Heaven's War Page 5

  They had joined and mixed up with the larger group from Bangalore. This uber-group had immediately splintered into (A) those who knew each other, (B) those who immediately got busy working on such matters as shelter and sustenance (with a good deal of overlap between groups A and B), (C) a larger group that had a litany of complaints requiring Immediate Action from Somebody, (D) an even larger group that moved in stunned silence, like the victims of a natural disaster, and (E) a small but disturbing group that seemed too paralyzed by shock to move at all.

  In group E was a young woman who had lapsed into catatonia. Which was bad enough, but what was worse was that she seemed to be the mother of an infant—said child had ceased wailing in justifiable complaint and probably hunger through exhaustion. (Harley sympathized; with a bit more provocation, he was prepared to engage in a screaming duel with the kid.)

  They had met Zack Stewart in the company of a nine-year-old Brazilian girl. Strange, certainly, but hardly a blip on Harley’s recent scale of strange experiences.

  Now all of them were gathered, more or less, around the Temple, listening to Zack, former NASA astronaut, former commander of Destiny-7, former astronomer, former inhabitant of Earth, answering questions. What is this place? Who built it? How did they get us here? Can we go home?

  Or, rather, trying to answer. It was obvious to Harley that his friend Zack was getting into deep water with the larger questions. Harley offered a change of subject: “Hey, Zack...any thoughts on food and water?”

  “Oh, right,” Zack said. “Water—there are at least two springs within walking distance. We have food, too. So far I’ve found fruits and vegetables. No meat, though.”

  “That is no problem for most of us,” a tall, middle-aged Indian man said, to at least some laughter. He was Vikram Nayar, the lead Indian flight director for the Brahma mission. Harley suspected that most of those transported humans were either space professionals or people working at one of the two control centers.

  Hardly a cross section of humanity. But then, what sort of talent pool was required? Were they going to be stuck here for days, weeks, years? In that case, Harley would prefer a dozen Boy Scouts, or farmers.

  Or were they going to find a way to go home? In that case, the space geeks were what you wanted.

  Responding to another question, Zack turned, allowing Harley to see his face, and it wasn’t pretty. The man was exhausted, filthy, and on the verge of collapse. That much was obvious to Harley, who had known Zack for fifteen years, and to Shane Weldon.

  It was even troubling to Rachel, Zack’s daughter. “God, Harley, can’t we get someone else to do this?” she said.

  “Who else knows anything?” Sasha said.

  Harley turned to Weldon. “What happened to your inventory?” That had been one small task he and Weldon had worked on during the trip, if for no other reason than to keep them from going batshit crazy.

  Weldon waved a piece of paper, the backside of a wrinkled printout salvaged from someone’s backpack. “Right here. I still don’t think we’ve got everything out of the RV.”

  Among the seventy-eight humans with whatever they wore and carried, the Houston Object had sucked up half of a recreational vehicle as well as a small boat, complete with two life jackets and oars; several coolers and lawn chairs; dozens of personal data devices (phones, laptops, BlackBerrys); various medications; several six-packs of beer; and even a couple of bottles of spirits.

  Just glancing at the items carried by the Bangalore crowd, Harley could add a food vendor’s cart—“Now there’s a useful item”—several bicycles, and a dozen colorful umbrellas. Actually, these were more flimsy: call them parasols.

  If Harley ever returned to Earth again, he would never make assumptions about what his fellow man or woman might be carrying on, say, the Day of Rapture.

  If nothing else, they’d be armed, too. “What about the weapons?” he asked Weldon.

  Weldon showed him the list of six handguns and a shotgun. When Harley made a groaning sound, Zack said, “Come on, Harls, what do you expect? It’s Texas, and it looked as though we were being invaded!”

  Harley Drake had made some strange trips in his life. But emerging from a tunnel on an alien planet into a regular damned Garden of Eden...with his old buddy Zack Stewart waiting to greet him?

