Heaven's War Read online

  “How do we know it came from the Beehive?” Harley said.

  Sasha pointed at relatively fresh tracks that led back into the Beehive. “Look for yourself.”

  “Does that mean this little guy was resurrected?” Harley said.

  “It might,” Zack said. He turned to Rachel. “Where on Earth are vervet monkeys found?”

  Now she was embarrassed, because she didn’t know. But Sasha rescued her. “They’re found in the Far East, particularly India.”

  Harley and Zack exchanged looks. “That sort of fits,” Zack said. He nodded to Camilla. “So far we’ve only seen humans being brought back, and every one of those had a direct personal link to one of the humans here.”

  Harley snorted. “So, if I get this...we’re wondering which of the Bangalore people is hot for a monkey?”

  Sasha slapped Harley on the shoulder. Meanwhile, Rachel was keeping an eye on the monkey...which was busy devouring the melon while staying vigilant.

  Zack was heading deeper into the Beehive. “I wonder what else is in here?” Rachel found the whole place creepy in the extreme, but she wasn’t going to let her father out of her sight.

  She followed. So did Camilla, closely, then Harley and Sasha.

  The Beehive was dark, except for light from the large opening into the habitat itself, and from a weird glow emanating from the hexagonal things along the walls.

  Camilla made a sound and clutched Rachel’s hand. “Daddy, what are these things?”

  “We called them cells,” Zack said. “They’re some kind of incubators.”

  “And Mom is one of these?”

  Zack nodded. The whole idea made Rachel shudder. “You know, Daddy—”

  She and the others heard another strange sound. But this wasn’t the screeching of a reborn vervet monkey...this was a pitiful yowl.

  “God, there wouldn’t be a baby here?” Sasha said.

  Harley rolled forward and around a corner. “No, I think we’ve got that covered elsewhere.” Rachel knew that the Bangalore object had brought a mother and newborn child to Keanu. “Zack!”

  Zack had been searching down another alley in the Beehive. Now he ran to Harley. Rachel wasn’t in a hurry, however; she wasn’t sure she wanted to see what was making that awful sound.

  It was coming from a cell a meter off the ground...there was light inside as well as the shadow of a creature—another animal, Rachel thought—thrashing in agony. “Let’s get it out of there,” Zack said, chipping away at the cell’s membrane with the shovel.

  As soon as he’d created a tear, he and Sasha peeled back the membrane and reached inside.

  They pulled out a dog.

  Or what looked and sounded like a dog that had lost its master. The creature had a snout and four legs but was encased in the same leathery second skin as the monkey, coated in slime from the cell. Which the dog immediately showered on Rachel and the others as it thrashed and shook itself. With Sasha pinning the animal, Zack managed to peel the second skin away from its face.

  Able to breathe and see, the animal calmed down. “Anybody here a dog person?” Zack said.

  “I grew up with a border collie,” Sasha said. She was making soothing sounds as she gently peeled away more of the covering.

  “I was actually wondering what breed this was.”

  “Looks like a golden-Lab mix,” Harley said. “Not that I’m an expert.”

  Just then the dog wrestled itself out of Zack and Sasha’s grasp and performed a violent shiver, obviously trying to free itself of what remained of the second skin.

  “Poor thing,” Rachel said. Not that she was a dog fan.

  “I wonder who this guy belongs to,” Sasha said.

  The dog looked right at Rachel...tongue hanging out. Here he comes, she thought, ready to back away.

  But the dog only took a step toward Rachel. And she couldn’t help reaching out to pat his head. The dog responded by licking her hand.

  “Well,” Zack said, “we know who he belongs to for the moment.”

  “Rachel, you ought to give your dog a name,” Harley said.

  “He’s not my dog!” The only dog Rachel had ever liked had been in some old television show. “All right, call him ‘Cowboy.’”

  Suddenly Cowboy barked. He had smelled or seen something off in the reaches of the Beehive.

  Rachel and the others instinctively clustered together. “God, what now?” Sasha said.

