The Architect, all eight meters of him, dead at the base of the open structure . . . sliced and diced like Pogo Downey.
Zack looked at Megan, who was looking away from the body. “No wonder you weren’t getting answers.”
Zack could be clinical and objective about the mangled Architect’s body—it wasn’t sufficiently human to arouse empathy. But the smell made him want to gag . . . and so did the realization that he and Megan were now truly on their own. Not that the Architect had been a very useful guide . . . but he seemed to be in charge of operations, or at least the flow of information.
Now what did they have?
In one of the passages to his left, he saw Camilla, terrified, runny-nosed, a child in a situation no child should ever imagine, much less face.
Directly across from her, in one of the passages on Zack’s right, stood a Sentry. It had an appalling bluish ichor—the Architect’s blood?—on its appendages.
“Zack, darling,” Megan said.
He didn’t answer. He was too fascinated by the Sentry . . . it was actually trembling, as if struggling. It turned its head back and forth, scanning. “I’m going to tackle the bad boy.”
“No, you’re not. I want you to pick up Camilla and go back to the tunnel, back to the Temple, anywhere but here. . . .”
He looked at her and was terrified by what he saw. Megan was pale, shrunken and hunched, as if suffering abdominal pain.
“Hang on—”
“Don’t say that! It’s over for me! Let me distract the Sentry while you get away—”
“I’m not leaving you—”
“You don’t have any choice. I may not last ten more minutes.”
He wanted to argue, but the evidence was compelling. She could barely stand. And yet her eyes blazed, reminding him of the angriest she had ever been at him . . . for some offense he could no longer remember. Or chose not to remember. “I lost you once. I can’t do it again!”
Suddenly her eyes were no longer fierce, but filled with tears. “You have to. Just remember . . . ‘the dead are free.’” She flung herself at him, for the shortest, most heartfelt hug of their nearly twenty years together, as well as a last kiss. “Now get the girl and go!”
Without waiting to see what Zack did, Megan charged directly at the Sentry.
Which turned its attention to her like some jungle beast. Then it opened itself and engulfed her.
Zack forced himself to look away and run toward Camilla.
He scooped her up. She hardly seemed to weigh anything, which was good.
It was time to run.
I wish to commend Destiny commander Stewart for his heroism in extraordinary circumstances. He has proved himself to be a true hero for the entire human race.
MESSAGE FROM BRAHMA COMMANDER T. RADHAKRISHNAN TO THE WORLD,
24 AUGUST 2019
“We’re coming up on the terminator,” Tea said.
A series of posigrade rocket burns had pushed Destiny out of the immediate clouds of debris surrounding Keanu, eventually dropping the vehicle into a lower orbit around Earth.
Of course, when even the perigee of that orbit was more than four hundred thousand kilometers, close was only a relative term.
The maneuvers also put Destiny on the dark side of Keanu. They could see the lopsided halo of the debris cloud shining in light from the Sun, of course . . . but the NEO’s surface was black, hidden, unknowable.
For a few moments, anyway.
“Destiny, Houston. Still showing you on track for retrofire in thirty minutes.”
“Copy that, Houston. Hope you can take some time off then.” Jasmine Trieu was still on duty as capcom—a fifteen-hour shift, if Tea had it right.
“I’m happy to stay here as long as you need me,” Trieu said. “Right up to splashdown, if necessary.”
“We’ll be getting some sleep before then,” Tea replied. Retrofire would put Destiny into an orbit with a much lower perigee . . . one that would intersect Earth’s surface about three days from now. “You should, too.”
Trieu’s answer was delayed by the lag, of course. Tea looked around the cabin. Lightly attached to the floor by bungee cords, Natalia Yorkina was sound asleep, eyes covered by Tea’s mask.
Lucas and Taj were yawning but kept busy bouncing between a laptop and one of the windows as they updated Russian mission control—the backup for destroyed Bangalore—on what had happened to Brahma.
Tea didn’t care what the rest of the world knew, or didn’t. She had no idea whether her conversations with Houston were being carried live.
She just wanted it to be over, to take the memories of Keanu and the resurrected Megan Stewart and the vaporized remains of Venture . . . and Zack Stewart’s sad, knowing smile . . . and hide them somewhere, like photos in a family album, to be opened at some happier time.
“Oh, Destiny from Houston. A bit of news. Tracking shows increased delta V for the NEO.”
“You mean it’s moving?” Tea had spent her entire professional life in engineering, most of that in NASA. She understood the need for precise usage . . . but there were times, like now, when she just wanted someone to use plain English.
“Tea,” Taj said. “Look out the window.”
While Tea waited for Jasmine Trieu to clarify her last statement, she floated up to the window, where dayside Keanu was coming into view.
She gasped.
Narrow swaths of Keanu’s surface were gone, exposing a shiny white surface. The NEO looked like an apple someone had started to peel. “What the hell?”
“Some of the snow and regolith are boiling away,” Taj said.
“I think that pretty soon it’s going to look like a big fat pearl,” Lucas said.
“Well,” she said, “we knew it was really a ship of some kind.” A ship that seemed to be shedding an accretion of debris gathered over ten thousand years. Shedding a skin to enter a new phase.
