Before anyone could ask a question—at least, a question that Rachel understood—Jillianne and Amy formed a human shield around her and marched her down the hall and out a back door.
Jillianne said, “I need to get you back to the family room.”
“I’m not going back to the family room.”
“Well, you can’t be out here. They’ll eat you alive.”
Rachel thought. “Let me talk to Tea.”
Jillianne considered this. “Fine. But phones off.”
Rachel and Amy were happy to comply. They were fine as long as no one decided to search Amy’s pockets.
The atmosphere inside mission control was completely different from that outside—serene, silent. The only sound was the familiar hiss of static.
On the screen, Rachel and Amy could see the top half of Yvonne Hall in her hammock. The rest of the view was Tea Nowinski, who kept bobbing up and down, clearly making some adjustment on the panel above the camera. When her face came into view, Rachel was horrified at the way she looked, with her hair ratted atop her head. Rachel knew ten times as much about makeup and clothing as Tea did. . . . One of the fun things about her relationship with Dad’s girlfriend was teaching her.
Of course, at the moment, Tea had other things to worry about.
Flight director Josh Kennedy spotted them and did a double take. He seemed about to drop his headset and approach them when—
“Okay, Houston, we’ve got a link again . . . holy cow!”
The big screen cut from the Venture interior view (which remained in a small picture-within-picture) to a dark exterior showing three astronauts, one NASA and two Coalition, with some kind of silver screen behind them. “Looks like they’re on television,” Amy said.
“They are on television,” Rachel said. Amy was starting to become annoying.
The Coalition pair was literally working on the camera, their helmets looming in front of the lens. The chatter on the air-to-ground was the Russian and Portuguese equivalents of phrases like Got it and Okay.
“What’s that shiny thing?” Rachel asked out loud.
Kennedy turned toward her. Once he registered the appalling fact that she was Zack’s daughter, watching this amazing feed live, he leaped into action, taking Rachel by the arm and trying to get her out of mission control. “We’re thinking it’s the outer door of an airlock.”
That was not what Rachel needed to hear. Her father had somehow fallen into a sci-fi movie . . . she wanted it to end. Come home! “Where’s my father?”
“Uh, he went through the airlock,” Kennedy said. Then, to the others in the room, “Anybody seen Harley Drake?”
Then Kennedy’s eyes went wide. Rachel turned to look at the screen. Amy and Jillianne grabbed her hands as everyone in mission control inhaled at the same time.
On the screen was a hand, then a waving arm. Her father’s. “Houston, Pogo,” Downey said. “Looks like Zack wants us to follow him.”
JSC DIRECTOR JONES: I can take three questions—
QUESTION: Given Hall’s accident, shouldn’t you be bringing the astronauts home?
JONES: Flight surgeons are monitoring her condition, which is stable. Yvonne herself has said that this vital exploration must continue.
QUESTION: Is there any worry that the Coalition craft contributed to the explosion?
JONES: The event on Keanu was a natural event . . . the only surprise was the actual timing.
QUESTION: What if there are further surprises?
JONES: The mission continues, of course. As we like to say, failure is not an option.
QUESTION: Are you worried about your daughter?
JONES: I’m worried about everyone in that crew!
PRESS BRIEFING ON NASA SELECT TV AND WEB
It took less than ten minutes for the other three to pass through the membrane, as Zack now called it. “One at a time,” Pogo had told his Coalition friends, “with me first.”
Now, completely disconnected from the camera and link they had managed to rig on the other side of the membrane, in contact only with themselves, the four moved swiftly across the rocky surface of a chamber that reminded Pogo Downey of Kartchner Caverns, the giant cave he’d visited while a college student in Arizona—huge, dark, unknowable.
Mindful of the one major limitation on all this activity—air and water supplies in their suits—he asked, “What’s the hurry?”
“I just . . . need to see this,” Zack said. He actually sounded out of breath. Was it exertion? Or excitement?
“What are these shapes?” Natalia said.