  Zack hefted the shovel just as another creature emerged from the shadows. Like Cowboy, this one was four-legged and of earthly design. “Is that a cow?” Rachel said.

  Harley laughed out loud. “What do you suppose our barbecue-loving Texas friends are going to say to that?”

  “Actually,” Sasha said, “I’ll be more interested in what our friends from Bangalore will say to what our Texas friends will say.”

  Rachel thought that was pretty darn funny, but Zack only grunted.

  There’s another thing we won’t have on Keanu, she realized.

  Fun.

  Part Two

  I can’t believe they’re having me do this.

  Hi, Rachel, it’s Amy...Amy Meyer. I hope you can see this...your dad’s friends thought we should send messages to everyone who went away in those things. I guess they have the idea you’ll receive signals. Everyone thinks you’re still, you know, alive.

  God, that’s stupid, I mean...hello, we’re all still thinking about you and praying for you and hoping you’re doing okay. It’s a little weird here, that’s for sure, but nothing like...whatever’s going on with you.

  Sorry, can I stop now?

  BROADCAST FROM HOUSTON MISSION CONTROL TO KEANU BY AMY MEYER

  AUGUST 31, 2019

  Okay, who do I know here? Some of the people from Bangalore. There’s Mr. Vikram Nayar, who was my father’s mission director and my mother’s—well, let that slide for now. Mr. Nayar is tall and grim and usually unhappy.

  There’s Dale Scott, who’s this American astronaut who was working for Nayar and my father because he was kind of a dick and NASA got rid of him. His girlfriend is here, too. Valentina is her name. She’s Russian and looks unhappy, too.

  There’s another ISRO engineer named Jaidev who’s maybe 28, and creepy.

  I also know Rachel Stewart, Zack’s daughter, who is 14 and from the Houston group.

  There’s no one I actually like.

  Which makes sense, because there’s nothing about Keanu that I like, either.

  KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, UNNUMBERED ENTRY, ARRIVAL DAY

  ARRIVAL DAY: VALYA

  Valya Makarova would remember several things about the trip from Earth to Keanu inside a giant bubble.

  First there was the fear. Can I breathe? (Yes, as it turned out.) Am I trapped? (She remembered having nightmares about the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk fifteen years back, and the horror of finding yourself in a cold dark tube from which there was no escape. And yes, she was trapped...but the bubble was translucent...and the temperatures stayed Bangalore-high.)

  She noted that she was still holding on to her purse. It was a large black bag, a Hermès Birkin knockoff she had bought in Moscow, and filled with such necessities as her phone, makeup, bits of candy and tissues, and her growing collection of key cards and security passes. Her right arm was through the strap; the purse rode high on her shoulder.

  Reassured by that, at least, she commenced a brief, urgent search for Dale Scott. They had been standing right next to each other in the shattered parking lot of the Bangalore Control Center when the looming bubble had expanded.

  Tumbled upside down into darkness, she had lost sight of Dale in seconds...she wasn’t even sure whether he had been scooped up, or left behind, or, horrid thought, sliced in half.

  What is happening? She hadn’t been able to make a count, but it was obvious that something like a hundred people had been scooped up by this bubble.... As it rose into the sky, then beyond the sky into space, some floated in zero g, screaming, while other
s tried to swim. Several people collided, fighting like panicky drowners. One encounter was so violent it left a cloud of blood floating in air.

  And with blood, there came the inevitable discharges of vomitus. At least a third of the hundred people looked either green or pale, each suffering from motion sickness.

  Some simply closed their eyes and attempted yoga positions, or sleep. After thrashing around and finding the actions useless—and exhausting—Valya had selected the last option, relaxing to the inevitable, folding her hands across her chest and finding that, after a while, she floated toward the bubble’s wall.

  For a moment, she was afraid she might sail through it—or slam into it. Or be electrocuted at a touch.

