Heaven's Shadow (35 page)

“Where will you be?” Tea said.

“I’m going after Megan and Camilla.”

So there it was. Tea knew Zack well enough to know he was not likely to change his mind. “So you believe that’s really Megan.”

“I guess I do.”

Tea didn’t know whether to punch Zack or kiss him. She was impressed by the enduring nature of love—and just as pissed off at him as she could possibly be. “You won’t have any way to communicate, no weapons. Even if you . . . free her? Is that the plan? You could make it to the membrane and find us gone!”

She knew he was already thinking a step beyond her. “If what you’re saying is true, a few hours or days won’t make any difference.”

“You’ll be going in with no backup.”

“Backup hasn’t made any difference.”

She took him by the shoulders and spoke quietly but firmly. “Listen, Zachary. One of the reasons I fell in love with you was that, you know, forget Lucas here . . .
you
were the World’s Greatest Astronaut. If you took a risk, it was informed and reasonable. You knew where the line was, and you never crossed it.

“But this caper—this is nuts. If you don’t come with us, you’ll
die
.”

He put his hands on hers, squeezed them. His voice grew softer, almost dreamlike. “It may have looked calculating, but I’ve always followed my instincts. And all of them say to go after Megan. If she lives, I’ll live. And if she dies . . .”

“You’re chasing a fantasy!”

There . . . she had said it. She did not really believe the Revenant was the real Megan Stewart.

“Tea—”

“Zack! Do the math! Alien beings. Big smart spacecraft! The ability to replicate living things. Add them up and what do you fucking know? You’ve got a familiar face to talk to!

“That’s what these Revenants are, guys. Sorry, Lucas. I mean, if I went to Brazil, I’d learn Portuguese. I’d wear something that looked Brazilian. I’d try to connect . . . Revenants are just their way of doing it.”

For a moment, Zack looked cowed. It was the first time Tea had ever seen him in that posture. “She knows things she shouldn’t know.”

“She isn’t Megan,” she said, firmly, feeling that she was this close to hauling him back from the edge. “But I’m me and you know that. I love you. Come with me . . . come where you
belong
. . . .”

“Right now I belong here.”

Tea Nowinski had a sentimental side. It had hurt her in many relationships and was probably going to do the same now. But not yet.

“This time you’re wrong, Zack. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You stay here or go gallivanting after . . . what looks like Megan, you will never see Earth again.
You’ll never see your daughter again.
Have you thought about that?”

“That’s actually all I’m thinking about.”

“Okay, then, what do I tell her? ‘Sorry, kid, your father chose not to come back to you because he had to chase—’”

“Stop it.” He was cold now, another Zack state she knew. There would be no explanations now, only orders. “You need to get going. All of you.”

Well, hell. If Tea looked at it realistically, she and Lucas and Natalia—and Zack and Megan and the others—were already doomed.

In that case, why not spend your final hours doing what you wanted?

“Okay, Zack, do your thing. I hope it works.” She gave him what she knew would be the last kiss they shared. “At least you should take Taj’s magic radio.”

There’s a freaky—hell, terrifying—rumor on the Net that the flash on
Keanu was caused by a NUKE. Did the U.S. launch something? Has
some kind of space war started? Has someone gone INSANE?

POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM

The U.S. has nothing nuclear that could hit Keanu, so relax. And what would be the point, anyway?

POSTER BELLANCA FAN, MOMENTS LATER

“Take all your knowledge about mission operations and set it aside,” Harley Drake told Shane Weldon and Josh Kennedy, as Sasha Blaine and Wade Williams looked on. “And I’ll have a vodka tonic.”

He addressed his second order to a bored-looking young woman wearing an apron and holding an order pad. Above the bar behind her, a muted television was interviewing a Buddhist monk about “alien reincarnation.” “Everyone else?”

Harley had finally escaped from the three rooms where he had been forced to spend his last three days. Home Team, Vault, mission control—none of these venues suited this presentation.

He had gone off campus, to the New Outpost, a bar across NASA Parkway from the Johnson Space Center. The original Outpost, a shack in the middle of a parking lot that had more craters than a similar plot of land on the Moon, had been a fixture in the community for decades but had been torn down.

