“Now who’s the pessimist?” she said.
“You have rubbed off on me.” A horn blared nearby, startling both of them. All around them, the business of Yelahanka Air Base continued as it always had. Buses and Jeeps passed—some distance away, prevented from approaching the hospital—but audible, visible, and smellable.
On the flight line not far away, a jet engine had been revved up . . . likely for maintenance, not preflight. In the relative quiet between revs, they had been able to put their heads close together and be heard. Now, however, the jet was running at military power, it seemed—without break.
“That’s a good thing, right?” Rachel said.
“Yes, it means no one can overhear us as we plot.” When she shot him a look, he said, “Come on, Rachel, if we are being so closely observed, it’s because they are suspicious and assume we are plotting.”
“It just . . . I wish I had more experience.” She knew she was displaying more caution than the situation warranted. They had trained themselves to operate “like you are visiting China,” Zhao had told them. As a former Guan Bao agent, he knew the means and methods.
Which were constant audio surveillance wherever they went inside a building, tails and shadows whenever they left, and likely directional microphones aimed at them when they spoke outside—as they were now.
“But lipreading is easy to beat,” Zhao had told them, “if you’re careful, especially if you lean close and block the cameras.” And while computer enhancement would easily separate human words from background jet engine noise, it would take time.
“Don’t you think they assume we have ways of communicating with . . . Manchester United?” Pav was sensitive on this subject, since he had come up with the code name.
“Why don’t you just say ‘Keanu’ and be done with it?”
It was his turn to shoot her a look. “Fine. They will assume we are in touch, they will assume we are about our own business, and, in fact, they would be far more suspicious if their surveillance showed that we were hiding nothing.”
“Which is why,” Rachel said, “I wish I had a cigarette.”
“I’ll ask one of the guards, how about that?”
She took his hand, trying to tell him, in the most secret way possible, that she really wasn’t angry with him. She pulled him close, to speak directly into his left ear. “I never expected to be scouting, then attacking an entire continent.”
He rocked back and laughed out loud. “Me, neither! And it’s time to start, especially . . .”
Rain had started to fall, big fat drops that felt like fingers tapping on Rachel’s back and shoulders.
As she and Pav turned, they saw Yahvi in the doorway, looking up, fear on her face.
“Honey,” Rachel said, “what’s wrong?”
“What is this?”
Rachel realized that her Keanu-born daughter had never experienced rain. The regular habitat mist, yes, but nothing like this tropical pelting.
“It’s rain, darling. It won’t hurt you.”
Then Yahvi sneezed. Rachel and Pav looked at each other. “Come on,” Pav said, “inside now!”
Rachel took the lead in putting Yahvi to bed. Thank God for the gift of the Beta!
She and Pav agreed that Rachel would go in search of soup while Pav would locate Xavier and make arrangements for the cargo. “This is suspiciously traditional,” Pav said, before departing. “This division of labor.”
“These are special circumstances,” Rachel said. She hoped, however, that Pav heeded the warning tone: She would rather have been seeing to their cargo than filling this domestic role.
But sometimes a girl needed a mother. As one who had lost hers at exactly this age, Rachel understood.
Leaving Yahvi with her soup, Rachel was met by Taj, who announced, “I just saw Pav. And I am happy to tell you that we have found three potential agents for you!”
That simple phrase infuriated her. “We”? “For you”? Rachel knew she was, as Harley Drake would say, spring-loaded. Poor sleep, general tension, Yahvi’s condition, Pav’s eager escape from domesticity, her father-in-law—in itself an unfamiliar concept—going paternal on her, and talking to Pav first! It all combined to cause Rachel to snap.
“Why don’t we roll that back a few pages, and let me see all of the applicants and interested parties so I can pick three. Maybe they’ll be the same. But maybe they won’t.”
She could see Taj’s head drop a perceptible quarter of an inch, a gesture clearly indicating a sense of persecution, and one he shared with his son, which was why Rachel recognized it—and grew even more furious.
“There are no applicants,” he said, with what Rachel was sure he considered extreme patience, “only three agents that we approached. The landing is still officially classified.”
“Perhaps we should move up the announcement.”
“It is scheduled for two hours from now. How much earlier can we make it? And still give your agent a head start?”
His answers were logical and correct, which did nothing to make Rachel happier. “You’re not empowered to make decisions for us.”
Taj stiffened. “I didn’t realize I was making decisions. I will resume searching—”
Rachel realized that she had become unpleasant. One of the benefits of reaching her middle thirties was that she eventually recognized that she was losing her temper . . . in time to salvage the moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The three candidates will be fine. Where was Pav?”
“Enduring a conversation with Mrs. Remilla and her senior staff.” The deadpan use of a word like enduring was just the thing Pav would have done to soothe Rachel, and it almost worked. “They have him trapped.”
“Why?” Aside from general sympathy for her husband and lover, Rachel was concerned for his primary mission, which was the cargo.
