“Let’s hope you’re right and I’m wrong.”
Now, hours later, here they all were, at Reiver Central, after a brief, bumpy ride in the cargo section of a large military transport.
Given the way THE people clung to them, she felt that she and the others had been turned into an Aggregate formation. They could only seem to operate as a group of six, plus their minders.
Rachel had asked Yahvi about her THE trio, specifically the blushing male. “That’s Counselor Nigel,” she said. “He’s almost human.” She said this loud enough so Nigel could hear. Which was fine, since Rachel and company had no privacy.
Rachel turned to that trio, sitting across from her on metal chairs. “Thank you for being honest.”
“Honesty is a tenet of THE,” he said.
Pav was next to Rachel. He said, “Even though it can get you in trouble?”
“It’s not the honesty,” Counselor Nigel said. “It was my prior revelation of secured information that was troublesome.”
“What are they going to do to you?” Yahvi said.
“It won’t just be me,” Counselor Nigel said, glancing at Counselors Ivetta and Cory. “We operate as a unit. If the actions of one earn a reward, we all share. If the action of one earns punishment—”
“And what does that mean?” Rachel said. “Confinement? Twenty lashes? Loss of your snazzy black uniform?”
Counselor Nigel hesitated before answering. His features softened just enough to make Rachel feel some pity for him. “All of those, along with retraining or, in some circumstances, termination.”
Yahvi was shocked. “You mean you could be executed for what you told me?”
Now Counselor Ivetta spoke. “All three of us could be terminated.” Her humanity was showing, too: fear, and a desire to terminate Counselor Nigel for putting her in this situation.
“It will probably depend on how successful this is,” Counselor Nigel said, indicating Rachel and the plane.
“I’m sorry your lives are in my hands,” she said, not feeling very sorry at all.
“That’s true for all of us,” Zeds said out of the darkness.
It was after landing, while all of the passengers were waiting for the cargo ramp at the rear of the plane to drop, that Pav said, “I asked them to contact my father.”
“Good idea. Let’s make them work for us as much as possible, while we can.” Their phones had been confiscated on landing at Edwards.
“It’s not like him to go dark, not even leave a message.”
“We’ve hardly had coverage,” Rachel said.
“We’ve had some.” He indicated Tea, who seemed lost, distracted by some fascinating detail of the cargo plane’s interior. “She’s had no word, either.”
The aircraft had landed south of St. George, Utah, on a runway that looked raw and new, even in the darkness. (Rachel guessed it was between four and five A.M. local time.)
De la Vega and his assistants had flown with them—in a separate compartment, along with Aggregates and the proteus. Now the human leader divided the party into three groups, each one to be ferried by helicopter to the Ring.
“How much farther?” Colin Edgely asked de la Vega. Rachel felt sorry for the Aussie; he had only been trying to help . . . had been thrilled to play a role in this mission.
Now he was exhausted, a captive in a foreign land, surrounded by strangers, some of them hostile and murderous. By speaking to de la Vega he was essentially saying, I don’t give a shit what you do to me.
But the human leader simply said, “Forty kilometers. We can’t land an aircraft this size at the facility.” And turned to other business.
Edgely caught Rachel’s eye. He seemed to feel that he had accomplished something valuable, gained some vital information. Well, Rachel thought, whatever made him feel better.
Not that she was in any position to feel superior to Colin Edgely. Her presence here was due to the same random factors. Until August 2019, she had been a typical fourteen-year-old American girl. Yes, her father was an astronaut . . . but that only made her rare, not unique.
She had not dreamed of flying to other worlds, or living on them. Or having to become a leader of a community, and certainly not some kind of space warrior.
Maybe that was how it was for everybody, all those notable figures throughout history.
Time and luck—some of it bad.
Rachel, Tea, and Zeds were separated from the others—though not from Counselor Nigel and his crew—and put aboard a helicopter with Counselor Cory. Rachel didn’t like being separated from Pav and Yahvi, but at least they were together.
