Heaven's Shadow (13 page)

Cosmonauts Lucas “World’s Greatest Astronaut” Munaretto of Brazil’s AEB (Agencia Espacial Brasileira) and Natalia Yorkina of the Russian Federal Space Agency followed more sedately; they had come equipped with rappelling gear and chose to leave anchor lines at the top before sliding down.

Watching the process made Zack impatient and confirmed his original judgment. Lucas, in particular, kept bouncing in the low gravity, literally hanging in midair for seconds at a time at the end of his rope, until regaining contact with the surface, and traction.

Natalia proved to be either an experienced climber or a natural low-gravity operator.

No matter, Zack was happy to have the rope option.

It was one thing to take a literal giant leap to the bottom of Vesuvius . . . it was quite another to do so with no obvious way back up. His last order to Tea was to get together with Taj and do a detailed survey of the Vesuvius slopes, in hopes of finding a road to the top.

While he waited, and while he still had communications with
Venture
, he was able to check his messages, which could be read on a tiny LED inside his helmet, about six words at a time.

There was a text from Rachel: HEARD YOU TAKE STEPS BUT COVERED MY EYES. BE CAREFUL AND COME HOME! LUV U.

He started to laugh. Even though it was easy, as the father of a teenage girl, to be distracted by the laziness, sloppiness, and occasional snotty attitude, Rachel was inescapably his child.

And Megan’s.

He did not want to unwrap the Megan memory box just yet. It would be too distracting.
Focus on your environment!

He was standing in the bottom of a giant pit as wide as Minute Maid Stadium, just out of the cold shadow that darkened two-thirds of the surface here.

The surface itself was more rock than snow. It was nowhere near flat, either, but rather gently rolling, like the surface of a frozen ocean.

He was tired, his hands ached from the struggle against EVA gloves, yet he felt buoyant, alive, elated. Zack extended this private moment long enough to piss in his diaper. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he was continuing an astronaut tradition that went back to Alan Shepard on the first
Mercury
. . . and Buzz Aldrin during the first walk on the Moon.

Now it was time to dig more deeply into Keanu. The only moment in his life that compared was his first date as a licensed driver.

In fact, he could see several clefts in the shadowed walls of the vent. He couldn’t wait to start. He was delayed only by a mandated rest break (something he had learned to appreciate during his space station EVAs). Lucas and Natalia were busy unloading the sled, while Pogo was unspooling fiber-optic cable from
Buzz
. That line would provide real-time communications to Tea and
Venture
—aside from the habitability module on
Buzz
, which allowed for extended EVA, the cable was the only clear advantage the NASA team had over the Coalition so far.

Constant, real-time communication between
Venture
and Houston had its drawbacks. There wasn’t an astronaut alive who enjoyed having his every syllable broadcast in real time to millions. But it also allowed Rachel to see what her father was doing—and even send him the odd text.

Zack wondered if she sent messages to Tea, too. They had developed their own independent friendship since that very tricky moment nine months back, when Zack had first introduced his fellow astronaut to his daughter . . . as his girlfriend.

It was his own birthday, and he had continued the Stewart family tradition of selecting a favorite restaurant—this year a new California cuisine place on El Dorado. Rachel was present, of course, and so were the Meyers . . . By prearrangement, Tea had arrived ten minutes late. Zack had allowed her to kiss him, then introduced her as his date.

All Rachel had said, then, was “Gee, I wondered who the extra chair was for.”

That night she had been more pointed. “I think she’s fine, okay? But, God, you could have told me in private!” Well, no . . . they had been fighting so much over so many trivial matters that season that Zack had simply been afraid to have a conversation with his daughter.

Things had gone better, with Tea spending more and more time at the Stewart house, and even going shopping with Rachel.

The only crisis had come when Zack took Tea’s spot as
Destiny-7
commander. She had become . . . just another astronaut. Ever since the crew suited up at the Cape prior to launch, there had been no shared looks between them, no secret touches, very damn few private words. Yes, this mission was all-consuming, but did it have to destroy any vestige of human emotion? Was that what real spaceflight did?

More troublesome was the possibility that the mission just exposed Zack’s lack of true feelings for Tea . . . or hers for him—

“Zack, look what we got here!”