“There are questions about your immigration status. A Foreigners Regional Registration Counselor is still not willing to consider issuing temporary visas for your crew.” Now Taj smiled, and Rachel saw her husband’s face—older, but handsome and engaging. Her anger drained away. “The Sentry’s status is a particular challenge, given that he is an extraterrestrial alien.”
“Earth is full of such aliens already, you said.”
“India is not. The Reivers aren’t welcome here. To my knowledge, none have ever tried to enter the country.”
“You’d better hope so.”
She followed Taj to the conference room, where Pav was indeed sequestered with Remilla and several male bureaucrats. Pav jumped to his feet eagerly, confirming his father’s description of a torturous meeting.
He told Rachel what was going on with the visas. “We’re cleared to remain in India for thirty days. We’re being treated as though we were on a work visa and our cargo as personal possessions not subject to duties.”
“Thank you, darling.” She put arms around him and kissed him, something she still enjoyed after so many years. (And didn’t mind doing in front of others.)
Her gratitude was genuine. She and Pav had spent a great deal of time planning the return to Earth, but concentrated on the technical challenges: trajectories, fuel, targets, communications. They had no real way of knowing what it would be like to be here—and then move forward. Would India be under some kind of martial law?
The meeting was breaking up, thank goodness. Remilla and Taj herded the immigration men out of the room, leaving Rachel and Pav alone. “Tough, huh?”
He smiled. “Among the many things we don’t have at home . . . bureaucracies and paperwork.”
“Give us time.”
“Well, here on Earth, it’s only going to get more difficult,” Pav said. “We’ll be in the news, we’ll have this media agent, then . . .”
He yawned.
“Are you as tired as I am?” Rachel said. Pav didn’t need to answer
; it was on his face. “Let’s be old folks at home for the moment,” she said, using a phrase her father loved, describing family nights. “Soup for Yahvi, then bed.”
“Tomorrow, the world,” Pav murmured.
QUESTION: Rachel, you have spoken about the challenges of simply surviving for twenty years in a habitat created by aliens using their technology—
RACHEL: First of all, the habitat was designed and built to accommodate humans.
QUESTION: How?
RACHEL: Ask the Architects.
QUESTION: Then back to my—
RACHEL: The same Architects equipped us with two things . . . one was the proteus, which is a 3-D printer evolved by a few thousand years. It’s a device that can replicate or fabricate just about anything, from food to tools to electronic equipment and even chemicals.
QUESTION: Sounds like magic.
RACHEL: Or just technology that’s far more advanced than ours. What would Ben Franklin have thought of a computer? We also needed one other thing to make the proteus work, and that was Substance K, which is essentially nanotech goo. Almost everything in Keanu was made of it. After living there for twenty years and eating food derived from it, I’m probably made of Substance K.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040
XAVIER
Xavier Toutant was not part of the big negotiations. It was not his thing, though during the prelaunch preparations he had been quite amused to hear Rachel and Pav and Harley Drake and the others talking about rights deals and money, since not one of the HBs had dealt with the subject since the day they were scooped off Earth in 2019.
Maybe that showed how shortsighted they all were, or possibly they had evolved past such mundane concerns.
At the moment, however, Xavier Toutant was consumed by his job, his mission, which was cargo.
The crew had only taken basic travel gear off Adventure—clothes, a little food, toiletries. Everything else that might have been interesting or useful remained aboard the spacecraft, including their own Keanu-built Slates and 3-D printing gear, but most important of all . . . a ton of goo.
Which was what Xavier had been calling it since the day he’d arrived on Keanu as a nineteen-year-old junior fry cook and failed pot dealer. The Bangalores came up with several names for it—NanoTech Slurry, Building Block, and mostly Substance K—but it was still the raw material that, they had discovered, filled whatever part of the interior of Keanu that wasn’t good old rock. There were even pipes that allowed Keanu’s control system to pump huge gobs of the stuff from one place to another.
The HBs had never learned how to make more of it. Keanu had vats and pools where it was obvious that goo was “grown” from raw materials that you would find in space (water being number one). They had built their own “pipeline” to transfer goo from these pockets back to the human habitat. Maintaining and redirecting that line was one of the most time-consuming jobs in the whole habitat.
Because the things you could do with the goo were . . . anything. Feed it into your proteus, then imprint it with assembly data, and you could make it into a metal machine or a composite structure or a cow or a bowl of gumbo—bowl and gumbo, which seriously impressed Xavier the cook.
In the past, goo had been used to make actual human beings. They didn’t live long, but that wasn’t the fault of the goo.
But it was what made life on Keanu possible. (All the habitats started out as giant empty chambers with a layer of goo that could be “rearranged” into soil, plants, buildings, and then some of the items already mentioned. Built to suit: Humans got an Earth-like habitat, Sentries got an aquatic one, Skyphoi got whatever the fuck they lived in, and so on.)
Adventure had several tanks of goo stored on the lower deck of the vehicle, right below the control module they had lived in for four days. It was Xavier’s job to make sure it was still there.
And to figure out how to transfer it, store it, and make it useful.
Because—and this was the real reason Xavier ducked out of the media agent auction—the goo and the “magic” 3-D proteus printing were going to fund the mission, not the crew’s “personal stories.”
