Heaven's Shadow Read online

  “Okay,” she had said, “that will be good for two minutes. Then what?” She held her hand out. Dennis returned the headset.

  “We should call Bangalore.”

  “You do that. But I’m not taking orders from them.”

  “We can’t deal with this alone!”

  “Houston will be over the horizon in two hours. Maybe I can stall him until then—”

  But the voice from Vesuvius Vent returned. “Venture, Downey. Do you copy?”

  “How the fuck can this be happening?” Yvonne said. “Didn’t you say he was dead?”

  “Yes. There was no doubt. I saw the footage of the body. There was much discussion while you were unconscious.”

  “But here he is.”

  “As with Zachary’s wife and the others. Yes, apparently Downey is restored.”

  “Okay, then what? Do I help the guy? He’s one of the crew.”

  “You don’t know what he is, what any of them are. Bad enough that our friends are dealing with them . . . we cannot let one of these creatures reach our ships.”

  “Well, we’re locked in here. What about Brahma?”

  “It’s not just access I worry about. It’s also potential damage. Suppose this being is hostile.”

  “He can’t hurt us in here.”

  Then Dennis had decided. “No, I have to meet him.”

  Now he had his suit open—on the Brahma suits, the backpack was the dorsal side, and opened, giving access. Dennis had his feet in the legs of his suit and was wriggling his arms into the arms and gloves. In spite of the tension, Yvonne had to admire the man’s skill at this procedure. Of course, he had been doing it for twenty-five years. Had helped design the suit, in fact.

  “What about me? Have you looked at my leg lately?”

  She had, and she didn’t at all like what she saw . . . the dark signs of blood poisoning.

  “My absence will have no immediate effect on your condition.”

  “But there’s a chance I could be incapacitated. And if you somehow wind up incapacitated, both vehicles are untended, and I think that’s a bad idea.”

  By now Dennis had his head through the neck ring into his bubble helmet and was sealing his backpack. He had to shout to be heard. “It is a worse idea to do nothing.”

  He began opening cabinets inside the airlock. “What are you looking for?”

  “A tool.”

  Yvonne wasn’t buying it. “You mean a weapon.”

  “Fine. A weapon.”

  “So that’s your big plan? Knock him on the head? Either you’ll crack his helmet and kill him, or you won’t do anything. Seems like a waste of time.”

  “I’d rather face that decision with a weapon than not have one if I need it.”

  Yvonne considered this. No point wishing for Houston to come on the line and tell her what to do. She was on her own . . . and she agreed in principle that this “Downey” creature should not be allowed into Venture—not yet.

  “Okay, the utensils we use are all plastic. Flashlights, pens, all of that stuff is lightweight.”

  “I remember.” That was right, Dennis had lived on the International Space Station for almost a year. He knew what kind of gear you’d find in a NASA space cabin.

  “The toolbox outside, though. There should be a torque wrench.”

  Dennis considered this. Through the faceplate of his helmet, already fogging with each exhalation, he smiled. “Thank you. You should seal this and evacuate the chamber. Keep it that way.”

  As Yvonne returned to the main cabin, dogging the hatch behind her, she felt dizzy and afraid.

  As she entered the commands to bleed air from the Venture lock, allowing Dennis to exit, her eye caught the silver case holding the Item. “What the hell are you looking at?”

  Q: What is the one thing you do better than anything?

  DOWNEY: Well . . . break things and kill people, I guess.

  ASTRONAUT CANDIDATE INTERVIEW WITH LT. COL. PATRICK DOWNEY, USAF,

  MAY 11, 2011

  Right up to the time he found himself staring up the vertical side of Vesuvius Vent, the Revenant formerly known as Pogo Downey had a warm memory of the radical maneuver Zack had chosen to get people and machines to the bottom. Yeah, just throw everything overboard. The assumption was that astronauts could be hauled up by rope—and the rover abandoned.

  That made sense, as long as you had a fellow astronaut at the top of the slope with a line.

