Heaven's Fall (35 page)

“I should take you back to the habitat and lock you up so everyone can hear your big secrets. You did escape, correct?”

“Ask Harley. He kept insisting I wasn’t a prisoner, or that if I was, it wasn’t his decision.”

“Oh, you were. And in a sense, are.” Zhao smiled, never a happy look. “But then, so are we all.”

Zhao nodded beyond Dale. He turned and saw half a dozen HBs approaching, two women among them, and one of them, amazingly, appeared to be Makali Pillay, the Aussie exobiologist who had shared Dale and Zack Stewart’s long, weird trek across the surface of Keanu. They did not seem hostile; they didn’t even seem to notice Dale, but rather fanned out to work on the vesicle. Zhao said. “To be honest, there’s no point in locking you up. Things are moving too fast. We actually need some help.”

“Doing what?”

“Getting this ready for launch.”

“To Earth?”

“Well, it’s not going to the fucking Moon!”

“But you already sent
Adventure
there!”

“And look how that’s going! They’re in everyone’s crosshairs. I know it seems like we sent six people up against an entire planet, but come on, Dale. We’re going after the Reivers, but not with
Adventure
.”

He pointed to the giant, almost-complete vesicle. “With this.”

Like all of the HBs, Dale Scott had arrived at Keanu in one of two vesicles . . . giant sample return craft launched by Keanu toward Earth.

There had been a third Object, which the Reivers had used twenty years ago to make their escape. Dale had never discovered how to fabricate another one; in the many areas of the Keanu library he had accessed, he had never even found a reference to the vesicles.

Which meant nothing more than that there was a vast amount of information about Keanu he had yet to learn.

It did bother him that somehow Zhao or Jaidev had managed the trick. It made him feel a bit less special.

But his momentary pique was tiny compared to the wonder of seeing a vesicle being not just fabricated but, in a way, grown. Simply learning how took hours, time in which Dale found himself tolerated if not actually welcomed.

“I can sort of see how you’d replicate the shell of this thing,” Dale said to Zhao, joining the former spy at his workstation. “But how do you equip it for war against the Reivers?”

“The basic systems were already in the library,” Zhao said, confirming that he had indeed accessed the system—which was news to Dale. “We’ve spent the last two years weaponizing it.”

“What do you use against a whole planet?” A chilling thought occurred to him. “It’s not a bomb, is it?” Dale didn’t think Zhao would launch a planet-killing weapon, even making the giant assumption that he possessed such a device, since it would kill millions or billions of humans along with the target Reivers, but power did strange things to men, so . . .

“Nothing like that,” Zhao said. “Even before we left Earth, bombs were no longer the weapon of choice, unless you were a terrorist. It’s all chemical-biological or cyber.”

“Like what we did to the Reivers before.” The alien Aggregates had been exterminated in Keanu by a designer virus fabricated by Jaidev in the Temple laboratory.

“Exactly,” Zhao said. “We assume the Reivers have evolved their defenses.” He smiled. “But we’ve evolved, too. We have the option of going after not just their populations, but against their networks and ability to communicate.” He pointed to the vesicle. “We’ve got half a dozen ways of attacking them.

“And, of course, we have stealth and surprise.”

“While the Reivers are panting after Rachel’s crew, you’re going to hit them from behind.”

“Assuming we ever get this fucking thing launched.”

“What can I do?” The words were out of his mouth before he truly thought about them.
So much for your enlightened communion with Keanu,
he thought. Well, before becoming an astronaut, Dale Scott spent years as a military fighter pilot.

Maybe he just wanted to kill something again. Especially Reivers.

Or maybe this was all about working with people once more, even people who despised him.

More hours and another day passed, an intoxicating time for Dale in which he almost forgot to eat. His job was to monitor the extrusion of the shell material from three different hoses. Looking like foaming white goo, the smart-shape material quickly hardened and soon enclosed the entire vesicle.

The others on the team—none of them familiar to Dale from years past—largely dealt with the interior equipment, which they were assembling and collecting on the platform that encircled the vesicle. Which caused Dale to approach Makali and ask, “How do you get this stuff inside? Does the shell eventually develop hatches?”

She stared at him for a long moment, as if she didn’t recognize him. She was certainly recognizable—clearly in her late forties now, with lines around her eyes and hair cropped like most of the HB women. But she had retained her athletic figure; in fact, she looked leaner and in better shape than Dale remembered. “You know, when I came in here, I said to myself, ‘That looks like Dale Scott, but it can’t be. Dale went walkabout a long time ago. . . .’”

“I’m back.”

“To stay?”

Dale shrugged. “To help.”

Makali had her arms crossed, a clear nonverbal sign that she was uneasy with him. Which was an unexpected posture for her—she had been so confident, in your face. Well, Dale had not only changed physically, he was a different person, too.