The Aggregates were all being loaded into a van instead of a helicopter. “Do you suppose they don’t like to fly?” Tea said, pointing to them.
“I think they are too numerous,” Zeds said.
“Truer words,” Rachel said. Tea laughed.
Before they could take off, Counselor Nigel returned and spoke to Rachel. “I’m sorry to say I have very bad news for you. General Radhakrishnan has passed away.”
Rachel took the news calmly, while thinking, Poor Pav! She had just said, “What happened?” when Tea groaned and reached out.
Oh, God, Rachel thought. Counselor Nigel didn’t know that Tea was Taj’s wife.
Then the door was locked and the helicopter rattled into the predawn sky.
Rachel had managed to trade places with Zeds—quite a trick in the cramped helicopter cabin—in order to sit next to Tea, who shook with sobs during most of the trip to the Ring. “God, I’m a mess.”
“You just got terrible news.”
“Poor Taj,” she said. She shouted across the cabin at Counselor Nigel. “Did they say anything? What happened to him?”
“Only that he died yesterday in Bangalore.”
Hearing this made Tea even sadder. “There’s no one to take care of him! I’m not going to be at his funeral!”
“Let’s ask de la Vega,” Rachel said, including her THE companions in the proposal. “Maybe they’ll let you go, compassionate leave?”
“Oh, honey,” Tea said. “First you have to have compassion.”
Counselors Nigel and Ivetta only exchanged glances, but their silence confirmed Tea’s statement. There would be no expression of compassion from the human leader and his Aggregate allies.
The helicopter turned then, giving Rachel a restricted but fascinating view of a reddening eastern sky, desert mesas casting insanely long shadows . . . and a portion of a glittering circular structure: the Ring.
The helicopter landed moments later. As the engines fluttered to a stop, Rachel said to Counselor Nigel, “Does my husband know?”
“No,” he said. “My orders were to inform you.”
Tea took Rachel’s arm again. “I’ll tell him,” she said, trying to smile through tears. “I’m his stepmother, after all.”
Rachel witnessed the dread delivery from several meters away. Tea had forced her way to Pav, but Rachel was held back; the helipad was crowded with two vehicles and disembarking passengers, all being herded toward stairways. Even Zeds, who could easily bulldoze a path, was stuck behind Rachel, and she behind Edgely.
By the time they were inside the building, Pav had already absorbed the blow. He accepted a hug from Rachel. “It’s so fucking unfair,” he said. “I just got him back!”
He remained stoic. Yahvi, however, wept openly. Xavier and Tea both comforted her. Zeds and Edgely looked on, each ineffectual in his own way.
De la Vega regarded them all with confusion; obviously he didn’t know what they were reacting to, and Rachel was damn sure she wouldn’t be the one to tell him. “Your equipment will arrive within the hour,” he said. “Right now you are going to the operations center to meet the project leaders. They will identify the devices we need and you can communicate that to Keanu.”
He turned to other business, leaving Xavier to ask Rachel, “How are we going to do that?”
“With whatever system they have.” She had seen several radomes at the perimeter of this facility.
“Fine. What are we looking for? Some specific tool we can use, some information?”
“Really?” Rachel said. “All we’re looking for is time.”
She glanced out the window at the desert morning, wondering . . . where was the vesicle?
Veteran NewSky TV reporter and on-air personality Edgar Chang died Friday, family and friends have revealed. No details were given, though family members claim he died outside China.
The 65-year-old Chang, well known to NewSky viewers for a generation, had been working with the six returnees from Keanu. They have not been seen in public for a week, since disappearing from an air base near Bangalore, India.
There has been no comment from NewSky.
XINHUA NEWS, APRIL 22, 2040
Does anyone have more information? Chang was with Colin!
KETTERING GROUP, SAME DAY
SANJAY
Sanjay awoke and was angry with himself.
He had so little time remaining! There was no value in wasting it with sleep, even if Keanu used that time to upload information to him. (He had had a series of strange dreams involving falling, being naked or lost in the passages of Keanu, or a mixture of the three.)
