“Or maybe it isn’t a space probe, and those Objects aren’t sample-returners.”
Sasha Blaine gave up the argument.
Just after crossing the bayou, as the traffic dwindled to nothing, Harley made a sharp right onto Red Bluff, and soon after, another right into Taylor Lake Village, a crumbling development from the 1960s.
“You do know where you’re going,” Rachel said.
“Used to have a girlfriend who lived here. She was married. Had to perform a few emergency evasive escapes.”
Rachel had endured twenty minutes of being slammed around the backseat. Never a happy passenger, she was getting sick to her stomach. And impatient. “God, will you hurry?”
“What’s the rush, Rach?” Harley said. “I don’t think the Object is going anywhere.”
“I just want to see it!”
Sasha Blaine turned around from the front seat. “You’ve had to listen to the two of us nattering. What do you think it is?”
It wasn’t a question of trying to keep her feelings secret . . . it was more that Rachel didn’t understand her own compulsion until Sasha asked her. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “All I know is that my mother told me not to be scared.”
You guys are awesome. No one in the world could have pulled this off in such a short time . . . no one in the world would have even tried it.
SHANE WELDON STATEMENT TO DESTINY FLIGHT CONTROL TEAM
Hey, guess what? Weldon gave everyone a “well-done!”
POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM
The Destiny had come to rest safely—“No apparent leaks or holes, Houston”—but with one immediate problem. “The fucking hatch is underneath.” Always a bit of a potty mouth, the tomboy’s legacy, Tea Nowinski had developed strict air-to-ground discipline in her previous flights.
But the sight of Destiny, relatively unscathed except for the loss of one of its solar panels, with one edge of the hatch visible about three feet off the ground, overwhelmed her already-challenged verbal governor. “Any ideas?”
The lag seemed to stretch on, but Taj was ready to fill it. “Remember where we are, Tea.”
He slipped past her, hopping close to the Destiny, which even on its side was twice his height. Tea found Taj’s tone infuriatingly cheerful “I haven’t forgotten,” she said, about to add, you fucking idiot, when she realized what the vyomanaut meant. “Oh. Right.”
Destiny had only a fraction of its ten-ton weight here. “Tea, Houston. We see your situation with, ah, hatch access. And we are recommending—”
“—That we simply roll it, copy, Houston.” Tea, you are the fucking idiot. “Stand by for magic.”
“Before you do,” Houston said, “give us five. We want to vent atmosphere.”
Of course: for uncrewed orbit operations, Destiny was pressurized to ten pounds per square inch, slightly less than it would be with a crew aboard. With all that pressure on one side, a hatch would literally blow open, possibly damaging its hinges.
Tea and Taj retreated fifty meters, to where Natalia and Lucas waited. “Thar she blows,” Tea said, as a sudden gout of vapor erupted from Destiny’s base. Within a few minutes, it was gone. Destiny’s interior pressure was now almost a vacuum.
It took the four of them, two positioned on the side of the gumdrop-shaped Destiny, two on the canlike service module. The challenge wasn’t moving the mass—which rocked slightly to the touch—it was traction. “We’ve got to dig in,” Taj said.
“I wish I had my football cleats,” Lucas said. Tea was happy to hear the World’s Greatest Astronaut speak; he had fallen completely silent over the past hour, a sure sign of exhaustion and depression.
Natalia, who had also been sullen and silent, hopped to work, digging footholds for all. (She had been clever enough to bring tools from rover Buzz.)
“Uno, dos, tres,” Lucas said . . . and the giant, bus-sized vehicle rolled twenty degrees, just enough to uncover the hatch.
“Goddamn, it worked!” she said. “Great idea, Taj!”
“Thank Zack,” Taj said.
Tea dropped to her knees, looking for the handle as she tried to orient herself. When Destiny was upright, its main hatch opened to the left . . . with the spacecraft on its side, the hatch would open toward her, like a ramp. Which would be good.
Entry was simply a matter of finding the access handle—which was on the top of the hatch, from her perspective, and almost out of reach. “Houston, Tea, I’m ready to open ’er up.”
She waited. Then Jasmine Trieu said, “Pressure is effectively zero. You’re go for open.”
The rectangular hatch, wide enough that Tea could not touch the ends if she stretched out her arms, opened easily. Tea climbed up on it, then stepped into the interior.
And almost fainted.
God, had it only been forty hours since separation? It felt as though she were visiting for the first time! There was the confusing inversion of local vertical and local horizontal—she entered the spacecraft along one of its sloping walls. The main control panel, and two unstowed couches, were directly over her head. She should have been used to that, of course; her last look at the interior had been as she dove headfirst through the hatch in its pointy nose.
Right now she was standing on a cabinet door that had not been designed—as parts of Destiny’s “floor” were—for stepping. Fortunately, with Keanu’s gravity, Tea’s fears were less about breaking or stepping through the cabinet than tracking alien ice and mud into the “house.”