Xavier was happy to spend his time making that a reality. His other goals here on Earth were minimal. All he’d left behind was his momma, and she was close to death the day he was scooped up in 2019. His first mission, once he was able to use a computer, or whatever they called it these days, was to find out when she’d died and where she was buried.
Taj, who in Xavier’s mind was turning out to be a good guy, and Wing Commander Kaushal, perhaps a bit less good, offered up a cargo truck, willing hands, and a weapons bunker after Xavier told them, “I’ll need secure storage for whatever I take off Adventure.”
“For how long?” Kaushal said.
“On the order of two weeks.” The figure was anywhere between two days and infinity, so two weeks seemed a good compromise.
Did Xavier need refrigeration or temperature control? No. Were there special handling needs? Well, yes—he may have suggested that there was a chance of a dangerous radiation leak.
Which made Wing Commander Kaushal unhappy. “What were you thinking, bringing radioactives to my base?” The look he shot at Taj said, pretty clearly, I’m not doing this—!
But Xavier and Pav had war-gamed this argument. “Do you have depleted uranium cannon shells?” he said.
Kaushal stared back. “I can’t answer that.”
“Fine,” Xavier said, “let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you might have a case around here somewhere. One case of those shells emits more radioactivity than our entire two tons in a year.”
This seemed to mollify Kaushal. It was the absolute truth without being the whole truth: The goo emitted no radiation at all.
But Xavier wanted Kaushal and his team to think it did. It would keep prying hands and eyes away.
He was introduced to Chief Warrant Officer Singh, a man of forty so dark and fat he could have been Xavier’s twin. The man’s grim, businesslike manner gave no hint of brotherly affection, however. It was clear he regarded Xavier with suspicion.
Singh’s team included four others in descending seniority and age: a sergeant, a corporal, and two leading aircraftsmen. The latter two were probably twenty years old.
There was another warrant officer, Pandya, who was Singh’s opposite in almost every way: ten years younger, fifty kilos lighter, relaxed and often smiling.
He deferred to Singh perfectly, which confirmed Xavier’s hunch that he was the representative of the Indian intelligence services.
Xavier had two trucks and the cherry picker at his disposal—quite a fleet for a guy who had never owned a car and hadn’t driven in two decades. They headed to the landing site directly after breakfast on the second day, Xavier jammed into the first truck cab with Singh and a driver. Two heavyweights in that small, crammed space, and no air-conditioning. It was the longest half kilometer Xavier had ever ridden.
April in Bangalore was like April in New Orleans, or Houston. Humid and, even before ten in the morning, headed for high heat. Xavier said as much to CWO Singh, who shrugged, as if he were weak. “April is the hottest month here, though not the wettest. That’s August.”
“That’s good,” Xavier said. “We only have to risk heatstroke, not drowning.” The driver, one of the enlisteds, laughed—to be silenced by a glare from Singh.
They parked, then grabbed masks and gloves, and, once the cherry picker was back in operation, Xavier rode up to the Adventure hatch.
All the way up he kept noting the strange tilt to the vehicle and debating the need for additional support—a frame, maybe, or even some kind of jacks under the busted fin. The ship rested on hard-packed earth, so Xavier wasn’t worried Adventure would sink. But it felt wrong to have it looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
One thing he n
oticed once he reached the hatch level—downtown Bangalore itself, glittering towers that had been lost in the haze, or simply not in his eye line, during his hasty exit yesterday. He started feeling sick and faint, so weak that he had to wrap his gloved hands around the railings of the cherry picker basket. How many millions of people lived here? Nine million? In India altogether, a billion?
He was no stranger to numbers on that scale. Houston had a million people when he lived there, the United States more than a quarter billion.
But for the past two decades he had lived in a habitat ten kilometers long and five or so wide, with fewer than a thousand people. They did rub shoulders from time to time, but he never ever got the sense that he was crowded.
Now, though, even twenty kilometers north of the city center, in what was, by Indian standards, uncrowded suburbia, Xavier felt closed in, suffocated.
The heat didn’t help, of course. Nor did Xavier’s precarious perch atop a very old piece of Indian equipment.
Not wishing to disgrace himself by vomiting over the side, or even fainting, he opened the hatch and plunged into the cool interior.
Adventure’s crew had left batteries running on low, essentially keeping the lights on and the environmental systems running. The sudden, relative cool made Xavier feel better—he wasn’t even bothered by the slanting floor.
He opened the hatchway to the storage module . . . all of the containers seemed to have come through the crash landing intact (something he’d worried about just before dozing off last night). There were sixteen identical units, each one about the size of a typical cardboard banker’s box from his youth. Fourteen of them held goo; the other two . . . equipment.
He could not off-load all of these things by himself, so he had to allow the enlisted men into Adventure. The four of them seemed uninterested in the exotic machine, acting as if they were entering the cargo hold of one of the rotting Antonov transports parked on the apron not far away. They plodded like robots as they set up a chain to pass containers along.
Heaven’s Fall Page 13
