Zack reached out, taking Megan’s hand. He wasn’t sure when he had leaped from reasonable skepticism to wholehearted acceptance that this was Megan . . . but he had. “You know what’s funny about this?”
“Not a lot that I can see, darling.”
“Megan, your entire life—you were the one who asked everybody all the tough questions. If you’d actually interviewed this guy, we’d have learned this stuff hours ago.”
At that moment, the giant alien stopped what it was doing. It rose to its feet with a grace Zack found surprising. At full height, it towered over the humans, but only for a moment. “Now he’s doing something else,” Zack said, taking Megan by the arm and pulling her back toward the opening. “Is he leaving?”
The Architect was already halfway across the chamber, headed for what Zack would call the back wall. “Yes,” Megan said. “We’re not the most important thing he has to deal with.”
“What could be more important than dealing with two members of this vital human race? Aren’t we the key to his future survival?”
“The race is important. The two of us, not so much.”
“And after all we’ve given up. Does he know we can’t go home?”
“Oh, he knows.”
The back wall opened, revealing the unchanged chaos outside the Temple. “We should follow,” Megan said.
“Back out there? It looks dangerous.”
“Yes.”
But she wasn’t waiting for him. She slipped out of his grasp and began following the Architect. Zack caught up with her in a few steps, as they found themselves once again outside in the near-darkness and buffeting winds.
To Zack’s horror, the Architect seemed to stagger. The creature’s staggering steps were just like those of the Sentry, before it collapsed.
“Is he all right?”
“No. Come on. We’re running out of time.”
My friends, all I can tell you is this: the wondrous rumors circulating about events on Earth’s new moon portend Great Things. Signs are being fulfilled even as we meet here tonight. The Rapture itself could be at hand. Let us pray.
THE REVEREND DICKIE BOTTOMLEY, GREATER KANSAS CITY ALL-SOULS CHURCH, AUGUST 24, 2019
“This is as far as we go in auto mode,” Harley said.
“Not a moment too soon,” Sasha Blaine said. Rachel agreed. They had left the dirt road and been bumping across muddy grass for the past few minutes. The only thing that kept Rachel from throwing up was their lack of speed.
Harley had stopped the van on the shore of Clear Lake Park, which nosed into Lake Pasadena, the brackish pool of water just south of Armand Bayou. Half a dozen fire and rescue trucks flashed rain-spattered lights from NASA Road One a hundred meters to the south, and to their left. “I think we’re inside the zone,” Sasha said.
Their view toward the Johnson Space Center was blocked by the glowing plasma dome of the Object, doing its slow churn a few hundred meters away, just across the lake. It reminded Harley of the New Orleans Superdome, only illuminated from within—and filled with strange squiggly and angular shapes that seemed to be crawling across its surface.
Or on its inside, trying to come out?
“You did it,” Rachel said. “You got us here.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Rachel and Sasha helped Harley out of the van, a process complicated by the astronaut’s insistence that he didn’t need help. “Maybe not getting out,” Sasha said, “but you’re not going to get far in the rain and mud without us, so just put a sock in it.”
The moment the wheels of Harley’s chair began to sink into the soggy grass, the complaints stopped. Fortunately, today’s rain hadn’t completely transformed the soil into muck, though in this part of Houston it wasn’t much of a transformation. Once they disengaged the power, allowing the chair’s wheels to turn freely, Sasha and Rachel were able to push Harley forward, toward the road.
They kept to the trees, partly to avoid being seen from the road, partly for shelter from the steady drumming rain.
The slow flashes of light from the Object reminded Rachel of the time she and Amy and several other friends had sneaked into the Harris County Fair. The lights of the midway and the swooping, whirling, rotating rides had blinded them—they’d failed to see a security guard and gotten caught, escaping punishment only by becoming unusually giggly and flirtatious.
“Does it bother anyone,” Harley said, “that the Object seems to have some kind of beacon?”
