Well, that was a pointless mental exercise. Even if Pav were correct that following this shaft might lead to the other side of Keanu...they couldn’t walk a hundred kilometers without food and water.
They couldn’t walk twenty.
“My hunch,” he said, offering fake optimism, the kind you gave a prisoner undergoing interrogation, “is that we will find a branch or a turn or an exit once we’ve reached the end of our habitat.”
“Shouldn’t we be pretty close to that by now?” Pav said. He was a young man—inked, wired, impatient. Zhao knew quite a few like Pav, not just from his time in India, but in posts in China, too. He found them all difficult to control past a few hours.
Not that he was expecting to have to control Pav past a few hours. “Let’s keep going,” he said. “Pav, your turn to count.”
Both teens started walking again.
Rachel was a greater challenge than Pav. Zhao knew what buttons to push to keep a bright, immature teen male in line. He knew of no equivalent training buttons that would produce predictable results with a bright, immature teen female, especially an entitled American.
Especially an entitled American teen female whose father was in her life and affecting her behavior.
Or an entitled American teen female whose dead mother had been recently in her life.
They had reached 140 in Pav’s count when all three of them stopped.
“Do you feel that?” Rachel said.
“It was like I was being pulled toward the wall!” Pav said.
He was quite agitated, and Zhao couldn’t blame him; he had felt something, too...a tingling that started with the soles of his sneaker-clad feet and shot up one side of his body. “Light, please,” he said.
The Slate flashed and held, and Zhao was surprised to see that the shaft was no longer cylindrical, but squared off; that the surface looked shiny, white, and polished, like the tiles in a new subway station; and that there was a branch leading to their right...what Zhao took to be the direction away from the human habitat. The main shaft continued.
“When did everything go so weird?” Rachel said. Her voice held her usual teen sneer, but Zhao could hear the hint of panic.
He touched her shoulder firmly. “Kill the light,” he told Pav. “I didn’t notice a specific change—”
“—Unless it was that zap we got,” Pav said, finishing Zhao’s statement, which Zhao found annoying.
“Now I know what’s freaking me out,” Rachel said. She had moved close enough to Zhao that he could feel her trembling. “This isn’t a tunnel, it’s a pipe.”
“What’s the difference?” Pav said.
Zhao was struck by Rachel’s insight. How had he missed it? “People and machines use tunnels for access. Pipes are for the transfer of fluids—” He didn’t have many phobias, but drowning in an enclosed space in the dark would top the short list.
“The walls were dry,” Pav said, clearly trying to make a case they all wanted made.
“For now,” Rachel said, almost hissing.
“The question,” Zhao said, “is whether this new branch is less like a pipe than what we just walked through.”
“I vote we take it,” Rachel said, already edging toward it.
“So we’ve given up on the dog?” Pav said.
“We haven’t heard or seen him in the past hour,” Zhao said. “I think—”
Just then he and the other two felt the strange tug and tingle again.
Only this time they were slammed against the wall and instantly dragged toward the new branch shaft like metal filings to a magnet. They were left hanging halfway up the wall...then released, sliding to the floor.
It wasn’t painful, though their clothing likely prevented scrapes, but it was frightening.
Fortunately, it lasted only a few seconds. Pav was the first to regain his feet, and he helped Rachel, then Zhao. “That,” the young man said, “was officially weird.”
Rachel turned to Zhao. “So what was that?”
Zhao realized that he could see Rachel and Pav. The new shaft was bathed in a blue, actinic light, but distorting. “Look!” Pav said.
As Zhao and Rachel watched, with considerable horror, the shape of the shaft ahead of them deformed, a wave passing away from them like a silent tsunami.
“To answer your earlier question,” Zhao said, “or your next, I have no idea.”
“Whatever it was, the first time it felt like it was headed up the shaft, the way we came,” Rachel said. “This time it came back—”
“—And made a turn and went down this tunnel,” Pav said.
“It looked like—God, this is going to sound stupid,” Rachel said.
Zhao was curious. “What did it look like, Rachel?”
“Like a little ball—as small as a marble—was being sucked through the wall of the shaft.”
“I didn’t see that,” Pav said.
“Well, I did.”
Rachel laughed. “This is funny?” Pav said.
“No, just...I played with marbles when I was little. You had steelies and agates. My favorite was a cat’s-eye because it had all these different colors—”
Zhao wasn’t ready to concede the idea that a small particle somehow distorted gravity—but on further reflection, why not? Based on its mass and density, Keanu’s gravity should be a fraction of what it appeared to be (about half Earth normal, one of the Bangalores had calculated). “Something is adding or changing gravity,” he said. “It could be we just saw it. Your cat’s-eye.”
“We sure felt it,” Pav said.
“Poor Cowboy,” Rachel said. “Even if he didn’t get squashed, he probably got thrown around....”
Rachel trailed off. Zhao felt a moment of disorientation, as if he had suddenly been picked up, spun, and dropped, all in less than a second.
Something was happening again, and not just the flyby of some gravity marble—
He felt heat on the back of his neck.
“Now what?” Pav was saying.
Zhao turned...a wall of yellow goo was rushing at them, a gelatinous mass the size of a subway train, and leaving just as little room for escape.
