Zack knew that wasn’t true, that they were hiding something. “Okay...”
“About Americans’ involvement in various conflicts going back a century...and how we frequently discovered we had been slow to recognize the threat of fascism.”
“Yeah,” Zack said. Rachel and Pav were looking at each other. Yvonne was staring straight at Makali.
“Like Hitler,” Dale said. “Americans were slow to realize what a danger Hitler was—” And here Dale glanced toward Dash.
Moving with a speed Makali found surprising and alarming, the Sentry pushed itself away from the wall, pulled itself toward the open side of the railcar, and jumped out.
Rachel screamed. The dog barked and jumped out, too.
“What’s going on?” Yvonne said. She pointed to the Architect, who was otherwise impassive. “He’s very confused.”
“Dash is working for the other side,” Dale said. “It killed Valya and the Skyphoi Revenant—”
The railcar rattled to a violent stop, throwing everyone forward.
“Now what?” Dale said. “Another blackout?”
“He stopped us,” Yvonne said.
“Well, make him start us again,” Zhao said. “We can’t waste more time.”
“What about Cowboy?” Rachel said.
“We’re not stopping for a dog,” Zack said. “But we’re stopped, right?” Yvonne nodded.
“Let’s find the son of a bitch before he does something else to us.”
He headed for the hatch and jumped into the dark tunnel.
Rachel Stewart started to follow her father out of the railcar, but Makali got in her way. “You stay.” She turned to Pav. “Keep her here.”
Pav grabbed for Rachel’s arm.
Now Zhao was up. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill that thing,” Dale said, “even if I have to use bare hands.”
“Unlikely,” Zhao said.
“First we’re going to catch him and make him talk,” Makali said. “Yvonne, if you think your link with the Architect will work at a distance, you should come with us.”
The astronaut headed for the open hatch. The Architect didn’t move.
Zack was already fifteen meters ahead of them, running after Dash. But the Destiny commander’s feet were obviously hindering him; Makali saw him slow, hop in pain, then try to get going again.
She and Dale quickly caught up with him. Yvonne was close behind. “Hey, Dash!” Dale shouted.
The Sentry ignored him. But the alien couldn’t ignore Cowboy. The dog was the fastest being in the tunnel—with a snarling yelp, he caught the Sentry and began tugging at its garments.
The Sentry actually stopped. As it struggled with the dog, it faced the approaching humans. Now what? Makali wondered. She well remembered the story of Pogo Downey’s ill-fated encounter with a hostile Sentry.
But she didn’t need a plan of action after all; Dale simply rushed the Sentry like a football linebacker, slamming the alien between knees and waist.
The Sentry was staggered, but not felled—until Zack Stewart hit him, too. Dash hit the wall, then stumbled sideways.
With the dog barking and looking for an opening, Dale and Zack, working together for the first time, tried to pin the Sentry.
It’s come to this, Makali realized. Two weeks ago she could only fantasize about discovering hard evidence of alien life in the universe. Now she was tackling a genuine alien being. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be hilarious.
“We saved you,” Zack yelled at Dash.
“I...expressed gratitude.” It was strange hearing a calm, monotonic voice emerge from the translation unit when the Sentry was clearly struggling.
“Didn’t last long.”
“I had my mission.”
“I don’t understand your mission. Or anything you’ve done.”
“We are bred to fight, even our own kind. It’s in our water—”
Before Yvonne or Makali could add their weight, Dash flung them aside as if they were angry cats. Dale landed on Cowboy, who squealed in pain.
With impressive speed and determination, Dash was off again, soon with four humans and a dog in ragged pursuit.
Within moments Dash had passed through a T-junction in the tunnel. As Makali, Zack, Dale, and Yvonne huffed and puffed in the Sentry’s wake, Zack said, “We’re never going to catch him again.”
“Maybe we should let him go,” Makali said, mindful of Zhao’s urging about their mission to the power core.
