Heaven’s Fall Read online

  When the HB Council decided that landing in India was preferable to Houston or Florida in the United States (there were more of the mysterious THE folks in America than anywhere else), Bangalore became the choice.

  The actual target was an Indian air base north of the city called Yelahanka, which had been chosen primarily because it was the closest controlled airport to the former Bangalore Control Center. The mission control building and surrounding territory had been destroyed by a Keanu vesicle in August 2019, but a larger space research campus survived.

  “Two thousand meters,” Pav said. “Descent speed is good.”

  “Feels a little sluggish to me,” Zeds said.

  The moment he uttered those words, Adventure shuddered and a red light flashed on the control panel. (The designers had kept the earthly conventions wherever possible.)

  Before Rachel could react—or even feel fear—Yahvi’s hand landed on her shoulder.

  “Relax,” Zeds said. “We’re still good.”

  “But losing some altitude,” Pav said. For a moment, they exchanged terse, operational chat, like all pilots Rachel had ever heard on every airplane flight she’d ever taken.

  “I saw a flash from one of the screens,” Pav said.

  Then Zeds added, “I think we lost part of the tail.”

  Hearing that, Rachel almost choked. The tail was actually a set of four fins, each providing aerodynamic control and landing support. Losing one or part of one might not be fatal, but it was certainly not good news.

  “We’re holding steady,” Zeds said after a long ten seconds. “Still under control.”

  “A heads-up would have been nice,” Pav said.

  Rachel wished again they could have kept constant contact with Keanu, a hopeless task given the NEO’s distance from Earth and the lack of relay satellites.

  The ultimate mission? Historically humans thought about visiting other worlds in order to explore. But no matter how much it had changed in two decades, Earth was their home . . . so exploration wasn’t the goal.

  Another classical reason was to find some vital element or mineral, and God knows the Keanu HBs could have used food, clothing, and any of a hundred thousand items from Earth, from books to shovels to electronics. They had been able to fabricate many items, but they were only as good as their memories—or ability to reinvent certain items. (It would have been great, Rachel believed, to have been able to buy an RL-10 rocket off the shelf, rather than try to fabricate something like it.)

  Another motive for great human voyages, of course, was war.

  So, really, the flight of Adventure was a bit of all three. Which made it sound as though there were a real plan. But for the first ten years of her life on Keanu, Rachel and her colleagues had concentrated on surviving in their original habitat, all the while trying to learn how to control the NEO.

  That job had previously belonged to a race called the Architects, the original builders of the NEO who had launched it on its ten-thousand-year mission.

  But the only Architects the humans had met had been Revenants . . . formerly alive beings revived to communicate with humans, to tell them, in Rachel’s view, just enough to make their lives difficult.

  Eventually, using clues from the last Architect, the HBs had learned how to “fly” Keanu, turning it back toward the solar system for this curious mission.

  Missing tail fin or not, Adventure was still flying, still descending at a survivable rate. Pav reached to his left and patted Zeds on the shoulder, or one of the pair on the Sentry’s right side. “Looking good!”

  Rachel allowed herself to feel hope—right up to the time Adventure crashed.

  It wasn’t a serious crash, an auger-in at great velocity. No one would have survived that.

  But it was a hard thump down, the silvery shell smashing tail-first into a grassy apron north of the main Yelahanka runway.

  Pav’s last words were, “Too fast!” Rachel had sat through a number of simulations, though nowhere near the number Pav and Zeds had performed. She could read the changing numbers—altitude and speed—and saw that the altitude number was getting low while the speed remained too high. (When, in rehearsals, she pointed this out from her backseat spot in the cockpit, Pav would often remind her that it was her father who was the astronaut, not Rachel. Of course, she could and did say the same to Pav.)

  She wondered what “too fast” meant. As in too fast for comfort? Or too fast for survival—

  In those twenty seconds, Rachel watched the view screen with horrid fascination, the tarmac rushing toward them not much faster than it had in their sims, Yahvi saying, “Mommy . . . !” Even Xavier couldn’t go silently into that not-so-good night, moaning, “No, no, no!”

