The other man was a younger Aussie named Quentin. He told Pav he came from a family of bush pilots. “Hoping to get back to that after this,” he said.
When Rachel first learned of the two-plane approach requiring the decoy to somehow make it all the way back to Hawaii, she had been terrified for the pilots. But both Benvides and Quentin assured her that they could not only make the trip, they would have a margin. “Your bird’s a Gulfstream,” Benvides said, “and it’s got a lot of range. But we’re driving a Dassault Falcon 9 with even more, and we’re packing extra fuel instead of passengers and cargo. Don’t worry about us.” He smiled. “Just make sure you kill all the Reivers.”
And now Benvides and Quentin were flying directly above them at the common altitude of ten thousand meters while Rachel’s Gulfstream had descended to two thousand and would go even lower.
Jo flashed a smile and a thumbs-up as she emerged from the lav on her way back to the cockpit.
And now Yahvi was up, seemingly cheerful. As she ate breakfast, she looked out the portside windows. “I keep thinking I see land, but I’m not sure.”
“It’s out there,” Rachel assured her. She patted her daughter, then worked her way to the rear of the plane, where Pav had gone to ground.
“Something up?” she said.
Pav wore his secretive face and used his quiet voice. “I didn’t want to tell the others, but about an hour ago we got a link to Keanu,” Pav said.
“What did you tell them?”
“That we didn’t have anything new, except that within three hours we expected to be . . . on station.”
Rachel smiled. “Have you heard from your father?”
Pav shook his head.
“Are you worried?”
He shrugged. “We’re only linked by cell phone, and that won’t work until we’re close to land.”
Rachel touched her husband’s hand. He seemed nervous. “There’s something else.”
Pav actually glanced over his shoulder, as if he had to worry about being overheard by Zeds and Xavier. “The Beehive is alive again.”
Among the many startling bits of news Rachel had heard in this past week, or, indeed, in her life, that was high on the list. “No shit.”
“Yes, shit,” he said.
“And?”
“They don’t know yet. I mean, nothing has come out of it. It’s just . . . active again. Glowing.” He made an eerie sound and waved his hands.
“Did they do anything to fire it up?” Pav shook his head. “Then what’s changed?”
“I’ve got to believe it has something to do with Dale Scott,” Pav said.
At that moment the cockpit door opened. Steve, the male pilot, stuck his head out. “We’re descending, making our turn. Everyone buckle in.” Unlike Jo, who, based on her accent, seemed to have been raised by Americans, Steve Liu’s English was halting and unfamiliar. He was a stocky, serious man in his thirties who reminded Rachel of Zhao, the quiet yet capable former spy who had eventually become one of the Keanu community’s leaders. Zhao gave the impression that he knew arts and possessed skills beyond ordinary humans, and Rachel saw a bit of this in Steve. Perhaps she was simply hoping.
As she and Pav took their seats and watched Edgely and Chang buckling in, Rachel felt that sudden, now-familiar rush of adrenaline. It had happened to her so often since leaving Keanu that it was becoming her natural state—and surely a bad sign. You could burn yourself out operating at that level.
She glanced at Pav across the aisle. He nodded an okay as he strapped in. She turned to Yahvi, in the seat next to her, who said, “Is this going to be dangerous?”
“No more dangerous than anything else we’ve done,” Rachel said. “A lot safer than landing Adventure.”
“That’s not saying much.” The girl was trying to act brave, but her voice and eyes gave her away. Rachel just squeezed her hand, noting, as she often did, that giving reassurance actually reassured her.
Why it did, she couldn’t say. It wasn’t as though the universe somehow looked more kindly on humans who offered comfort to others—the universe should, Rachel believed, but there was no evidence that it did.
She was, in fact, appalled at how little she knew of the universe, even though her experience of matters beyond Earth—beyond anything seven billion other humans could ever hope to know—should have given her some insight, some special sense.
Yes, she had proof that alien life existed; hard evidence of that sat within four meters of her. She was convinced that her home world was little more than a speck of sand on some cosmic beach. (And that for the past twenty years she had lived inside an even smaller speck.) She had seen the marvels of amazing alien technology, not just the ability to send an inhabited planetoid from one solar system to another, but to literally demonstrate the power of life and death.
She knew that there was an ancient conflict between at least two types of intelligences in the universe, organic versus machine—and that she and her family had somehow gotten in the middle of it.
To think they and their friends could win . . . could have more effect on the battle than a butterfly could affect a hurricane . . . was probably laughable. Her limited but valuable lessons suggested to her that in big games, the score was always going to be Universe: 1,000,000,000; Individual Human: 0.
Yet here she was . . . here they all were, stuck inside a metal tube, flying over an ocean toward a place they’d never seen, controlled and guarded by some of the most capable and hostile aliens imaginable.
Looked at one way, it was insane. Looked at another, it might have been hilarious.
Looked at as part of the human experience . . . maybe it was just fucking typical.
She could feel the plane diving now . . . quite steeply. If she tried she could almost hear the pilots talking on the other side of the cockpit door. No words, just evidence of communication—squawks, grunts, sounds that had the potential to be words.