“No. He’s killed humans and he’s involved with the Reivers. We need what he knows.”
“No we don’t,” Yvonne said. “We need to...”
She turned back and looked at the railcar a hundred meters away.
It was moving toward them.
“We need to get out of the way,” she said. “This way!” She pushed or dragged the other three into the side tunnel. Cowboy was faster than all of them.
They had barely exited the main passage before the railcar flashed past them like a whisper. Makali felt the explosion of displaced air and a disturbing rippling sensation, as if her entire body had been stretched wide, then allowed to snap back to its original state.
“What the hell was that?” Dale said.
“Cat’s-eye passing,” Yvonne said, as if that explained anything.
The railcar had stopped a few meters away. Zhao, Pav, and Rachel were emerging slowly, like accident victims. “Who did that?” Zhao said.
“Keanu did it,” Yvonne said simply.
Dash lay on the floor of the tunnel in front of the railcar. The impact had been horrific; flattened on one side, oozing internal fluid, the Sentry looked as though it had been dropped from a ten-story building. The dog sniffed at the remains and didn’t much like what it smelled.
Zack knelt to examine the body. After a moment, he simply sat back. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting tired of finding these things dead.” He slowly rose. “That makes three.”
Only now did he realize that his fourteen-year-old daughter was standing two meters away, taking in the entire gruesome scene. “Rachel,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Daddy. After the things I’ve seen...”
Makali noted that Pav was holding her hand. And that the Architect had emerged from the railcar. The silent giant moved like an old man with arthritis.
Then the power died again. Unlike the previous momentary blackouts Makali had experienced, this was accompanied by a sound that might have been a distant explosion. The entire tunnel—indeed, all of Keanu—seemed to shudder.
“Tell me that was another cat’s-eye,” Makali said.
“Sorry,” Yvonne said, nodding to the Architect, who now appeared hunched over. “That was the vesicle being launched with Reivers on board.”
“We’re too late. It’s going to Earth.”
“The son of a bitch suckered us,” Dale said.
“What are you talking about?” Zack said. The power returned but immediately went off again. The whole system seemed to be sputtering.
“He stalled us just long enough!” Dale laughed. “He literally threw himself under the bus so these Reivers could get to the vesicle first!”
“Does that mean we’re screwed?” Pav said. “We can’t go home?”
“I’m more worried about whether Keanu will survive,” Zhao said. “The power’s not steady.”
Zack turned to Yvonne. “This is the Architect’s world,” he said. “What can we do?”
“Go to the Skyphoi,” Yvonne said. “They’re our only hope now.”
HARLEY
“It’s a form of the disease that afflicts Dr. Jones,” Jaidev said. “His attacks the organs from within. This attacks the brain and central nervous system.” He was holding a crude-looking injector filled with a milky fluid.
“But it kills the host,” Harley Drake said.
“Yes.” The serious-minded Indian engineer looked at Harley as if he were an idiot. And not for the first time. “How
else would it do the job?”
Shane Weldon sat down next to Harley. They were at the worktable in the second-floor “kitchen” of the Temple. The light was so low it was like camping out. The sounds of the habitat—a distant drone, the whisper of a faint breeze, and what Harley now realized was a creaking sound he associated with spacecraft expanding and contracting—had all died away as the power dropped to a minimum.
The only sounds were footsteps of HBs running up and down the ramps, as Harley and Nayar gathered their “war council.”
That, and Gabriel Jones’s broken voice. A few steps away, he was using the Tik-Talk to converse with his daughter, Yvonne, who had been killed in the horrific and misguided detonation of the baby nuke during the first exploration of Keanu.
Had been killed. Alive again. Harley Drake kept thinking about that idea.
Well, he was just grateful that the Tik-Talk still worked, and that they’d been able to locate Zack Stewart and the others. They knew that the Reivers had launched the vesicle toward Earth and essentially shut down Keanu’s power core.
