“Venture, we show one minute to PDI,” Weldon said from Houston. “Everything’s looking good from here.”
“Is it okay if I say that I can’t fucking believe we’re still going to land?” Tea said.
In spite of the apparent anger, the whole exchange was pro forma, its very familiarity allowing the crew to feel as though they were back in their Houston simulator and not attempting the first piloted landing on a Near-Earth Object.
It was ten times the challenge faced by Armstrong and Aldrin on the first lunar landing—yes, Venture had far better guidance systems, but the Apollo crew had been aiming for a world that had always been in the human mind . . . had been studied for centuries, and in the years prior to their launch, been probed a dozen times.
Keanu had been unknown until three years ago. It had since been the subject of exactly two distant flyby space probes. (There wasn’t a government or corporation on Earth capable of conceiving, funding, building, and launching a probe to Keanu in less than five years, by which time the NEO would be long past its closest encounter and heading back into the interstellar darkness from which it came.)
Zack Stewart’s Destiny-7 and Venture crew would indeed make the first human contact with this world.
“Thirty seconds,” Pogo said.
It didn’t seem to take that long for the numbers to reach zero. With a rumble that Zack found startling—he had never experienced a burn from the Venture cabin—the twin RL-10s ignited, ramping up from twenty percent of thrust to a full one hundred.
Zack was technically the commander of the Destiny-7 mission, something he found especially absurd at the moment. Hot pilot Pogo Downey was flying this landing.
Of course, Pogo wasn’t actually flying it yet. True, hundreds of hours of simulations had prepared him to manually steer Venture to a flat spot on the surface of the Moon . . . and several dozen hasty, postdecision sims had concentrated on the challenges of accomplishing the same thing in Keanu’s lesser gravity.
But Venture’s incredibly sophisticated and rugged guidance system was really making the decisions, its radar pinging the surface of Keanu, recording range and rate of descent, then making the delicate adjustments in the tilt of the engines, whose combined axis of thrust—tweaked by the smaller reaction control jets spaced around Venture’s exterior—determined where the vehicle was going.
Two booms rattled the cabin. “RCS,” Zack said quickly. He could actually hear the startled gasps of Tea and Yvonne on the communications loops.
He grinned to himself. He hadn’t been selected as commander for his ability with a joystick. As much as he joked about Tea’s “big sister” mentality, he had an even more acute case of wanting everyone to be happy. This personality trait had guided his professional life—he couldn’t count the number of people with whom he’d nursed violent disagreements who took his low-key assents and gentle arguments as signs of genuine friendship. If he had to work late hours, fine. If an apology was called for, he would make it. If being charming was what a situation required, he could be very charming.
And, if the greater good could be served by a display of temper, he could boil over with the best of them.
After his second space station tour, one of the NASA doctors had told Zack he rated highest among every astronaut studied in one key interpersonal factor: not technical skills (though his were superior) or even emotional control (though he obviously stayed on an even keel).
He simply played well with others. Shared his toys. Helped pick up. Did more than his portion of dirty jobs.
Making the first landing on Keanu was, in many ways, a dirty job. Training time was short, danger was great, the crew had been shuffled at the last minute. And there was a good chance of conflict with the Brahma crew.
NASA wanted the people of Earth to be happy. And who better to keep them that way than Zachary Stewart? Not only was he an experienced space flier who had spent two years training on Destiny-Venture, he happened to be the astronaut office specialist in all matters Keanu. Best of all, he actually knew—and liked!—the rival Brahma commander.
“Coming up on pitchover,” Pogo said, the first words he’d uttered since the start of powered descent.
Although there was no sense of motion—nothing like the banking of an aircraft—the view out the forward window changed, black sky giving way to Keanu’s gray-and-white horizon.
It was as if Venture had clambered to its feet—which, in technical terms, it had. Within moments they were heads up, plus Z in NASA terms.
“What’s that?” Pogo said.
Since burning into orbit around Keanu, Destiny-Venture had made two low passes, but both on the night side, where visibility was almost non-existent. Now, for the landing, Venture was heading toward the sunlit side, like a transatlantic airliner flying toward the European dawn.
Only this dawn showed a giant geyser flaring thousands of feet into the black sky. Unaffected by winds—Keanu had no atmosphere—it looked like a perfect tornado funnel out of Zack’s childhood nightmares.
He had to force himself to say, “Houston, are you seeing what we’re seeing?”
Houston was receiving the same image, of course, from Venture’s cameras, but controllers wouldn’t experience the same awe and majesty . . . or barely contained terror.
“I hope that’s not from Vesuvius,” Zack said, and immediately saw the answer to his own question, as the plume slid off to the left—clearly from another vent, which Weldon calmly confirmed.
As Buzz Aldrin had, while Neil Armstrong flew the first lunar landing, Zack concentrated on his job as commentator. “Okay, Pogo, there’s three hundred, down at twenty.” Three hundred meters altitude, down at twenty meters per second, both figures diminishing at different rates. “The field below looks smooth.” They could see their landing zone from the forward windows, whose lower halves were angled inward. But glare from Keanu’s snow and ice washed out the view—better data was coming from a radar image in the head-up display, which showed scattered boulders, though so far none big enough to topple Venture.
