Heaven's Fall (4 page)

Rachel could see Pav shrug. Zeds just grunted, a peculiarly human reaction.

Things began to happen very quickly now. A guidance system was doing the actual piloting: Zeds and Pav were simply monitoring—or, in Pav’s case, worrying aloud.

They were low enough now, over the Laccadive Sea, that Bangalore had had to alert air traffic to their passage—but still high enough that they could see, off to the right, the northwestern coast of Sri Lanka.

But just like that they were over India proper, heading directly north up the tip of the subcontinent. “Was that Madurai?” Yahvi said. Rachel had asked her to keep quiet at this time, but at fourteen it was hard to remember parental orders—Rachel knew from experience. And besides, she was proud of the fact that her daughter had tried to learn terrestrial geography.

“Not yet,” Pav said. He had actually flown over Madurai as a boy.

“Coming up on the big swoop,” Zeds said. “Ready to rock it.”

The “big swoop” was a vital maneuver. . . .
Adventure
was currently flying nose forward like a reentering space shuttle. Unlike that vehicle, however, it could not lower landing gear from its belly and glide to a stop on a runway.

Adventure
would have to fire its main engines, which had so far been used rather sparingly, first to lift the vehicle off the surface of Keanu four days back, then to change its trajectory, essentially slowing it down, putting it on a shallow “flight” toward Earth.

The stress on the vehicle would be immense. But, having shed much of its original thirty-eight-thousand-kilometers-an-hour speed diving into the atmosphere—turning velocity into heat—
Adventure
now began to ascend, gaining a bit of altitude (and reaching thinner air), going nose up, up, up, and up until the vehicle was standing on its tail . . . and the crew left feeling as if they were weightless and motionless.

They weren’t, of course. They were still flying toward Bangalore at a good clip.

Stress on the vehicle aside, there was also stress on the six of them—the only real g-forces they experienced during the flight. They now felt as though they were being pushed deeper into their couches, possibly with the addition of a fifty-kilogram weight on their chests.

But that lasted only for a minute or two. Zeds was especially silent and obviously struggling. Rachel had learned that the gravity of the original Sentry world was half that of Earth, and the Sentry habitat was stabilized close to that. (Sentries always seemed unhappy when they entered the human habitat; it was due to being twice as heavy as they liked.) Zeds wore a protective suit that offered support, but he still had to be feeling flung about.

Rachel and the other humans were in street clothes. They weren’t expecting multiple g-forces, or not for more than a few seconds, so suits weren’t needed.

Xavier did utter “Shit” a couple of times. And there was at least one audible whimper in the cockpit.
That was me,
Rachel realized.

“Good job,” Pav said, surely intending that for
Adventure
herself.

As things smoothed out, Rachel began to feel relief—she had not realized just how worried she had been about the big swoop.

Now she and the others felt as though they were falling backward, as
Adventure
rode its rocket down and to the north. A rearward-facing camera showed a large city passing beneath them . . . Bangalore. But they were going too fast and their field of view was too narrow to identify any landmarks, just the mass of the big city itself.

When the HB Council decided that landing in India was preferable to Houston or Florida in the United States (there were more of the mysterious THE folks in America than anywhere else), Bangalore became the choice.

The actual target was an Indian air base north of the city called Yelahanka, which had been chosen primarily because it was the closest controlled airport to the former Bangalore Control Center. The mission control building and surrounding territory had been destroyed by a Keanu vesicle in August 2019, but a larger space research campus survived.

“Two thousand meters,” Pav said. “Descent speed is good.”

“Feels a little sluggish to me,” Zeds said.

The moment he uttered those words,
Adventure
shuddered and a red light flashed on the control panel. (The designers had kept the earthly conventions wherever possible.)

Before Rachel could react—or even feel fear—Yahvi’s hand landed on her shoulder.

“Relax,” Zeds said. “We’re still good.”

“But losing some altitude,” Pav said. For a moment, they exchanged terse, operational chat, like all pilots Rachel had ever heard on every airplane flight she’d ever taken.

“I saw a flash from one of the screens,” Pav said.

Then Zeds added, “I think we lost part of the tail.”

Hearing that, Rachel almost choked. The tail was actually a set of four fins, each providing aerodynamic control and landing support. Losing one or part of one might not be fatal, but it was certainly not
good
news.

“We’re holding steady,” Zeds said after a long ten seconds. “Still under control.”

“A heads-up would have been nice,” Pav said.

Rachel wished again they could have kept constant contact with Keanu, a hopeless task given the NEO’s distance from Earth and the lack of relay satellites.

The ultimate mission? Historically humans thought about visiting other worlds in order to explore. But no matter how much it had changed in two decades, Earth was their home . . . so exploration wasn’t the goal.

Another classical reason was to find some vital element or mineral, and God knows the Keanu HBs could have used food, clothing, and any of a hundred thousand items from Earth, from books to shovels to electronics. They had been able to fabricate many items, but they were only as good as their memories—or ability to reinvent certain items. (It would have been great, Rachel believed, to have been able to buy an RL-10 rocket off the shelf, rather than try to fabricate something like it.)

Another motive for great human voyages, of course, was war.

So, really, the flight of
Adventure
was a bit of all three. Which made it sound as though there were a real plan. But for the first ten years of her life on Keanu, Rachel and her colleagues had concentrated on surviving in their original habitat, all the while trying to learn how to control the NEO.

That job had previously belonged to a race called the Architects, the original builders of the NEO who had launched it on its ten-thousand-year mission.

But the only Architects the humans had met had been Revenants . . . formerly alive beings revived to communicate with humans, to tell them, in Rachel’s view, just enough to make their lives difficult.

