Heaven's Shadow Read online

  “There might be something inside the rover. An equipment bag, perhaps. Shit!” Taj batted at something around his head . . . an insect or bird, Tea couldn’t tell, but it was just large enough to be an annoyance.

  Tea took several swipes at the creature and nailed it on the fly. She bent to examine the carcass. “Now, that is weird.” She stood up. “It has edges. Looks like a flying Lego.”

  “I don’t care about the bug!”

  “Come on, Taj, try to relax—”

  The vyomanaut turned on her. “I might tell you to get serious! Do you realize the danger we face?”

  “Yeah, well, we all knew the job was dangerous when we took it . . .” She needed to keep busy; during almost every waking moment of her previous spaceflights, she had had switches to throw, experiments to operate, toilets to fix, food to prepare. So far, the Keanu mission was way too light on operational activities. She began collecting big “leaves” to cover Pogo’s remains.

  “Tea! This is not a joking matter! It’s not just our lives—all of Earth is at risk!”

  There was no way out of this. Taj was squatting, head turning right and left, as if he expected to be attacked by a wild animal at any moment. Tea knew she would have to engage him . . . the last thing she wanted to do. “Okay, how?”

  “These creatures we’ve found. Think of what they represent.”

  “You mean, beyond that old ‘advanced technology that’s indistinguishable from magic’?”

  “It’s extremely advanced technology! And it isn’t benign, it’s aimed at us. If, in addition to traveling from one star to another, the Keanu entities can generate creatures from our lives . . . Tea, there’s no weapon on Earth that can touch them.”

  “Fine, conceded. Whoever built this place and runs it is completely out of our league. But I still don’t see the threat. What could we possibly have that they want? Resources? Water? Plutonium?” She opened her hand to the dynamic environment around them. “They can cook up a whole jungle in an afternoon! They could probably snag a comet and turn it into anything they need, metal, cellulose, fuck, I don’t know . . . magic beans.”

  Taj had closed his eyes. He was rocking gently on his haunches. “I don’t assume hostility. Indifference is just as bad. Keanu’s magic might harm us in the same way a human foot crushes an anthill. That is my fear . . . that anything could emerge from this place.”

  “Or anyone.” Tea had not thought of it until this moment, but who- or whatever built Keanu had somehow crafted “undead” from the lives of Zack, Lucas, and Natalia, but not from Taj’s or hers.

  Not yet, anyway. Was that still to come? Or had the window closed?

  Taj got up and stretched. His movement drew Tea’s eye, forcing her to look beyond him deeper into Keanu’s interior.

  Where she saw a structure. At first it looked like a geological formation—a literal pile of rocks, possibly sandstone—hidden in the foliage. But the more she stared at it, the more it looked artificial. The term human-made came to mind, but she suppressed it. Still, in its tapering lines, it could have been an Egyptian pyramid or a Mayan temple—

  Goddamn Keanu twilight. She spread a last covering of leaves over Pogo’s remains, then immediately started walking toward the structure. “What’s the matter?” Taj asked.

  “At your one o’clock, about half a click out.”

  “Dammit,” Taj said. “I suppose we have to check that out.”

  “Unless you’ve got something better to do.”

  It proved surprisingly difficult to reach the structure, which Taj immediately began calling the Temple. “I wish we had the science gear with us,” he said. “We might be able to see what it’s made of. . . .”

  “Shit, Taj, we’ll be there in another ten minutes.” This Taj—hypercautious, stodgy, reliant on instruments—was easier to take than the paranoid version on display forty-five minutes earlier. But only slightly.

  On approach, the Temple turned out to be larger than Tea had originally judged, and much farther away. For the first time she felt misgivings about her impulsive approach . . . maybe Taj was right. This structure looked old and weathered, but the Destiny and Brahma explorers would have noticed something this big. Zack had originally reported that the interior of Keanu—prior to “sunrise” when the glowworms illuminated—was bare rock. He had not mentioned a three-story ziggurat within five kilometers. And he wasn’t the type to let it slip his mind....

