Heaven's Shadow Read online

  And to hear the assignments to new missions, including that of Tea Nowinski as commander of Destiny-7.

  But his days were spent in a nondescript office on the second floor of Building 24. It was early on the morning of June 9; Rachel had had a sleepover at the Meyers’, so Zack was in his office at seven A.M. when Harley Drake—another early-to-work type—rolled in and closed the door. “Seen the news?”

  “Narrow it down a little for me. Are we talking budgets, politics, women, or Keanu?” Harley had taken the loss of his mobility—and his flying and astronaut careers—better than Zack would have, throwing himself into a new career as a space scientist. He was enrolled in a master’s program at Rice, and had established himself as the hardest-working member of the Keanu Group . . . all without losing any of his bawdy irreverence, sometimes shocking the more genteel, academic types in Building 24.

  “Brahma’s going to Keanu.”

  The Coalition was scheduled to send its first mission beyond Earth orbit—to the Moon—three months hence. Since Brahma would be landing at Shackleton Crater, there was some chance—and outright concern—that Brahma’s stay would overlap with Tea’s crew on Destiny-7.

  “Shackleton and Keanu?”

  “No, fuckhead. They aren’t made of fuel and consumables. They are going to forget the Moon and land on Keanu during closest approach.”

  “That’s only two months from now. How the hell can they get a project like that together?”

  “Turns out they’ve been kicking it around for a year, but, really, dude, the spacecraft doesn’t have to be changed; it’s all guidance and traj.”

  Zack immediately began to consider the operational challenges of landing on Keanu . . . low gravity, the possibility that rocket exhaust would turn ice and snow into steam—

  “I don’t get this,” Harley said. “The idea that Brahma is going to fly to Keanu is huge news—and I’m the one breaking it to you? That’s not the Zack Stewart I knew.”

  In spite of his two-year fog—hell, call it depression—Zack was honest enough to recognize the truth of Harley’s statement. Besides, his own body confirmed it: He blushed. “All right,” he said. “What would you do if you were Zack Stewart?”

  “You mean, aside from asking myself why I’m not still in bed with Nowinski at this hour?” That was another bull’s-eye for Harley Drake . . . in the past six months, Zack’s relationship with Tea had taken a sharp left turn from supportive family friend and fellow astronaut to . . . well, girlfriend.

  With Tea assigned as commander of the upcoming Destiny-7 mission, America’s third visit to Shackleton Station, they had tried to keep the relationship quiet. Obviously they had failed.

  “Yes,” Zack said, electing not to deny or confirm. “Aside from that.”

  “I’d be knocking on Shane Weldon’s door.”

  Zack was on his feet before Harley finished the sentence.

  Shane Weldon’s tour as chief of the astronaut office had ended a year after he made the painful but inevitable decision to replace Zack with Travis Buell. Buell’s subsequent behavior on the first landing had contributed to Weldon’s change of job—NASA management was equally split between those who blamed Weldon for putting a hothead like Buell in such a visible position and those who thought him a managerial genius and patriot.

  Moving him to mission operations made both sides happy. It was a promotion that put Weldon on a path to be head of the Johnson Space Center some day, and it also got him out of day-to-day personnel decisions.

  Or so it said on the job description. In truth, Weldon, like the true bureaucratic master he was becoming, never let go of reins he once held. It was said in Building 4-South that not one of the new chief astronaut’s crew selections was final until Shane Weldon signed off.

  Powerful or not, Weldon’s office was strictly government issue, part of a suite surrounding a central reception area occupied by three assistants, one of whom, the ancient Kerrie Kyle, nodded Zack to a couch. “Shane’s usually in by now.” Workdays at JSC ran from eight to four, if not earlier. Weldon’s absence was unusual enough that when he did show up—fifteen minutes later—Zack had to tease him. “Sleeping in these days?”

  “Nice to see you, too,” Weldon said. “Come in.”

  Zack followed him into his office, which was dominated by pictures and models of aircraft and spacecraft Weldon had flown—and a huge astronomical image of Keanu so new that it was resting on a chair. “You can move that,” Weldon said, realizing it was where a guest would sit.