  Then there was the image of half the RV floating around inside the Object. That had struck Harley as simply terrifying; any space traveler knew that just because a module didn’t have weight didn’t mean it didn’t have mass. A couple of people had slammed into the vehicle, and while the injuries turned out to be bumps and bruises, it could have been much worse, had the thing not eventually slithered to the bottom of the Object and stayed there.

  Coming in at third place: becoming foxhole buddies with Gabriel Jones.

  For years Harley had dismissed the Johnson Space Center director—an African American astronomer—as an affirmative-action hire, a pleasant face and voice not backed up with leadership skills.

  He had been happy to be proven wrong, as very soon after the “scoop,” Jones had rallied the troops, taking roll, conducting, in essence, a town meeting.

  Not that there’d been much leading he could do. As the Earth receded from view and Keanu grew larger, it became clear that the Houston group—seventy-nine of them; Jones had confirmed the number through several head counts—was on a voyage likely to last two days. (Calculations courtesy of one of the retired JSC engineers swept up by the object.)

  Two days of confusion, hunger, thirst, deteriorating hygiene, and general panic that eventually died out from lack of energy.

  But Jones had proven himself to be as capable as anyone could be, given the strangeness factor, offering reassurance where needed, a bit of cheerleading at other times, and even a sharp correction when warranted.

  It was quite remarkable, considering that Jones’s daughter, Yvonne Hall, had been one of the astronauts killed on Zack Stewart’s snakebit Destiny-7 mission.

  Then there was what Harley later called the “Close Encounter.”

  It happened midway through their second day. Harley had been half-dozing when Sasha nudged him.

  “Did you see that?” Sasha said. The large, flamboyant redheaded woman had become Harley’s closest friend throughout this mad adventure. With her highly irregular human interactions, she seemed highly suited to this new environment.

  “Don’t tell me you saw something weird.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

  She slapped him on the shoulder. “Out that side...I thought I saw another blob.” The Houston Object—or, as most of them referred to it, “the blob”—was essentially a giant stiff-sided balloon...its skin was white and it was possible to see through it...though, given that the only visible features were the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon, Harley saw little point in doing any observations.

  “‘Plotting an intercept course, Mr. Data?’” That earned him another slap.

  “Actually, flying in formation,” she said. Harley and Sasha had begun to act like a bickering couple from a bad romantic comedy. It seemed inevitable that they would wind up together, if they could just overcome the immediate obstacles.

  In their case, of course, the obstacles were possible death by impact on a strange planetoid, or suffocation or any of the dozen ways one could die in spaceflight.

  One of the other passengers, a short African American kid named Xavier, agreed with Sasha that “something” was out there. But when Harley had dutifully looked where Sasha had indicated, he had seen nothing.

  Which didn’t mean there was nothing to see. He knew, of course, that Bangalore had been struck by an Object before Houston had. Maybe that had turned into a scoop, too.

  Finally, there was the landing itself. Fascinating was the best word Harley could come up with. He had already made the assumption, and confirmed it with Jones and Brent Bynum, the disturbed White House guy, and Weldon and even Rachel Stewart—everyone else he knew who had been scooped up—that the Ke
anu people weren’t going to send an Object to bring them across space only to smash them on the surface.

  So, mentally, he had treated it like a landing, the kind of maneuver he had once hoped he would perform on the surface of the Moon.

  And, sure enough, during what a Venture lander crew would have called the terminal phase, as the half-moon of Keanu became the single biggest thing in Harley’s universe, something inside the Object had gone online, some kind of deceleration engine.

  Everyone had begun to feel it, too, as they started to slide toward the bottom of the spherical object. The terminal phase had dragged on, in Harley’s semiprofessional judgment. Of course, if you had unlimited propellant or a magic engine, you would go slow. Harley had flown a shuttle docking at the International Space Station, and the final closing rate was usually a meter per second. At that velocity, a bump wasn’t going to do too much damage.

  Which seemed to be the idea behind the object’s touchdown on Keanu.