  At the moment, Pogo was alone . . . and searching in the darkness for the ramp Zack had suggested as a backup return route.

  It had been easier to see in glowworm light. When he emerged from the passage between the membrane and the vent floor, he found that the glowworms had shut down! There was no light but the beams from his helmet lamps . . . and faint starlight.

  Making matters more challenging, he was cramping. EVA suits were not tailored to individual astronauts, but they came in three sizes: Pogo had worn large while Zack Stewart used medium.

  He had also not been able to perform any system checks.

  The critical driver now was oxygen. There was less than ninety minutes left in his tanks. If he’d had time and been alone, he would have recharged them at the rover . . . but he had been able to slip into the camp for only a few moments.

  “Pogo, do you read me?” Chertok’s voice had a strange, distant sound. Probably bounced all the way to Earth, then to Keanu.

  But at least someone had answered.

  Downey’s response was, “Five by,” a callback to flight tests of three generations earlier. Five by five. Clear. “Where are you?”

  “On Vesuvius rim.”

  Downey looked up the cliff face in the general direction of Brahma. “I don’t see you. Too dark.” And those Brahma suits are blue.

  Another lag. The signal was definitely being routed, probably through Bangalore. Which meant that everyone knew what had happened to Patrick Downey.

  During his trek through the membrane, down the long passage and then across the floor of the vent, Pogo had made major changes in his plans.

  At first, realizing he was alive again, he had wanted to get back in touch with Zack and the others. But three events had convinced him that was a bad idea: The first was finding the body of another Revenant, a sign that Pogo’s former colleagues were prepared to be violent.

  Second was the sight of Zack and the other crew members in complete disarray, suits discarded, in the company of other humans, among them two members of the untrustworthy Coalition crew.

  Third was finding his own body . . . seeing his own bloodied face frozen in final agony—

  He needed an advantage. High ground. Leverage.

  He was also determined to contact Linda and the kids.

  Surely they had been told of the earlier accident—strange to think of the words, his earlier death. The thought of their pain and uncertainty triggered blinding tears.

  All he wanted in life was to be able to take that away, to make it better, to hold them again. No, it was all a mistake. I’m alive!

  He could reach his family—and gain needed leverage—only by going outside the chamber and back to Venture.

  So he had stolen a suit and helmet.

  All during this time he had been bombarded with strange pseudo-memories. Images of structures and landscapes somewhere deeper inside Keanu. One was dark, glowing, burned. Another was filled with greenish fog and strange floating shapes. There was a recurring image of a large, multilimbed creature dressed in garments that were a kind of shiny armor.

  He knew their names. Garudas Scaptors. Architects. The fact that there were several factions of Architects, each with its own agenda.

  And the stupid Sentry, which wasn’t a Sentry at all, but simply another life-form. If it had a more accurate name, it would be candidate. For what, Pogo didn’t know.

  There was so much more . . . concepts that lurked at the borders of memory, like lessons in computer science studied twenty years back: the idea that entities
, organic or not, had a greater footprint in the universe than suggested by visual borders or physical limits, that they left quantum “wakes” or “clouds” that could be detected—and manipulated—years after death or destruction.

  The dizzying confusion of it, the lack of words to fit concepts, his frustration with his own inability to understand how, why—it made him physically ill. Yet as he reached the rim of Vesuvius—spotting Dennis, who had switched on his helmet lights—he suddenly knew what his mission was.

  Not just to go home, to return to Linda and Daniel and Kerry.

  To punish the Architects for their cruel and ill-planned contact with the human race.

  Then go home.

  As he passed through the Beehive, he had flung rocks at as many cells as he could. The destruction was minimal, but likely significant.

  “Where’s the ramp from your twenty?” he radioed to Dennis. As he waited, he looked at the rocks and ice around him. His hands felt empty. What he needed was a stick, something to steady himself. Deep in the shadows, under a cleft, were several items that, in a terrestrial cave, would have been called stalactites.