  “It’s fine where it is,” Zack said.

  Weldon had been on his way to his seat. Instead he remained standing while opening his laptop. “Out with it.”

  Zack felt like a ten-year-old selling chocolate bars for a school project. “Well, this might be above my pay grade, but if it’s true that Brahma is heading for a landing on Keanu, I think we ought to divert Destiny-7 there, too.” An old Michigan phrase came to him. “It’s time for Operation Welcome Wagon.”

  “Why do you care if we beat them? I have some vague memory that you might have disapproved of Buell’s little speech at Shackleton.”

  “I don’t care who gets there first. But I think we’ll be kicking ourselves years from now if we pass up a chance to go there at all. How many monster NEOs will ever be in reach?”

  Now Weldon sat, fingers drumming on the desk. “We’ve never simulated a landing on a NEO.”

  “Look, are we a space program or not? Destiny is the vehicle that’s supposed to open up the solar system. It’s already been to the Moon twice. It was designed for missions to Mars and—I seem to recall—Near-Earth Objects. The guidance teams will have a challenge with a short deadline, but this would be just the kind of grenade they’d dive on.”

  “Is there some takeaway from this mission? Some cool science?”

  “For God’s sake, Shane! This won’t be flags and footprints! We’re creaming our jeans because we found a few tons of ice on the Moon—Keanu’s covered with the stuff. It’ll be like taking a trip to the birth of the solar system!” He noticed that Weldon was actually typing on his laptop. “Are you writing this down?”

  “It’s good phraseology. Not that I expected anything less from you.”

  “So you’re considering it.”

  “Way ahead of you. Did Kerrie say why I was late?” Zack shook his head. “I was in a double-secret meeting with Gabe Jones and the entire eighth floor: HQ and the White House want us to send Destiny-7 to Keanu, and beat the Coalition there.”

  He turned his computer so Zack could see the cover of the Powerpoint presentation. “You bastard!” But there was no anger in it. “Why didn’t you tell me to shut up?”

  “I’m going to have to sell this thing to a bunch of very skeptical division heads. For every one who’s eager to embrace the challenge, there will be two who think it’s too dangerous or just too much fucking work. I need to show the same enthusiasm you just did.”

  “Then send me.”

  “I might do that. I need to double-team this—”

  “Fuck your briefings, Shane.” Zack leaned on the desk. “Send me to Keanu. Put me on the crew. I’m the center’s expert on the subject. I’m qualified on Destiny and Venture.”

  Weldon stared, his face neutral, giving away nothing. “Seven has a crew.”

  “For a lunar mission. It needs a Keanu expert.”

  “Which happens to be Zack Stewart.”

  “Look around the astronaut office and tell me who else even comes close.” Zack didn’t wait for a correction. “Besides, I’m current on hours and classes.”

  “No question.”

  “But you’re still reluctant.”

  “True.” Now Weldon looked directly at him. “Really, Zack . . . you lost Megan two years ago, but you’ve been wandering in the wilderness a little. Are you ready . . . mentally?”

  “I wouldn’t be here.” At that moment, Zack realized he needed this mission—this new goal—more than anything in the past two years
. If Weldon said no, he was going to walk out of the office and out of NASA.

  “I appreciate the enthusiasm, Zack, but—”

  Now Zack got to his feet. “Fuck it, Shane. You owe me the spot. Deke’s Rules.”

  Weldon blinked. “No doubt. Of course, Deke’s Rules may not carry a lot of weight on the ninth floor or at HQ—”

  “Okay, then, look at your crew matrix. You’ve got Tea, Yvonne Hall, Oliver McCabe and Pogo Downey. Hall is capable, strong, great on EVA, but loaded with Daddy issues. Call her a ‘possible.’

  “Downey is the best ops guy in the office. And for going into a strange environment on short notice, nobody better.

  “McCabe is smart but green and so totally focused on lunar regolith that he’s a fucking bore on the subject. You’re already planning to unload him.” Weldon’s face gave nothing away.