It was Lucas. The Brazilian astronaut—who had spent so much time in Houston over the past decade that he seemed more American than Zack—had unpacked a portable aperture-radar unit from the Coalition’s sled and was panning it, like a twentieth-century video camera, around the bases of the vent.

Zack and Pogo shuffled toward the Coalition team. “What have you got?”

Lucas handed him the radar gun, but Zack saw only a confused image that reminded him of a prenatal sonogram—more evidence that the Coalition team was better equipped and trained for exploring Keanu. “An opening,” Lucas said. “A big one.”

Pogo took the radar gun. He seemed to have a better idea of what it showed. “He’s right. Sucker’s ten meters wide, at least, and at least half that high. You could drive a semi through it.” As he handed the gun back to Lucas, he added, “Did I say straight edges?”

Keanu maneuvered.
And there was a ramplike structure inside this vent. And now what seemed to be a portal with straight edges . . .

Zack could feel his heart rate climbing. “Let’s get rolling, then.”

They pressed forward like Arctic explorers . . . or so Zack imagined. Pogo led the way on foot, followed by Lucas pulling the sled, Natalia playing out the fiber-optic cable, and Zack driving
Buzz
at the rear. It was his job to keep Tea and Houston informed of their progress. The exchanges were curt and to the point. “Fifty meters from the cleft.” “Copy, fifty.”

“Notice anything about the surface?” Pogo said.

Immediately behind Pogo, Lucas tried to halt but fell on his face, a victim of a high center of gravity. The others helped him up; no damage, thank God. It was a real concern, since, from his perch on the front of rover
Buzz
, Zack could see that there was less snow beneath their boots and wheels.

More amazingly, there was also none of the expected gray, lunarlike soil. What they were walking on, what stretched before them to the cleft, was a flat, cracked, and weathered surface that reminded Zack of an ancient Roman roadway.

“Venture
and Houston,” he said, trying to hold his helmet cam steady. “Are you getting this?”

Houston only copied, but Tea said, “Jeez, all you need is a welcome mat.” When she added, “Be careful, baby,” he smiled like a teenager with his first crush; maybe she did still like him.

They pressed forward, the cleft now clearly visible as an opening. “Not only do we have some kind of pavement below us,” Pogo said, “there’s obvious machining on the opening.”

Zack could see it, too: scarring and scraping that looked too regular to have been made by hand tools. And there was something else—

“Anyone
feeling
any different?” he asked.

“You mean, other than extremely nervous?” Lucas said, violating every unwritten rule concerning astronaut demeanor.

“I’m getting better traction on my boots,” Natalia said. “And sled feels heavier!” Zack had noticed that under stress, Natalia’s otherwise-excellent English began to shed its articles.

That confirmed Zack’s perceptions. “The rover’s not sliding as much.”

“Could gravity be increasing?” Lucas asked.

“Could it be that we’re on firmer footing rather than sliding on ice?” Pogo snapped.

“Houston and
Venture
, we offer that as food for thought,” Zack said, short-circuiting a pointless debate. “We are inside the cleft now.”

They had all moved from sunlight to darkness. “Lights going on,” Zack said. Rover
Buzz
had been designed to operate in lunar night, so it had a set of honest-to-God headlights.

“We have portables,” Natalia said, bending to the sled. “Give us a moment.”

As she and Lucas went to work removing several lights and stands, Pogo returned to the rover. “What do you think?” he said. “Leave the rover here, or take it into the cave?”

“We need equipment, we might need shelter. As long as there’s room for it, I say drive on.”

Houston concurred. Then Pogo said, “I’m having comm problems. Going to Channel B.”

His voice sounded different in Zack’s earphones. “What do you think of the Coalition bringing portable lights, rappelling gear, and a sled?”

Zack had been wondering the same thing. “They had some idea they were going spelunking.”

“I wonder what else they know that we don’t?”

“Lucas says he’s nervous.”

“Let’s hope the lights are the only tool we actually need.”

After a pair of lights was set up, all four explorers took a meal and rest break. Elapsed EVA time was two hours, not in itself a problem. Typical station EVAs ran seven to eight hours. But here the astronauts were working in gravity, slight but nevertheless real. And not one of them had really rested for today’s expanded activities. Zack, in fact, had already spent an hour on the surface dealing with Yvonne’s injury.