“Destiny, Houston, confirming: There have been eruptions on Keanu that are consistent with, uh, propulsion. It seems to be leaving Earth orbit.”
It was going farther than that, surely. “Houston, Destiny, I think our NEO is going home.”
It would be seven seconds before she heard an answer, but Tea Nowinski didn’t need it.
She was going home, too.
But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death.
GENESIS 2:17
Dragging Camilla, Zack emerged from the Factory tunnel to the Temple chamber into a shower. Rain was falling and blowing sideways. It wasn’t a downpour, nor was it a tropical gully-washer like those he’d experienced in Houston. It was more like a rainy day in the Pacific Northwest . . . but warmer! It actually felt good to have some of the grime wash away.
It felt better to let some of the water trickle into his mouth. He could not remember the last time he’d had a drink. He actually scooped some out of a shallow puddle and offered it to Camilla. “This could kill us,” he said. “But without it we’re going to die of thirst.”
This small gesture toward survival took Zack’s mind off the idea that the same Sentry that had killed his wife and the Architect was on their trail.
No sign of him so far. The respite allowed Zack time to consider his next move. Now that you’ve done such a great job solving the water problem.
Through the mist he could see, a kilometer distant, the top of the Temple rising over what, for lack of the proper term, he would have to call trees. He had no special desire to return there, but it was the only possible shelter he knew—and the only door he might be able to close.
“Come on,” he told the girl, knowing his words weren’t being understood, but hoping his gestures conveyed the message.
Camilla didn’t respond. She was looking past Zack, behind him—
Toward the tunnel.
Zack turned . . . and there was the fucking Sentry. The colloidal bubble dribbling out of the creature’s tool vest and d
own its torso was bloody. It made Zack want to rip the being apart with his bare hands.
That not being an option, he picked up Camilla and, hoping the Sentry had not yet seen them, plunged into the nearest stand of trees.
Camilla whimpered. It wasn’t loud, it was understandable . . . but it was potentially fatal. As Zack glanced back, he saw that the Sentry had heard the girl.
And was after them.
Knowing they would be faster if he dragged Camilla rather than carried her, Zack dropped the girl and led her through the trees. They had some advantage here . . . the trunks were close together. They could slip through, but the Sentry would have a more difficult time—
Until the creature simply slashed at several trees, clearing his way.
There was no point in looking back. Zack kept his eyes forward, always on the Temple. “Stay with me,” he said. “Keep going.” He was speaking to himself as well as to Camilla.
The clearing around the Temple loomed. The crash and crunch of trees being torn up told Zack that the Sentry was probably fifty meters behind.
Get ready to run—
They broke into the clearing, where Zack took three steps, tripped, and sprawled on his face, taking Camilla down with him.
That was it. He had fucked up and now he was going to die, like Pogo, like Megan. . . .
With the last of his strength, he rolled toward Camilla, who was lying on her back, eyes closed, as if she had already given up. “Run,” Zack said, making shooing gestures. At least he could get the girl away safely, not that the poor child was likely to survive long here, alone.
But Camilla refused to move.
Okay, then, time to face the truth. Zack rose to a crouch, looking around for stalks or husks of whatever vegetation had been cleared for the Temple. He still believed that a sharp stick might be useful—
Crack! The top half of several trees less than a meter away disintegrated into a shower of sticks and knifelike shards, slashed away by the Sentry.
It had caught up to them.
The creature was growing in apparent size, its protective bubble expanding around its middle pairs of arms without hindering them. Now Zack could see that the semiliquid came from its vest. No matter . . . the Sentry was winding up for a killing slash at the prone Camilla. Without thinking, Zack reached for one of the shards at his feet and flung it at the Sentry.
The jagged spear bounced off the creature’s major right-side appendages, but not without leaving a wound.
The Sentry whipped all of its left-side arms at Zack, who fell flat on his back dodging the attack.
He found himself looking right up into the Sentry’s face. It wasn’t horrific, just cold, implacable, like that of an executioner about to trigger the guillotine—
This is it, Zack thought—
But the Sentry didn’t make the killing blow. It suddenly twitched to one side.
Camilla had flung herself at the creature and was clinging to its right leg.
As the Sentry turned to brush her off, Zack had enough time to locate a sharp, sturdy spear.
With a whimper, Camilla went flying.
When the Sentry turned back, Zack stabbed it in the vest, pushing through the colloidal bubble. Which collapsed in a shower of watery goo.
For a long, anguished moment, the Sentry stood in what could only have been shock and surprise, its appendages waving in confusion, a greenish ichor bubbling out of its torso, then its throat.
Then it collapsed and began to curl into itself, rolling into a ball that began to hiss and steam.
“Camilla!” Zack ran to the girl. She was crying, badly scratched, but not seriously injured. He picked her up.
Within a few minutes they had worked their way around to the rear of the Temple, the side that had opened for the Architect. It was still open, revealing the empty chamber where he and Megan had first encountered the being.
Where he had left his radio.