Pogo realized that over the thirty-or-forty-meter traverse from the membrane he’d seen shadows in his peripheral vision . . . had assumed they were just visual effects from four bobbing helmet lights hitting boulders or possibly stalagmites.
Idiot. He wasn’t in Kartchner Caverns. He was inside Keanu . . . it was strange how the mind kept laying familiar shapes onto alien ones.
Lucas went up to the nearest shape, shining his torch up and down. “It’s another marker!”
Indeed, it looked like another spiral galaxy or double helix, but larger and more detailed.
Zack didn’t have to ask any of them to take pictures, or do a radar scan. Lucas, Natalia, and Pogo swarmed the marker, recording every possible angle. Lucas had hauled a new camera from the sled, bulkier and less finished-looking than the other instruments. “What’s a Zeiss MKK?” Zack said.
At that moment, Pogo noted a wisp of vapor on the leg of the commander’s suit. “Boss,” he said, suddenly worried, pointing. “Check your pressure.”
But Zack didn’t seem worried. “This chamber is pressurized. Look at the ground . . .”
Pogo did, and saw a puddle. “Zack,” he said.
“I think it’s water,” the commander said quickly. “It appeared to be melt from my boots. Yours, too, I’m guessing.”
Natalia disagreed. “There’s more here than we were carrying.”
Then Lucas said, “I hear something.”
And Pogo realized he had been hearing it, too. “Is that the wind?”
“What the hell is going on?” Natalia said. She sounded nervous. Pogo couldn’t blame her. Puddles of liquid? Air pressure? Wind? Some of those conditions could exist on the surface of Mars, so it wasn’t unthinkable.
But on a NEO—inside a NEO?
“Let’s press on,” Zack said. “Time is our enemy.”
All four began to shuffle forward again, individually stopping to take images. Natalia was taking soil samples, scooping or scraping from the ground or the base of the markers (they’d passed half a dozen of them by now, each one clearly a cousin to the others, but all slightly different.) She held each one up to her microfocals before bagging it. Given the obvious fogging in her faceplate, she had to be getting frustrated.
“Hold up,” Zack said.
Pogo and the others had already stopped, because all of them could see the same thing now.
Whether it was the combined illumination from their helmet lamps or some other source, the walls of the chamber were now barely visible . . . enough that the astronauts could see that they were covered with cell-like hexagonal structures of varying size, ranging from two meters wide to multiples of that, more or less symmetrical.
“Looks like a beehive,” Zack said.
“I wonder where the bees might be.” Natalia again, still sounding unnerved. Given the unholy uncertainties they were facing and the nagging problems with her suit, Pogo sympathized.
But that kind of unease could be contagious. They’d already seen more evidence of alien life than any humans in history—cumulatively. Who knew what lay ahead—what was right around the next corner?
“Zack,” Natalia said, “what is our plan? Walk until we reach consumable limits, then turn back?”
“Essentially.”
“Yeah,” Pogo said. “Too bad this is such a short stay—and there’s no chance for a follow-up.”
“I really wish we had a bett
er view,” Zack said. “More light.”
“Let me,” Lucas said. To Natalia, he said, “Do you have any idea of the oxygen content here?”
“Substantial, over a quarter,” she said, “but it’s raw data.”
“But it’s not pure oxygen.”
“No.”
To Pogo’s surprise, the World’s Greatest Astronaut skipped a few meters ahead and raised a fat pistol in his gloved hand.
Where the hell had he found a flare gun? Of course—in the Brahma’s survival kit! There was one advantage of having your Earth return craft double as your lander. “Is it okay?” Lucas asked.
“Might as well,” Zack said. “We can’t see much without it.”
The Brazilian astronaut fired the flare, which corkscrewed in the low gravity, reaching high into the chamber before igniting.
“Holy shit!”
Pogo couldn’t help himself. Not only was the chamber so big that its far reaches could not be seen, but the Beehive itself had opened. The floor spread right and left with no walls, honey-combed or not.