Not that any of this was especially comforting. If the power core didn’t get rebooted, they were likely all dead, and with Keanu dead, not likely to become Revenants.
But the information had allowed them to come up with plans: Zack and his team would attempt to deal with the core while the Temple would stage a counterattack against these Reivers, the cause of all the problems. Jaidev and his magicians had seized on a suggestion by Zhao and had managed to produce one dosage of this brain-attacking horror before every system shut down. Their bioweapon was based on samples from Gabriel Jones. Harley wasn’t quite sure how or why, but biochemistry had never been his field. Or close to it.
“The Reivers reproduce quickly and efficiently,” Jaidev said. “They pass information and apparently genetic material from one aggregate to another...anything poisonous or damaging that hits one in its information-processing center, also known as its brain, will hit them all.”
“I still don’t get how we get it to them,” Weldon said. “The Reivers have totally corrupted and infested the Keanu system. What is the actual vector? You don’t just jam that injector into the nearest pile of Reiver goo.”
“It goes into a human host,” Harley said.
There was another interruption caused by a group of people descending from the third floor as another individual tried to reach the second. It was Xavier Toutant, with this sad message: “Mr. Bynum is dead.”
There was an additional bit of data for Harley’s consideration: the apparent sell-by date for the Keanu Revenants. It was as if they were brought back to perform a single function, then tossed aside.
Not every Revenant, of course, and certainly not at the same rate. Look at Camilla. Also, animals from cows to cats and birds to bats had been emerging from the Beehive for the past several days. None of the HBs had been able to figure out a pattern—assuming there was one—but one thing was clear: None of the animals displayed the types of wear and tear that affected Revenants Camilla and then Chitran and now, finally, Brent Bynum. They had probably been deemed too lacking.
“Is that the bug zapper?” Xavier said, pointing to the injector.
“Not to go all operational security at this late date,” Weldon said, “but aren’t we afraid they might hear what we’re planning?”
“The Reivers?” Nayar said, standing up for his team. “If they are literally bugging us, then they know all our moves and we are wasting our time. Let’s remember that while they’ve corrupted Keanu’s systems, they are still quasi-organic beings with their own vulnerabilities and limitations. Which we will exploit.”
“By injecting someone with the...the bug zapper?” Weldon said.
“No, Shane,” Harley said. “By infecting someone with a fast-moving fatal disease that will kill him, and by killing him and putting his personality matrix, or whatever it is Keanu is able to isolate and reuse, into the Revenant system.” He had been reluctant to say it aloud, he realized, because that someone was going to have to be Mayor Harley Drake.
So he would get stuck with the bug zapper. He would be the one to quickly plunge into a feverish coma and death. It would be his poisoned and corrupted morpho-genetic data that would be absorbed into the Keanu system, and quickly into the Reivers...where it would burn them all.
“Oh.” Weldon looked at the injector. “So I guess the question is—”
“Who,” Nayar said. “Not when. This has to happen immediately.”
“There’s no point waiting,” Harley said. “It’s my job.” He had hoped that saying it aloud would make it seem easier, somehow. So far...no.
Then Sasha Blaine came hurrying up the steps, all red hair and inescapably impressive figure in a tank top. Great, Harley thought, let your last conscious thoughts be lustful.
That surge of inappropriate interest passed quickly, because even in the faint light, Sasha was clearly distraught. “What’s wrong?” Harley said, as if there was anything else that could possibly go wrong.
“Camilla left.”
“She was curled up in a ball in the corner,” Weldon said. “Just like Bynum.”
Sasha turned to him. “Oh, she was. I thought she had gone completely catatonic, and was just talking to her in German. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Then I started repeating her little ditty about ‘ratos’ and she sat right up. And just ran away.”
“Then forget her,” Nayar said. “I know she’s a child, I know she’s not responsible, but we have larger problems.” He pointed to the injector. “We need to make our move now to have any chance.”
He slid it toward Harley.
Sasha intercepted it. “Oh, no,” she said.
