Heaven's Shadow (43 page)

“Big talker.”

Rachel was only beginning to contemplate the meaning of that exchange—good God, were they flirting?—when another group emerged from mission control: Shane Weldon and Brent Bynum, together with three of Jones’s horse-holders.

“Where are you sneaking off to?” Harley asked them.

“One guess,” Weldon said.

“Don’t you have a vehicle to launch?”

Weldon tapped his earpiece. “Josh and the Orbit Two team are totally on top of things. They don’t need me looking over their shoulders.”

“Who are you, and what have you done with Shane Weldon?”

Bynum snickered. “Seriously,” Weldon said. “I’m off duty for two hours.”

“So why aren’t you collapsed on a couch somewhere?”

Weldon smiled. “Why aren’t you?”

Harley was attaching his seat belt. Weldon and his crew still hadn’t reached their cars. “Race you,” Harley said, in best astronaut tradition.

There was no chance for a contest. There was barely any forward progress once Harley’s van left the JSC grounds and joined a polite and steady-but-slow flow of vehicles north on Saturn Lane. Blaine said, “Where are they all going?”

“The staging area for evacuation is the Harris County Courthouse. It’s a few kilometers west of here.”

“They’re still evacuating?” Rachel said.

“Inertia, maybe,” Harley said. “It might also be wise because, ladies, we’re in completely uncharted territory here. We have no idea what this Object is for, or what it might do.”

“I have an idea,” Blaine said. “It’s spinning and churning up soil, right?”

“Soil, air, pavement, and pieces of buildings, yeah.”

“I mean, think about what Keanu really is.” She waited. Rachel certainly had no ideas. “A space probe, right? Just like
Mariner
or
Viking
. These Architects sent it here to take images and readings of Earth and the entire solar system. Well, now that they know there’s life here, they’re sampling.”

“So these plasma balls are just some kind of advanced soil scoop. Don’t they have dirt and water on Keanu?”

“Maybe not enough, or not the right kind.”

Harley made a right turn onto Bay Area, a major street that paralleled the north boundary of JSC, then intersected Space Center Boulevard. That thoroughfare snaked around to the south and east . . . directly toward the impact site. The traffic here was all one way, the other way.

Harley smiled. “It might be better to perform a flanking maneuver here.” He drove right through the intersection of Space Center and Bay Area—a smart choice. Rachel could see that there was a roadblock a hundred yards south. No cars were getting through.

As Harley continued east on Bay Area, into the wooded lowlands flanking Armand Bayou, he glanced at Sasha Blaine. “Riddle me this: If our advanced civilization really just wanted to make a survey of this solar system, or a hundred solar systems, why would it send something as freaking large as Keanu?”

“Maybe it needs to be that large to survive a ten-thousand-year trip.”

“Or maybe it isn’t a space probe, and those Objects aren’t sample-returners.”

Sasha Blaine gave up the argument.

Just after crossing the bayou, as the traffic dwindled to nothing, Harley made a sharp right onto Red Bluff, and soon after, another right into Taylor Lake Village, a crumbling development from the 1960s.

“You do know where you’re going,” Rachel said.

“Used to have a girlfriend who lived here. She was married. Had to perform a few emergency evasive escapes.”

Rachel had endured twenty minutes of being slammed around the backseat. Never a happy passenger, she was getting sick to her stomach. And impatient. “God, will you hurry?”

“What’s the rush, Rach?” Harley said. “I don’t think the Object is going anywhere.”

“I just want to see it!”

Sasha Blaine turned around from the front seat. “You’ve had to listen to the two of us nattering. What do you think it is?”

It wasn’t a question of trying to keep her feelings secret . . . it was more that Rachel didn’t understand her own compulsion until Sasha asked her. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “All I know is that my mother told me not to be scared.”

You guys are awesome. No one in the world could have pulled this off in such a short time . . . no one in the world would have even tried it.

SHANE WELDON STATEMENT TO
DESTINY
FLIGHT CONTROL TEAM

Hey, guess what? Weldon gave everyone a “well-done!”

POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM

The
Destiny
had come to rest safely—“No apparent leaks or holes, Houston”—but with one immediate problem. “The fucking hatch is underneath.” Always a bit of a potty mouth, the tomboy’s legacy, Tea Nowinski had developed strict air-to-ground discipline in her previous flights.

But the sight of
Destiny
, relatively unscathed except for the loss of one of its solar panels, with one edge of the hatch visible about three feet off the ground, overwhelmed her already-challenged verbal governor. “Any ideas?”

The lag seemed to stretch on, but Taj was ready to fill it. “Remember where we are, Tea.”

He slipped past her, hopping close to the
Destiny
, which even on its side was twice his height. Tea found Taj’s tone infuriatingly cheerful “I haven’t forgotten,” she said, about to add,
you fucking idiot
, when she realized what the vyomanaut meant. “Oh. Right.”

Destiny
had only a fraction of its ten-ton weight here. “Tea, Houston. We see your situation with, ah, hatch access. And we are recommending—”

“—That we simply roll it, copy, Houston.”
Tea, you are the fucking idiot.
“Stand by for magic.”

“Before you do,” Houston said, “give us five. We want to vent atmosphere.”

Of course: for uncrewed orbit operations,
Destiny
was pressurized to ten pounds per square inch, slightly less than it would be with a crew aboard. With all that pressure on one side, a hatch would literally blow open, possibly damaging its hinges.

Tea and Taj retreated fifty meters, to where Natalia and Lucas waited. “Thar she blows,” Tea said, as a sudden gout of vapor erupted from
Destiny
’s base. Within a few minutes, it was gone.
Destiny
’s interior pressure was now almost a vacuum.

It took the four of them, two positioned on the side of the gumdrop-shaped
Destiny
, two on the canlike service module. The challenge wasn’t moving the mass—which rocked slightly to the touch—it was traction. “We’ve got to dig in,” Taj said.

“I wish I had my football cleats,” Lucas said. Tea was happy to hear the World’s Greatest Astronaut speak; he had fallen completely silent over the past hour, a sure sign of exhaustion and depression.

Natalia, who had also been sullen and silent, hopped to work, digging footholds for all. (She had been clever enough to bring tools from rover
Buzz
.)

“Uno, dos, tres,”
Lucas said . . . and the giant, bus-sized vehicle rolled twenty degrees, just enough to uncover the hatch.

“Goddamn, it worked!” she said. “Great idea, Taj!”

“Thank Zack,” Taj said.

Tea dropped to her knees, looking for the handle as she tried to orient herself. When
Destiny
was upright, its main hatch opened to the left . . . with the spacecraft on its side, the hatch would open toward her, like a ramp. Which would be good.

Entry was simply a matter of finding the access handle—which was on the top of the hatch, from her perspective, and almost out of reach. “Houston, Tea, I’m ready to open ’er up.”

She waited. Then Jasmine Trieu said, “Pressure is effectively zero. You’re go for open.”

The rectangular hatch, wide enough that Tea could not touch the ends if she stretched out her arms, opened easily. Tea climbed up on it, then stepped into the interior.

And almost fainted.

God, had it only been forty hours since separation? It felt as though she were visiting for the first time! There was the confusing inversion of local vertical and local horizontal—she entered the spacecraft along one of its sloping walls. The main control panel, and two unstowed couches, were directly over her head. She should have been used to that, of course; her last look at the interior had been as she dove headfirst through the hatch in its pointy nose.

Right now she was standing on a cabinet door that had not been designed—as parts of
Destiny
’s “floor” were—for stepping. Fortunately, with Keanu’s gravity, Tea’s fears were less about breaking or stepping through the cabinet than tracking alien ice and mud into the “house.”

Taking slow breaths, she focused on the cabin lights and on key features: the stowed couches, the personal gear held in place by webbing along another part of the wall.

Better. She turned back to the hatch, where Taj waited. Natalia and Lucas were right behind him.

“All right, everybody. Last chance. Hot food, showers, massage. Well, none of that, exactly. But I’ll think you’ll enjoy the accommodations.”

“
Destiny
, Houston for Tea. We need you to take a look at Panel Delta.”

Tea reacted without thinking, closing up the flight data file and dropping it in the next seat. Panel Delta was where data on
Destiny
’s environmental systems was displayed.