DALE
If he hadn’t been wrapped in the cocoonlike skinsuit, forced to work with Zack Stewart and crazy Makali, tagging along with his ex and with an ancient sci-fi writer, with no real knowledge of his destination or how long he would have life support—
Dale Scott would have enjoyed the trek to Mt. St. Helens, which was the next vent—one of the Keanu features given terrestrial names by clever, unimaginative Earth-based astronomers.
The path was blessedly smooth, better than any road or sidewalk Dale had seen, even allowing for the fact that his most recent exposure to roadways was in Russia and India, where the standards fell considerably short of, say, Beverly Hills.
He decided that the closest thing to this white Keanu surface material was a basketball court, specifically the parquet of the old Boston Garden. (His father had taken him there when he was eight. He’d never forgotten the smooth, solid-but-yielding beauty of that floor.)
The sky was the black of space, though lots of it. Dale had seen that sky, of course, but only through small windows. He had never walked out in it, in the open. By raising his head, he could see stars, a very strange sight over a sunlit landscape. Thank God the crescent Earth lay behind them; he would have found it distracting and, given his chances of ever walking on it again, sad.
Physically, he was still feeling fine. In another time or place, he would have been eager to dissect the skinsuit to see what techno-magic allowed it to provide a breathable atmosphere (he assumed that the same sort of nanobuilt gear that developed in the vesicle was wrapped around his waist right now) while keeping him from being thirsty, hungry, or tired.
He and the others had reported feeling a series of pinpricks up their spines and in their stomachs; Dale was pretty sure the suit was giving him water and calories that way, and possibly even the Keanu equivalent of an energy dr
ink.
As for other life support matters, he hadn’t tried to urinate yet, but then, he hadn’t felt the urge, either. Given the challenges of elimination in even the most advanced human space suits, which Dale knew better than almost anyone (EVA suits had been his first tech assignment as an astronaut), this was the true innovation, worth millions or tens of millions on Earth.
But he wasn’t going back to Earth.
At least, not yet. Not that he could see. Given that, he was doing okay.
He just wished he could touch his medallion, the lucky item he wore around his neck.
Because this wasn’t an ordinary medallion. No, sir, no St. Christopher medal for him. This was a genuine 1974 Incredible Hulk medallion he had bought with his allowance when he was eleven.
He had displayed it in his room for the next three years, next to his comic books and action figures. He was ashamed to admit that he liked the Hulk, the green-skinned alter ego of mild-mannered professor Bruce Banner when circumstances demanded...rage and muscle, not brains and timidity, not because of the Marvel comic books, but because of the CBS TV series.
Whatever. Nobody but Seth Bryant ever asked him, and Seth was a comic book snob and geek. Dale Scott was, to the rest of the world, a jock.
Who relied on the Hulk to keep him safe.
That was necessary around the Scott household, because John Jeremy Scott was a blackout alcoholic—a fact Dale realized when he was eleven. Until that time, he had just thought J. J. Scott, a police officer in Anaheim, was tough because he had to be. He would yell and stomp around the house and break things—not always, not even very often, but enough—and, when Dale was younger, slap him when he got out of line.
From the time he got the Hulk, however, Dale never got slapped. Not once, up to the day his father finally moved out.
And Dale discovered that his Hulk was gone! Stolen from its place of honor on his shelf.
He didn’t have to wonder who (his father) or why (because J. J. Scott was always doing nasty things and once had teased Dale about spending his time watching the Hulk on TV).
But Dale had his revenge. After J.J. moved out and then moved in with some other woman, he settled in Fullerton, not far from Anaheim. He shared custody of Dale and Dale’s sister, Chelsea, though he wasn’t very rigorous about keeping to the schedule—a relief to both children.
The one time Dale found himself in J.J.’s apartment, he had sneaked into the master bedroom...and found the Hulk medallion sitting in the top drawer of a clothes chest.
Dale had pocketed the medallion and escaped clean with it, though he lived in trembling fear that J.J. would discover the theft—or, rather, the recovery—and turn on him in one of his terrible rages.
Dale feared that right up to the night, two years later, that J.J. Scott died in an off-duty auto accident...drunk.
He had had it put on a chain, so he wouldn’t lose it, and the Hulkster had accompanied him to Cal Poly Pomona, then to the Navy and flight training and grad school, to Iraq twice, and test pilot school and NASA, and even aboard the International Space Station.
And now here...wherever this was. Some godforsaken hollowed-out planetoid pushing itself out of the solar system back home. He wondered how far they’d traveled in these few days. Keanu would still be visible from Earth with the naked eye, even if its trajectory was due solar south. Someone in New Zealand or Chile, or Byrd Station, South Pole, would have a good view.
Keanu could probably keep accelerating for a long time—hell, centuries, maybe, meaning it could reach some fraction of the speed of light. But so far...hell, they weren’t even as far from Earth as the planet Mars!
Zack and Makali were in front, like lead mutts on a dog sled. Williams was in the rear, probably because of age and an inability to keep from stopping every few dozen steps just to take in the view. Well, what the hell; he had been imagining shit like this for fifty years. Dale guessed that it was okay for him to take it in.
