Heaven's War Page 6

  Sure, no one in Houston or Washington had known what the crew and controllers would face on Keanu, but Gabriel had found it too easy to listen to the consensus, to be America- or Earth-first.

  There was another issue, too. Thirteen days before the Destiny-7 launch—a date that, to his amazement, was still less than a month in the past—Gabriel Jones had been given news that forced him to change the way he thought about the future. His original path was to use the JSC directorship as a stepping-stone to deputy administrator, or even the top agency job...and then to...the Senate, perhaps? Or president of a university. That was now Future I.

  The news put him on a radically different track, Future II: manage his health.

  Now, even more strangely, he was facing Future III. He had been dumped into an environment a hundred times stranger than JSC had been to him, and considerably more dangerous than even Future II.

  To ensure his future survival, he had days—not weeks, days—to:

  One: get off Keanu and back to Earth, or—

  Two: find twenty-first-century medical technology on Keanu.

  He did not want to calculate the odds that he would be successful at either.

  As they headed toward an opening up ahead, Gabriel slowed down so that Harley Drake and his new friend, Sasha, and Zack Stewart’s daughter, Rachel, could keep pace with him.

  Gabriel noted that Sasha kept reaching out to brush the tunnel wall with her fingers. “Tell me why you’re doing that. Are you a geologist?”

  “I’m trying to keep reminding myself that I’m no longer on Earth,” she said.

  Gabriel laughed, then turned to Harley Drake. He knew the crippled former astronaut more by reputation than contact. He admired the way that, following the accident in Florida, Harley had chosen not to crawl into a hole, instead reinventing himself as a planetary scientist...while remaining a bit of a trash-talking horndog. Given his own news, Gabriel hoped he possessed similar force of character. “You, too, Harls?”

  “Hell, no! I keep hoping this is just the nightmare of all time and that any moment I’m going to wake up.”

  “Oh, come on,” Gabriel said, making sure to smile at Rachel Stewart. Keep her included. “Aren’t you just a little bit...fascinated? I mean, I keep wanting to see one of those Markers the crews found.”

  “I keep wanting to see a whole set of Venture landers waiting to take us home.”

  “Harley, for an astronaut, you really don’t have much pioneer spirit.”

  Gabriel realized that the exodus was losing steam as it neared the opening. Those in front of them were bunching up, shoving and beginning to make noise.

  Brent Bynum sprinted past them, shouting, “Hurry it up, everyone!”

  Gabriel looked at Harley and Weldon. “Who woke up and made him cheerleader?”

  “Brent?” Weldon said. “He’s been acting weird since we got scooped.”

  “Before that,” Harley said.

  Harley grinned. “Maybe he thinks that running around flapping his arms will restore his authority.”

  “What authority?” Gabriel said.

  “Exactly.”

  As they reached the cluster, they saw the cause of the problem.

  It was a human female, likely Indian, perhaps thirty years old, wearing khakis and a faded sky-blue shirt. Her long hair was sun-streaked, and she wore an expression of puzzled annoyance, as if she had been interrupted at some important work. In fact, she was engaged in what appeared to be an argument with Bynum, and with another of the Houston group, a sleepy-eyed young African American Gabriel Jones recognized from the trip. He had been one of the few who kept poking his nose—and entire body—into the RV.

  “She says we can’t go past her!” the young man said. Xavier was his name; Gabriel was good with names, eventually.

  “I said no such thing!” the woman said, as the crowd pressed around her. “I only said you should be careful, that there are a lot of other people right outside—”

  Gabriel realized that he ought to take the lead. Before Bynum could open his mouth, he said, “Excuse me, I’m Gabriel Jones of the NASA Johnson Space Center.”

  “I’m Makali Pillay. Welcome to Keanu.” More startling than her surfer girl manner...Pillay had an Aussie accent.

  Everyone soon saw what the problem was: Just beyond the opening was another opening, off to the right, and out of it an even larger group of humans had emerged...and this group had not dispersed. They were collapsed in a collective heap, sick, frightened, paralyzed.

