bynum?” Burnett nodded. “Is Mr. Bynum employed by Wackenhut, which would make him one of your supervisors?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He’s not with NASA, or certainly not with the Johnson Space Center, either, is he?”

  Burnett considered this. “I don’t believe so.”

  “In fact, Mr. Bynum, with whom I’ve had several meetings already today, works for the White House. Which means he has zero authority to be ordering you around—especially zero authority to be ordering you to detain people and confiscate property.”

  Burnett considered this for a moment. Then he reached into his desk and pulled out Amy’s cell phone and Rachel’s Slate. “Thank you, Toby,” Harley said, knowing it was time to let the man down easily. “I will see what I can do about keeping these young ladies where they can be found.”

  Moments later the four of them were out in the muggy night, heading in the general direction of mission control. “Thank you,” Rachel said. Amy said nothing; she was already firing up her phone and going glassy-eyed.

  As they reached the entrance to Building 30, then entered, Harley quickly updated Rachel on the loss of signal from the Venture crew. “We aren’t going to know anything about your dad until tomorrow.” He looked up at Jillianne Dwight, who had been notably silent until now. “Can you drive them home?”

  “Love to. But . . . I’m parked behind Building Two.”

  “We’ll wait right here.”

  As Jillianne headed out, Amy announced that she needed to use the bathroom. Harley pointed her down the hall, then turned to Rachel . . . who suddenly looked like she’d had the shock of a lifetime.

  “Something wrong?”

  She held up the Slate. The headlines on the screen said, “Humans Alive in Keanu.” “Crew Finds Undead.” “Most Shocking Discovery in History.” “Space Angels!”

  “May I?” Harley took the unit and tabbed his way through half a dozen sites, all of them blaring the same general stories: A Destiny astronaut had been killed (true). Destiny and Brahma crews had discovered alien civilization (truish).

  They had also discovered living humans inside Keanu—at least one of them identified as a deceased Russian. “What the fuck?” Harley was usually careful about cursing in front of young people, but his guard was down.

  “You don’t know anything about this?” Rachel said.

  “Hell, no!”

  “What do you think?”

  “My first response, and my hundredth . . . garbage. Batshit crazy time. I mean, maybe the crew found a humanoid body—”

  He shut up as Amy rejoined them. Rachel said, “Can’t we just go back to the family room?”

  “No, you’re going home for the moment. To Amy’s.”

  “Harley, come on—!”

  Jillianne returned at that point. “Okay, girls, I’m parked illegally. . . .” She dangled her keys. It occurred to Harley that she might be eager to get back to her husband or whatever, too.

  Rachel was in a semicrouch, her face filled with disdain. Harley decided, not for the first time, that he would not want to trade places with Zack Stewart—at least not when it came to being the father of a teenage girl. “Rachel, your father is the best person in the world to be handling this situation. Trust him. I do. The moment anything happens, the moment we have any news, I’ll be in touch. I’ll get you right back over here.”

  Rachel hesitated, then reached out for her Slate. But Harley held it away. “Let me keep it for a moment. It’s better than mine. I’ll give it back to you
tomorrow.”

  Rachel stared, horrified. “Don’t worry, I won’t troll through your pictures.” She still wasn’t convinced, so he leaned close. “They took mine.”

  Once she realized she was helping Harley in a conspiracy, Rachel gave up the argument. Even though Amy was pouting, she allowed them both to be led off by Jillianne.

  Harley had not shown Rachel the last image that appeared on her Slate.

  It was a dark, unclear picture of a woman who, except for short hair, looked exactly like Megan Stewart.

  ALL THE HEAD SHEDS are behind closed doors ALL THE TIME. All I know is, astronauts are still alive, exploration is still proceeding. But beyond that—could be anything, from battling bug-eyed monsters to decoding meaning of big black monolith. We are twiddling our thumbs during LOS talking sci-fi scenarios, your tax dollars at work.

  POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM

  Tea found Patrick Downey’s remains just where Zack had told her, less than two hundred meters deeper into Keanu, and in exactly the same horrific condition: flat on his back, headless, sliced from neck to toe, still more or less contained inside his blood-spattered EVA suit. She noted that pieces of Pogo’s helmet had been gathered into a small pile. Small comfort.

  Zack had confessed, “I had nothing to cover him with.” And Tea had nothing, either. Human decency suggested that she should cover him with earth (a term that seemed increasingly inappropriate), but although “trees” had risen, there was nothing like loose soil here . . .

  “Any suggestions?”

  Taj was with her but completely distracted by the environment. “We cremate our dead,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, Zack might have been able to light that one fire . . . I don’t think we’re equipped for a funeral pyre.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that. I’m more worried about how we get him back.”

  Tea had not allowed herself to think that far into the future—a realization that alarmed her, since her whole career was based on her ability to project, plan, prepare. But Taj’s point was logical: Don’t leave your dead on the battlefield. “Then we’ll need a plastic bag.”