She had been happy to be inside her suit, tanks recharged and good for a few more hours. She wasn’t sure the atmosphere inside Keanu would remain breathable.
Taj must have thought the same, because all he said was, “I don’t think we’re welcome inside there any longer.”
At that moment the five of them felt a second jolt. This one was shorter, if possible, and oddly less jarring, though the rover rocked gently on its suspension for several seconds.
“Everyone still okay?” Tea got a “Fine” from Lucas. “Okay, saddle up!”
She actually began to trot, a ridiculous notion, given the high center of gravity and uncertain footing. But she felt that if she didn’t escape from the dark passage soon, she might just . . . sit down and die.
Step, slide, step, slide. Repeat. Taj was doing the same thing. The pair on foot were pulling ahead of the rover.
Finally they emerged into the vent itself . . . and beheld the changes. “It’s mostly bare rock,” Taj said.
“The snow and ice melted in the heat, sublimated away,” Tea said. She clicked her radio. “Venture, Tea. Venture for Yvonne.” As she kept walking, she repeated the call, listening for a response that never came.
In her earphones, she could hear Taj making similar calls to Brahma, with no better results.
Now that they were in the relatively open center of the vent floor, she thought it worth a shot to try contacting mission control directly. If Venture was gone, of course, she would be relying on a potential signal relay through Destiny. Where was the mother ship, anyway?
“Houston, this is Tea. I’m in Vesuvius Vent with Taj, Lucas, Natalia. Do you copy?”
Nothing. “Taj, I suppose you’re missing your radio.”
“No response,” he said.
It was clear that they needed to get out of the vent. A climb up the rocky sides wasn’t impossible—with most of the snow gone, Tea could see potential handholds.
But Zack had talked about a ramp . . . and there it was, curling up the inside of the far wall, a few hundred meters away. She pointed her team toward it.
Ten minutes later, somewhat out of breath, she was at its base, which was rubble-strewn. A suited astronaut on foot could get across it, but a path would have to be cleared for the rover.
“Lucas, Natalia, you two wait here. I don’t want you to depress that cabin until we have to. Taj and I will scout up top. We’ll come back and help clear this junk.” Then her tone changed. “Do Indians have any tradition of granting last requests? You know, if someone is going to die?”
“No more than any other culture. Why? Feeling pessimistic about our chances?”
“Well, somewhat. But I was just curious about how you guys came so prepared.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s see. The relay satellite. A terahertz radio. The set of scientific instruments.”
“Tea, Venture could just as easily have carried all of those. In fact, I think our guys got some of the ideas from NASA.”
“Oh, bullshit, Taj. Christ, the only First Contact tool you left out was the sign reading Welcome to Earth.”
Taj hesitated. Then he said, “A year ago an observatory in Crimea was looking at Keanu in the high radio frequencies. They saw something anomalous—not just unusual activity, but pulses and patterns that, in their judgment, could not be natural.”
“We should have been looking at those things, too.”
“Maybe you did, maybe you just happened to miss them. In any case, we were told there was a high probability we would be making contact.” They had to stop to let the rover negotiate the last turn. “Well, is that what you wanted to know? That we were ready?”
“Yeah,” she said. And then couldn’t resist it: “Now I can die happy.”
They were halfway up the ramp—with less than two hundred meters to go—when Tea heard a magical sound in her headset. “—on UHF, comm check. Venture crew, Houston. Tea, this is Jasmine.”
“All right!” Tea said, practically shouting. The next few moments were a comedy of overlapping messages, broken sentences, all complicated by the eight-second round-trip lag. But eventually Houston knew that four were still alive and on the surface, that Zack was alive and yet to be heard from.
More to the point, Tea knew that Destiny was still operating in orbit around Keanu, and that the rocket scientists in mission control were seriously considering bringing it to the surface for a possible rescue. “That’s assuming Venture and Brahma are both too damaged for use,” Jasmine Trieu said.
“We understand,” Tea said. “Can you relay for Taj?”
“We’re already doing so,” Trieu said, after the lag.
“Then let’s get eyeballs on the situation.” Tea and Taj continued their ascent, covering the last fifty meters in what seemed like three flying leaps.
The view from the rim was disheartening. “Oh, fuck, Taj, where are they?”
The surface had been blasted clean . . . this small piece of Keanu real estate, which had resembled a glacial valley on Earth, now looked like the Moon, a vista Tea knew as well as any human being.
She had been prepared to find damage. What was killing her was this: Both Venture and Brahma were gone. It was as if both vehicles had simply launched without them.
“Tea, Houston. We did not copy your last.” Christ, Houston had heard her despairing comments. Nice work, Nowinski.
“Roger, Houston. Taj and I are at the top, noting, uh, some thermal effects of whatever happened.” What were they telling the people of Earth? “Are you getting imagery?” She had no idea if her helmet cam was working, or if working, capable of punching an image to Houston via Destiny.
“A fuzzy landscape,” the capcom finally said. “Can’t tell much except dark sky and brighter surface.”
Tea chose not to answer that directly. Taj had started toward the landing sites halfway around the rim of the vent, so she followed.