Like every member of the HB community, Sanjay knew about the Revenants . . . tortured Pogo Downey, brave Yvonne Hall, tragic Camilla . . . and, of course, the amazing Megan Doyle Stewart.
Their second lives had all been short, with Camilla lasting the longest . . . a little over a week.
Sanjay wanted to become the new Revenant life span record holder. At the moment—less than a week after being born again in the Beehive—he felt terrific, alert, pain free, manic, and productive in a way that was quite familiar from his work at Bangalore and Keanu.
Not only that, but he was eager to see Earth. He felt he had been cheated by the accident. Now he had cheated death—How do you like it?
He wanted to confront the Reivers, too. He had no memory of their earlier presence on Keanu—Zack Stewart and his daughter, Rachel, and Dale Scott were the major players in their expulsion.
But Sanjay had always loathed the whole idea of the creatures, part organic life form, part machine, all-consuming, and totally against everything he valued in life.
He had learned that there was some kind of galactic war between the Reivers and the Architects of Keanu as well as their allies, the Skyphoi and the Sentries. Humans had sided with the Architects; Sanjay had seen no reason to remain neutral. If eradicating the Reivers on Earth would help that effort, he was all for it.
Or so he had believed, right up to the moment of his death. Now, though . . .
“Where are we?”
Sanjay was floating near the rounded nose of the vesicle, a milk-colored egg thirty meters long and twenty wide at its broadest.
Zhao Buoming floated several meters below him, his head inside a silver dispenser that would shortly be spewing deadly material all over Earth. Without turning, a bit of a trick in microgravity, the former spy said, “We are over halfway, and falling fast.”
Then Zhao rotated, showing his bare feet to Sanjay, and pushed himself away, toward the base of the vehicle, which was stuffed with life support and guidance equipment. Sanjay knew there had to be some propulsion gear, too, though not much; the vesicle had been blasted out of Keanu like a shell from a cannon. In addition to basic equipment, it also carried several tons of Substance K in a variety of containers. Some of that was being converted into weapons (most had been assembled on Keanu, but certain substances were so dangerous to humans that Jaidev and Drake and Rachel had deferred their final preparation to postlaunch).
Sanjay had found the launch punishing, which shouldn’t have surprised him; he knew that the vesicle would be fired toward Earth at a high velocity, much like the original Objects that had struck Bangalore and Houston in 2019. A free-fall trip between Earth and Keanu took four days; those had covered the distance in less than one.
But since one of the marvels of Keanu tech was the ability to control gravity, Sanjay had expected the vesicle to be equipped with a field that would mitigate the effects of being blasted off the NEO. No chance; when the countdown (Harley Drake had insisted) reached zero, the vesicle had shot forward with a speed that belied its mass (an egg the size of a small building, weighing as much as a semitruck, should not be capable of such acceleration!), flashing through one of Keanu’s passages before emerging into open space.
Like the others in the crew, led by Zhao, Sanjay had been strapped flat on a squishy mat at the base of the vesicle, a sensation that reminded him of the golden fluid packing his reawakening cell in the Beehive. He had instantly experienced pressure, like a giant sitting on his chest, and suffered narrowing of his vision, a sign he was graying out and likely to black out.
Fortunately, the chest-crushing event had lasted less than five minutes. Now, twelve hours later, he was feeling good . . . just angry at having fallen asleep for six of them.
“When do we land?” He pushed off from the nose of the vesicle and slowly descended to its base.
Seeing him, Zhao looked up, a typically sardonic smile on his face. “You mean hit, don’t you?”
“Stop torturing him,” Makali Pillay said. She had been hidden inside the piles of Substance K containers and processing equipment that filled the vesicle interior. “Not very long ago he was dead.”
“Whatever term you prefer,” Sanjay said to Zhao.
“We land in ten hours,” Zhao said. And floated off, leaving Sanjay with Makali.