Taking slow breaths, she focused on the cabin lights and on key features: the stowed couches, the personal gear held in place by webbing along another part of the wall.
Better. She turned back to the hatch, where Taj waited. Natalia and Lucas were right behind him.
“All right, everybody. Last chance. Hot food, showers, massage. Well, none of that, exactly. But I’ll think you’ll enjoy the accommodations.”
“Destiny, Houston for Tea. We need you to take a look at Panel Delta.”
Tea reacted without thinking, closing up the flight data file and dropping it in the next seat. Panel Delta was where data on Destiny’s environmental systems was displayed.
It was only an hour after she and her colleagues—survivors of the human race’s less-than-nominal First Contact mission—had sealed themselves inside Destiny. Taj and Natalia were now awkwardly camped out on the sloping “floor” next to four rigid and empty pressure suits; Lucas was wedged atop the two stowed couches.
And Tea was in T-shirt and shorts, perched above them at the command operator’s position.
The moment she had been able to close the door and restore pressure, Tea had not only removed her worn-out EVA suit, but had also stripped off her fantastically nasty undergarment. She then cleaned herself with a wad of wet wipes and shrugged into a flight suit, telling the others, “Be my guest.”
Taj had objected. “What if there’s a loss of pressure?”
“Then I’ll die comfortable,” she said. “Besides . . . your suits have different hose fittings. You can’t recharge from these tanks. You might as well clean up and change clothes, too.”
To spare the others the awkwardness of donning coveralls last worn by dead comrades, Tea had opened a cabinet and pulled out spare garments intended to be worn the last day of the mission. She hoped this was the last day of the mission.
Pogo’s size XL hung loosely on Lucas, and Tea’s spare didn’t fit tiny Natalia much better. Zack’s fit Taj as though tailored . . . which caused Tea to think about her absent friend and commander. As the others laid waste to the stored food and water, Tea radioed a quiet query to Houston about word from Zack and was only told, “Last contact was two hours ago. Nothing since then. Nothing expected.”
Now Houston had her checking environmental systems. She quickly learned why. “Houston, I’m seeing a pressure drop . . . barely over seven hundred millibars, and I think it’s gone down a point since I’ve looked.” She was too tired to do the math, or to wait for Tr
ieu to confirm those figures. “How long before we’re sucking vac?”
“It’s still on the order of hours, possibly a day or two,” Trieu told her. “But it means we have to get you off the surface ASAP.”
Taj had heard this, and so had Lucas and Natalia. The vyomanaut was already climbing into the seat next to Tea. “How much time?”
Houston answered for Tea. “You will be going LOS in the next ninety minutes. We want you off the ground before then.”
“No more than we do,” she had told them.
Just then, strangely, the spacecraft rolled. It was worse than one simple motion . . . it actually seemed to yaw a bit, too, causing Tea’s already-sensitive stomach to protest. “Okay, anyone, what the hell was that?”
Natalia said, “I thought this was solid ground!”
The nearest window to Tea showed nothing but black sky overhead. “Taj, take a look—”
The vyomanaut already had his nose up to the square window in the hatch. “There’s a lot of vapor outside!”
Lucas pulled himself up to the couch next to Tea. “Are we venting?”
Tea didn’t think so—at least, no more than before the movement—and a quick glance at all the panels confirmed it. “No indicators. Haven’t heard anything.”
Taj was getting agitated. “I think Vesuvius is active again—”
That was all Tea needed to hear. She clicked her radio. “Houston, Destiny . . . Let’s get to that departure checklist!”
Big Smart Alien
TERM COINED BY NASA ASTRONAUT ZACHARY STEWART, AUGUST 2019
To Zack, it seemed as though the Architect considered his request to release Megan.
Then it moved again, its portside appendages swiftly lashing out, touching the interior walls to Zack’s right. A third of the way up, just above the height of Zack’s head, a panel opened up—
And a body slid out.
Zack moved reflexively . . . and a good thing, too: it was a writhing, scratching, loudly protesting human female.
Megan.
They both collapsed. Fortunately, Keanu’s gravity ensured that they wouldn’t be hurt.
It took a moment before Megan realized who had caught her. “Oh my God,” was all she said.
Zack had never heard anyone so relieved. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
They regarded each other. “I keep hoping I’m eventually going to figure this out,” Zack said.
“Me, too.”
Zack turned to the Architect, who, after releasing Megan from a hole in the wall, had resumed exploration of other cabinets higher up in the chamber, using two or three of its appendages at the same time. “Any ideas?” Zack shouted.
“I think he can hear you.”
“And you would know.”
“Yes.” She seemed to be regaining strength. “Both of us know.”
“Listen, darling . . . I’m just about out of time and energy. I haven’t slept in three days, I have barely eaten . . . I’ve seen stuff I wouldn’t have thought possible. And I’ve given up my ride home. So there’s a clock on me. I don’t know whether it will be days or hours, but if you and the Architect have anything to share, please do it now.”