“Yes,” Harley said.
“Why you?”
“It has to be one of us,” Weldon said.
Sasha turned to him again. “Except ‘us’ has turned into ‘Harley.’”
“I’m the leader,” Harley said.
“I’m the leader, too,” a voice said behind them.
It was Gabriel Jones, his eyes still red and face still shining from a very emotional conversation. “These people were my responsibility from the beginning. The weapon uses my...tissue. If anyone should make the sacrifice, it should be me.”
“You need to see Yvonne face-to-face again,” Harley said.
“Oh, Harley, she’s wearing out. Dying like Bynum.” He forced a smile. “She seems okay with it...says she fulfilled her mission, redeemed herself. But she won’t last.”
“Actually,” Shane Weldon said, “none of us will last if the core isn’t rebooted and the Reivers eliminated.”
Jones pointed at Weldon. “Exactly. And I’m the biggest medical burden. I’m past my sell-by date. Give me the zapper.”
For one selfish moment, Harley felt a flood of relief. Gabriel Jones was the most logical victim.
And yet...Harley was in charge. If there was one lesson he had learned in life, one thing he believed in without question, it was this: The guy in charge makes the big decisions. The captain goes down with the ship. “Sorry, Gabe,” he said, and reached for the injector.
Then Xavier Toutant stepped forward, snatched up the injector—and handed it to Jones! Before any of them could stop him, the JSC director touched it to his arm and triggered it.
He seemed about to say something...but failed, as his eyes rolled up in his head and he fainted.
Nayar and Jaidev caught him and gently lowered him to the floor. “For God’s sake,” Harley said, “make him comfortable.” As he dies.
“God, that was brave,” Sasha said.
“Let’s hope it wasn’t for nothing,” Shane Weldon said.
ZACK
The encounter with the Skyphoi had been strange even by Zack Stewart’s improved and expanded scale of strangeness.
The survivors of the Dash treachery had returned to the “station” in the railcar, bumping along on low power, like a golf cart with a dying battery. A pair of the giant balloon creatures had been w
aiting, both flashing chromatophores in patterns the humans could not and would likely never understand.
The failing state of the railcar matched that of the Architect. It seemed to be declining into immobility and likely death at the same rate as the entire NEO. When Zack said as much, Rachel announced, “That’s because he is Keanu.” Zack would have loved to pursue that, but the Architect went into terminal failure at that instant, slumping to one side and almost crushing Zhao. “Daddy!” Rachel shouted.
Zack and Dale reached for the Architect, their hands failing to find purchase on the creature’s garments. But sheer muscle power allowed them to extricate Zhao.
As the Chinese spy slid out from under the Architect, he said, “Should I try some kind of resuscitation?”
“Where the hell would you start?” Dale said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Yvonne said. “He’s gone.”
Zack didn’t like the way Yvonne looked: gray and listless. “How are you doing?” Had she been linked, somehow, to the Architect as the alien died? And how did the death of this creature relate to the possible death of Keanu itself? Was the Near-Earth Object itself dead already? How would you be able to tell?
“As okay as I’m going to be,” she said. “For the first time since...coming back, I feel like myself. No more voices in my head.” She managed a smile, one that was so familiar to Zack from their time as astronauts that it brought tears to his eyes.
Well, hell, everything was bringing tears to his eyes right now.
“Last things,” she said. “Think of the Skyphoi as custodians or caretakers. They live a long time by our standards. They aren’t truly individuals, or not all the time, so there’s a lot of continuity over generations. They’re masters of the systems, though. They devise repairs, and other races, with hands, do the dirty work.”
“So that’s us,” Makali said. “Hands.”
“For a vessel like this, yes,” Yvonne said. “The Skyphoi wouldn’t have built anything like Keanu.”
“What do they have?” Zack said.
“A trigger to restart the power core.”
“Won’t that be...very large?” Dale said. “I mean, the power core has got to be massive.”
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