  Fortunately, none of that happened. She simply...bounced...and found herself gently but definitely sliding toward one end of the bubble along with several dozen others. (Just as many seemed to be sliding toward the other “pole.”) The object must be spinning, imparting some motion to its contents.

  And now all Valya could do was take in the spectacle of a group of people floating inside a giant bubble, an image that looked as though it were more suited to some demented ride at an American amusement park.

  For the longest time, the bubble was filled with screams, complaints, prayers in a polyglot stew of Hindi, Urdu, even Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian.

  As for the other, nastier aspects of existence inside the bubble, Valya noted that, quite separate from the water and food dispensers, a different machine was sucking in the blood, urine, and other debris.

  She found this reassuring. It told her that the builders of the bubble had deliberately collected them and, for whatever reasons, planned to support them.

  Somewhat comforted, Valya had spent much of the next half day, in rotation, sleeping—the worst airplane sleep was better than the best she was able to get in the bubble—and then taking inventory of her purse (There seemed to be fewer items every time! Where had the roll of Dyno-Mints gone?) and speculating on who had grabbed them, why, and what for.

  Mostly, however, what she remembered was feeling as though she were falling.

  Intellectually, she knew it was no different from what cosmonauts had experienced for sixty years: zero g or microgravity or, yes, free fall.

  But knowing that...even knowing that Dale, her most recent lover, had lived it...nothing had prepared her for the unsettling experience.

  She passed the journey without significant interaction with her fellow voyagers. Yes, there was an occasional nod, a shared grimace. At one point, a sobbing young woman floated within reach and Valya grabbed her, saying soothing things in Hindi that she half-believed herself. “Don’t worry. We’re being taken somewhere. If they wanted us dead, they wouldn’t be giving us food and water.”

  One thing that Valya couldn’t help noticing: the surprise on the woman’s face when Valya spoke. True, she’d been a real outsider in Bangalore. Although she was of average height and weighed more than she wanted (at age fifty-three she was finding it depressingly easy to put on pounds), she had blue eyes and blond hair and spoke Hindi with a Russian accent.

  Russians had never been popular in India.

  In spite of her linguistic skills, her isolation from the other bubble victims was no surprise. Valya had gotten to know very few of the team at Bangalore. To this point, all her Brahma-related work had taken place in Moscow.

  As well it should have. She was a linguist, not a space person. Yes, she had grown up on the fringes of the space program—her father, Anton Makarov, worked in the Energiya factory, where spacecraft were built; he was essentially a plumber. Valya’s mother was a secretary in one of Energiya’s sister organizations.

  From both parents their daughter had learned about the overwhelming and unproductive role of the Communist Party—never dealing with ideology, but only with bonuses and perks—and the inside politics of any organization larger than a football team.

  Rather than follow her family, and her contemporaries, into aerospace engineering and a sure job at Energiya, Valya had chosen to study languages at Moscow University.

  Part of it was her desire to make money as a translator. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union threw itself open to European and American business interests in a desperate attempt to remain Communist. The effort had failed; by 1992 the Soviet Union had fallen apart.

  But the market for translators never slackened. Valya had made a better than decent living—in hard, non-Russian currency—by knowing not only English, but French, German...Spanish, and Portuguese. Over the years she had added some Arabic and Hindi and had a reading knowledge of Chinese (she spoke the Cantonese version).

  It was this broad-based knowledge that had brought her to work for the Indian Space Research Organization, to help translate strange signals. Her skill had likely made it easier for her to fall into a relationship with Dale Scott.

  On balance, then, she would have to conclude that language had ruined her life.

  After a few hours, however, with the bubble clearly in space, the bodies no longer flailing, the long wave of panic having receded, Valya was able to hear.

  Somewhere inside the bubble, machines were at work. There was a definite hum, and occasional insane series of mechanical clicks.

  Turning her head, she saw dark rectangular shapes at the nearest “pole” of the bubble. They seemed to be the source of the noises.

  No matter. By this point, perhaps two hours into the situation, Valya’s overriding thought became...Now I need to urinate.