Megan knelt and slipped her arms around him, cradling his head the way she’d held Rachel as a child. “Ssshh,” she said, almost cooing. “I know. I do know. You were . . . incredibly brave to come here.”
“You’re the brave one—”
“Hardly. I was in an accident, then these guys brought me back. I didn’t choose any of it. But I would have, to see all this.”
“Yeah. I wish I felt luckier.”
She hushed him, just like Megan of old. “How many people ever get the chance to . . . change the history of the world? Or a couple of hundred worlds?”
“Yeah, well, my team hasn’t done a very good job so far.” He glanced up at the busy Architect. “I’d like to tell our . . . host here that that bomb was a major mistake.”
Megan leaned her head close to his again. “I think you just did.”
“You think, or you know?”
Megan looked at the Architect herself. The giant being looked back. “I know. I mean, I figured my new body had some improvements.”
“You know things you shouldn’t.”
“Even more as time goes by. It’s like I’m being prompted. I can’t just offer things up. But hear the right question—bam! Here’s an answer.”
Zack turned her face back toward him. He put his hand on her cheek . . . their first truly intimate touch, so familiar. “Who are they? What do they want? Just building or outfitting a ship like this would take the resources of an entire civilization!”
She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is . . . incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”
“You said we.”
“Yes, we. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel . . . he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”
“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”
A pause. “Yes.”
“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”
“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.
Zack was about to seize on the term candidates—for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of . . . any race?”
“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”
“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”
“It was accessing data stored in . . . the closest I can come is morphogenetic fields. The universe is filled with it . . . with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”
“Like the akashic records from the Vedas, the ‘library’ of all experiences and memories of human minds through their physical lifetimes.”
“They’re not using those terms.”
“Neither am I, really. They were Taj’s.”
“And I keep thinking of Jung. I guess we all reach for the words and concepts we already know.” She smiled. “This is like trying to explain the Internet to Benjamin Franklin. You know electricity, but you’re a long way from computers and networks.”
Zack looked up at the Architect, who seemed almost indifferent to his presence. “I feel like I’m standing outside the biggest library in the world, only it’s closed.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“Oh, God, honey, it’s not about you. It’s just . . . look at this!” He gestured at the Temple interior. “Okay, why did your friends send this vessel?”
“We’ve found a . . . presence, a challenge, another entity, and it’s been a threat to us. We came here looking for help. We think you might fill that role.”
“Against another race?”
“Another type of being, the Reivers.”
“The what? Sounds Irish.”
“I’m sure it’s Irish, Scots, Gaelic, whatever. It’s the word in my head, and it means bad guys. It’s not just that they’re enemies, they are enemies bent on exterminating us, and all memory of us. We can’t coexist.”
Zack took her by the shoulders. “But, still, it’s thousands of years in the past, hundreds of light-years from here, right? Does that threat still exist?”
“Yes. The Reivers don’t live on the same time scale humans do. They’ll be a threat for a million years.”
“In that case, I don’t know how much help we can offer. We could barely make the trip from Earth to here! When we did, it took us a day and a half to try to blow you up. We’re rude, crude, and pretty damn stupid!”
“We’ve become too unatta
ched, too machinelike. We can’t be rude or crude, though we can still be stupid. But you’re alive, and we’re not.”
Zack pointed to the busy Architect. “He looks alive to me.”
“He’s alive the same way I am.” She paused. “But he’s not the actual Architect. . . . Sorry, this is all mixed together in my brain.” Megan actually took several steps. It was another habit that Zack found heartbreaking in its familiarity . . . he had always joked that his wife was the Sundance Kid, the legendary gunslinger who could hit anything as long as he was in motion. Megan thought better when she moved. “The race of Architects is old. If you think of humans as belonging to the past million years, try a hundred times as long.
“We don’t have bodies anymore. The same technology that allows us to identify and copy souls in these circumstances means we can move a consciousness from one machine to another, or when necessary, to a . . . a reconstruction like this.” And here she gave a girlish bow. “It gives us immortality. But it costs us our ability to fight, to think creatively. To care about failure. To suffer.”
“So he’s a Revenant, too.” Zack stepped back and looked up at the busy Architect. “What is he doing?”
“Setting switches.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s one of your phrases, isn’t it? ‘Setting switches’?”
“Now you’re channeling me?”
“I lived with you for eighteen years . . . I don’t need to channel you.”
“It means configuring a cockpit. It’s what we did on Destiny.”
“I know.”
“So this building is a cockpit?”
“I think we both know it’s not really a Temple.” She thought for a moment. “How about, a command module?”
“Commanding what? Oh,” Zack said, seeing the answer to his own question. “Keanu.”
“Yeah. There are a lot of systems here. I told you there were other chambers. Some of them are bigger.”
“What’s in them? Uh, samples of these other races?”
“No one is saying.” She pointed at the Architect. “But whatever he’s doing, it’s related.”
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