Heaven's Shadow

by David S. Goyer

  “Those guys are good,” Zack said.

  “We’re all good, baby. And you’ll be better if you get some rest.” Tea knew he was operating without sleep.

  “So now you’re my nurse?”

  “Just noticing that you’re getting a little scope-locked.” This was a term from Houston mission control, when some engineer would work a problem to death, ignoring food, sleep, and common sense.

  But Tea knew better than to prolong the argument. She also had to concentrate on the tricky business of helping Zack into his EVA suit, a process that required gymnastic flexibility and brute strength and could rarely be accomplished in less than ten minutes. “And you’re all buttoned up.”

  “T minus fifteen,” Pogo called from the other side of the tunnel. “Are we gonna do this gauge thing or what?”

  It was only when strapped to his couch in the second row next to Yvonne, behind the two occupied by Pogo, the actual pilot, and Tea, the flight engineer, that Zack allowed himself to relax.

  Tea reached a hand back and took his, squeezing it. A simple gesture that triggered tears . . . partly from fatigue, partly from tension, but mostly from the memory of the strange events that had put him in this place, at this time. The events of two years past—

  Where was Rachel now? Was his daughter watching Destiny’s flight from mission control? What was she thinking about her father? Zack could picture the look on her face, the unique mixture of love and exasperation. More of the latter than the former. He could almost hear her the way she would stretch the word Daddy across three syllables.

  “Five minutes,” Pogo said.

  “How close are we?” Tea said. “I’m the navigator and I have a right to know.”

  “Fourteen hundred clicks from Keanu, give or take a few.”

  The four screens that dominated the Destiny cockpit were alive with spacecraft systems data, range and rate, timelines, numbers, images.

  They would do this burn in the dark, without talking to Houston through either the open network or the encrypted one. Mission control wasn’t worried about being overheard . . . but the Coalition had systems capable of detecting raw communications traffic, and even if the other side couldn’t decrypt a message, just the heavy traffic load might give the game away.

  “One minute,” Pogo said.

  The cockpit was now completely silent except for the hiss and thump of oxygen pumps.

  The figures on the panel ran to zero.

  Zack and the others heard a thump and felt themselves pressed forward into their straps, their only experience of gravity since launching from low Earth orbit.

  “Thirty seconds,” Pogo said. “Looking good.”

  Only now did Zack allow himself the luxury of looking ahead. Humans had been to the Moon eight times now, half a dozen during Apollo, two more since.

  He and his crew would be the first to land on another body entirely . . . one that hadn’t even been discovered until three years ago. It would have lower gravity, but water in the form of ancient snow and ice—

  “Ninety seconds. Still good.”

  And what else? From years of studying Keanu, he knew that it was pockmarked with deep craters and vents that occasionally spurted geysers of steam. Their landing target would be next to one such feature known as Vesuvius Vent.

  It would be the adventure of a lifetime, of several lifetimes . . . if the equipment worked.

  And if politics didn’t interfere.

  “Shutdown!” Pogo called. “Right on time, three minutes, sixteen seconds!”

  It was Zack’s job to make the call. “Houston, commander through Channel B,” Zack said. “Burn complete, on time.”

  It took five seconds to hear, “We copy that, Destiny,” from Weldon in mission control. “You are good to go. We’ll be sending you updated figures ASAP.”

  Laughing nervously, the crew began to unstrap.

  Then Tea said, “Oh my gosh, look at that.”

  Even hardened Pogo Downey gasped. Outside Destiny’s three forward windows, Keanu’s daylight side rose, its snowy, rocky surface flowing past below them. Zack thought, It’s like hang gliding over Iceland—

  “Zack,” Pogo said, refocused on the controls. “Houston’s giving us an update on Brahma.”

  Zack felt a surge of alarm. “Did they make a burn, too?”

  “No. Pretty pictures.”

  Zack looked at the image on the control panel.

  It showed the cylindrical Brahma—the height of a six-story building—half in shadow.

  And sporting what looked like a missile attached to one side. “What the fuck is that?” Yvonne said.