  Before it became an emergency, however, she found herself joining a collection of humans—none of whom she recognized—at the south pole of the bubble, where it became apparent that the object was equipped with life support mechanisms. One unit displayed obvious nipplelike structures, and some desperately thirsty people were lapping away, happily wiping their mouths. “Water!” one of them proclaimed.

  Water. Good.

  Valya surmised that a similar unit next to it dispensed food of some kind. At the moment, a pair of Indian men in the standard white shirts and slacks were examining the device, fingers probing, hands tapping around the edges. A heavyset young Chinese man joined them for a few moments, too, before giving up.

  Thank God for engineers, she thought.

  Then a different man joined them—American, in his fifties, a bit stocky, yet looking somehow less rumpled than the others. He conversed briefly with the two Indians, seemed to reassure himself of something important, then saw Valya...and smiled. “Hey, baby! Happy to see me?”

  When the Bangalore Object struck, Valya had just reached Dale’s car in the parking lot. Like most of the several thousand employees of Bangalore Control Center, Valya commuted by bus, a trip that often took an hour, one way, from the city center.

  But Dale Scott was American. His belief in private transportation bordered on the religious. He was proud of the fact that he had bullied ISRO into leasing a car for him. “Driving it is still a bitch,” he said. “What they need is what they used to have in Russia...a lane right down the middle of the fricking road for VIPs.”

  Valya remembered such a road, running near Energiya. “What makes you think you’d be a VIP here?” she teased.

  “I’ve spent four years teaching these folks how to operate in space, and now they’re on their way to Keanu. Without me, Vikram Nayar would be just another space wannabe instead of the rajah of Brahma.” One of the things Valya had liked about Dale, his good looks aside, was his confidence that, now and then, slipped into arrogance.

  It had hurt him with NASA, she knew. His astronaut career had stalled seven years back. But, for some reason, it had endeared him to the Indians Valya had met. Certainly her stock had risen considerably when they learned she was dating Dale, the unspoken observation being, He could have all the younger women he wanted!

  The same thought had occurred to Valya, of course, who assumed that, in fact, Dale likely was having all the younger women he wanted. They had only met two weeks before the Brahma la
unch, hardly time enough to develop a real relationship. She had been flattered by his attention and certainly enjoyed making love with him but wondered how much of the shared attraction was transient—or fueled by a common language.

  No matter. Barring a miracle, they had both left behind a world in which relationships existed. Now their goal was day-to-day survival.

  She realized, however, that the affair with Dale had probably saved her life. When the shocking news came that a pair of objects had been fired from Keanu toward Earth, and that one of them was targeting Bangalore Control Center, Valya had not known what to do, where to run.

  Valya had spent the last two days at the center, working frantically and not productively, trying to translate some of the signs, symbols, and signals received from Keanu. The new imagery from the Brahma crew on the NEO had not been shared with the linguistic team dealing with the earlier radio signals. Valya knew there was additional material, but in true ISRO fashion, it wasn’t being shared.

  In fact, she was close to leaving the center when Dale appeared in her tiny office and said, “We’re going, now.”

  “What about the mission?” she heard herself saying, though she was already in motion down the hallway.

  “Fuck the mission, it’s over, anyway.”

  They had run for the parking lot, a cramped collection of multicolored automobiles behind the control center. Seeing the jammed vehicles—Indians were worse than Russians when it came to respecting the rights of other cars in a parking lot, and Russians would happily block you in for a day if it suited them—Valya had said, “We’re never going to get out!”

  But Dale had simply grinned his crooked grin. “Oh, we’ll get out if I have to steal a car.”

  They had barely reached his Mercedes, however, when they realized they weren’t going to get away. They could see and hear the approaching object.

  Dale reached for her—to shield her, she thought—but the blinding impact slammed both of them to the pavement. A blast of heat washed over them—it wasn’t hot enough to melt metal, or flesh. Either that, or it didn’t last long enough. It was possible that the jammed vehicles sheltered them.