  She was thinking, I’m going to die here, stupidly and so will my daughter. Why did I put her at risk?

  “Are we on the runway?” Pav asked.

  Rachel wanted to scream, Who cares? But Zeds answered, calmly, “No, but I think it’s going to be okay—”

  They crunched with a sound like a Dumpster falling two stories onto concrete. The impact was greater than the worst airline landing Rachel had ever experienced. The couches cushioned the impact, but a large piece of the control panel broke off and fell, barely missing her and Yahvi.

  Adventure rocked, shuddered, seemed to sink into the grass . . . then finally settled, at a bit of a list. They were on their backs, pinned like insects, looking up, feeling full Earth gravity after several seconds of multiple Earth gravity. Rachel felt sick to her stomach.

  “Bangalore, Adventure,” Pav radioed. “No matter what it looked like out there, we’re down and safe.” Then he glanced over his shoulder to give Rachel and Yahvi a smile.

  At that moment, Xavier said, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  Seeing what Yahvi, Zeds, and Rachel could not, Pav’s expression changed. He touched his headset. “Correction, Bangalore, we’re going to need emergency medical assistance!”

  Now they all looked toward the rear or bottom of the cockpit, where they saw Xavier, his restraints unhooked, trying to get to Sanjay’s couch a meter away. It likely didn’t matter; Xavier wouldn’t be able to do much.

  The broken panel section had hit their genius designer and engineer right in the head.

  Rachel was thinking, First Venture, then Brahma, now this.

  The Stewart and Radhakrishnan families should never be allowed to land another spacecraft.

  I come from a small town, very few people, where the number doesn’t change much over the years. For example, whenever a gal gets pregnant, some guy leaves town.

  DALE SCOTT’S FAVORITE JOKE,

  TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL BABYLONIAN

  DALE

  “How’d you get it moving, Harls?”

  Dale Scott may have spoken a bit louder than necessary, and his words were nothing like a greeting, all of which explained why a bald, middle-aged man wearing a silly flowered shirt and baggy shorts (which exposed shiny new flesh-colored legs) started as if he’d been shot. Then he turned with a look of genuine surprise.

  To be fair to Harley Drake, it had been some time since he had seen Dale—and their last conversation had been angry.

  Making matters worse, Dale had totally ambushed him. It was still very early morning, Keanu human habitat time. The glowworms on the ceiling above were just beginning to grow brighter, heralding a new day of earnest productivity and blind, robotic denial—at least as Dale thought of it.

  But Harley Drake, Dale’s long-ago astronaut colleague and Keanu nemesis, was more aware of the lingering mysteries and unanswered questions concerning their space home of two decades.

  As far as Dale knew, every morning since that first month, Harley had visited this part of the habitat, the area known as the Beehive, a magical collection of honeycomb-like cells ranging in size from squirrel to elephant. For several months back
in 2019, dozens of living creatures had emerged from the Beehive—reborn on the Near-Earth Object after their DNA or computer code or 3-D map or “soul” had been retrieved by Keanu’s systems, then imprinted on a suitable collection of nanotech goo, to be combined, transformed, and rearranged into a living creature indistinguishable—at least by any measure the Houston-Bangalores possessed—from its dead original.

  People emerged from the Beehive, too. Not many, and not for long. Shortly after the arrival of 187 involuntary human immigrants to Keanu, the Beehive stopped reviving humans, stopped creating Revenants. The reason was unknown, maybe unknowable, but Dale suspected that everyone was relieved. Over the years, all of the HBs began to believe that the Revenants would never come again.

  Harley Drake was the only real exception. Dale suspected that the former mayor of the HBs came to the Beehive every morning, ritualistically, to see if any additional Revenants had come back . . . or to make sure that they hadn’t.

  Today, however, he found Dale Scott.