He thought of Megan. As a working reporter, as a mother, she was famous for making realistic assessments of situations. Her most overworked phrase was, “Hoping won’t make it happen.”
Zack was out of hope. He did not expect to leave Keanu. He did not expect to survive more than a few days at best.
But if he could get in touch with Houston, if he could somehow tell them what had happened.
If he could talk to Rachel—!
He left Camilla at the threshold of the chamber, making it as clear as possible that he wanted her to stay put. Then he began searching. . . .
It took only a few moments to locate the Zeiss right where he had set it down.
Five minutes later, he was ready to smash it. He could not make it work! All the buttons were operating as before—the power indicator lit. But there was no link, no response, nothing.
Where was Camilla?
Leaving the radio behind, he ran out of the Temple, calling, “Camilla!”
Off to his left, a few steps into the forest, a hand appeared.
Zack found that the girl had plucked some purplish soft gourd off a tree.
“Hey, don’t eat that!”
Too late . . . Camilla had already bitten off a good chunk. Zack reached for her, hoping to get her to spit it out, but the girl scampered away, chewing happily.
She climbed up one of the trees, parking on a branch just out of reach, and like a primate avoiding a keeper, happily finished the fruit.
Zack watched Camilla carefully. She showed no signs of instant rejection . . .
And she was starving. “What the hell,” he said. “Eventually we’re going to have to do this.” He went back to the tree and plucked his own piece of Keanu fruit. The texture was like a green pear; the taste reminded him of mango.
He must have liked it, because he devoured it right down to a core.
After a while, still feeling full—not poisoned—but terminally exhausted, he led Camilla into the Temple, where they curled up against the farthest wall.
His last thoughts, as he lost awareness, were sad ones. He would never see Megan or Rachel again.
We have entered a new age.
PRESIDENT’S REMARKS, AUGUST 24, 2019
. . . and I don’t like it much.
POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM
Lucas Munaretto woke in great confusion. He was floating, though wrapped in a light sleeping bag. The Destiny cabin was dark, except for the gentle glow of several LEDs on the instrument panel. The windows had been covered. For a good few moments, he thought he was still aboard Brahma approaching Keanu.
Then he remembered, and wished he hadn’t.
He could see his fellow travelers, all asleep in their own bags . . . Tea, her hair an unbound halo, somehow appropriate for the sacrifices she had made, and the skill she had shown in getting them all aboard Destiny, off Keanu, and now falling toward reentry. She would be a hero once she returned to Houston . . . sadder, yes, but with an unlimited future.
Then there was Natalia Yorkina, wrapped too tightly, of course, like a woman in pain. Given nagging equipment failures—Lucas had done an EVA in an overheating Russian suit, and it almost drove him mad—she had done well. From the mysterious exchanges between Zack and her, and the quick disappearance of her Revenant, Lucas suspected a dark secret that would haunt Natalia. But only he and Taj could embarrass her, and neither would. Natalia would return to Russia and some make-work job with Roscosmos, slipping into anonymity.
The largest figure in the cabin was Lucas’s commander, Taj, who had submerged his intense dislike of American arrogance in order to bring most of his crew home safely. Taj would be publicly acclaimed in India; Shiva only knew what kinds of criticism he would face in private, both for the extraordinary losses of spacecraft and Chertok, and for allowing Zack Stewart to make so many vital, and possibly flawed, decisions. Ultimately, though, Taj would be promoted . . . he would go back to the Indian Air Force to command a fighter wing, or he might stay on as a leader in ISRO.
No, all of the others would be happ
y to reach Earth. Only Lucas Munaretto felt that he had left something undone.
Camilla, of course. He had never been that close to Isobel and her family . . . Camilla’s birth had occurred when Lucas was away training for his space station mission.
He never knew the girl, not really. Was that why he had been so useless to her in her second life? He had held her, yes, comforted her, fine, given her voice with the others, great, told her her mother loved her, all good. But that was all. He had not learned what she saw, what she felt. He had made no move to bring her back, had stood by helpless as she was taken.
And yet he did not know whether she was still alive, or as she had been before. What was he going to tell Sepal?
Then there was Zack Stewart . . . abandoned on an alien world, left to die.
No, the only failure was the World’s Greatest Astronaut. He should have stayed.
He knew he would carry that guilt all his days.
It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.
VOLTAIRE
Zack woke with Camilla curled into a crouch and facing him. He had had terrible dreams of being chased, and then being shaken, like sleeping through a thunderstorm.
The light streaming into the rear of the Temple looked different . . . brighter somehow.
Leaving Camilla to her sleep, Zack walked outside.
No wonder he had dreamed of a storm. The environment had obviously gone through a radical change in the past few hours, from the vaguely Amazonian jungle to what could now pass for North American forest.
There was no more rain, no wind blowing. The glowworms were back in the sky, a network of bright yellow-white light.
But something was happening in the chamber. Zack could hear . . . voices?
He ran around to the front of the Temple. Coming toward him was a ragged stream of people! He had never been good with crowds and numbers, but there were hundreds of them. Many appeared to be from India; the men were all wearing that subcontinent’s uniform of white shirt and trousers, the women and children in colorful garb.
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