Heaven's Shadow (15 page)

“It won’t take long, and yes.” As Harley wheeled up to a polished conference table, Bynum opened a safe—aside from table and chairs and a blank HD television screen, the only furnishing in the room. He took out a blank sheet of letter paper and slid it to Harley, with a pen. “Please sign this.” They were the first words the White House man had uttered.

“Nice to meet you, too.” Harley scribbled his name without hesitation.

Bynum continued: “Now, print these words above: ‘I understand the penalties associated with unauthorized disclosure of this information.’”

Harley carefully printed the sentence, but now he smirked. “How long do you think this information is going to remain secret?”

Bynum merely blinked as he collected the paper. “I’m sure some of it is on the Web even as we speak.” Then he stepped back and, as far as Harley was concerned, faded into the wallpaper.

Weldon pulled an aged manila folder from the safe. Harley couldn’t wait to flip it open—how often does anyone see any document that is so ridiculously secret? The folder was smudged, ancient—it even smelled of mildew—and contained a solid two inches of documents, many of them tabbed.

The cover page was priceless—an original typed sheet from someone called “Lt. A. G. Cumming” working for something called “Project Grudge,” part of the Technical Intelligence Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Dated January 4, 1948—six months after the first widespread flying saucer reports, from what Harley recalled—and originally classed as “Secret,” it bore half a dozen strikeouts and upgrade marks.

It was also labeled
Copy 1 of 5 copies
. Who got the other four? he wondered.

Beneath the cover was a two-page memo summarizing what was known about flying saucers and suggesting that a “protocol” be developed in case some sort of extraterrestrial beings—here called “Foreign/ Non-Human Entities”—happened to show up, alive.

On the sound assumption that whatever this Lieutenant Cummings had proposed in 1948 was likely to be revised, expanded, and eventually contradicted by the newest documents in the file, Harley flipped ahead several pages. “I was hoping for the secrets to the Roswell crash. Until today I was skeptical about the idea that we had alien bodies at Hangar 18. . . .”

“The whole Roswell–alien body thing was made up in the 1970s.”

“So you’ve read this.”

“No,” Weldon said. “I’m not cleared for it.” Which surprised Harley. “But I was interested in UFOs as a kid.”

Harley quickly worked through the pages, seeing little more than a series of cover pages recounting each new name of the organization that succeeded the Technical Intelligence Division, ultimately becoming the Air Intelligence Center—at which point the “protocol” was transferred to “joint control” between the Air Staff, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the State Department. (At one point in the early 1980s, some low-level Air Staff officer—clearly not worried about potential damage to his career—had dubbed the protocol “Have Atom”.)

“Don’t fucking
read
it, Harley. Skim. The world is waiting for me.”

“I’ll try not to move my lips.”

The content kept expanding, but the principles did not: Non-Human Entities should be treated as potentially hostile, like the crew of a captured Soviet or Red Chinese aircraft or vessel in the absence of a formal declaration of war.

Any landing or crash site should be sealed off and treated as a radiation leak. A team of pre-identified experts—Harley was amused to note that linguists were high on the list—would be activated and brought to Wright-Patterson and designated “The 48 Committee.” Decisions should be made at the presidential level, with input from his national security adviser and the secretary of state. Financial support would come from the intelligence community black budget; support personnel would be Air Force. All information would be treated as highly secret.

But there was nothing mysterious about the document, nothing worth classifying . . . except for the fact that it proved that the U.S. government had taken the possibility of extraterrestrial life seriously as early as 1948.

Harley Drake had grown up with the idea, of course. Every other cartoon he had watched as a kid, most comic books, a good number of books and movies . . . all assumed that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, often hostile life.

Even at ten he had not expected to find a giant alien spaceship parked over Washington, D.C., but he had been waiting for the day some backyard astronomer would announce that he’d picked up an extraterrestrial radio signal.