  Or, to be precise, touchdown inside Keanu. During the last fifteen minutes of the descent, Harley had spotted a crater growing prominent through the cloudy surface of the object. No matter what maneuvers the blob made—and it was making occasional adjustments, each of which caused Harley’s stomach to turn over—the crater stayed square in the center of the field of view.

  And kept growing until it was a target so obvious, no one could mistake it.

  All Harley knew was that this wasn’t Vesuvius Vent, the large crater that had served as the landing site for both Zack Stewart’s crew and the Brahma team.

  Trying to think ahead, Harley latched on to his wheelchair. (The only truly nice thing about the trip inside the object had been the lack of gravity...Harley had been able to float just like everyone else.) He wanted support if gravity built up, as he expected it to.

  With Sasha’s help, he got positioned in the chair. “First time I’ve felt like I needed to be strapped down,” he said.

  Harley had begun hearing a few “Oh my Gods” and other alarmed whimpers. Before he could say anything, however, Gabriel Jones had spoken up. “People, please! Remember what I said about the voyage itself! Somebody wants us on Keanu! They’ll land us safely!”

  Harley hoped that Jones was right, and not just enthusiastic. He had lost perspective, lost any thoughts of the second object; the only thing he could do was watch the crater grow until it literally filled the field of view.

  Whoosh!

  The dark walls of the crater enclosed them with very little clearance, for a moment shaking Harley’s confidence that this would all end with a soft landing.

  Then, with no more g-forces than you’d experience in the ground-floor stoppage of an elevator, they were down...somewhere inside Keanu, all seventy-nine of them. Since they were now subject to gravity, they slid toward the lower fifth of the object, collecting around the bent RV.

  “Now what do we do?” Bynum said. The man from the White House staff—the most unlikely refugee in the whole unlikely group—looked more alive than at any time in the past two days.

  “Look for the door marked EXIT,” Sasha said.

  “How do we know we can go outside?” someone asked. That was another one of Harley’s associates, Wade Williams, the famous—though not as famous as he thought—sci-fi writer. For all his farseeing intellect, Williams was a cranky, half-deaf geezer wearing an Astros cap he had managed to find somewhere in the cloud of flotsam.

  “For the same reason we knew we would live through this,” Jones shouted. “Because someone wants us here!”

  Still nothing happened for at least a minute, maybe two.

  Then the entire object rotated and turned slightly. It was just enough to unsettle everyone and nearly throw Harley from his chair.

  Something wasn’t right. “Sasha,” he said, “do you feel anything really unusual?”

  She started to say no, but stopped in midsyllable. “Shit, what’s happening?”

  The curved surface of the object was beginning to soften. It retained its by-now-familiar milky translucency...but it also appeared to be melting. Harley sensed the wheels of his chair sinking in. The sensation was not pleasant.

  “It’s getting gooey,” Sasha said.

  The voices of those sharing the space with them began to rise, too. There were a couple of moans; someone started weeping.

  “Look at the life support gear!” Weldon said.

  At their backs, at the very base of the object, the machines that had provided air, water, and food as well as cleanup service were beginning to melt, too. Harley could smell a nasty odor, like burning plastic. “I hope that’s not toxic.”

  The process seemed to accelerate...the machines were now just puddles of goo and the surface of the bubble actually writhed and wrinkled, as if losing tensile strength.

  “Oh my God, Harley—” Sasha was literally sunk to her knees. She reached for Harley’s chair, but it, too, was sinking...

  At that moment the bubblelike skin of the object simply collapsed, covering them all in a substance that felt like fabric, but also like liquid.

  Which dissolved, leaving only a thin film of powder that quickly, gently wafted away, like ashes from an old campfire.

  The entire group, along with every piece of equipment including the RV (lying on its side), was sitting on the floor of a chamber at least five or six stories tall, and substantially wider.

  “My ears popped,” Sasha said.

  Harley’s had, too. “I hope that’s increasing pressure, not decreasing.” He took a deep breath...the air actually smelled and tasted fresh, like a spring morning. Of course, any air would be an improvement over the fetid stew he and the others had lived in for the past two days.