Sasha considered it. “It’s not very beaconlike, though, is it?”
True enough; as Rachel and Harley watched with Sasha, the lighthouse-like light seemed to pulse in an irregular pattern . . . flash, dark, flash flash, dark. “I hope it’s not a searchlight,” Harley said.
“With a heat ray behind it,” Sasha said.
“Stop it!” Rachel said.
“Sorry,” Harley said. “Sometimes we forget . . . Anyway, we’re here, as close as we can get. Now what?”
The rain had let up, though there was a strong breeze blowing in from the ship channel. “I want to go closer,” Rachel said. She had already decided that the Object was not a weapon—or it would have gone off already. It was sitting there as if waiting. . .
“Assuming that that’s a good idea,” Sasha Blaine said, “and I don’t think it is . . . how? It’s across this lake!”
Rachel pointed. “We can go across the bridge. All the cops and everybody are down the road.”
“Granted,” Harley said. “But then what? We’re here . . . we’ve had as close a look as anyone else. You are not going to touch it.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, okay? But I think we should be closer. I think it’s supposed to give us something or tell us something.”
“It’s a sophisticated piece of alien hardware! Why doesn’t it just send us a signal?”
“I’m going to find out,” Rachel said. “You can come along or wait here.”
She broke from them and sprinted toward the causeway. But in the dark, the mud and gravel defeated her. She lost her footing trying to climb up to the road, slipped, and slid back to the bottom.
As she was getting to her feet—and Harley and Sasha approached, furious with her—a new light fell on the trio. “Hey, you people—freeze!”
Rachel thought she was going to pass out. Then five men walked forward, and one of them turned out to be Shane Weldon.
“We followed you,” Bynum told Harley. Weldon, Bynum, and their passengers all helped lift Harley up to the causeway.
“Not very closely.”
“We had to stop to pick up some instruments,” Weldon said. He pointed to one of his team, a young man with a boxlike object slung over his shoulder.
“Is that an actual Geiger counter?” Sasha Blaine said.
“Yeah. The best we could do on short notice,” Weldon said. “We got that, a camera”—he raised a Nikon still camera like those astronauts used on missions—“and a spectrometer.” Another of the party was struggling with a box twice the size of the Geiger counter. “That baby was built for lunar surface ops about ten years ago. I’m not sure it even works.”
“Gotta love NASA planning.”
“Don’t worry,” Weldon said. “I’ve got a real team putting together a set of instruments that will be able to tell what this thing had for breakfast this morning.” He nodded toward the Object, which now loomed over them like a dome-shaped building.
“Speaking of breakfast,” Sasha Blaine said. “What was the latest on the material this thing seemed to be ingesting? It appears to be sucking up water, mud, and even some vegetation.”
“There might be some small absorption, right, Brent?” Weldon said, looking at the sodden, sullen White House man. “But nothing major. We don’t feel as though Earth is about to be sucked into some kind of mini–black hole—”
“—At least, not this particular moment,” Bynum said.
“Can we just go?” Rachel said. The entire party was now on the cau
seway, but they had not moved forward. Rachel was happy not to have been arrested, and grateful for the helping hands . . . but she felt she had to get to the Object as soon as possible. Or she’d lose her nerve.
Harley took Rachel’s hand. “Okay, we’re going—”
“No.” Brent Bynum stepped in front of them, a pistol in his hand. “This is a hostile entity. None of us should be this close. I authorized it so we could gather data.”
“Brent—” Weldon stepped forward.
“Stop right there!” Bynum screamed. To Harley the White House man looked unhinged. He could hardly blame him. “I’m . . . responsible!”
“No,” Harley said. “I’m responsible. You and Shane told me. You had me sign the documents. I’m the official in charge of alien encounters. And I say we go.” Bynum was wavering, unsure.