And who knew when any of them would be able to stand down. At the moment, the into-Keanu EVA looked open-ended.

Realizing that dragging the sled across the “pavement” would be difficult, Zack offered to move the Coalition’s gear to the racks on rover
Buzz
. “Canny,” Pogo said. “We move more easily, and we get to see what else they’re carrying.”

If that was Pogo’s goal, he was disappointed. The Coalition gear consisted of half a dozen unmarked containers, although Natalia donned a set of microfocals that attached to her helmet. “For geological study,” she said, volunteering an explanation without being asked.

With the exit lights growing smaller behind them, now relying on
Buzz’
s headlamps, the explorers probed deeper into the cleft. Zack walked point, in Pogo’s phrase, while his fellow astronaut drove
Buzz
, and the Coalition partners flanked him.

“Comm is getting ratty,” Pogo said. This time he wasn’t kidding. The standard VHF signals wouldn’t travel far through Keanu’s rock, and even the Coalition’s cable was suffering dropouts. It was obvious from the spool that they were almost out of cable, too.

“How deep is this thing?” Zack asked.

Lucas aimed the radar gun. “Maybe a hundred meters to go.”

“Then what?” Pogo said, not bothering to hide his irritation.

“Ah, it’s very confusing.”

“How confusing can it be? It’s a hole or it’s a wall.”

Natalia came to Lucas’s rescue. “It looks like a junction. Branches.”

That possibility was as terrifying as it was exciting. “Houston,
Venture
, Zack. We might be coming to a fork in the road at the same time we go dark.”

This time both Houston and
Venture
had the same firm reaction. Weldon said, “You’re closing in on three hours elapsed EVA time. Hold at the junction.”

Bangalore and Taj were even more insistent with the Coalition pair.

There had been no further change in the environment, aside from a general sense that he was getting heavier. (How heavy, ultimately? If they reached the equivalent of Earth gravity, they would barely be able to move; the EVA suits weighed more than a human being. Rover
Buzz
wouldn’t move far, either. Its suspension had been engineered for lunar gravity.)

The same “paving stones” lined the floor of the cleft. The walls and ceiling had the same scraped look. How long ago had this been carved? Zack wondered. Ten thousand years ago? About the same time human beings were figuring out how to cultivate crops?

A hundred thousand? When humans were barely out of Africa?

A million? When there were no recognizable human beings on Earth?

Maybe ten million—maybe longer!

He could hear Lucas and Natalia patiently debating their situation with Taj in
Brahma
, and Nayar at Bangalore. “How can we stop here? What have we learned?” Lucas said. The young Brazilian clearly had not absorbed the astronaut rule book, either about admitting fear or having open debates with mission control.

But Zack was glad he was along. Every group needed someone who would say what the others secretly thought.

More troubling, it appeared that Natalia’s EVA suit was overheating, a common problem with the Russian-built unit. So far it was likely to be an inconvenience rather than a disaster for the EVA.

Zack motioned Pogo forward, almost beyond the range of
Buzz’
s lamps.

“Houston,
Venture
, Zack. How do I read?”

“I’ve got you,” Tea said. A few seconds later, there was a static burp, presumably Houston.

“Tea, what would you be doing if you were here?”

“Call me chicken. I might camp out in the rover.”

“I hear you, but I’m too wound up to get any real rest,” Zack said. “While our friends are catching up on news from home, I think we’re going to recon this junction.”

Pogo was so excited he trotted ahead of Zack. “Take it easy, cowboy.”

“Come on, Zack! I mean, look at the situation: Keanu slows down and goes into orbit. It’s got a big old entryway at the logical landing site. Doesn’t it all add up to them wanting us to say hello?”

Zack had known Pogo for almost a decade—knew him to be religious, a straight arrow . . . and also, in spite of his physical chops and manly skills, a bit of a geek. The Air Force jock had read far more sci-fi than Zack, who gave up quickly on movies and books when presented with space battles that looked like aerial engagements from World War II. “I’ll give you this,” he said, huffing and puffing. “It’s what we signed up to do.”