  “Friends,” Gabriel Jones announced, “I think we have arrived.”

  “In what?” Weldon asked. It seemed to Harley as though the former flight director and chief astronaut got angry every time Jones opened his mouth. He realized he would have to watch Weldon; he wasn’t handling the situation very well.

  “In a docking bay?” Bynum said. “Isn’t that what you NASA people would call it?”

  “It’s as good a name as any,” Harley said. He turned to Sasha, who was staring up, openmouthed. “What?”

  “Just...looking,” she said.

  On the “ceiling” Harley saw what appeared to be squiggly luminous tubes growing brighter.

  “I think there’s a door,” Bynum said. He was pointing behind them to a glowing rectangular opening.

  “I, for one, am heartily sick of waiting,” Harley said. He turned to Sasha. “Could I trouble you for a little help? I want to be first, as in, ‘one small roll for Harley Drake, one giant push for Sasha Blaine.’”

  She smiled, took a moment to run her fingers through her hair, then settled her hands on the handles.

  They were joined by the others now, all crowding behind them as they moved en masse toward the “door.”

  ARRIVAL DAY: GABRIEL

  Their arms filled with whatever they could carry, the Houston group had trudged several hundred meters down a broad, rock-lined tunnel. “Better bring everything,” Jones had said. “We may not be coming back this way!”

  And while she no doubt meant it to be an aside—this chamber had amazing acoustics—Gabriel heard what Sasha said to Rachel next: “Why does he think we aren’t coming back? Does he know where we’re going?”

  Harley couldn’t let that pass. Nor could he let them continue complaining, believing that they couldn’t be heard.

  “Ladies,” he said over his shoulder, “right now we are forced to look good rather than be good.”

  Gabriel knew that was how many NASA people—and some outside the agency—would describe his entire career. He’s slick and superficial, no substance. He’s affirmative action all the way.

  While acknowledging that he had, indeed, benefited from affirmative action—hell, if it worked for Obama’s career, it could work for his—he also knew what he knew. He’d literally done his homework si
nce junior high in Baltimore. He’d managed to balance a promising baseball career with solid academics, enough to get him noticed by scouts for the Ivies, who wouldn’t offer money, but rather a hell of a lot of prestige and connections.

  But a lucky visit to Rice University had given him his first exposure to Houston and the great state of Texas, neither of which were high on his go-see list. And the aero engineering team he’d met there seemed far more experienced and practical than their equivalents at Princeton and Dartmouth.

  Then there was the weather. Houston wasn’t anyone’s garden spot, but at least it didn’t have snow on the ground for several months of the year.

  So he’d graduated from Rice, then gone to MIT for grad school. A taste of the commercial space world with Lockheed had convinced him he was not cut out for that type of pressure, even with the potential rewards. (Besides, in technical circles, it was still just a bit tougher for an African American to rise than, say, for an Asian. That was another thing the folks who snickered “affirmative action” tended to forget.)

  He had joined NASA Goddard outside Washington. Working on NASA’s uncrewed programs was not the road to space program glory—until Gabriel found that he was being repeatedly asked to be Morris the Explainer when TV programs deigned to cover Mars landers or Mercury orbiters or asteroid encounters.

  He’d wound up at headquarters, and when NASA turned its attention beyond Earth orbit, why, who better to lead the agency’s premier operations hub, the Johnson Space Center?

  If pressed, Gabriel would admit that his tenure at JSC had been troubled. He had not been eager to spend the hours required to immerse himself in JSC’s unique culture, which looked like the rest of NASA, but was to, say, Goddard what the culture of suburban Maryland was to, say, Saudi Arabia.

  He had made mistakes. Hell, maybe he had been lazy, too used to the magic created by his own words and personality.

  And his daughter, Yvonne—one of two astronauts killed on the Destiny-7 mission—had paid the price. Gabriel had had ample hours to consider the reckless decisions that led to her death, the way he had been swayed by “national security” concerns to allow Yvonne to carry a nuclear weapon aboard a “peaceful” mission.