  “Tea . . . who knows her better than the boyfriend? She’d be a great commander, for a lunar mission. You know and I know how programmed she gets: As commander of a Keanu mission—again, on the shortest notice possible—she is going to drive the training teams batshit with questions and more questions and you don’t have time for that. She’s on the team, but not as commander.

  “I’m the guy. I know both spacecraft well enough to be backup to Tea for Destiny and Pogo for Venture. I’ve got as much EVA time as Yvonne. And there is no one at the center, much less the office, who is more familiar with Keanu than me.

  “Your predecessor and the ninth floor and HQ thought I was capable enough to be trusted with the first lunar landing of the twenty-first century. Are you going to sit here and tell me I can’t handle this?”

  “There’s still a looming question,” Weldon said, apparently agreeing with Zack’s impassioned points. “Your family situation. What will Rachel think?”

  Since his conversation with Harley, Zack had not devoted much thought to Rachel . . . he needed no special insight to predict what she would think, and say. “She’ll like the idea for a week, then she’ll hate it. How will that be different from any other astronaut family? She’ll deal. It’s my decision. My goal. My mission.”

  Weldon stared for five seconds. Then he offered his hand. “Congratulations, Commander Stewart. Destiny-7 is yours.”

  Zack could only nod. He had had magical moments in his life— telling Megan that he was in love with her, not knowing whether she felt the same . . . the birth of Rachel . . . the call from NASA asking him if he was still interested in becoming an astronaut—

  “Know what your real challenge is going to be?”

  Zack could think of many sudden, terrifying challenges. The training. Rachel. “What?”

  “Telling your girlfriend that you snaked her command.”

  Go Destiny-7! Go USA!!!!

  TYPICAL POST IN THE CHEERLEADING THREAD AT NEOMISSION.COM

  Grow up. You wouldn’t be there without the Coalition.

  POSTER BRAHMA FAN, SAME THREAD

  KEANU STAY

  “Thank God we’ve got the airlock,” Pogo said, his face red from the torturous business of getting Zack’s and Yvonne’s suits ready for the EVA, a job that involved swapping out the torsos, gloves, and boots. The only surprise in the comment was that it came from Col. Patrick Downey, USAF, normally a hairshirt stoic on matters of space and livability. Zack, Yvonne, and Tea had spent two hours grunting and cursing as they executed the maneuvers necessary to eat, clean up, use the toilet, and get Zack and Yvonne suited for the first steps onto Keanu’s surface. Items had to be removed from lockers, used, then replaced—or the debris stashed in a different locker. “This is like a clown car,” Pogo snapped, clearly at his limit. “And what the fuck is this? Yvonne?”

  He had a silvery box in his hand labeled HALL PPK, Personal Preference Kit, the collection of college banners, family photos, commemorative stamps, and other memorabilia astronauts were allowed to carry on flights—as long as they didn’t exceed a kilogram or two of mass.

  “I hope that isn’t filled with good-luck coins or doodads,” Tea said, teasing. Early astronauts had gotten into trouble for sneaking memorabilia aboard their vehicles.

  “It’s all within limits,” Yvonne replied, clearly stung.

  “What it is, is in the wrong locker,” Zack said, taking it from Patrick and handing it to Yvonne. “20-B is where the PPKs go.”

  He slid between Patrick and Yvonne and entered the airlock. The chamber was almost as big as the cabin itself. On the day—hopefully a week from now—when Zack and his crew climbed into Venture to launch off Keanu’s surface, it would be left behind, along with the rest of the descent stage of the vehicle. But right now it was serving as a dressing room, where Tea waited, holding Zack’s helmet for the final stage of his suiting. “Oooo, Commander Stewart,” she purred in a fairly good imitation of some movie sex kitten, “I’d much rather be undressing you . . .”

  “We’ve still got time to add ‘first boff on Keanu’ to the resume.”

  “Optimist,” Tea said, resuming her normal voice, “but thanks for asking.” She was about to lower the helmet past his ears when she hesitated.

  “What is it?” Zack was normally not a nitpicker or worrier, but this was not a normal situation.