The closest he’d come was the day he first heard about Keanu. So the events of the past few hours didn’t require a major paradigm shift; it was like hearing the results of a blood test. “Okay, I’ve got the idea, Shane. Mr. Bynum. There’s a whole set of plans for dealing with E.T., assuming we run into one on Keanu.”

“You didn’t read the last page very closely, which was the one thing I was cleared for: It says that the 48 Committee will designate a point of contact and team leader, reporting directly to them.

“That team leader is
you
, Harley. You are now planet Earth’s general in charge of First Contact, and that’s how you’re going to be introduced if I ever have to talk about this in public.”

His first impulse was to tell Weldon to piss off . . . and to take Bynum with him. He wasn’t that happy trying to wrangle the great minds of the Home Team; he surely didn’t need to face reporters or deal with the White House.

But the second impulse was to remember the aviator’s creed: Never turn down a combat assignment.

“Okay,” he said.

“This changes very little, of course. Your primary job is making your experts available to mission control. . . .”

But Harley had ceased to pay attention to Weldon or Bynum or the political challenges of the Alien Protocol. He had just realized what was disturbing about Keanu’s newly increased rotation.

“Shane, we’re going to lose contact with
Venture
.”

Weldon was an agile thinker, but fatigue, pressure, and setting combined to make him blink and say, “What?”

Harley quickly recapped the information from the Home Team, noting that
Venture
and
Brahma
had landed close to the western limb of Keanu, as observed from Houston. “Keanu is rotating, and sometime in the next hour, two at most, Vesuvius Vent and those two spacecraft are going to be out of direct line of communication.”

“And this might last ten hours?” That was an eternity in mission operations.

“Yeah, best guess—” Weldon was already on his feet and heading for the door, leaving Harley alone in the Vault with the White House security man.

“I think that means we’re done,” Harley said, wheeling himself out.

The President of the Russian Federal Space Agency sends his congratulations
to cosmonauts Chertok and Yorkina for their heroism in
rescuing American astronaut Hall, and for their continuing participation
in mission
Brahma
under command of
ISRO’s
T. Radhakrishnan. The
President notes that today’s use of Russian equipment to correct deficiencies
in a critical American operation is the sixth such event since
1975, including the recent evacuation of a sick astronaut from the International
Space Station in September 2017.

FEDERAL SPACE AGENCY (ROSCOSMOS) PRESS RELEASE, 23 AUGUST 2019

“Zack, check this out.”

The beam from Pogo’s torch wiggled as it described a circle farther down the branching passage.

A passage that ended in shimmering brightness. Zack had to blink several times, clearing the sweat from his eyes, to be sure what he was seeing. It looked like a wall of ice, something found in an Antarctic cave . . . but it also reminded him of the northern lights . . . It was gauzy, somehow insubstantial.

“Stop right there,” Zack said.

“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Lucas? Natalia?” Zack knew they had to be behind the American pair. He just wanted to hear their voices.

“I see it,” Lucas said.

“We all see it,” Natalia said, sounding snappish. Her suit was probably still overheating, making her hot and causing her faceplate to fog. “What is it?”

“Bubbles.” “I see texture.” “It looks like a curtain.” All three of them had instant theories.

“I just hope it isn’t one of
them
,” Pogo said. Of course, why couldn’t the inhabitants of Keanu be shimmering energy beings? The Air Force astronaut continued to surprise Zack with his imagination.

“Let’s get some snaps for the folks back home,” Zack said, really missing real-time communication with Houston or
Venture
. “Lucas, what does the radar say?”

“Scattered return,” the Coalition astronaut said. “It’s not a solid surface.”

“Is it moving or held in place?” That was Natalia.

“Seems to be attached around the edges.”

Lucas’s information confirmed Zack’s own perceptions. They were looking at some kind of curtain blocking the end of the passage. “I hate to say it, but there’s really only one way to find out what this is.”