Their voices were no longer calm.
That was understandable, right? They were executing a tricky maneuver, diving toward the Pacific, preparing to fly toward land at an altitude of less than five hundred meters. Rachel was not a pilot, but she had grown up with an astronaut for a father, and Zack Stewart had been required to fly in supersonic jets as an “operator.” She had heard the grim jokes and sardonic phrases about how “air is easier to fly through than mountain” and “don’t turn your plane into a boat.”
Looking out the window, she could see nothing but sea and sky—a beautiful sunny afternoon, with a few clouds way off to the north suggesting an approaching storm front. At this height, individual waves were visible . . . long broad rollers heading for the beaches of Mexico.
There were beeps from the cockpit.
Yahvi heard them, too. “Mom . . .”
Rachel had never been one to offer unthinking blanket reassurance. She hated the phrase It’s going to be all right with a passion, because she had ample evidence that very often things didn’t turn out all right.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said.
She glanced at Pav, who would have said the same thing—and who was incapable of hiding his alarm.
The plane began to maneuver. . . . “We’re making S turns,” Edgely said, as if he were a newly appointed aeronautical expert.
“Can you see land from your side?” Rachel said. Whatever the type of turns, she was still seeing only sea and sky.
The plane rolled to its right suddenly, making Rachel feel as though she were on a carnival ride. Every occupant of the cabin uttered a “whoa!” or the equivalent.
Then it felt as though they were diving, which could not be good, given that they were only a few hundred meters above the water to begin with.
Yahvi was paralyzed with fear. She clutched Rachel’s hand like a potential drowning victim.
The plane
began to rise now, its motion pressing Rachel and the others into their seats. Like a rocket launch, she thought. As this went on and on, as the plane continued to climb steeply, the rocket-launch analogy seemed even more apt. The whine of the engines grew louder. Rachel thought she heard and felt the airframe shuddering.
“Are we heading back to Keanu?” Pav said, triggering nervous laughter from Chang and, behind them, Xavier.
That two seconds of grim humor quickly gave way to even grimmer fear. This wasn’t right—!
As she looked out the window to the north, Rachel saw a fireball.
Yahvi saw it, too. “Mommy, what was that?”
“Our decoy,” Xavier said.
Rachel had known that, though it took Xavier’s words to supply confirmation. She gasped and uttered, “Oh, no!” Benvides and Quentin!
As their plane leveled out, the light brown coast of Mexico visible on the horizon, Rachel saw two other aircraft in the sky, heading toward them from the left.
From the cockpit came the clear sounds of Steve and Jo in a grim struggle, overlaid with alarming beeps.
They were alone in the sky now, targets for the Aggregates.
THINGS WE DON’T HAVE ON KEANU
Sports teams or most sports, except for cricket and some basketball
Churches
Books on shit like diets, investing, pets, or etiquette. Books, period
Electronics stores
ATMs
Kentucky Fried Chicken or other restaurants
THINGS WE DO HAVE ON KEANU
Music
Markets
Free time
XAVIER TOUTANT, AS QUOTED BY EDGAR CHANG
FOR THE NEWSKY NEWS SERVICE
SANJAY
His memories were completely confused.
Sanjay Bhat remembered the tension of Adventure’s final approach to Bangalore and Yelahanka . . . the barely suppressed pride and even glee that a hostile missile had come close to destroying them, but failed.
Then he had watched the last few meters of the descent, his eyes unable to look away from the figures on the control panel, as if rapt, unblinking attention could somehow slow the rates, change them to the numbers he wanted—
Then? The shattering impact, cushioned by couch and belts, the sound of something smashing, the panel flying toward him, blinding, crippling pain—
Followed, seemingly a few moments later, by a cough, a feeling of suffocation, an opening of the eyes to see a brownish-yellow film in front of them.
Clawing, feeling relief that the covering was coming away, terror that he was confined. Had he been buried? Was he in the wreckage of Adventure?
Then he was shaken by a series of violent spasms. Fortunately, they passed quickly, leaving him shivering, twitching, but alive . . . and lying on his back inside a golden coffin-sized cell, like a honeycomb.
Along his left side was a wall made of a thin, translucent substance that felt like wax. There were shadows outside! Maybe someone who could get him out!
He turned on his side and reached with his right hand—
And poked a hole through the wall.
The whole thing broke into soft pieces, some falling, some peeled away by the entities outside.
Even though his ears were still covered by the clinging second skin, Sanjay could hear a human female voice calling, “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Then arms reached for him, pulling him free.
As he slid out of the cell, he realized that he knew where he was. Like most HBs, he had sneaked into the Beehive at one time—or, in Sanjay’s case, several times. And that was where he was, in the Beehive, in the arms of a woman he knew very well . . . Sasha Blaine.
“Thank you,” he croaked.
There was the choking sob at the realization that he must have died, followed by the instant elation that he had somehow survived, or rather come back.
“It’s okay, Sanj,” Sasha Blaine said. “We’re here.”
Another woman held him, too, this one dark-haired, dark-eyed, not familiar. Sanjay let himself collapse into their arms.