  “More to the point,” Tea said, “how come we didn’t see it before now?”

  “They might not have deployed it before leaving Earth orbit,” Zack said.

  “And God forbid we should actually be looking at them when they were close,” Pogo snapped. He was convinced that America routinely underestimated its rivals.

  As Zack tried to comprehend the startling but real possibility that he could be in a space war, he heard Weldon’s voice in his earphones. “Shane for Zack, Channel B. Did you notice anything funny about your burn?”

  The phrasing was highly unusual, especially for Weldon, who was the most precise communicator in space history. Funny was not a word he would normally use. Tea and Patrick exchanged worried glances.

  “What you do mean by funny, Houston?” Zack said, looking at Yvonne for support.

  She gestured to the displays, nodding vigorously. “It was on time, proper orientation. If we had champagne, we’d pop the cork.”

  There was a moment of relative silence . . . the carrier wave hissing. Finally, Weldon said, “DSN noted an anomaly.”

  Anomaly? What the hell would the big dishes in Goldstone or Australia see that Destiny herself wouldn’t see?

  “Don’t keep us guessing, Houston.”

  “There was a major eruption on Keanu.”

  Hearing this, knowing his crew was listening, too, Zack said, “Keanu’s been venting periodically since we started watching.” He was proud of himself for not adding, That’s why we wanted to land here, assholes.

  “This was substantially larger. Note the time hack.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about, the time hack?” Pogo snapped, clearly rattled. Not that it took much to set him off.

  Zack looked at the figure uploaded from Houston. “Keanu started venting at 74:15.28 MET.” Feeling a bit like a doctor delivering bad news to a patient’s loved ones, he waited for the reaction.

  “That was our burn time,” Tea said, her eyes as wide as a six-year-old’s.

  “So some volcano on Keanu farted at the same moment, so what?” Pogo said. “The universe is full of coincidences.”

  “The same second?” Yvonne said.

  The burly Air Force pilot loomed over her. “What are you saying?”

  “Something on Keanu reacted to our burn.”

  Pogo’s face went red. “Like what? Some alien anti-aircraft system? What are you going to hit with steam?” He pushed himself as far away from Yvonne as he could get without actually leaving Destiny.

  Yvonne turned to Zack and Tea. “This is significant, isn’t it? I’m not crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Zack said. If she was, then he was, too. He was resisting a connection between their burn and the venting on Keanu, but only in the sense that a cancer patient is reluctant to accept a fatal diagnosis: He had experienced a sickening chill the moment he heard the time of the event, as if his body and his unconscious mind were simply better informed than his intellect.

  Now his cool, rational, scientific, astronomically astute intellect had had time to do the math:

  Destiny was hours away from beating Brahma to the first landing on a Near-Earth Object.

  And they had no idea what they were going to find there.

  The prospect was as terrifying as it was exciting.

  Far below the solar plane, at a distance of 1.4 million
kilometers—closer than the orbit of the planet Saturn—Keanu now becomes visible to even the most low-powered Earth-based telescopes, first as a point of light, then, at higher power, as a resolvable disk. Which is to say, a definable body.

  One year after its discovery, Keanu’s nature is still the subject of a violent debate in the astronomical community . . . Is it a comet? A planetesimal? A visitor from the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt? Most astronomers agree that Keanu originated far beyond our solar system....

  NEOMISSION.COM, JUNE 20, 2017

  TWO YEARS AGO

  God, it’s hot.

  It wasn’t even ten A.M. on this June morning, and already the temperature on the Space Coast was ninety and climbing. Megan Stewart’s hair—normally straight—was frizzed into a Bride of Frankenstein do. Under her arms, behind her knees, everywhere she could be damp, she was. Even the backs of her bare thighs had somehow stuck to the fabric of the car seat.

  It’s like being in a broiler. The metaphor was tired—she needed something punchier if she was going to use it for her documentary.