  “Who are these people?” Rachel said.

  “Folks from Bangalore, I’m guessing,” Harley said. He turned to Sasha. “Your other Object.”

  In this half-lit space, crowded with unwashed, uncounted bodies, it was impossible for Gabriel to see beyond the few people in front of him. He had to concentrate on Miss Pillay. “Are you in charge? Is there someone I can talk to?”

  “Come on,” Pillay said. She seemed unusually serene for the circumstances. Gabriel wondered if that was her nature or some Eastern meditative state.

  Or drugs. Gabriel would have happily accepted the last two.

  She led him through the crowd, few of whom bothered to move.

  ARRIVAL DAY: RACHEL

  Rachel noted that several members of the new group were eyeing Weldon’s cooler, which he’d set down. “You might want to keep that thing closed,” she said.

  Weldon looked up. “Good point.” He sat on the cooler. “You’re awfully suspicious for your age.”

  “Yeah.” For once in her life, she had no smart reply. Well, she didn’t know Shane Weldon; he was just one of her father’s space friends.

  For another...nothing seemed funny right now. Whatever compulsion she had felt to go to the Object, then stay put as it expanded to absorb them all...that was long gone.

  She had insisted on being taken to the Object because she believed that she would be seeing her resurrected mother. She had even been silly enough to think Megan Stewart might be aboard the Object when it landed. Why else would it have set down where it did, within walking distance of the Johnson Space Center?

  Why else would her mother have told her—not in exact words, but still—to go to it?

  These past two days, the worst in her life aside from the day her mother was killed, had forced Rachel to question everything.

  It was probably natural, once you spent forty-eight hours in a space bubble, being hungry when you weren’t throwing up, feeling filthy (she’d had to simply find a relatively private area of the Object and pee, which was unbelievably gross even if all the other women were doing it!), and basically keeping close to Harley and Sasha.

  Now...Rachel had reached another planet. She felt as happy about that as she had on the family trip to Mexico, which was not very much.

  At least Keanu was quieter than Mexico, though it seemed, right here, just as crowded.

  And maybe, just maybe, she would find her mother again.

  Or her father. The last she’d heard, and what she believed, was that he was here, alive.

  Sasha took her hand. “Come on, everyone’s going out.”

  They were all headed toward an opening a lot like something you’d find in a sports arena...a big passage twenty meters wide and almost as tall. For the first time, Rachel examined the walls of the passage, which didn’t look like any tunnel she’d ever known from trips or movies or pictures. Mine shafts were dug out of rock and earth, then braced with timbers. There was this cool archive in Pennsylvania where the walls had been carved out of rock by some kind of machine...those walls looked ground down, like a tooth before the placement of a crown.

  These walls looked poured and smoothed, like the cement of a new sidewalk...but with no grain at all. In fact, visually, they appeared to have been painted, they were so even. The “floor” did look a bit machined...it was certainly more metallic than stone—

  “Whoa, check out the stash.”

  Harley had interrupted her examination of the passage. The processio
n had reached the final opening. Just outside it sat a pile of electronic gear: PDAs, BlackBerrys, Tik-Talks, Slates—there must have been two dozen different devices—being examined by several Indian men.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “I guess everyone got tired of carrying dead weight,” Harley said. “Hey, though, check this out.”

  The creep from the White House, Brent Bynum, was pawing through them like a hobo in a restaurant Dumpster.

  “Brent,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”

  “One of these things has to work.”

  Harley glanced sideways at Sasha and Rachel, as if to say, Stupid son of a bitch. “I’m sure they all work. Even if everyone left their little machines running during the trip, they’re still good for days yet. But, Brent, think this through: where’s the fucking network?”

  “I know, I know,” the White House man said. “But we’re not that far away! If we could get to the surface, we could see Houston and Washington!” Harley was pretty sure you couldn’t—you could barely make out the shape of North and South America. “How far does line of sight work?”