Stranger yet, the collection of markers had been replaced by different structures—actually, they looked to Pogo more like growths. They were tall, fragile-appearing things that in some cases stood ten or fifteen meters high. “Corals,” Pogo said. He had dived the Great Barrier Reef.
“Not quite,” Natalia said, going closer and examining the nearest growth with her focals. “Corals have a jagged, irregular structure . . . these look spherical.”
“Like the filling in the membrane?” Zack said.
“Apparently.”
“Too bad Houston can’t see this. They’d freak.”
“I’m freaking,” Zack said. “It was bad enough to realize that Keanu was a vehicle, not a natural object. I frankly don’t know how to handle alien artifacts and landscapes.”
“And the rest of us do?” Pogo said.
Even Natalia laughed. “Your openmindedness makes you the perfect choice to lead us, Dr. Stewart.”
“We have two hours of consumables before we have to turn back,” Pogo said. “We can camp out in Buzz and upload everything we’ve found. Then we would have input from Houston before we came back.”
“That’s my big worry,” Zack said. “I don’t know Yvonne’s condition. We might get back in touch and be told the mission is over, we’re going home.
“This might be the only chance we get—and I don’t want to miss something important, because no human may ever be here again.”
“Relax. We’re doing everything we can.” Pogo was getting impatient with Zack’s expressions of doubt. Sure, they were justified. But a commander can’t afford to appear indecisive or weak.
Of course, a good soldier doesn’t question or undermine his commander, either. Both of them were no doubt getting tired. The suits were ridiculously easy to wear and work in, but they were still heavy and confining.
And even though gravity here was light, being on your feet for hours—
“I have a theory,” Lucas said. Pogo realized that the other three had been clustered at the base of a coral tower.
“Please share.”
“These corals might be building blocks.”
“Building blocks of what?” Pogo said.
“Of life! What else?” Natalia said.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe they’re building blocks of a new car or a piece of cheesecake! Goddammit, people—”
“Calm down, Pogo.”
He really was feeling impatient. “I just don’t think it’s a smart idea to be putting everything in familiar boxes. . . .”
Lucas spoke up. “Of course, we will leave the analysis to the experts on Earth.”
“Absolutely,” Zack said. “It’s just human nature. And now I have an entirely new image to confuse the matter: These corals look like fractal structures—”
“Yes,” Lucas said, either warming to the idea or simply playing along, “Mandelbrot sets!”
Pogo noticed that Natalia had not only gone silent . . . she had stopped working her way around the coral and was frantically trying to reattach one of her scanners to the front of her suit.
Shit, he thought, she’s gone blind. As he got closer, he saw that her visor was completely fogged over. “Boss, we’ve got a problem here!”
“Don’t,” Natalia said. The astronaut code: death before dishonor.
“Shut up. You’re overheating. You can’t continue to function in that suit.”
Zack and Lucas came up. Zack took in the situation quickly. “Okay, Lucas,” he said. “The EVA is officially over. You guide her back to the membrane. Wait on this side of it. Pogo and I will be right behind you.”
Lucas didn’t argue. He was probably as exhausted and overwhelmed as Pogo.
The Coalition team turned and started back the way they had come. Pogo realized now that they had not only walked into a huge chamber . . . they had come down a gentle slope—
“Pogo,” Zack said. “Is it my imagination, or are we seeing better?”
Pogo had just noticed that himself. He looked away from Lucas and Natalia toward the center of the chamber.
The view forward was brighter. “It’s like dawn. . . .”
It was indeed. As the four of them watched in openmouthed wonder, high above them on the “ceiling,” a dozen long mobile shapes lit up, strong enough to brighten the chamber like a summer sunrise.
Pogo put his hand on Zack’s shoulder. “And the Lord said, ‘Let there be a light in the firmaments.’”
It bordered on blasphemy. But given the circumstances, Zack could not argue.