“Look,” Harley said, “as far as the White House is concerned, I’m still in charge—and I’ll be blamed.” He held out his hand. “And take a step back, Brent. We’ve been reacting, not acting.” Harley pointed to the Object looming in the near-distance. “Would that thing be here if we hadn’t set off a goddamn bomb on Keanu? Give me the weapon. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Bynum seemed happy to be rid of it.
As Harley dropped the piece into his lap and placed his hands on his wheels, he couldn’t help noting that he was shaking.
And that everyone was immediately trying to forget what just happened.
Within moments, the party had carefully advanced across the bridge, with Sasha Blaine looking over the railing for signs of Object-related sucking. “So far, so good.”
“Look,” Harley said. Off to their right, on the other side of the lagoon, still well north of the Object, half a dozen lights bobbed in the darkness. “I hope they’re on our side.”
“This might just be the most dangerous fucking thing I’ve ever done,” Weldon said.
“I certainly hope so,” Harley said, to general laughter.
Let’s review the bidding. There might be intelligent life on Keanu, which is no longer a NEO but likely a starship . . . at least one astronaut is dead, two others are missing . . . and both JSC and Bangalore have lost contact with the landing craft. And now two “objects” have slammed into the Earth’s surface.
Am I missing anything? Has the entire universe gone insane?
POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM
You’re actually missing quite a lot. Stand by.
POSTER JSC GUY, SAME SITE
“Two minutes, we’re go for pop-up. Enabling RCS two and four. Go for main at plus two ten.”
Tea Nowinski was strapped into the left-hand couch of the Destiny, with Taj to her right. Behind them—and, once Destiny translated to a nose-up, tail-down orientation, below them—Natalia and Lucas were simply stretched out on a “bed” of netting that held the discarded EVA suits. It was not the most comfortable situation, but the g-forces associated with a launch from Keanu’s gravity field would be minimal. “About like a fast elevator,” Jasmine Trieu told her. Tea didn’t even need the straps at her seat. But she wanted them; they were a physical reminder that her vehicle was about to change locations.
“We show six-eighty on cabin pressure,” Tea reported, knowing Houston could see the same figure, but just to remind the team of that looming problem. She could not get a handle on the leak. Pressure wasn’t dropping in some straight line, suggesting some blockage somewhere. Destiny’s environmental system was pumping air into the cabin to compensate. That couldn’t go on forever, of course. They had to get off Keanu, and back to Earth.
“RCS is go, main engine is go,” Houston radioed, after the lag, which Tea now judged to be the most irritating thing she had ever experienced in her life. The reaction control system was a series of four small quads of rockets positioned equidistantly around Destiny’s service module. They were usually fired when Destiny needed to reorient itself.
Today, in this most unusual operation, they would actually lift the spacecraft off the increasingly unstable surface of Keanu. “We’d like to have clearance from the ground before we light the main,” Josh Kennedy had told her.
“If you like it, we like it,” Tea had responded. She saw the logic; even though the thrust of Destiny’s main engine would quickly lift the vehicle off the surface, there was no real way of predicting just how soon . . . it might scrape the ground for fifty or two hundred meters before getting airborne, certainly causing more damage.
“One minute.”
“I hope we don’t get any more movements,” Taj said.
“No negative thoughts, okay?” Tea told him.
There had been concern about whether the RCS quads had come through the snowplow intact, or through that shocking movement caused by either melting snow or some other external factor. Quad number one faced downward at the moment, buried in Keanu snow. JSC’s data showed that it was still intact—no fuel leaking, at any rate—but no one could know whether the small nozzles had been bent, and if so, how they would perform.
Fortunately, the pop-up burn didn’t require quad number one, but rather numbers two and four.
“It will be nice to see home again,” Natalia said, trying to correct for Taj’s gloom.
“For some of us,” Lucas said.
“Thirty seconds,” Tea said, knowing she sounded snappish, not to mention a couple of seconds ahead of the actual count. She couldn’t help it. Ever since buttoning Destiny’s hatch, all she could think about was the horrifying truth that she was abandoning Zack. A colleague. A good man. A man she loved.