  She adjusted her Sennheiser webset. Five years old, the digital camera and mikes were already obsolete yet retained ease of use while still producing webcast-quality images. She looked directly at her twelve-year-old daughter in the backseat. “Rachel, how would you describe the weather here today?”

  The girl blinked her brown eyes, making the now-familiar adjustment back to real time from her own Slate-based reverie. “Better than Houston.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Florida’s just as hot as Texas, but it doesn’t smell as bad.” Rachel’s whole lifetime had been blogged by Megan for one site or another, from New Baby to Terrible2s to TweenLife and now for Megan’s half-hour documentary for GoogleSpace. She had grown skilled at uttering answers that were just good enough.

  Behind the wheel, Harley Drake laughed. “Why don’t you just call it ‘The Sixth Circle of Hell’?”

  “I presume that’s the one with fire.”

  “Yes, as opposed to blood or mud or being pummeled with heavy objects.” He smiled. “It’s for heretics.”

  “For a guy who calls himself a space cowboy, that’s a lot of literary reference.” Megan made sure to apply an exaggerated version of the Houston accent she had been absorbing over the past nine years. It was also a joke: Drake was an astronaut, but he had a master’s in literature to go with four engineering and science degrees. Unlike Megan, he had likely read Dante’s Inferno. Probably in the original Latin.

  “‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’”

  “Which is a quote from Whitman. Thank you, astronaut Drake. God, this is uncomfortable.” Megan killed the feed and removed the webset so she could swipe a tissue across her face.

  Rachel said, “Why are all these people here so early? The launch isn’t until next week.”

  Megan looked out the passenger side window of the Tesla. The southbound traffic on Highway 95 from the house in Nova Villas through the grimmer stretches of Titusville toward the 407 interchange—never easy—was truly terrible today, thanks to the addition of several thousand cars, pickups, and RVs heading the same direction, or parked on the shoulders.

  “They want a good view,” Harley said. “And a launch is an excuse for a party. It beats tailgating at a football game.”

  “Well, the view from here isn’t actually very good, is it?” Rachel said. She disliked Harley so thoroughly she took every opportunity to contradict him.

  It was certainly true that on this June morning, the view toward the twin gantries that hid the giant, three-barreled Saturn VII rockets was hazy and indistinct. Still, it made a serviceable backdrop for Megan’s doc—which still lacked a title. My Husband’s Going to the Moon sounded dated, like a filmstrip from the Apollo days. Another challenge.

  Megan glanced back at Rachel. She was a small girl, favoring her father, bright, a bit too verbal at times, usually friendly and easy to get along with, though not this trip. Megan was relieved to see that she had momentarily transported herself back to her communal e-space with her Slate. “Ah, the teenage years . . .” she murmured, just loud enough for Harley’s ears.

  Or so she thought. Rachel’s eyes opened and she uttered, “Oooo, the teenage years,” in a perfect, contemptuous imitation of Megan.

  Ordinarily that sort of challenge would have triggered a corrective response from Megan, but today she let it pass. Rachel’s snippiness and her dislike of Harley was caused by fear that her father, Megan’s husband, Zachary Stewart, would be killed on Destiny-5, the first crewed flight to the Moon of the twenty-first century.

  Five years ago, when Zack first rode a Russian Soyuz into earth orbit, Rachel had been too young to truly appreciate the dangers. But no longer. Even if being a teenager in the close-knit astronaut community in Houston didn’t provide reminders—such as the grown-up neighbor whose father had been killed in the Challenger accident—this trip surely had. They were presently driving on a stretch of State Road 405 known as Columbia Boulevard, named for another fatal NASA tragedy. And had Rachel noticed the turnoff to Roger Chaffee Street? He had been one of the Apollo astronauts who died in a fire in 1967—

  Just to their right, as they crawled past the airport and slowly approached the causeway across the Banana River, sat the Astronaut Hall of Fame and its space mirror monument—a thin black slab with names of all the astronauts who had died on missions or in training. At last count there were thirty.

  Megan had briefly considered a stand-up in front of the mirror, with the twin launchpads in the distance, but not this trip. Not with a terrified Rachel.