“In that case,” she said, glancing toward Zhao, who merely nodded his approval of the exchange, “if you’re going to help, you ought to have the answers.

“No hatches, no windows. The whole vesicle expands or contracts. The skin becomes so thin and permeable, you can push through it. Then it closes up again.”

Dale remembered seeing the Bangalore vesicle rotating slowly after it thumped down . . . then expanding to gather in a hundred human beings along with a considerable amount of soil and even a couple of automobiles.

“I always wondered what propelled it.”

“Well, it gets expelled from Keanu—”

“Like a bullet, I know,” Dale said. “But both of those things took off from Earth—”

“We think it’s the skin itself,” Makali said. “As the whole thing spins, some of the material on the bottom begins to boil, using
boil
in a very crude sense. It turns into some kind of propellant.” She smiled. “Why? Planning to take a hop to Earth and come back?”

Dale shrugged. It was just the engineering side of his mind.

But Makali’s statement made him think: He could go with the invading force. He could return to Earth!

Before he could ponder those possibilities, there was some disturbance in the group surrounding Zhao.

It was Jaidev himself. He barely registered Dale’s anomalous presence. “You need to see something,” he told Zhao. “We all do, back in the habitat.”

“But I’m busy here! I have a lot to do before we can launch.”

“This may change everything,” Jaidev said. “The Beehive is active again.”

Day Seven

THURSDAY, APRIL 19, 2040

NIGHT SKY REPORT

The Moon is waxing, Venus getting closer to the Sun each passing night as is Mars, though in different parts of the sky.

Do I include Keanu in this? Tonight it’s as close to the Moon as it’s likely to be, and ought to be spectacular. (The shadows will be weird, I tell you that.)

But it all feels so temporary. Anybody have any idea whether Keanu is GOING TO STAY?

POSTER GILLAM, KETTERING GROUP,
APRIL 19, 2040

“We’ve got a serious problem.”

Taj was awakened by his phone, which was lying on his bed next to his pillow. This was not its usual overnight resting place, but given the threats facing Tea, Pav, Rachel, Yahvi, and the others, it was an obvious choice. Taj had lain down in an agitated state, fearing that he faced a restless night. But the clock proved that he had slept; being sixty-six and operating on perhaps four hours of rest in the past five days might have been a factor.

But he was asleep no longer. Short of breath, confused, he had forced himself to answer the phone and found Remilla on the line. It was just past five in the morning. Though Taj could sense that there was some light through the windows, it felt like three
A.M.
“Radhakrishnan,” he said, military fashion.

“It’s Melani,” Remilla said, sounding just as exhausted as Taj felt, though she had enough energy to say, quickly, “This is not about Pav and his crew.”

“Thank you.” The ring tone alone had almost given him a heart attack. Taj had had no word from his son since their conversation about Sanjay a day and a half earlier. He had remained at the Yelahanka Air Base hospital long enough to oversee the transfer of Sanjay’s body to Hebbai Electric Crematorium, which had been located by Melani Remilla—it happened to be the closest civilian facility.

Upon leaving Yelahanka, he was subject to a strange set of emotions—an odd and unearned nostalgia combined with a firm desire to never trod its grounds again.

Sanjay and the crematorium were the subjects of Remilla’s call, which continued: “He is about to be taken out of our hands,” she said.

“I didn’t realize that ISRO managed dead bodies from outer space.”

“The military has taken over.”

“I’m military and no one has told me.”

“That’s my job. The army wants this whole matter resolved. With the crew out of the country, Bhat’s remains are the only . . .”

“Loose end?” Of course. “What are they planning?”

“I think they plan to take the body.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Word is that someone, somewhere, wants it.”

“The family is having a cremation later this morning.”

“Even that isn’t three days!”

Taj was not as religious as many of his colleagues—even though the events of twenty years ago had opened his eyes to the unknown mysteries of human existence—and certainly not devout Hindu.

But he knew the rites, and it was too soon for a cremation! “Why are you telling me?” he said. “Do you expect me to stop it?”

“I have no power,” Remilla said. “I only discovered it by accident and thought you ought to know.”

He thanked her, then painfully rolled out of bed and splashed some water on his face. He was famished, so he made a quick breakfast as he considered his options.

Attending to lifestyle matters in these strained circumstances reminded him of a typical morning aboard the International Space Station, where daily rituals were so important to an astronaut’s mental as well as physical health. Today it gave him a moment to plan, even though, compared to a day in space, he was forced to improvise.

He and Tea had been renting an apartment not far from ISRO headquarters for the past six months, and had never truly moved in. Neither of them was a cook, either, so there was little food on hand. Taj would have preferred some idli cake, for example, or tea. Failing that, eggs and beans for an English breakfast.