  She leaned forward and kissed him gently. “For luck.” Then the helmet descended, dampening the humming rattle of Venture’s ambient noise. Tea clicked the base of the helmet into the neck ring, and Zack was now suited up, breathing from its tanks.

  In his headset, he heard Pogo say, “Zack, check this out!”

  “What is it?”

  “Brahma’s coming in.”

  Without being told, Tea disconnected Zack’s helmet and helped him remove it. “Remind me—”

  “—That you’ve already used a few minutes of air, yeah, yeah.”

  At the command console, Pogo had turned one of the exterior cameras north and zoomed out.

  The image showed black sky over the fuzzy white edge of Vesuvius Vent . . . and a bright star. “Looks like an airliner on approach,” the pilot said.

  “They’re feeding it live,” Tea said, calling up the worldwide broadcast from the flight deck of the Coalition craft . . . it showed the snowy surface as seen from an altitude of fifteen hundred meters, according to the updating figures.

  “Should we be at general quarters or something?” Pogo said. He had not forgotten the missile launcher.

  “Yeah, stand by to repel boarders.” Zack was confident there would be no “action”; even if there was, he didn’t have a lot of options for counterattack. “Houston, we’re holding on EVA prep until Brahma is safely down.”

  Five seconds later, Houston acknowledged. “We copy, Venture. Wait until the debris settles.”

  The bright star resolved into what looked like a beer can with legs, with a fin on one side. Brahma was actually stopped in midair, hovering.

  “Taj is taking his time,” Tea said, paying attention to the commentary on Coalition TV.

  “He’s not flying it, is he?” Pogo said.

  “Don’t worry, Colonel—people will still remember you did it first,” Yvonne said. Pogo shot her a look that could have burned holes in her forehead.

  “Coming down—!” Tea reported.

  Like the Venture lander, Brahma’s engines burned clear; there was no plume of flame, just a brightness at the base of the vehicle and wisps of vapor being blown off the snowy surface. “It looks like 2001,” Yvonne said.

  “Like what?” Patrick said, almost snarling.

  “The movie,” Tea said. Zack could see the point . . . there was indeed a resemblance to the big round commercial Moon shuttle touching down at Clavius Base in the Kubrick-Clarke film.

  “Fifty meters now, I think,” Pogo said.

  Then Brahma disappeared in a cloud of white.

  “What the hell was that?” Yvonne said.

  Zack slapped her on the forearm of her suit. “Shut up and watch!”

  Through the mist—like the lifting fog on a coastal morning—Zack could se
e Brahma bouncing just as he imagined Venture had . . . but only a few meters.

  The damn spacecraft actually rotated, allowing the Destiny astronauts to see a line reaching from the missile tube on Brahma’s side into the ground. The giant six-story vehicle shuddered like a breaching whale . . . then gently settled.

  Zack laughed out loud. “I don’t believe it! They harpooned it!” Seeing that none of his crew understood, he said, “They fired an anchor from that tube. It wasn’t a missile launcher, it was a tool to keep them from bouncing the way we did.”

  “You mean, they winched themselves in?” Tea said, clearly stunned. Of the four of them, she was the only one with sailing experience.

  “Bingo,” Zack said. “Just like a sailing ship.”

  “Well,” said Pogo, turning to Zack. “I guess you’re not the only Horn-blower reader around here.”

  The crew of spacecraft Brahma prepares for its historic exploration of Near-Earth Object Keanu. Data continue to be received via Deep Space Network at Byalalu near Bangalore.

  It may be recalled that the Brahma spacecraft was launched from European Space Agency’s Kourou Space Centre on 18 August 2019.

  INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANIZATION PRESS RELEASE, 22 AUGUST 2019

  “Yes, I’m standing by.”

  Lucas Munaretto was growing tired of using that phrase. In the four days since Brahma had launched from Kourou, it was almost the only thing he had been able to say on the air-to-ground link.

  The problem was Bangalore mission control, where even the simplest question triggered a series of lengthy consultations. Lucas had noticed this hesitancy during the months of mission simulations but had written it off as the learning process (Bangalore had never controlled a mission this complex). Besides, Taj’s international crew had frequently been too slow to act.