  Besides, she had her own night sweats and tremors to deal with. She would dream that Zack was falling ten miles to smash on the smooth face of the Atlantic. Or stumbling on some rocky outcrop at Shackleton Crater, his oxygen and life seeping through a tear in his suit. Or incinerating on reentry (the interior of the Destiny suddenly going yellow, then red, then disintegrating in agony). Or any of the seemingly endless ways you could be killed in spaceflight.

  The true horror would be confronting those last moments and wondering, Is that it? Is that my life? It went so fast! What did I do?

  “You’re getting that look again,” Harley said.

  “What look is that?”

  “You suddenly go silent. Your eyes go wide.” He nodded toward her hands. “And you start digging your nails into your palms.”

  “I’m allowed to show a little stress.”

  “Agreed. My job is to distract you when you do.”

  “Even though it doesn’t change the situation.”

  “It only makes it less terrifying. And keeps you from giving your competitors some YouTube moments.”

  Megan’s mouth formed the words Screw you. She liked Harley better than most of Zack’s often insufferable, smug astronaut colleagues. But not today, not this week. Harley was serving as the Crew Assist and Casualty Officer—the astronaut designated by Zack and Megan to help with mundane matters like travel and housing during the week leading to the Destiny launch. It was a rule in NASA: Every crew member selected a CACO.

  And so far, Harley had been a great travel agent, finding Megan and Rachel a family friend’s condo in Titusville.

  But should something go terribly wrong, Harley would also handle the funeral arrangements and insurance questions. He would be the one holding Megan’s hand at . . . well, it wouldn’t be Arlington. Zack was a civilian.

  It would be at a graveside in northern Michigan, in Zack’s hometown of Marquette. Megan had managed to wrench that much if-things-go-wrong information from Zack in the past week.

  So, now, every time she looked at Harley, she saw herself in black, with smudged face, weak knees. Too bad she wasn’t profiling Harley, because she had a title for him: He was her Escort to Widowhood.

  “Do you believe in God, Harley?”

  “Is that a comment on my driving?”

  They had crossed the Indian River Lagoon and reached the Orsino gate to KSC
proper, where the traffic had eased a bit. Of course, getting through the main gate didn’t mean the trip was over; the Kennedy Space Center spread over hundreds of square miles of coastal Florida swamp, with the Indian River to the west and the Atlantic to its east. Harley Drake clearly wanted to cover the route in ten minutes.

  “Well, you could slow down a bit,” she said. “But the question remains.” Megan was used to asking pushy questions. She was spending time with Harley; might as well get to know more about him. He was younger than Zack, though he’d been an astronaut longer and came from a military background. He’d been an Air Force test pilot, so presumably he was conservative, possibly Evangelical, though Megan had never seen evidence of it.

  “Meg, I most certainly do not believe there is a white-bearded guy who tells angels what to do, but I’m a superstitious flyboy, and I can tell you from way back in my flight school days—there are guys who just bear the, what the heck is it? The mark of Cain? A black cloud over them. You just know that somewhere, somehow, the universe is going to get them. It won’t be their fault, it’s just . . . well, God’s will. Whoever God is.

  “Zack, by the way, is not that guy. The way good old Harley Drake reads the universe, your husband is destined to walk on another planet, then come home to give you a big wet kiss. How about that?”

  He had such a goofy smile on his face beneath aviator sunglasses that Megan couldn’t help laughing. “Consider me reassured.”

  But still she wondered. Based on what she’d learned from other astronaut spouses—female and male—Zack was high on the scale of personal openness. Not that the astronaut scale permitted him to be what a normal human would consider emotionally open.

  She remembered how painful it had been to get basic burial information out of him—forget theological revelations! Questions about God and an afterlife had never been part of their marriage to begin with . . . pro forma attendance at a church, fine, both agreed on that. Both had been lapsed Catholics, so returning to Mass was easy—and good for Rachel. “At least she’ll know what she’s rejecting,” Zack liked to say.