  “Not that far,” Shane Weldon said. Rachel had thought so, too, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Who knew what kind of magical, state-of-the-art PDA a White House staffer carried or knew about? Everyone was talking about the Tik-Talk, which had a walkie-talkie capability, but that item had been too expensive for Rachel; she had no idea what it could do. Maybe a Tik-Talk was capable of picking up signals at this distance—especially if some unit of the U.S. government kept an antenna pointed at Keanu.

  For that matter, maybe they’d kept it pointed at the object as it shrank in the sky.

  Gabriel Jones returned. “We’ve all had the same experience...scooped up and brought here. Their bubble thing dissolved, too. They know nothing that we don’t.... Pillay says we should just keep going, and I agree.”

  The combined group surged forward, reminding Rachel of refugees fleeing a natural disaster like a volcano or maybe a tsunami. Which, of course, they were. Jones and Pillay took the lead, with Bynum at their heels.

  Harley seemed tired and overwhelmed; Rachel couldn’t believe he would pass up the chance to take a verbal shot at Bynum, who, to Rachel, was moving exactly like a golden retriever.

  Then she realized that Harley wasn’t exhausted...he was taking in the breathtaking vista.

  They had entered a space that reminded Rachel of the time her parents had taken her to the old Astrodome...multiplied by a hundred. It was a roofed enclosure, longer than it was wide. “This is big enough to hold a city,” Sasha said.

  “Big enough to hold a war,” Weldon added. He was growing increasingly pessimistic.

  Rachel hoped that Shane Weldon would cheer up. Certainly she was feeling a little better, now that she realized she was entering a parklike landscape. There was soil, there were rocks, there were greenish growing things not far off. Smallish trees...or given the odd perspective, maybe not so smallish.

  The roof was hundreds of meters high, likely higher, and covered with the same squiggly tubes that had given light in the tunnel, but many more of them.

  Harley squeezed Sasha’s hand, then Rachel’s. “In spite of our differences, I think we all have one thing in common,” he said. “Look!”

  Every one of the humans, Houston and Bangalore, was staring up, openmouthed, in exactly the same way.

  As they marched over a low rise, they gained improved perspective. Not only did the habitat stretch at least ten kilometers in front of them...so far that Rachel could not see the other side...but one structure was in clear view, looking like an Aztec temple rising above a jungle.

  Rachel’s appreciation of the alien building was short-lived, however. She heard a growing clamor off to the right, where most of the Bangalores were bunched up and breaking like a wave around a rock.

  Two humans were approaching...one was a young girl Rachel had never seen before. “How the hell did those people get ahead of us?” Sasha said.

  “They don’t look Indian,” Weldon said.

  “They’re not,” Harley said.

  No, they were not. Rachel recognized that walk, that oh-so-typical posture! It was her father.

  She screamed and pushed through the crowd, heading for him.

  ARRIVAL DAY: JAIDEV

  The fighting had stopped.

  At least, for now, and for Jaidev Mahabala, good. One side of his face was swollen and sore; he had a split lip; his left eye was half-closed. He looked awful, and for a man who took pride in his appearance—said pride already hit hard by the awful stench and misery of the flight from Earth to Keanu—it was emotionally as well as physically painful.

  Not that there was ever likely to be a reason to restore his prior appearance: slim, dark-eyed, the carefully cultivated stubble, the close-fitting shirt and tailored trousers. Jaidev’s life had effectively ended when he was enclosed in the Bangalore Object.

  But he had hoped that getting into a scuffle over food would have paid off with something. A Power Bar or even a drink of warm American beer.

  Nothing...except bruises.

  His participation in what began as a mad scramble for rations—one of dozens Jaidev had witnessed—had ended with a nasty punch delivered by Daksha Saikumar, a fellow Brahma enviro systems engineer. Daksha was a decade older than Jaidev’s twenty-nine, so hairy and slow that unfriendly colleagues dubbed him “the Gorilla.” Jaidev had never considered Daksha a friend, but he had never expected him to shove him aside, then complete the maneuver by striking him in the face.