Zack patted the equipment belted to his suit. He had a small geological hammer. Unhooking it, he waved it in front of the curtain. Got no response.

So he chucked it at the shimmering surface, which swallowed it instantly.

“What do you suppose that means?” Pogo said.

“It means a hunk of metal could pass through. Which means—”

“Copy that, Commander.” Pogo skipped forward, but Zack followed and caught him.

“Commander’s prerogative. If I don’t come back, you’re in charge.”

Without further discussion, or hesitation, Zack headed right toward the curtain, which shimmered and glittered, but did not move.

He stopped a meter away. For an instant he thought the curtain might be nothing more than an image, some kind of 3-D projection. Slowly, he reached out until his gloved fingertips disappeared into it. The gloves prevented him from feeling texture or temperature . . . but there was a kind of resistance, like pressing against a pillow, or, more likely, an energy field.

“Zack, let us put a line on you.” Pogo was right behind him.

“You don’t have a line. Come on,” he said, feeling impatient, “where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Patrick is right,” Natalia said. “You can’t be reckless!”

“I’m simply going to see if this is permeable. I’ll keep talking. If I lose comm, give me one minute, then come and get me.”

He stepped forward, right into the curtain . . . and was immediately bathed in light and drowned in bubbles that literally flowed across the surface of his suit and helmet. “It’s as if I’m taking a bubble bath, but they have substance. They’re more like transparent ball bearings, maybe.”

No answer. He counted. “Step three, step four.” The bubbly bearings did not resist him. He was able to step just as freely as he had in the outer passage.

“Six, seven . . .” On the eighth step he was through the bubble curtain—

—Into another passage much like the one he had just left, just as broad, high, and dark!

The beam from Zack’s helmet light simply vanished, as if dying in a vast open space. He turned right and left. Another marker sat on the wall to his right. Unlike the one outside the curtain, this marker looked untouched.

Maybe it was new.

He took one more step and felt himself slip. He did not fall, but what he saw then almost staggered him.

He was standing in a pool of water. The snow that had accumulated on his boots and legs from the excursion across the surface of Keanu was
melting
.

There was air pressure on this side of the curtain. The temperature was above the melting point of water.

Which meant that the bubble-beaded curtain was actually some kind of airlock.

Going to a rocket launch killed my mother. Now
NASA
is trying to kill my father. Fuckmylife some more,
NASA.

RACHEL STEWART, ON HER SLATE, FREQUENTLY

“Can we go in?”

Looking up from her phone, Amy Meyer peered past Rachel into the auditorium, where several dozen reporters with computers and camera operators were bombarding Gabriel Jones, Shane Weldon, and Harley Drake with shouts. It didn’t appear to be going well.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Never mind,” Amy said, possibly remembering that Rachel’s mother had died on the way to a press conference. “Hey,” she said, “just in case.” She pulled something from her shorts pocket . . . opening her hand, she revealed a brownish cigarette.

“I can’t believe you brought a joint here!”

“Fine, I’ll go flush it—”

“No!” Rachel said, wrapping her hand around Amy’s. “We just might need it.”

Rachel had her back to the door, which kept opening and closing every few seconds. She and Amy had escaped from the family holding cell to go in search of food and had been swept here by the crowd.

But they didn’t have to stay, and they wouldn’t. Rachel had a headache; she felt sick to her stomach.

Nevertheless, getting this far had been useful. From what she’d heard through the open door and being talked about in the hallway, Rachel knew that her father was alive, but now completely out of touch inside the NEO. And that he and Patrick Downey had been in their suits for something like five hours, with no end in sight, and that the doctors didn’t see any problem with that, even though Rachel remembered her father coming home from five hours of spacewalk training in the big pool with his hands so bruised the fingernails were black, and with giant welts on his neck.

She didn’t expect to be able to talk to him, not during the EVA . . . but what she really hated was not being able to
hear
him. She thought of her Slate and how really useless it was sometimes.