She hadn’t gone far when she saw a flash of genuine color next to a collection of smallish boulders near the rim.
She signaled Taj to go the private channel. “That looks like a Brahma suit.” It was a Brahma-style EVA suit . . . rather, the top half of it.
Tea heard a long, anguished sigh in her earphones. “Yes, that’s Dennis,” Taj said. Of course, Taj’s identification was unnecessary: Dennis Chertok was the only missing member of his crew. “What was he doing out here?”
Tea bent as close as she could. Not only had the body been fragmented by the blast, but the multilayered fabric and helmet had been fused to the rock. The helmet was still intact, but frosted on the inside, mercifully obscuring Chertok’s face. “I have no idea,” she said. “All I know is that there seems to be blood on the inside of his faceplate.”
Taj indicated the rocks behind the body. “Might be from impact.”
Tea straightened and turned away. There was no immediate value in trying to conduct a postmortem. Their goal now was to keep from adding to the body count.
She saw more color now . . . fifty meters away, four gold-colored uprights—well, two uprights, two that had been twisted and knocked over.
Venture’s legs. The rest of the twenty-ton, five-story-tall, two-billion-dollar spacecraft, the pride and joy of an entire nation, had simply vanished, along with Yvonne Hall . . . and Patrick Downey?
Taj joined her. He could see the same wreckage. “And over there . . .” he said.
To their left, looking toward the blue-and-white crescent of the rising Earth, was an even more appalling sight: the wreckage of Brahma.
Venture had been vaporized by the heat of the detonation, but Brahma’s wounds—though equally fatal—were more varied. In the first milliseconds of the blast, the Coalition vehicle had lost two of its legs, then toppled and melted as its fuel tanks exploded.
What remained was a lumpy, half-shattered cylinder lying on its side. It was still recognizable as a vehicle of some kind.
Taj was saying, “Do you suppose we’re being exposed to radiat
ion?”
“Yes, and that would be the last of my worries at the moment. I mean, are we likely to live long enough to die from too many rems? Besides, the suits should offer some protection.”
Tea had to fight her emotions. She wanted to lie down and cry. Even as she reported the grim news to Houston—and heard Taj telling Bangalore—she fought to keep from simply sobbing.
There’ll be plenty of time to lie down later, she thought. If Houston can’t pull off its little miracle with Destiny.
“Houston for Tea . . . We, ah, confirm loss of both Venture and Brahma. We got some clear imagery. Stand by.”
They were wondering just what the hell to tell her.
“Copy that, Houston . . . Tell you what: Taj and I are going to head south of this site, roughly where Yvonne wound up yesterday. Give us half an hour and see if we can’t pick out a runway for you.”
Thanx for the kind words re my dad. He’s smart and strong and I know he’ll come through this! Love you all!
LAST POST FROM RACHEL STEWART ON HER SLATE
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Jillianne Dwight said, as she drove through the open, silent gates of Forest Park Cemetery.
“I can handle it,” Rachel said.
“I know, sweetie. It’s just . . . it’s been a weird couple of days.” She glanced at the Slate in Rachel’s lap. “Are you going to post something?”
Rachel shrugged. “That’s why I have it, I guess.” She also had a small garden spade in her bag. She had grabbed it from the back porch—where the Stewarts’ few plants were in severe distress—just before leaving the house.
“When did you start doing all that?”
“When didn’t I? I mean, Mom was always blogging or taping from the day I was born. She did a show on her pregnancy. It was like she wanted to save every moment of her life.”
“And yours, too.”
“I suppose.” She looked out the window. The sky was growing darker, some big storm about to blow up from the Gulf. In fact, the cemetery now looked much as it had the day Megan Stewart was buried. “What’s really weird is that I might have the chance to ask her.”
Jillianne kept her eyes on the winding road. “So you think that’s really your mom up there?”
“You don’t?”
“Honey, I just—Well, my momma taught me that all good people sit with Jesus. It took me a long time to sort of, you know, get past that.” She smiled sadly. “Not that you can’t work for NASA and be religious. There are a lot of people at the center who do both. But I had to choose sides, you know?”
“So you’re on the side that says those people up there are alien whatevers.”
“I don’t want to be on a side, young lady. I suppose if it was someone I knew and loved, I’d feel different. Sorry, I mean . . . well, I don’t know what I mean. But I think we’re here.”
Rachel hadn’t been completely sure that the “Megan” she had talked to was really her mother—
Until now. It was just like Daddy said: You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. If Megan’s intimate knowledge had brought Rachel ninety percent of the way to full belief, Jillianne’s gentle skepticism had carried her the final stretch.
Of course, there was still Megan’s body. . . .
Her grave lay twenty meters off the road, in a flat, open area surrounded by other graves, of course, most of them recent, many of them marked with crosses and angels. Rachel slid her bag over one arm, tucking her Slate under, then followed the familiar trail. Jillianne stayed with the car.
Rachel and Zack had their cemetery rituals, visiting every year on Megan’s birthday in November, and on Mother’s Day. And now and then, just on impulse.