  “Fuck you, Dale.”

  “Nice talk.”

  “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Not my intention.”

  “Yet, it happened. You chose to lurk there instead of walking up to the Temple during working hours.”

  “True,” he said, “but the Temple is so crowded with—”

  “People who hate you?”

  “As cruel as it is true.”

  Only now did Harley meet Dale’s eyes. Until this moment Harley had been looking past him, at the stale-smelling maw of the Beehive. But it wasn’t rudeness or extreme caution that kept Harley from engaging; it was history. Harley had been a well-regarded test pilot and NASA astronaut up to two years before the whole Keanu debacle.

  But during a trip to the Cape he had been injured in a car crash that took the life of Megan Doyle Stewart—wife of astronaut Zachary Stewart (and later a Revenant). He had lost the use of his legs, a condition that persisted for years on Keanu.

  Harley was an adaptable man and he made the best of his situation, but even after Keanu technology managed to make him mobile again, those special habits died hard. He was no longer used to seeing eye-to-eye—in every sense of the phrase.

  “Exile hasn’t been good to you, Dale. You look like the Unabomber, and the blue bag is a bad fashion choice. Maybe you ought to come back to the habitat.”

  Dale had believed he was long past the time when Harley Drake could insult him. He felt that he had thrived in exile. But Harley’s words forced him to touch his face, recognize that he wore a patchy beard. His hair was long, too, what there was of it: bald on top, his fringe reached to his neck.

  Even his face had changed: His nose was bent, thanks to an accident a decade ago. And there were markings . . . tattoos of a sort . . . on one cheek and both arms and lots of other places Harley Drake could not see.

  And Dale’s clothing? The faded sky-blue jumpsuit modeled after the uniform he and Harley had worn in their NASA careers was looking shabby. “You know how it gets,” he said. “Live alone—”

  “I have no idea. What is it you want? Food? A bath? Better clothing?” Here Harley almost spat the word: “Forgiveness?

  “And what the hell did you ask? Get what moving?”

  “Keanu.”

  “We turned it around years ago. You were there.”

  “Turning it around and guiding it into Earth orbit are two entirely different challenges.” He smiled. Harley said nothing. Fine, Dale thought. “I came here to help you out and maybe offer a trade.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way—or maybe you can take this the right way—but I don’t think you have anything to offer.”

  “There’s trouble with Rachel Stewart.”

  Now he had his attention! “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I know that she and Pav and four others landed on Earth yesterday, in India. I also know that you are in touch with them, but not as much as you’d like to be—or should be.”

  “Fine, and no big secret, by the way. So what?”

  Before Dale could answer—he hesitated because he was still not sure exactly what he wanted to reveal—both men heard Harley’s name called.

  Looking concerned, Sasha Blaine arrived, a whirling vision in scarves and long red hair. She was in her early fifties—a dozen years younger than Drake—taller than most men and, with a bit of added weight, larger, too. Dale knew that she was fiercely intelligent—emphasis on fierce—a Yale mathematician who had the bad luck to be working in Houston mission control at the time of the Destiny-7 fiasco, and the Big Scoop that followed.

  She had never liked Dale. “Get away from him, you son of a bitch.”

  “We’re just talking, Sash,” Harley said. It didn’t seem to satisfy Sasha; she stood there with arms folded, as if daring Dale to launch a personal assault. “Dale was just about to tell me how he knows the details of Rachel’s mission.”

  This information didn’t lessen Sasha’s annoyance to any detectable degree. She simply said, “Bullshit. He’s been living in caves for years.”

  “I’ve been spending most of my time in the Factory,” Dale said. “The rest of you should visit. You might learn something.”

  “Like what?” She was still ready to spring at Dale.

  “Like the fact that your big secret surprise landing was not only expected all over Earth, the vehicle was attacked. And whatever you’ve got planned next, it’s not going to work.”

  Now Sasha turned to Harley, who said, “I think it’s worth a listen.”