It was only an hour after she and her colleagues—survivors of the human race’s less-than-nominal First Contact mission—had sealed themselves inside
Destiny
. Taj and Natalia were now awkwardly camped out on the sloping “floor” next to four rigid and empty pressure suits; Lucas was wedged atop the two stowed couches.

And Tea was in T-shirt and shorts, perched above them at the command operator’s position.

The moment she had been able to close the door and restore pressure, Tea had not only removed her worn-out EVA suit, but had also stripped off her fantastically nasty undergarment. She then cleaned herself with a wad of wet wipes and shrugged into a flight suit, telling the others, “Be my guest.”

Taj had objected. “What if there’s a loss of pressure?”

“Then I’ll die comfortable,” she said. “Besides . . . your suits have different hose fittings. You can’t recharge from these tanks. You might as well clean up and change clothes, too.”

To spare the others the awkwardness of donning coveralls last worn by dead comrades, Tea had opened a cabinet and pulled out spare garments intended to be worn the last day of the mission. She hoped this was the last day of the mission.

Pogo’s size XL hung loosely on Lucas, and Tea’s spare didn’t fit tiny Natalia much better. Zack’s fit Taj as though tailored . . . which caused Tea to think about her absent friend and commander. As the others laid waste to the stored food and water, Tea radioed a quiet query to Houston about word from Zack and was only told, “Last contact was two hours ago. Nothing since then. Nothing expected.”

Now Houston had her checking environmental systems. She quickly learned why. “Houston, I’m seeing a pressure drop . . . barely over seven hundred millibars, and I think it’s gone down a point since I’ve looked.” She was too tired to do the math, or to wait for Trieu to confirm those figures. “How long before we’re sucking vac?”

“It’s still on the order of hours, possibly a day or two,” Trieu told her. “But it means we have to get you off the surface ASAP.”

Taj had heard this, and so had Lucas and Natalia. The vyomanaut was already climbing into the seat next to Tea. “How much time?”

Houston answered for Tea. “You will be going LOS in the next ninety minutes. We want you off the ground before then.”

“No more than we do,” she had told them.

Just then, strangely, the spacecraft rolled. It was worse than one simple motion . . . it actually seemed to yaw a bit, too, causing Tea’s already-sensitive stomach to protest. “Okay, anyone, what the hell was that?”

Natalia said, “I thought this was solid ground!”

The nearest window to Tea showed nothing but black sky overhead. “Taj, take a look—”

The vyomanaut already had his nose up to the square window in the hatch. “There’s a lot of vapor outside!”

Lucas pulled himself up to the couch next to Tea. “Are we venting?”

Tea didn’t think so—at least, no more than before the movement—and a quick glance at all the panels confirmed it. “No indicators. Haven’t heard anything.”

Taj was getting agitated. “I think Vesuvius is active again—”

That was all Tea needed to hear. She clicked her radio. “Houston,
Destiny
. . . Let’s get to that departure checklist!”

Big Smart Alien

TERM COINED BY NASA ASTRONAUT ZACHARY STEWART, AUGUST 2019

To Zack, it seemed as though the Architect considered his request to release Megan.

Then it moved again, its portside appendages swiftly lashing out, touching the interior walls to Zack’s right. A third of the way up, just above the height of Zack’s head, a panel opened up—

And a body slid out.

Zack moved reflexively . . . and a good thing, too: it was a writhing, scratching, loudly protesting human female.

Megan.

They both collapsed. Fortunately, Keanu’s gravity ensured that they wouldn’t be hurt.

It took a moment before Megan realized who had caught her. “Oh my God,” was all she said.

Zack had never heard anyone so relieved. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

They regarded each other. “I keep hoping I’m eventually going to figure this out,” Zack said.

“Me, too.”

Zack turned to the Architect, who, after releasing Megan from a hole in the wall, had resumed exploration of other cabinets higher up in the chamber, using two or three of its appendages at the same time. “Any ideas?” Zack shouted.

“I think he can hear you.”

“And you would know.”

“Yes.” She seemed to be regaining strength. “Both of us know.”