  “Why don’t we hold up right here?” Tea said, as they reached the edge of the clearing surrounding the Temple.

  “I concur,” Taj said. His thoughts must have paralleled hers, because he moved left along the boundary of the clearing, eyes fixed on the ground.

  “How new does it look to you?” Tea said.

  Taj picked up a handful of stalks that reminded Tea of reeds . . . if reeds happened to be the color of blood. “They appear to have been chopped off.”

  “So this clearing is . . . new?” Tea was relieved, though that implied other dangers.

  “As new as everything else, I think.”

  Now Taj regarded the Temple itself. “It is more rectangular than pyramidical,” he said.

  “Is that a good or bad thing?”

  It sounded like a joke to Taj, and he showed his irritation again. “It’s just an observation. Feel free to add your own.”

  Architecture was not one of Tea’s specialties. She could tell a skyscraper from a bungalow, sure. She might go so far as to say she could tell Federal style from Art Deco, and she had vague memories of hearing the term Bauhaus. “Taj, to me it just looks like a fucking pile of sand-colored bricks.”

  “The same. But resembling a cube. Given the proportions of the gates and ramps . . .”

  “Don’t start reading more than you should.”

  “I was just wondering . . . a human building that height would have three or four levels. How many does our Temple have?”

  “I guess that’s one of the things we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

  They continued around the perimeter, with Tea growing increasingly agitated. “I don’t see any doors or windows.”

  “Neither do I.” Taj offered one of his rare smiles. “We must be careful about anthropomorphizing the structure. We call it a temple and look for temple-like openings. It might just be a solid pile of rocks, like a giant cairn or grave marker.”

  “Don’t try to cheer me up, okay?” Taj had identified Tea’s biggest concern. Like all of them, she kept slapping familiar names on what she was seeing—ramps, trees, temples—without any real knowledge of what these objects were.

  That seemed like a great way to get yourself in trouble. But then—

  “What do you think?” Tea said. “Could that be the entrance?”

  Embedded in the surface of the Temple that faced away from the Beehive was the biggest, most complex marker they had yet seen. Below that was an opening.

  “Yes. And it seems to have the same proportions as the membrane passage,” Taj said, raising his camera.

  “What do you think? Shall I see if anyone’s home?” Tea said.

  “Let me.”

  “Actually, no. My idea. My risk. Besides, you’re Brahma commander. . . . I’m slightly more expendable than you.” Before he could argue, Tea was several steps away, heading directly for the big marker and the door.

  “Do not go inside!”

  “Not planning to!” she called, picking her way carefully across the surface, which was nowhere near smooth. It was ridged and tufted, like a Kansas wheat field after harvest. Anthropomorphizing again, Tea thought it looked as though some machine or entity had cleared this area—hastily?

  She stopped about ten meters from the opening and clicked off several images. “I don’t see a door,” she called to Taj. “None of those magic beads, either.”

  “Can you see inside?”

  “Nope. It’s all shadows.” But she did feel something strange . . . a tugging at the camera. She loosened her grip, and the unit almost
flew out of her hand. “Whoa! I think there’s a big magnet in there!”

  “Come back here now!”

  Taj didn’t have to tell her twice. She clutched the camera to the front of her EVA long johns, turned, and hopped quickly over the ruts back to where she started.

  She realized that the feet of her undergarment were going to be filthy, which was all going to wind up back inside the boots of her EVA suit. Bad protocol there.

  “Did you feel that?” she asked Taj. “It was as if the camera was being pulled out of my hands.”

  “I felt nothing.” He gestured at the camera. “I hope that effect didn’t erase the images.”

  Tea hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that was the reason for the Temple’s magnetism.

  Or not. How could she have any real idea? Nothing here was as it should be!

  Taj was saying, “We’d better get back. However we’re going to deal with Keanu, it’s got to be easier as a team.”