“Copy that,” Pogo said, in a voice that was basically a grunt. Zack had once flown in a NASA T-38 jet that Pogo had to land in bad weather. All during the approach, the pilot had fallen essentially silent, his eyes locked on displays, hand on the stick.
Scope-locked.
Venture’s landing on Keanu was different from that dark, threatening approach to Cape Canaveral in a T-38—the computer was still flying the vehicle, something pilots never liked.
“Two hundred, down at fifteen. Horizon looks close.” Now, at a height of less than two hundred meters, the NEO still looked round! For a moment, Zack had the feeling Venture was edging sideways up to a giant white ball. He literally had to shake his head.
His twitching must have been visible even in the thick EVA suit. He felt a reassuring pat on his shoulder. Tea. There was no way to acknowledge it—which she must have known.
“Coming up on one hundred, down at ten,” Zack said. “Electing manual.”
According to the flight plan, manual landing was the backup mode, but Zack and Pogo had privately decided that human eyeballs and reflexes were better suited to the delicate task of accomplishing a safe landing than a computer. Zack’s words gave Pogo the go-ahead to click the “pickle switch,” making his hand controller come alive, while also telling Houston that this was a decision, not a systems failure.
“Venture, go for manual.” Zack knew that Shane Weldon would agree with the decision. Besides, if they were wrong, they were dead.
“Hovering,” Pogo said, just as Zack was about to note that Venture was at forty meters with zero rate of descent. Instead he said, “Will you look at that!”
Twice as far across as a football field, Vesuvius Vent lay in front of them, a big black hole in the ground, its bottom lost in shadows.
“Do I turn on the windshield wipers?” Pogo said, stunning Zack— and no doubt millions of people listening, for years to come—with his coolness.
Gently, the snowy field rose to greet them. Zack could see individual rocks now—again, none tall enough to be worrisome.
“Ten meters.” He wasn’t bothering with rate of descent now. “Making some steam!” The invisible but hot four-lobed plume of Venture’s engines was vaporizing Keanu surface snow. Wisps of vapor rose, reminding Zack of Lake Superior on a winter day.
“Shutdown,” Patrick announced, as the RL-10s quit abruptly, and the shuddering and vibration inside Venture ceased.
“Contact!” The traditional blue indicator lit—
—Then went dark. “Shit!” Patrick said.
Zack could feel it in his stomach, the roller-coaster sensation. “We’re bouncing!”
Suddenly they were shaken by three quick booms—Pogo manually firing the small reaction control rockets spaced around the Venture cabin. “Keep her upright!” Zack shouted.
“Coming down again—”
Zack watched Venture’s squat, four-legged shadow rushing to meet them. There went the contact light—
“Goddammit!” They bounced again.
“It’s lower this time,” Zack said, almost convinced himself.
Sure enough, this time Venture settled and slid.
And stopped, safely upright on the surface of Keanu, fifty meters from the well-defined edge of Vesuvius Vent.
“Houston, Vesuvius Base here—Venture is on the surface and, ah, tied down.”
He patted Pogo on the forearm. He could see his pilot grinning, making a quick sign of the cross. Only now did Tea and Yvonne speak, letting out whoops of relief.
Then Weldon finally responded. “Venture, Houston. As they said the first time, you’ve got a bunch of people about to turn blue here. Next time, drop the anchor.”
Zack pointed to Pogo, who said, “Copy that, Houston. Tell ops I want credit for three landings.”
For the next few minutes, they ran through the postlanding checklist, making sure not only the two main engines but the RCSs were shut down, that Venture was level and not settling into a pool of water now turning back to ice. “I think we’ve got rock under the pads,” Yvonne said. “That’s a good thing.”
They also removed helmets and gloves, though two of them would be donning them again for the first steps on Keanu.
Zack stepped away from forward position and slipped past Tea and Yvonne. The Venture cabin was cramped—it would be very close quarters for the weeklong mission—but designed to be divided in two.
He pulled the privacy curtain, creating a vague “room.” With his gloves off, he reached for the keyboard to tap out a private message to Rachel: MADE IT—INFLIGHT MOVIE TERRIBLE BUT HAD A WINDOW SEAT XOXO DAD.
He hit send. Then the tension of the past several hours, the past four sleepless days, the past two years, slammed him like a sudden squall. He buried his chin in his chest and shook with sorrow over the miracle of what he’d just lived through . . . the looming challenges ahead of him . . . and the fact that his wife would never know any of it.
Worst of all, that it was her accident that gave him this opportunity. She had to die so he could risk death.
Megan . . . we made it.
When he thought back two years, he still found himself angry—at God, at the universe, at whoever or whatever was in charge. He was crying from sorrow, but also from fury.
“Zack, how are you doing?” It was Tea, having slipped behind the curtain, speaking so quietly that Patrick and Yvonne couldn’t hear.
The typical male response would be to shrug off the question with a noncommittal answer. But he and Tea knew each other too well. “Been better.”
“It’s been a tough road.” She patted Zack’s arm, then turned away, leaving him in this brief bubble of privacy.