  Pogo wondered briefly if it was possible for a human to break ice that had been hardened for ten thousand years. The answer was yes—

  “To my left, your right . . . two hundred meters.”

  Downey was in motion before Dennis finished telling him, slipping and sliding, bracing against the vent wall with one free hand, the other using the ice shard as a cane.

  He felt faint—probably stressing the suit’s oxygen flow, which was not designed for cross-country hikes—and the momentary lightness reminded him all too much of the circumstances of his own death. Just how had that happened? Clearly Lucas had spooked the Sentry, but what kind of creature responded to a simple flash of light with a killing blow?

  Unless that creature was so strong and fast that it was merely intending to grab and hold him—

  There was the ramp, its terminus littered with small rocks mixed with snow. Clearly no one had tried to use it in centuries or longer.

  But he could pick his way across the rubble, using his “cane.” And once he got past the debris at the base, the ramp proved to be relatively clean, though strangely broad. You could have driven two rovers up this thing, side by side.

  A good thing, too. The low gravity meant little traction. Every other step resulted in a skid . . . and though he knew, intellectually, that he could survive a fall, he had no wish to return to the vent floor and start the climb again.

  He was running out of time.

  A bobbing light played across the irregular vent walls. Dennis making rendezvous. “I see you.”

  “Copy that.”

  Downey reached the rim before Dennis arrived. He stopped, catching his breath, wheezing a bit. He could see Brahma off to his right, a six-story silver skyscraper that seemed ridiculously close . . . and Venture beyond, squat, lit like a Halloween pumpkin.

  “Downey.” Dennis stopped several meters away. “Welcome back.”

  The lag was driving Pogo crazy—even though the EVA suits effectively masked physical gestures that accompanied speech, it was annoying to see the Russian raise his hand in greeting . . . and have the words trail by seconds.

  Maybe that explained what happened next. In silence, the cosmonaut reached out to him with his right hand . . . but there was something in his left! And Dennis was raising that hand—

  Downey blocked it with his cane. The movement was exaggerated by low gravity—Chertok spun.

  And the icy tip pierced Chertok’s suit.

  The Russian stared at the gash in the thick blue fabric and a quick spew of bloody droplets that quickly froze, becoming red sleet.

  Only then did Downey hear the man say, “Take my hand.”

  So it hadn’t been a mistake! Dennis Chertok was drawing him close to hit him, likely to smash his helmet.

  Now it was Dennis Chertok whose air and life were hissing out of a hole in his suit. He dropped the tool and frantically reached for his chest—obviously he couldn’t see exactly where he’d been cut.

  Did he have a patch? One hand pawed at a pocket on the left leg of the suit.

  His faceplate fogged over, then frosted. Words in Russian. Downey heard what he knew to be a curse, followed by a single word: Spaseniye. Help.

  Then a strangled hiss. Chertok fell over, face down in the snow of Keanu. No movement. He was dead.

  Pogo dropped his ice spear and picked up the tool. Better.

  Pogo had no memory of the next few minutes. It was as if he had tele-ported, à la Star Trek, from the rim of the crater to a place midway between the two vehicles, approaching Venture from its back side.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt Dennis Chertok. Well, maybe he had wanted to punish him for meeting him with a weapon. Surely the Russian must have known what would happen. Did the man have no understanding of what Downey had endured?

  But dead? No. Of all people, Downey knew what that felt like. The sudden, permanent, inescapable disconnect. Of course, whereas Downey had been dismembered, literally seeing if not really feeling his body being torn apart, Chertok had frozen and suffocated . . . it must have been like drowning.

  Downey had always heard that drowners felt peace at the end. He rather hoped the same was true for cosmonauts exposed to vacuum. . . .

  Still, it shouldn’t have happened. He was too quick to react, too uncontrolled.

  But it was done. “Yvonne, Pogo. I’ve got a problem.”

  At least the lag was gone—Downey could communicate directly with Venture through line of sight. “No shit, you stupid bastard. I saw what you did.”

  “Then you know it was an accident.” As he talked, Downey realized he couldn’t just stand on the surface of Keanu debating Yvonne Hall. He continued to approach the lander.