  Jaidev had been left to wander the fringe of the refugee crowd in search of something potentially edible.

  All he—and several other members of the Bangalore group—had found was a large, shallow pool of muddy (looking) water, which everyone drank from even as Daksha sniffed in disdain, naming it “Lake Ganges.”

  It was the latest in a series of humiliations. Jaidev couldn’t even blame the worst of them on the Bangalore Object.

  He was from an IT family; everyone, his father, mother, an older brother, and two older sisters all worked in the Corridor in Chennai, though on a lower level. (One brother ran a call center.)

  Jaidev had built on the family experience and earned a position at nearby Sathyamba University, a lucky move, since it allowed him to get out of his father’s house and into the hostel.

  (The school had a fleet of buses available to students, too. Odd how those crowded, hot vehicles reminded him of the vesicle....)

  The other bit of luck was that his specialty at Sathyamba was mechanical and production engineering rather than telecommunications or computing.

  What struck his parents and sibs as an unproductive career detour turned out to be a direct route to study in the United States at Cornell, where he was first exposed to computational synthesis and advanced 3-D printing—processes that promised to revolutionize manufacturing. He had taken part in the development of so-called gray goo...material designed to serve as the building blocks of any substance or structure, mechanical or biological. They called this stuff plasm, preliminary lithographic assembly material.

  It was Jaidev Mahabala the plasm specialist who was able to work briefly for the U.S. space program, then his country’s.

  Right up to the week of the Brahma mission.

  For the last readiness meeting in advance of the launch, thirty members of the Bangalore team flew to Rio de Janeiro.

  Jaidev had done his work at the Brazilian Space Agency well; his team had been responsible for crew equipment and consumables. All of the final reports were accepted.

  Leaving them all free to play. Leaving Jaidev, alas, free to get drunk in a gay bar on the Avenue Viera Santo near Ipanema Beach.

  And to be arrested with a male prostitute.

  Jaidev had embraced his homosexuality once out of his family’s home, making full use of the Internet to find other friends in Chennai, and especially visitors to the tech zone.

  It had been fun—a
nd continued to be fun during his time in the United States. He kept hoping to find someone special, someone he could commit to...and had decided to make that his number one personal goal at the conclusion of the Brahma mission.

  The arrest had destroyed that plan. Rather, he was free to pursue personal goals, because the day the Object struck, he had been called into Vikram Nayar’s office and informed that he was being “transferred” away from the control center to an ISRO office in Ladakh, or someplace equally remote.

  He’d been fired.

  Word of the scuffle must have reached the new “leaders,” since a group of them came running to Lake Ganges. Most of them were Americans: people such as Gabriel Jones, Shane Weldon, and even Zack Stewart, all known to Jaidev from Brahma.

  Stewart, Weldon, and Jones saw that there were no Houston types in the group and drifted off to consider the uses of the water supply.

  Nayar was left to chastise the rest, all of them quieter. Even Daksha’s temper had cooled and he was now subdued, possibly shamed. It didn’t stop Nayar. “Look at you! Have you forgotten where you came from? Everything you learned? Two days and you’ve become beasts!”

  “We need food,” one of the men said.

  “You’ll get whatever any of us gets,” Nayar said. “Try to act as though you deserve it. Better yet—be proactive and start searching. Do something useful instead of lying around like this!”

  “Vikram!” It was Shane Weldon calling from across the lake. “We need to get back!”

  Nayar had turned away from the Bangalores in disgust, finding himself directly in front of Jaidev.

  The Brahma mission director was surprised. “I didn’t know you’d been taken, too.”

  “Bad luck,” he said. “If only you’d fired me an hour earlier.”

  Nayar grunted; he was not noted for having any sense of humor. But his criticism had suggested something to Jaidev, who had been hearing stories of Keanu’s changing environment, of Revenants, of mysterious “goo” or soil that seemed to have the ability to transform itself. “Sir—”