Eventually, using clues from the last Architect, the HBs had learned how to “fly” Keanu, turning it back toward the solar system for this curious mission.

Missing tail fin or not,
Adventure
was still flying, still descending at a survivable rate. Pav reached to his left and patted Zeds on the shoulder, or one of the pair on the Sentry’s right side. “Looking good!”

Rachel allowed herself to feel hope—right up to the time
Adventure
crashed.

It wasn’t a serious crash, an auger-in at great velocity. No one would have survived that.

But it was a hard thump down, the silvery shell smashing tail-first into a grassy apron north of the main Yelahanka runway.

Pav’s last words were, “Too fast!” Rachel had sat through a number of simulations, though nowhere near the number Pav and Zeds had performed. She could read the changing numbers—altitude and speed—and saw that the altitude number was getting low while the speed remained too high. (When, in rehearsals, she pointed this out from her backseat spot in the cockpit, Pav would often remind her that it was her
father
who was the astronaut, not Rachel. Of course, she could and did say the same to Pav.)

She wondered what “too fast” meant. As in too fast for comfort? Or too fast for survival—

In those twenty seconds, Rachel watched the view screen with horrid fascination, the tarmac rushing toward them not much faster than it had in their sims, Yahvi saying, “Mommy . . . !” Even Xavier couldn’t go silently into that not-so-good night, moaning, “No, no, no!”

She was thinking,
I’m going to die here, stupidly and so will my daughter. Why did I put her at risk?

“Are we on the runway?” Pav asked.

Rachel wanted to scream,
Who cares?
But Zeds answered, calmly, “No, but I think it’s going to be okay—”

They crunched with a sound like a Dumpster falling two stories onto concrete. The impact was greater than the worst airline landing Rachel had ever experienced. The couches cushioned the impact, but a large piece of the control panel broke off and fell, barely missing her and Yahvi.

Adventure
rocked, shuddered, seemed to sink into the grass . . . then finally settled, at a bit of a list. They were on their backs, pinned like insects, looking up, feeling full Earth gravity after several seconds of multiple Earth gravity. Rachel felt sick to her stomach.

“Bangalore,
Adventure
,” Pav radioed. “No matter what it looked like out there, we’re down and safe.” Then he glanced over his shoulder to give Rachel and Yahvi a smile.

At that moment, Xavier said, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

Seeing what Yahvi, Zeds, and Rachel could not, Pav’s expression changed. He touched his headset. “Correction, Bangalore, we’re going to need emergency medical assistance!”

Now they all looked toward the rear or bottom of the cockpit, where they saw Xavier, his restraints unhooked, trying to get to Sanjay’s couch a meter away. It likely didn’t matter; Xavier wouldn’t be able to do much.

The broken panel section had hit their genius designer and engineer right in the head.

Rachel was thinking,
First
Venture
,
then
Brahma
, now this.

The Stewart and Radhakrishnan families should never be allowed to land another spacecraft.

I come from a small town, very few people, where the number doesn’t change much over the years. For example, whenever a gal gets pregnant, some guy leaves town.

DALE SCOTT’S FAVORITE JOKE,
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL BABYLONIAN

“How’d you get it moving, Harls?”

Dale Scott may have spoken a bit louder than necessary, and his words were nothing like a greeting, all of which explained why a bald, middle-aged man wearing a silly flowered shirt and baggy shorts (which exposed shiny new flesh-colored legs) started as if he’d been shot. Then he turned with a look of genuine surprise.

To be fair to Harley Drake, it had been some time since he had seen Dale—and their last conversation had been angry.

Making matters worse, Dale had totally ambushed him. It was still very early morning, Keanu human habitat time. The glowworms on the ceiling above were just beginning to grow brighter, heralding a new day of earnest productivity and blind, robotic denial—at least as Dale thought of it.

But Harley Drake, Dale’s long-ago astronaut colleague and Keanu nemesis, was more aware of the lingering mysteries and unanswered questions concerning their space home of two decades.

As far as Dale knew, every morning since that first month, Harley had visited this part of the habitat, the area known as the Beehive, a magical collection of honeycomb-like cells ranging in size from squirrel to elephant. For several months back in 2019, dozens of living creatures had emerged from the Beehive—reborn on the Near-Earth Object after their DNA or computer code or 3-D map or “soul” had been retrieved by Keanu’s systems, then imprinted on a suitable collection of nanotech goo, to be combined, transformed, and rearranged into a living creature indistinguishable—at least by any measure the Houston-Bangalores possessed—from its dead original.

People emerged from the Beehive, too. Not many, and not for long. Shortly after the arrival of 187 involuntary human immigrants to Keanu, the Beehive stopped reviving humans, stopped creating Revenants. The reason was unknown, maybe unknowable, but Dale suspected that everyone was relieved. Over the years, all of the HBs began to believe that the Revenants would never come again.

Harley Drake was the only real exception. Dale suspected that the former mayor of the HBs came to the Beehive every morning, ritualistically, to see if any additional Revenants had come back . . . or to make sure that they hadn’t.

Today, however, he found Dale Scott.

“Fuck you, Dale.”

“Nice talk.”

“You scared the shit out of me.”

“Not my intention.”

“Yet, it happened. You chose to lurk there instead of walking up to the Temple during working hours.”

“True,” he said, “but the Temple is so crowded with—”

“People who hate you?”

“As cruel as it is true.”

Only now did Harley meet Dale’s eyes. Until this moment Harley had been looking past him, at the stale-smelling maw of the Beehive. But it wasn’t rudeness or extreme caution that kept Harley from engaging; it was history. Harley had been a well-regarded test pilot and NASA astronaut up to two years before the whole Keanu debacle.