  “Then,” she said, “he can come back to the Temple. For however long it takes to hear him out . . .” And she turned to Dale: “Then you go back to the hole you crawled out of.”

  The day Adventure returned to Earth, Dale Scott returned to the Beehive, his first visit to the human habitat in three years.

  As Harley and Sasha’s greeting showed, he hadn’t asked permission. While his former hab-mates had their mayor and council, they never had sufficient reason to establish a police force, much less an immigration service. There weren’t enough of them. They were also pretty well behaved.

  In fact, with the exception of Zhao Buoming, a former Chinese intelligence agent and murderer (he killed a man on the Houston-Bangalores’ first day aboard Keanu), now solid citizen, Dale Scott was the community’s most notable bogeyman. His crimes fell into categories like “vagrancy” and “petty theft” (which implied private property, a fairly dubious concept given the way the HBs operated), or “failure to contribute communal labor.” Guilty of that charge!

  It really came down to, “Scott, you have a bad attitude.” Well, shit yes. It had ruined a marriage and an astronaut career and had made his life on Keanu miserable.

  It wasn’t as though he hadn’t tried to change. During the weeks that followed his arrival, his overland explore with Zack Stewart and Makali Pillay and Wade Williams and Valya Makarova—a space trek that may have saved Keanu from the Reivers!—Dale had consciously and openly tried to listen to others, to do what job-jar tasks needed doing, to share, to smile.

  To no avail. True, Zack Stewart, Wade Williams, and Dale’s lover, Valya, had been killed in the big trek. Also true, while the Reivers on Keanu had been exterminated, untold numbers had escaped, not only stealing the only obvious means of transport off Keanu but surely heading for Earth.

  For some reason Makali, the Aussie-born exobiologist who was just as much a part of the overland trek to the Sentry habitat as Dale, escaped all blame for what went wrong.

  After a year of sanctions that resembled the silence that offenders received at military schools, Dale finally confronted Harley Drake. “What did I do wrong?”

  “You lost Zack Stewart. Williams died. Your girlfriend, too.”

  “You know the conditions were insanely difficult. Makali and I were lucky to survive!”
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  “I know. And you’re a pilot, so that’s your story and you’re sticking to it.”

  “Come on, Harls! Are people saying I killed the others? Wouldn’t that be kind of suicidal?”

  “People are saying,” Harley said, “that you might not have tried very hard to save them.”

  “I didn’t want to save Zack Stewart?”

  “You mean the guy who kicked you off ISS and ruined your life?”

  Dale closed his eyes. This conversation had taken place near the interior wall of the human habitat . . . the one opposite the Beehive. Looking back toward the Temple, three kilometers distant, Dale had been able to see evidence of progress and industry . . . fields under cultivation, small structures built, people moving with purpose.

  They had all done well in the first year . . . avoiding starvation and plagues and the sort of conflicts that frequently—automatically?—afflicted small human groups in isolation.

  Dale had tried to be part of it. He had wanted to work with the Bangalore magicians Jaidev and Daksha, the geniuses who devised the “poison pill” that killed the Reivers, who then turned their considerable skills to learning and operating Keanu’s proteus printing and fabrication system, turning out everything from T-shirts to coffee cups, from penicillin to sweet corn. He possessed a degree in engineering, didn’t he?

  So, it turned out, did most of the HBs. It wasn’t really a surprise, given that the Bangalore Object scooped up staffers from ISRO mission control.

  “There’s a huge delta between thinking a guy did you wrong, and killing him.”

  “Letting him die,” Harley had said. “But I take your point.”

  Accompanied by Camilla, the child Revenant, Zack Stewart had died a hero’s death, carrying a thermonuclear trigger into the deadly core of Keanu in order to reboot its power system. Dale had been so impressed that for several moments, perhaps hours afterward, he had forgotten what a smug, arrogant, entitled prick Stewart was. “I can’t believe that’s the reason no one is talking to me.”