  “What do you want?”

  “What the hell do you think? I want to come aboard! I can’t stay out here.”

  Another half dozen steps closer. “Where are Zack and Tea?”

  “No idea. Still in Keanu.”

  “How do I know you didn’t hurt them?”

  “Why don’t you ask them?”

  “I would if I could.”

  “Well, they were fine last time I saw them.” That was the truth . . . Downey had no reason to lie. “Come on, Yvonne, it’s me. We’re friends.”

  “We’re crewmates. A whole different deal. Especially when it’s past tense.” For the first time since returning to life, Pogo Downey felt a flash of real anger. Stupid bitch—she really had no understanding of the loyalty one member of a crew owed another. Especially during a mission. What was it the Russian trainers told cosmonauts? “Learn to work together, because if one of you screws up, all of you get blamed.” That was the reality.

  “Well, I’m returning to Venture.”

  “I can’t let you in.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  There was another long silence. This time it was broken by a familiar crackle in Downey’s headset. “Venture, Houston. Venture, Houston, do you copy?”

  As quickly as he could, he said, “Houston, Downey on EVA. Do you copy?”

  Houston’s response would have taken eight seconds, but Downey would never know, since Yvonne immediately radioed, “Downey is on the surface and attacked Chertok. I consider him a threat.”

  Then she switched to Channel B, making it impossible for him to hear. “Downey for Houston, how me?”

  Another long lag. Finally a different capcom: “Ah, welcome back, Pogo. Stand by.”

  Shit.

  For a moment he paused, looking to his right at the taller Brahma lander . . . it was unoccupied. Taking that over—it would be another Horatio Hornblower maneuver, just like the gravity gauge. Only now they would be “cutting out” an enemy vessel. Well, not they . . . just Pogo Downey.

  Then what? Claim it for the United States and NASA? Repel boarders? Launch it and leave Taj and his crew stranded?

  The display in his he
lmet had just flipped to yellow. He had half an hour of oxygen left. Getting aboard Brahma would allow him to keep breathing, but he’d be trapped. It was unlikely he could recharge his suit’s tanks from those on Brahma—hell, he’d spend an hour just trying to make the radios work.

  No, Venture had to be his target.

  “Downey for Venture through Houston. I’m at the ladder.”

  No answer. No answer!

  Although NASA’s Destiny-7 mission has had its share of setbacks, including the loss of a crew member, the agency is reporting that communications should resume shortly and that the astronauts will soon complete their EVA and return to the Venture lander. The crew of three is expected to splash down in the Pacific sometime Sunday.

  Meanwhile, an insurgent armed with a handheld missile launcher brought down an American helicopter in northern Pakistan today. . . .

  LEAD TEXT, CBS CABLE NEWS, AUGUST 23, 2019

  “We’ve got AOS,” Josh Kennedy said.

  Harley knew it before the worn-out flight director said it, because all around him, at the twenty consoles, blank or safe-mode screens had suddenly lit up with data, live feed from Venture.

  Knowing acquisition of signal was imminent, Harley had left the Home Team room, leaving one order behind: Jillianne Dwight was to take Rachel and her friend Amy home. Rachel was exhausted, for one thing. For another, the outcome of the whole Keanu adventure was still in doubt. Harley ordered Jillianne to deliver Amy to her parents, then put Rachel to bed and get hold of the information flow. (He had given the girl back her Slate. It was hers, after all, and with revelations flooding the data devices in the Home Team, Harley no longer needed it.)

  Now he watched as Shane Weldon walked into mission control hours after his team—lead for the mission, scheduled originally to handle ascent from Keanu and rendezvous with Destiny—should have been on duty. Although he loomed over Josh Kennedy, Weldon let the junior flight director reestablish contact, which he did, first, by nodding to Jasmine Trieu, his capcom. “Make the call.”

  “Venture, Houston, acquiring you at Stay plus twenty-six hours, eighteen minutes.”