He took a breath and wiped his eyes. They had made the landing; now they had to explore a whole new world.
Oh, yes, and wait for whatever Brahma might pull.
Well, he had been able to establish one important scientific principle: Tears don’t fall in a NEO’s gravity field.
Part Two
“LONG, GENTLE THUNDER”
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth, out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust shalt thou return.
GENESIS 3:19
TWO YEARS AGO
Tropical Storm Gregory was approaching the Houston area the day Megan Stewart was buried. The hot rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sweeping across the roiled waters of Clear Lake, obscuring the headquarters building at the Johnson Space Center, turning streets into rivers of slick menace.
It also transformed the procession from St. Bernadette’s to the cemetery from a stately ceremony into a ragged retreat. Zack felt a surge of sympathy for the more casual mourners, such as parents from Rachel’s school who felt obligated to attend the services but whose empathies would be sorely tested by hot rain blowing directly into their faces.
Not that the ceremony would be underattended. Zack had had no idea how many people would turn up, but St. Bernadette’s had been jammed. Not with just local friends, but workers from JSC and people Megan had worked with over the years: editors, producers, even a few characters who had been subjects of various profiles and interviews. Zack was not the type to judge the success or failure of a funeral by the number of attendees, but . . . there it was.
Of course, the shocking and public nature of her death contributed. The headline had made every news outlet. “Moonbound Astronaut’s Wife Dies in Florida Car Crash.” The story had a media throw-weight equal to the overdose death of some Hollywood actress/model/whatever. Megan herself would have approved of the perfect storm of tragedy and notoriety.
None of which was much comfort to Zack, to Rachel, or to Megan’s parents.
James Doyle, Megan’s father, was a thick, ruddy man of seventy who looked like a career cop with a history of alcohol abuse, but was, in fact, a retired insurance salesman with a history of alcohol abuse. He had summed it up for Zack: “No matter how bad things are going, they can always get worse.”
Zack’s own parents were not present, though the circumstances—Dad’s increasing frailty, Mom’s lack of comprehension—were not happy, either.
Now James Doyle sat across from Zack in the limo thoughtfully provided by the funeral home. He was vainly trying to comfort Megan’s mother, Diane, a slim, vital woman of Scottish descent in her midsixties, clearly the one Megan took after.
In the seat ahead sat Megan’s brother, Scott; his wife; and their seven-year-old son. Their grief was either overwhelmingly numbing or under control. But thank God they were here. The challenge of having to face them, to comfort them and be comforted, had allowed Zack to compartmentalize his own grief and put it aside.
For the moment. He had yet to break down over the loss of lover and wife.
Or his loss of the Moon. He would have traded that adventure, every glorious moment of it, to have Megan back.
As the car rolled down the Gulf Freeway toward Forest Park Cemetery, Zack thought about the casket in the hearse ahead of them.
Megan was inside. Megan with the deep brown eyes and that wicked smile. The athletic yet feminine build. The slim legs that still, after eighteen years of intimacy, had the magic to stir him. The walk that had caught his eye at Berkeley.
The throaty laugh and perfectly pitched voice that, he realized after many years, was the single trait he found most attractive in her.
All stilled and silenced. Boxed for shipping.
At the hospital, he had forced himself to look on her battered body. Not as horrible as he feared—the only visible damage a bruise on the right side of her face. But Zack could not believe it was Megan . . . the collection of bone, muscle, and
blood on the gurney was too still to be his often-jittery, constantly mobile wife.
Enough. Time to act like an astronaut—don’t look back, look at the problem directly in front of you.
Which was Rachel. She had escaped serious physical injury in the crash, but the shock and trauma would be with her forever.
In the first hours afterward, she had acted irrationally, speaking only to demand her Slate and, when Zack failed to produce it (the unit was still in the wreckage of the car, wherever that was), sinking into a sullen stupor that stretched over three days. She went through the motions of her precrash life—she ate, she dressed, she continued to experiment with makeup. There was nothing robotic about it, nothing overt enough to trigger a diagnosis of depression. She was merely . . . subdued. When addressed, she would respond, but usually with a single word.
At least, that was Zack’s perspective. How reliable were his judgments?
Zack could not make words come out of his mouth. Take a breath. He had to be strong not only for Rachel, but for Megan’s parents, who sat across from them, their faces furrowed with concern. He patted his daughter’s hand and tried to be calm and businesslike. “Have you got your poem?”
Rachel’s eyes widened in apparent horror. Emotion! Zack wanted to cheer. “Oh my God, I think I left it home!”
Before Zack could react, Rachel’s face reset to cold and stoic. Her voice, however, was rich with teenage condescension. “Do you honestly think I’d screw this up?”
By the time the cortege reached the grave site, the wind and rain had stopped. The cemetery was bathed in a gauzy sunlight that Zack found both peaceful and unusual.
As the casket was being wrestled into place, another car arrived from a different direction.
For an instant, Zack hoped it would be Harley Drake. Harley had been badly injured in the accident, likely crippled, alive but still unconscious. Zack wanted Harley to wake up and be well, because he was his friend—and because he wanted to know what happened.
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