Now there was this slick new hangout, with autographed astronaut photos on the walls, glassed-in memorabilia.

As far as Harley knew, no astronaut ever went into the place. Which was why he’d suggested it this day. There was little chance he would see anyone he worked with.

By now JSC was crawling with reporters—and dozens of staffers whose curiosity and self-importance had overwhelmed their adherence to the privacy code. If a security guard or assistant cook spotted Weldon, Drake, Bynum, and the others huddled in conference, word was going to be on the Web within seconds.

“Besides,” Weldon had said, “I need to get outside that gate.”

So here they were, Harley setting the tone with his order of an alcoholic drink at lunch, and that was stretching the lunch hour to late morning. Very 1960s, Apollo-era. Weldon unbent enough to order a beer, and so did Sasha Blaine. (Harley was liking this girl more with each new revelation.) Williams, with his years on the wagon, stuck to club soda, and Kennedy ignored the offer.

“So,” Harley said, once the waitress had returned to the bar, “are we clear on the proposal?”

Kennedy actually sneered. “You mean, crash-land
Destiny
on the surface of Keanu?”

“It’s not really a crash landing,” Williams said, his voice at least twice as loud as necessary—or prudent. Harley’s expression warned the elderly writer, and he continued more quietly. “That’s why Harley said to forget what you know about ops—the closing velocities will be so low that you could think of this as a rendezvous between
Destiny
—”

“—and a spacecraft a million times larger and more massive,” Shane Weldon said, sipping from his beer. He turned to Blaine. “Of course, that’s just a wild-ass guess. You’ll run the figures.”

Blaine had her Slate with her. “I’m sure they’re good enough for this discussion, but I’ll run them, just in case.”

“Can we get serious here?” Kennedy was no longer hiding his impatience. He had already glanced at his watch.

“You got somewhere else to be, Josh?” Harley said. “Is there a kids’ soccer game on the schedule?” He had judged Kennedy to be one of those precise, ascetic youngish men who worked hard and played, whenever possible, without alcohol, late hours, and unsavory companions. They had been the dominant personality type in mission ops for a generation. It was probably inherent in the job; you couldn’t be a boozer or a womanizer and still possess the appropriate seriousness to manage a flight into space.

Or so the mythology had it. Harley agreed that guys who followed rules made better flight directors—as long as that job was defined as . . . following the flight rules.

But in a situation like this, where the rule book was having its pages bent, if not entirely ripped out, NASA needed a riverboat gambler. A buccaneer. A Shane Weldon.

Not an earnest young father. “Since when is my personal life any of your business?”

“It’s not,” Harley said, “unless it keeps you from doing your job.”

Kennedy was bright enough to take the temperature of the room, and right now it was cool toward him. “Sorry. Let’s work this through.”

Harley said, “The idea is to command
Destiny
to make a burn, to descend in the flattest trajectory possible . . .”

“And just skid across the surface?” Kennedy’s voice was now neutral, but it was clear he was still horrified.

“It’s largely snow,” Weldon said. Kennedy shot him a look that said:
Traitor
. “The impact velocity could be as low as three meters a second.”

“Or . . .” Harley said, not wishing to attempt conversions or even division with a vodka tonic aboard.

“Sixty to eighty kilometers an hour,” Blaine said, blushing. Was it doing the math so quickly under pressure? Or the beer? Or something else?

The figure sounded good to Harley until Kennedy said, “That speed would still beat the hell out of my Hyundai.”

Williams was spoiling for a fight. “Your Hyundai wasn’t designed to be blasted into space, then survive thousand-degree heat on a lunar return.”

“Don’t we both know that those are different kinds of durability? The vibration damping and thermal protection aren’t the same as impact resistance, right? I mean, the tiles on the space shuttle could withstand temps of three thousand degrees, but if you dropped a penny on them they would split in two.”

Weldon said, “Josh, no one is suggesting that we might not lose an antenna—”

Kennedy had placed his palms on the small table. He would not look directly at anyone. “It’s the solar panels I’d be worried about, though, okay, you ought to be able to operate for a few days with only one. But consider trying to maneuver to the right attitude, make burns, and reenter without data from Houston.”