They cleaned him up as well as they could, helping him peel the second skin off his head and face, shoulders, chest and arms, legs. “We ought to leave it around your middle,” Sasha said, “until we get you some pants.”
Sanjay’s response was a spasm of laughter. Yes, his nudity was the concern. Not his condition, not the fact that he had been killed on Earth and reborn on Keanu. “What about Rachel?” he said, horrified at the way his throat felt and his voice sounded, like that of a man of a hundred. “Is she still on Earth? What happened? How did I get here?”
“Rachel is still good, as far as we know,” Sasha said. She nodded to the woman with her—Sanjay remembered her name now: Jordana, agro sector. “Do you have any memory of what happened?”
It didn’t take long to tell her—the approach, the missile, the crash. “That’s pretty much what we heard,” Sasha said. “And now here you are.”
“Having been killed.”
“Uh, apparently.”
“So I’m a fucking Revenant.”
“Well, yes.”
“Any idea how?” He looked up at the Beehive. “This hasn’t functioned for twenty years.” He thought of Jaidev and Zhao, who had devoted hours to the problem, with no success. “Did someone figure out how to turn it back on?”
“No,” Sasha said. “I’m kind of hoping you could tell us what happened.”
“I told you everything I know.” He croaked again. “So far.”
“Well, welcome back. Which sounds really stupid, like you’ve just been away on a trip.”
“Well, I have.”
Sasha turned to Jordana. “Let’s get him out of here. He needs water and God knows what else.”
Among the two gigantic mental adjustments Sanjay Bhat was making—realizing he had died, and that he had been reborn as a Revenant back on Keanu—there was a new one, perhaps more important:
No Revenant had lived more than a few days.
He emerged from the Beehive to a crowd larger than any he had seen in his life in the habitat. The HB population of Keanu had no celebrations or events that required such gatherings. “Is this all for me?”
“Everyone heard about the Beehive,” Sasha said.
Sanjay found that he could stand . . . that breathing was easier . . . that he seemed to be gaining strength. Aside from the emotional whiplash of going from dead to alive again—not inconsiderable—and the lingering discomfort of wearing strips of second skin and moving with muscles that seemed untested, he felt good. Even great.
He knew that he had been killed by a blow to his face and head. He carefully raised his hand and felt the same set of bones he had always known.
Allowing for the uncertainty of his new, second life span, Sanjay thought, Keanu brought me back good as new.
He spotted Jaidev and Harley Drake and Zhao and then, to his amazement, the legendary Dale Scott, looking as old and confused as Sanjay had felt fifteen minutes earlier.
Sanjay raised his hand. “Hi, everyone,” he said.
Then he heard a woman scream.
Oh my God, he thought, Maren.
Maren Houtman had been Sanjay’s lover for the past five years. And had the Adventure mission not intervened, likely for years to come, possibly for life. She had become that important to him in that time, though not, he realized with some embarrassment and worry, so important that she had a place in his thoughts until now.
He couldn’t possibly tell her that, either. Maren had many virtues, from intelligence and artistry (she had managed the trick of marrying pottery and sculpture to Substance K engineering) to classic Nordic beauty . . . but a sense of humor was not among them. Nor was she truly confident of Sanjay’s affections; when they argued, it always seemed to be about t
he likelihood that he would find someone he preferred to her—
It was probably in her nature. When scooped up by the object at Bangalore back in August 2019, Maren had been a clerical assistant with the European Space Agency supporting her boss during the Brahma mission. ESA had no representatives in the Brahma crew but was providing tracking and communication data.
She had endured the flight to Keanu and the years of adjustment, loss, and recovery without ever interacting with Sanjay Bhat in a significant way. Maren had just been a thin blond woman who spoke little and busied herself with food preparation and distribution . . . two things Sanjay Bhat avoided.
It was only when she began installing fascinating objects on various HB structures, from representational or abstract pieces to a misguided bust of Zack Stewart, that Sanjay began to notice her. (In fact, their first real conversation had been an argument over what Sanjay thought was the silliness of creating likenesses of deceased humans.)
Now Maren was on him, at him, kissing, holding. She was so distraught that she was hardly able to form words. But he did hear: “They just told me yesterday!”
“What?” he said, his voice sounding better, though still not great.
“That you were . . . were . . .” And then, unable to say were dead, she started sobbing.
“Look,” Sanjay said, “they were wrong!” He had to admit that he enjoyed the rush of emotion—he was blinking tears himself—as well as the comfort of Maren’s strong arms around him.
And her fragrance. Early in their relationship, he had realized that he loved the way Maren smelled.
Now she fastened herself to him with a ferocity he would have loved to reciprocate in a more private setting. She made it difficult for him to walk, not that the pressing crowd of HBs would have allowed much speed. “Let’s get you to the Temple,” Harley Drake was saying.
Harley’s command voice worked its magic. Maren’s death grip relaxed and the other HBs moved aside. Sasha and Jordana and Maren formed around him on three sides. All were taller, Sanjay realized, and the variety of coloring—ginger Sasha, blond Maren, and dark Jordana—sent a jolt of smug, unjustified pride through him. My three graces, he thought.
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