  Has anyone considered the possibility that Keanu—now proven to be an ALIEN SPACESHIP—visited Earth one or more times PRIOR to this? There is a suspicious periodicity to such major human events as the building of the Great Pyramids, discovery of writing and end of the last Ice Age, all approximately 3,500 years apart! Just saying!

  POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM, AUGUST 23, 2019

  Okay, new rule: post first, then drink. Not the way you have it, Jermaine.

  POSTER ALMAZ, SAME SITE, MOMENTS LATER

  “We’re calling them Revenants,” said Sasha Blaine, as the footage of an impossibly alive Megan Stewart froze on the screen.

  Harley Drake raised his head and tried to reconnect with the chaos in the Home Team.

  He had been thinking about Pogo Downey. He had lost colleagues and close friends before—a buddy who hit the ground in an F-22 during test pilot school, and another who was shot down by a SAM over Yemen. Those were just close friends; other second-tier acquaintances had died, too.

  And, of course, there was Megan Stewart.

  So he was quite familiar with the sensations experienced on hearing the news, the ashen looks on faces, the constant headshaking and confusion, and the rituals.

  Except for those associated with death in space. He had joined NASA too late for the horrors of Columbia, when seven astronauts had been killed as their orbiter broke into pieces, burned up, then scattered itself across Texas and Louisiana thanks to an undetected breach in its thermal protection system.

  Pogo’s death would be the top story on every news site around the world. What was it they said about Lincoln? “Now he belongs to the ages.”

  Now Patrick Downey belonged to the Web pages.

  All of them knew flying in space was risky—that you had, in essence, a one-in-fifty chance of being killed. You were actually far safer working in a coal mine for twenty-five years, or serving consecutive combat tours.

  But knowing that didn’t make it easier. A friend was suddenly gone. Bad, but worse yet—killed by some unknown entity.

  That was the true horror. . . . What in God’s name was running around loose inside Keanu that was capable of killing a man?

  And wanting to?

  There were reports that this thing, the Sentry, had died, too. Which was another problem. Better to have captured it, interrogated or studied it.

  Harley was afraid for his friends on the mission. “Sorry,” he said, “what the hell does that mean?”

  “Revenant is a French word,” Wade Williams said, winding up for another giant info-dump, “meaning a visible ghost or an animated corpse!”

  But before he could take another breath, after which he would be unstoppable short of violence, Steven Matulka, one of the more socialized members of the Home Team, a generation younger than Williams, slapped his hand on the table. “For God’s sake, Wade!”

  In the immediate silence, Harley noted the shocked look on Wade’s face—Matulka was a protégé of the older writer; this might have been the first time in a twenty-year relationship that the younger man had spoken up—and several bowed headshakes around the room. Sasha Blaine had her hand over her eyes.

  “Speaking of rope in the family of the hanged man?” Harley said, offering a nod of thanks to Matulka. “Don’t worry, I’m not that sensitive.”

  “It’s not that accurate, anyway,” Matulka said, with a by-your-leave gesture to Harley. “Megan Stewart’s earthly remains are here in Texas, so corpse is the wrong word.

  “ Ghost doesn’t apply, either. According to the data we’ve received, those beings are corporeal. Flesh and blood.”

  “I’ll give you flesh,” said Williams, unwilling to cede the stage for long. “Don’t know about blood!” It wasn’t as witty as he’d hoped. The room was silent again.

  “I’ll give you this,” Harley said. “ Revenant sounds better than zombie. So, fine, use it. But you seem to be grabbing the shovel by the wrong end here. You’ve managed to come up with useful names for all these new things—”

  “It’s a hard habit to break,” Blaine said. “If you name something, you own it.”

  “Fine. Let’s consider Keanu and the membrane and the Sentry and the Revenants as proprietary. Publish your papers and claim priority. At what point do you start giving me, and by extension, the folks in there”—he aimed a thumb in the direction of mission control—“and the White House and the world some goddamn concrete data? Everything you’ve named could be a potential threat to our existence! Keanu maneuvers and seems to be inhabited. Fine, but by what? Is your Sentry a machine or a life-form? Either way, how can we communicate with it—or things like it—so no one else gets killed? What about the environment? Why is it changing so fast? How long does that go on? And there’s the big one. How the hell can there be people inside that thing? Formerly dead people the crew knows. That may be the freakiest question in human history.