Can someone explain to me why we’re doing this crazy mission? Especially since NASA clearly didn’t know what it was getting into? Couldn’t we have spent three billion dollars closer to home?
POSTER TRACEE34 AT HUFFPOST.COM
Her PPK still clutched to her chest, Yvonne listened to Tea’s side of two and sometimes three conversations. One was the open channel with Houston, the other the encrypted one. Then there was the link to Brahma and cosmonaut Dennis Chertok, her savior, who had now returned to the Coalition craft.
There was even a fourth . . . Tea’s regular call every minute or so for “Zack, Pogo, from Venture, do you read?” That conversation was one-sided, and increasingly pointless. Yvonne wondered if Zack and Patrick, and Lucas and Natalia, were even still alive, because as far as she could tell, Keanu was a hostile environment.
She wanted off.
From the encrypted comm, she knew that the planners in Houston were preparing Venture for a departure—“R plus ten hours,” R being the moment the explorers returned.
That was one scenario, she knew, the one assuming her condition didn’t worsen. It allowed the crew to have some kind of rest before managing a liftoff from another planet, and a life-or-death rendezvous with the Destiny mother ship.
There was an R plus six, and even an R plus two. Knowing how difficult a rendezvous would be—and, frankly, remembering that the shorter the gap, the worse her health—Yvonne was hoping the choice would be R plus ten.
That would bring the Destiny-Venture crew back to Earth within three days . . . carrying samples from this NEO starship-or-whatever-the-fuck-it-was. They could be astronaut heroes.
And Yvonne could forget about what was in her PPK.
Given the effects of the tranquilizer Dennis had given her, she wasn’t sure she really believed it, anyway. A bomb—an honest-to-God suitcase nuke, the kind she’d heard about in spy movies.
It had happened eight days before launch, the day the crew was to move into the trailer at Johnson Space Center where they would be kept in medical isolation, and would start sleep-shifting to accommodate liftoff at a ridiculous hour.
Yvonne had just parked her car and was pulling her travel bag out of the trunk when her cell phone rang. There was a text asking her to stop by Building 30 on her way to the trailer.
She had walked into a hallway to find her father waiting for her.
Ga
briel Jones had divorced his wife, Camille, when their daughter Yvonne was thirteen years old. The young space scientist had been caught having not one but two extramarital affairs, one with a fellow researcher, the other with the producer of a Discovery Channel series in which he had starred. “He just found a more exciting life.”
Or so the former Camille Hall told her daughter. Watching her father from afar—there was financial support, but damned little additional contact over the years—Yvonne concluded that her mother’s bitterness was justified:
Gabriel Jones had let fame and power go to his head.
Worse yet, he lacked real human feelings. “Oh, he can turn on the tears like a faucet,” Mom would say. “But it’s all show: nothing inside.”
Which he had proved conclusively on that occasion. Yvonne stared in stunned silence as her father, the head of the Johnson Space Center, showed her a suitcase and told her it contained a small nuclear device known as the W-54C, with a yield of 2 kilotons and a blast radius of a kilometer. It was to be detonated if the Venture landing on Keanu proved to be dangerous to Earth. “We’re talking some kind of contamination.”
“Glad to hear you’ve got this all thought out. ‘Some kind of contamination.’ Christ.”
“Don’t swear.” That was typical of Gabriel Jones, too. He was like one of those Baptists who was against sex because it was too close to dancing.... “It will be thought-out. You will have a set of orders. This is only a last resort.”
“Not so good for me, though, is it, Daddy?”
He had stared at the floor. Typical; she could not remember ever meeting his gaze. “Two things. The circumstances that would cause you to use this are so horrendous that death would be preferable. Imagine you were on an airplane plunging toward the ground—”
“God, you really are a cold, sick son of a bitch!” Before he could protest, she said, “Why me? If anything should be the commander’s job, this is it! Or it should be Downey. He’ll follow orders.”
“Downey is dogged and he’s capable and does what he’s told, but he also has a streak of . . . well, he might be too quick to pull the trigger.
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