“This is where mission ops will shine,” Harley said. “You guys will have the departure burns and times precalculated and preloaded to
Destiny
’s onboard computers before we make the landing.”

Kennedy was nodding, though not so much in acceptance as impatience. “Yeah, yeah, got that. So we pancake down on the surface and manage not to rip a hole in the side of the vehicle, or scrape off both panels and every antenna.” Now he looked up. “You’ve got four, five people in suits. How the hell do they get on board?”

Harley hadn’t given this problem much thought. Because it was not designed for EVA operations,
Destiny
did not possess an airlock the way the
Venture
lander did. Which meant it didn’t have easy-open hatches. There was access through the nose—where the Low-Impact Docking System allowed
Destiny
to dock with
Venture
. And there was the side hatch, which was how the crew of four entered the vehicle on the pad and departed from it after landing.

The capsule could be depressurized in an emergency. Its electronics were hardened against exposure to vacuum. But which hatch to open, and how—those procedures weren’t in the front part of the training manual, and the surviving
Destiny
astronauts would be exhausted and totally dependent on guidance from the ground.

“That is what you guys need to work on,” Harley said, feeling the warmth of the vodka through his entire body. “Which way in is better, through the LIDS or through the side access?”

Kennedy had his own Slate out now and was tapping notes to himself and his team. Nothing made an engineer happier than a tricky engineering problem.

“There are other challenges, too,” Weldon said, for Kennedy’s benefit, and to keep Harley and his team on track. “We might have five or six people rather than four; how do we protect them against g-forces on reentry? Water and oxygen and food shouldn’t be immediate problems, but I’m just guessing on the oxygen front.

“There’s the whole business of sample returns, assuming they’re still carrying anything, and how to secure those when we pluck them out of the ocean.”

“And how easy is it going to be to get five exhausted astronauts out of
Destiny
when it’s bobbing in the Pacific?” Harley disliked many things about the
Destiny
design, had fought wars against all of them a decade past. But his greatest hatred was for the water landing, a relic of the Apollo days.
Destiny
could have been designed to thump down safely on a military range like Edwards, but weight considerations and trade-offs had killed that idea. Now the capsule splashed down off the coast of California, near the Channel Islands, where it would be picked up by a NASA-chartered freighter.

“If I may,” Williams said, knowing well that no one would say no, “I just want to say that this kind of rapid response makes me proud and thrilled. It’s like watching the rescue of
Apollo 13
. It’s NASA at its best.” He tipped his club soda to Weldon and Kennedy. “Cheers.”

Harley said, “Before we pin on the Congressional Space Medal, what are the next steps?”

“We have to be ready with the landing plan as soon as possible,” Kennedy said. “The moment we hear from the crew, we should start counting down to a burn at first opportunity.”

“And a data upload based on that,” Weldon said. He and Kennedy fired times, phrases, and names back and forth for several minutes, then both stood.

Harley tried to help with the sales pitch. “This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Ten years ago, when we were looking at NEO missions, we were planning to simply fly a
Destiny
right down to a surface.”

“Down to the surface of a NEO the size of a football stadium,” Kennedy said. “Or maybe a kilometer across. Keanu is a hundred times larger, with real gravity of its own. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I am saying it ain’t the same deal.”

“Whatever, we’ll be ready in two hours,” Weldon announced. And he tossed down the last of his beer.

Emerging into the Texas afternoon was like entering a broiler. The clouds, threatening rain, managed to dull the glare, but they added to the oppressive thickness of the air. Even with Sasha Blaine pushing his wheels, Harley could feel his energy being drained. “It’s amazing,” Blaine said.

“The discomfort?”

“No!” she said. “It just all looks so normal! Insane things are happening half a million kilometers away, and all these people are just living their lives!”

It was true. There was a McDonald’s a hundred meters down the road, cars still lined up for lunchtime drive-through. Other vehicles, each one sealed and air-conditioned against the tropical Houston summer heat, glided past on NASA One. Harley knew that there were dozens of protesters at JSC’s back gate, but not out here.