Especially knowing that he wasn’t going to live any longer than Dale.
He looped close to Valya and asked her, in his below-average Russian, how she was doing. He had detected growing tension back at the Brahma site, along with real reluctance to press forward.
“How do you think?” she growled. Okay, obviously still some tension.
“I wish I could cheer you up,” he said.
“What would you do?” she said. “Sing me a song? Tell me a joke?”
“It worked before.”
“You had many charming techniques that worked before. We are in different circumstances.”
“Copy that.”
He let her mush on ahead of him and fell back with Williams. “Is it everything you dreamed it would be?” he asked.
“Less and more,” Williams said. “Even though I wrote it a few times, I surely never thought I’d be doing a traverse across an alien starship.”
“Funny how dreams come true.”
“Or nightmares.”
“That would be the ‘less’ business.”
“I keep telling myself that I also imagined and published miraculous escapes for my heroes. So if I have the true predictive vision...”
“Here’s hoping.”
Dale noticed that for all his bravado, Williams was actually limping a bit. Before he could ask, however, he heard a shout from Makali.
“Oh my God, look at that!”
Though still better than a NASA EVA garment, the skinsuit’s biggest drawback was limited field of view. The cowl-like hood was fairly rigid; in order to look up or sideways, you had to turn your body. You had almost no peripheral vision.
And the view forward wasn’t glasslike, either. You were looking through a filmy fabric about a centimeter in front of each eyeball.
Which was why Dale pressed forward, asking, “Can you see Mt. St. Helens already?” Zack had said “ten to fifteen kilometers,” which Dale took to mean “fifteen or more.” They could not have gone halfway yet.
“It’s not the vent,” Makali said, completely unnecessarily by that time, since Zack and Valya and Williams and Dale could all see what she’d found.
It appeared to be another spacecraft.
At least six stories tall—taller than Brahma before the accident—it was a rounded cylinder like a big fat bullet, or something out of an old Jules Verne novel. There were bumps and protruding blisters on the skin, which appeared to be metallic.
“Look at the pitting on this thing,” Zack said. “It must be really, really old.”
“How do you know it wasn’t designed that way?” Makali said. Of course, Dale thought, be argumentative.
“Just a hunch,” Zack said. “And no landing legs. And I believe it was designed that way.” The vehicle rested perfectly upright but lacked legs or any obvious landing aids. It rested on material that reminded Dale of a collapsed balloon.
“It must have crunched down on that skirt,” Makali said. She was close enough to toe the material, which was bleached an ugly white. “Hard.”
“Petrified,” Williams said. “More fuel for the argument that this is really, really old.”
“Whom did it belong to?” Valya asked. “Who landed it here?”
“Nobody from Earth,” Dale said. “And with that kind of landing, I get the impression this was a one-way trip.”
“Both Brahma and Venture had ascent motors inside them,” Makali said.
Dale couldn’t decide which annoyed him more, the fact that exospecialist Makali Pillay would presume to argue matters of spacecraft engineering with him, or just that she kept talking, period. “And both were modular,” he said, knowing he should not engage the woman. “With obvious separation lines. I’m looking at this baby, and it all seems to be one big piece.”
“—With an open hatch on this side,” Wade Williams said.
The hatch was a thick plug that opened downward rather than to the side, creating a platform for occupants going EVA.
And at least ten meters off the ground, preventing any o
f them from seeing inside the opening...or from reaching it.
“This gives me some idea of who it belongs to,” Zack said. “Look at the proportions of the Temple...the Architect was twice as tall as a human being.”
Dale could hear Wade Williams sputtering. “Surely the Architects are more advanced than this thing. They launched the vesicles, for God’s sake. This vehicle looks as though it could have been built by China, now!”
“Well,” Makali said, “whoever built it, a ladder would have been nice.”
“Shame on the Architects for not realizing you’d be coming along and wanting to go aboard,” Dale said. He had decided he might as well declare war on Pillay in the hopes of getting her to shut up. Otherwise he would be provoked to violence.
Zack ignored the exchange. “They probably had a rope ladder of some kind—”
“—A thousand years ago,” Williams finished. “Even something metal would have gone brittle in that time, baked and frozen a few million times. It must have eventually blown away like dust.”
“This is all quite fascinating, I’m sure,” Valya said. “But since we can’t go aboard, we should press on to this vent, since I believe it represents our only hope for survival. Or am I overstating matters?” For a non-native English speaker, Valya had perfect pitch when it came to sarcasm. Dale had always enjoyed it, at least on the few occasions when it was directed at someone other than him.
“Oh, I think we can go aboard,” Zack said.
“Zack, how?” Makali said. She was almost sputtering.
“Because in this gravity, we can throw him ten meters,” Dale said. They were all experiencing low gravity. But apparently not all of them were thinking of its potential advantages. Not even the famous exospecialist. “Or, really, you could throw me ten meters. You’re mission commander, Zack. I’m expendable.”
Zack considered this for a moment. “I guess, if you count Keanu as one, I’ve already been first to enter an alien spacecraft. It’s someone else’s turn.”
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