“He’s really consistent in being shitty to people,” Makali said. Sanjay had never grown to know her well, since she preferred to spend her time outside the Temple laboratory, working on agro projects (she was the HB’s “flower girl,” assembling and then planting beautiful nonfood items), or taking her own walkabouts. Makali was the closest thing the community had to a Keanu expert and explorer—Dale Scott without the weirdness.
“A mission like this is not going to soften a man,” Sanjay said.
“Still,” Makali said, “it would be helpful if he remembered that the enemy is on Earth, not here. Hungry?”
“Always.”
Food was prepackaged, to the extent anything on Keanu was packaged: dried fruit, nuts, bars.
Basic though it might have been, Sanjay found the food glorious. And engaging in such a mundane activity allowed him to think back on his life prior to Adventure and the frantic moments since.
He was glad he had kept Maren from coming along. She had screamed at him to stay; when that failed, she had turned on Sasha, Harley, and Jaidev, begging them to send her, too.
Sanjay had sided with Jaidev, Harley, and Sasha in refusing. It was bad enough adding a seventh human “passenger” to a vehicle that had been designed to support six. There was some flexibility in the consumables, allowing for a seventh, but not enough to accommodate an eighth human who would be breathing oxygen, drinking water, and requiring food. Maren would just have been baggage.
There was also the Revenant factor. Sanjay hoped that he would live through the completion of the mission.
But what if he didn’t? Poor Maren would be experiencing the death of her lover for a second time. And even in success, he was still dead, and Maren was Zhao’s responsibility.
No.
He asked Makali, “Why did you volunteer for this? Surely you haven’t solved all of Keanu’s mysteries.”
She hooted. “I haven’t solved a single one of them, if you want to be factual. But I sort of fancied seeing Earth again—”
“Even though this is essentially a bombing mission.”
“Well, no other travel options, right? We didn’t build a tourist v
esicle. I also figure, this works and Keanu survives. If not . . . I won’t be doing much more exoscience because I’ll be dead.” She seemed embarrassed by the comment. “Sorry.”
“It’s not a problem,” Sanjay said. “Being dead hasn’t made me more sensitive.” But it had changed him in ways he still didn’t understand. Even as he uttered those words to Makali, additional data formed in his head, a process that gave him a brief, quiet, shuddering spasm that was almost sexual.
Momentary pleasure aside, becoming a link between Keanu and humans was proving to be stressful. (Another reason the Revenants didn’t last?) There was no clarity. Trying to interpret the words, sounds, and images in his head—the implanted memories—was like being an English speaker trying to translate a passage in Chinese to a dolphin.
Last night’s data, and this new material . . . it all seemed to deal with the Reiver facility and a vision of a vesicle sitting on a desert landscape not far from it.
“The mission is still dangerous,” he heard himself telling Makali. “Unless you were talking in secret after we took off in Adventure, no one has really dealt with getting back to Keanu.” Even for Adventure’s crew, return was always a desirable option, not a concrete plan.
“No matter how dangerous, and whether or not we get back, it’s still worth it.” Makali snagged the nuts, chomping them in midair. She smiled. “Frankly, I’m tired of the same old faces.”
It seemed like a trivial motivation until Sanjay remembered that within the HB community, Makali was famous for tempestuous love affairs and sexual adventurism, at least to the extent that could be practiced in the limited pool of candidates.
So she was risking her life in order to find new partners, which had the virtue of being a basic biological drive.
Which left Sanjay wondering about the other four in the crew, three Bangalores and one Houston. The Bangalores, like Sanjay, were all forty or slightly older—engineers or other Brahma control center functionaries who had been scooped up by the Object.
The Houston team member was a woman slightly older, Bobbi by name. A sales clerk at the Bayport Mall, Bobbi had been the victim of geography (her apartment was near the impact site of the Houston Object) and natural curiosity (she had gone out to see what had happened). Surely her motivation was less primal than Makali’s—probably just the urge to go home.
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