It didn’t matter that he’d ordered her to do it. Who cared that she really had no choice? He was going to die, and for the rest of her life she would know it was her fault.
“Fifteen.” She brushed tears out of her eyes, then put her hand on the controller.
It didn’t seem to take long at all. Twin whumps! sounded in the cabin and Tea felt herself being lifted and, more annoyingly, flung forward. “We’re up, Houston!” She thumbed the pickle switch on the controller, activating it and firing a burst from a smaller reaction rocket on Destiny’s nose . . . Houston had warned her that Destiny might go a few degrees nose-down when the RCS—aft of the combined vehicle’s center of gravity—ignited.
It had, and Tea’s immediate action seemed to correct it.
Destiny’s main engine lit at that moment, delivering a substantial bang and jolt. The RCS shut down at that point. And they were off.
Tea had a window, but all it showed was the black of Keanu’s sky. She looked instead at the instruments, especially the altimeter, which showed them already at fifty meters . . . seventy-five . . . “How high were those mountains?” she asked.
“Now who’s the pessimist?” Taj said. He was craning to see out one of the other windows.
Before the burn reached its one-minute point, Tea knew they were clear. Not necessarily safe . . . there were still several tricky maneuvers to perform to put Destiny back on an Earth-return trajectory, at which point the concern would be the small matter of guiding the giant gumdrop command module through the searing, deadly plasma of reentry.
And, oh yes, before the air ran out.
But they were off Keanu. Away from whatever the hell was going on down there. Away from the vaporized bodies of lost comrades—and of two spacecraft.
Away from Zack and his reborn wife.
It had to be.
At three minutes plus, the main engine shut down. Tea radioed the news, then waited for Houston to tell them: “Destiny, copy shutdown. Pleased to inform you, you are now in orbit around planet Earth. You are free to maneuver to attitude.”
Tea grabbed the controller again and fired a small tweak. She wanted to see where Keanu was. . . .
Not far, as it turned out. The altimeter showed Destiny at fifteen thousand meters and climbing rapidly. That was high enough to show the NEO as a crescent.
“Got your camera, Taj?” Tea said. She thumbed the radio switch. “Houston, are you seeing this?”<
br />
She didn’t know how to describe it. Keanu’s surface appeared to be melting . . . giant ripples swept across the surface, like waves on a lake . . . Entire sections of the ice were breaking up, like chunks of Antarctica during the Big Melt. There were small eruptions, too, shooting geysers into the sky . . . likely with debris.
Something was happening down there, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to be close to.
“And, Houston, we would welcome, uh, separation data.”
Tea’s message overlapped with Jasmine Trieu’s answer to the first, about the imagery. “What does it look like to you, Destiny?”
“I think the place is coming apart!”
Part Five
“FOR THE DEAD ARE FREE”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on
And our little lives are rounded with a sleep.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST
Following the Architect was like chasing Frankenstein’s monster through a blizzard . . . Megan clung to Zack’s hand as they both ducked flying debris and tried to keep the giant creature in sight.
It wasn’t easy. The light was low, the equivalent of the moments before sunset. The wind was strong and gusting and would have forced them to shield their eyes even absent clouds of tiny particles.
“I hope Camilla’s safe,” Zack said. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“She was scooped up the same time I was,” Megan said. “I assume she was taken to the Temple, but I just don’t know. I keep feeling we should stay and search for her.”
“Me, too,” Zack said, “but finding her won’t solve the immediate problem. Might just make things worse for all of us.”
The Architect led Zack and Megan out of the Temple and across the by-now-familiar scorched cornfield, then took a sharp turn into what seemed to be a huge ovoid tunnel. The Big Smart Alien, as Zack dubbed him, was no longer staggering—perhaps he’d found his legs again after centuries or millennia in storage.
“Any idea where this leads?” Zack shouted to Megan.
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