  “You’ve got some facts. Start giving me explanations that fit, or you might as well go home.”

  Within moments, the dozen members of the team had broken into smaller groups . . . except for Williams, who was left by himself, busy pushing his glasses back up his nose.

  Which gave Harley a terrible, wonderful idea. If there was one thing he hated more than having to answer reporters, it was having nothing to say!

  Why not send members of the Home Team out to brief the world, one by one?

  Better yet, why not send Wade Williams out there . . . he could soothe or baffle the press as needed, with the added bonus that work inside the Home Team would go faster and be more productive.

  And Harley could worry about Rachel Stewart.

  CROCKETT: So you’ve heard about what’s going on with the Destiny mission.

  BOONE: You mean the alien stuff?

  CROCKETT: Don’t you think it’s cool that our astronauts may have discovered intelligent life on another world?

  BOONE: I’d be more impressed if they discovered intelligent life on this one. (WAH-WAH SFX)

  CROCKETT: Seriously . . . there’s also this rumor going around that they’ve discovered souls . . . that these aliens are smart enough to bring dead people back to life.

  BOONE: All I can say is, if they revive my uncle Eduardo, I’m not giving the money back.

  KPRC RADIO “ALL-AMERICAN” GUYS, AUGUST 23, 2019

  She was late again. She was supposed to be meeting with a producer, but something had gone wrong—goddamn Houston traffic, maybe—and she was half an hour behind schedule.

  And then she didn’t have her Slate! How the hell was she supposed to make her pitch without it?

  And where were her pants? What was she thinking, going out naked from the waist down?

  It made Megan Stewart feel cold.

  She shifted on her bed. Ouch. That didn’t feel right—

  She opened her eyes. Why was she in the backyard? And where was Rachel—?

  Then she sat up and began to tremble. The dream was already returning to the place dreams go. Here was the reality . . . she had been sleeping in the ope
n air next to a rock, said air and rock being part of the environment of the Near-Earth Object Keanu.

  Another figure lay next to her . . . the girl Camilla. Across from her, her husband, Zack. Beyond him, the white cylindrical vehicle known as rover Buzz.

  It was morning, at least as far as her biological clock was concerned.

  Oh, yes, she was alive again after being dead for the past two years. She had been resurrected somehow, on another planet.

  Among other sensations—rather far down the list, but still worth noting—her throat hurt. For that matter, she ached everywhere.

  “Hey,” Zack said, waking up and trying to stretch in his EVA underwear—never a flattering look. “Good morning.”

  “You don’t look very comfortable.”

  “You don’t, either.” That much was obvious as Zack slowly rose to his feet. “How did you sleep?”

  “What was it I used to say? ‘Like the dead.’ Now I know what that means.”

  He got that cautious look on his face, one she had learned to recognize. “So what does it mean?”

  “Well, I misspoke. I’m alive, right?”

  “But you must remember . . .”

  “Being dead?” How did she answer that? She wasn’t entirely sure herself. She had fragmentary memories of the accident. Her frustration with the weather, with Rachel, with Harley’s attitude. The truck suddenly filling the view. She hadn’t had time to feel fear. Just a moment of—surprise. “Some of it. It’s like the dream you can’t quite bring back. I know part of me was floating. Flying, actually.”

  “Or just disembodied.”

  “I like my word better. But, fine. And I was bombarded with images and memories and . . . stuff.”

  “No visits with dead relatives? No Uncle Marty or Nana Becky?”

  “Yes and no.” She really didn’t want to be debriefed—she was hungry and needed to urinate, not necessarily in that order. But, like therapy, this was helping her remember. “I knew they were out there. That everyone was out there, if I would only reach out.”