There was a simple stone with Megan’s name and years. And one thing that had always freaked Rachel out: the empty plot next to it. “That’s for me,” Zack had told her, the first time she asked about it, early one summer morning almost two years ago.
“That’s seriously creepy, Dad.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to occupy it any time soon.”
“But doesn’t it bother you to think that someday you’re going to be there for a thousand years or whatever?”
Since Zack rarely wore sunglasses, he had blinked in the brilliant sunshine. “It’s just not that big a deal.”
“If it’s not that important, why do we keep coming back?”
“You got me.” He had closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. Then smiled, as if he’d solved a big problem. “Wait. It’s because coming here gives us a place to think about your mom.”
“We could do that at home.”
“No, there are too many distractions. This is just . . . a special meditation zone dedicated to her, okay?”
Rachel had remembered that. She was never comfortable offering prayers, anyway. She didn’t like going to church and, after a series of heated arguments, had persuaded Zack to let her skip religious education.
But meditation? Thinking good thoughts? She had been able to do that.
Though not today. She examined the grassy surface of the grave, then knelt to run her hand across it.
It didn’t seem to have been disturbed. But how to be sure?
She took the little spade out of her bag and jammed it into the sod. It went in easily—of course; with all the rain, the ground was soft, soggy.
She chopped out a square two feet on a side, then began sliding the tip of the blade around the edges. She had just started to peel up a corner of the sod when a man said, “Rachel Stewart, what are you doing?”
Startled, Rachel sat up.
Harley Drake was a few feet away, his powered wheelchair finding slow if silent going. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Hiding,” he said.
“Really.” She went back to her excavation.
“Really? I just wanted to check on something.”
“What?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I don’t think so.”
He was at the grave now. He looked uncommonly serious. “I just wanted to be sure the grave was still intact. Weird, huh?”
Rachel managed to peel the square of sod off the grave. Her hands were dirty, so she wiped them on the grass. “You’re nuts.”
“Before you make judgments, tell me what you’re doing. Because it almost looks as though you’re worried about the same thing.”
“What? That aliens stole my mother’s body so they could fool everybody?” She knelt again and quickly dug a hole of sorts where the sod used to be.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but, well, yeah.”
Rachel smiled. Poor Harley. “Nope.” She picked up her Slate and dropped it in the fresh hole. With several swift moves, she covered it with loose soil.
Harley watched this. “Uh, that’s a pretty expensive item. . . .”
“My father used to say it was really just a paperweight.”
“Now it’s a muddy paperweight.”
She put the sod back in its place, then walked on it.
“All that blogging and stuff, that was my mom’s world. I need to take a break.”
“Unplugging? That’s not the worst idea you’ve had lately.”
They both laughed. In moments, the laughter turned to tears—even hardcase Harley Drake. Rachel knew it had nothing to do with her disposal of the Slate. She gave him an awkward hug. “Her old body is still under there, Harley. But that other part seems to be up in space.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yeah.”
“It makes things really difficult, then.”
At that moment, Harley’s phone rang. “I don’t believe this.” But he answered it, listened for a moment. “Wow, okay. Yeah, I’ll be right in.”
“What’s going on?”
“Your father. The rest of the crew is on the surface, but not him.”
“He won’t leave without my mother.”
“Guess not
.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“I have no idea, but I think you need to come with me.”
This is Destiny mission control. The team here is following a number of unexpected developments, beginning with the anomalous loss of contact with the Venture spacecraft on the surface of Keanu at 103 hours, 34 minutes mission elapsed time and associated venting on the NEO’s surface. Mission manager Shane Weldon has issued the following statement: “We consider this to be an extremely serious situation.” He adds that the orbiting Destiny spacecraft is still providing downlink. We will continue to bring you timely updates as warranted.
NASA PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMENTATOR SCOTT SHAWLER
“Maui got this twenty minutes ago,” Shane Weldon said.
On the main screen, the white crescent that was Keanu still showed the traces of the detonation as a faint, symmetrical cloud.
With Rachel tagging along, Harley had rushed to mission control without stopping at the Home Team. But he had found Sasha Blaine already waiting, lost in the group grope, since at least a dozen people crowded the usually sacrosanct area near the flight director and capcom stations. Bynum was here, too, of course, and so was Gabriel Jones, still, to Harley’s eyes, looking like a phantom.
“Is this real-time?” Bynum asked.
“Just watch the damned screen,” Jones said. His voice sounded weak, and the idea that the Johnson Space Center’s director would snap at a representative from Washington was further confirmation: Jones was out of it.
Even in real time, what happened next made Harley’s heart go irregular.
There was a flash of light from beyond Keanu’s bright limb— something exploding or erupting on the side away from the Earth-based telescope.
But instead of dissipating like the debris from past events, a small object fell away from Keanu. “What the hell is that?” someone said. Harley could not have phrased the question any better.
“Keep watching, everyone,” Weldon said.
Then it happened again, though this time the eruption seemed to come from Keanu’s south pole. But the result was the same . . . a bright object that, like its predecessor, separated from the NEO.
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