Heaven's War (28 page)

But Dale grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him back toward the chamber. “Goddammit, Zack! Why don’t we crawl back in there! A hole big enough to let that much air
out
will let us back
in
!”

Zack and Makali took steps toward the chamber, where flaps of material still fluttered weakly. “What do you think?” he said to Makali.

“It’s not like this leak would empty the whole habitat,” Makali said. “The annex was sealed off from the Beehive proper.” She reached for one of the flaps. Before her skin-gloved fingers made contact, however, the entire chamber simply collapsed. “Get back!” Zack shouted.

It was a strange sight, almost in slow motion, the “tent” vanishing under a cascade of rocks and soil. There was no cloud of dust; in the vacuum and low gravity, particles simply fell to the surface.

There was a long moment. Finally Dale said, “I withdraw my suggestion.”

Williams spoke for the first time in a while. “Well, now what do we do?”

“We go out,” Zack said. “Uh, gravity might be less than you’re used to…try to slide rather than step.”

Before they could emerge into the harsh sunlight of Vesuvius Vent, they reached an intersection where four different tunnels branched off.

“Where do these go?” Williams said.

“We never had time to investigate,” Zack said. “We were too focused on this.”

He pointed to the Marker, a stone plate mounted at least two meters off the ground. Makali was already camped beneath it.

Valya had seen one brief image of the Marker, the first definitive sign that the
Destiny-Venture
and
Brahma
explorers were dealing with an advanced civilization. Keanu’s maneuver from flyby to Earth orbit had been one clue, followed by the existence of the ramp in Vesuvius Vent…but both events had other explanations. Not this 3-D-like image of a helical galaxy that shifted to a DNA helix, and who knew what else, depending on the observer’s viewpoint.

“God,” Makali was saying, “I wish I could get higher and see what it looks like from above.”

“From Architect height?” Zack said.

“Yeah.” She was clearly getting frustrated. “I’d love to see what that guy would be seeing.”

“You think it was different?” Dale said. “The basic image is the galaxy, our galaxy, we assumed.”

“And there’s not much point in showing another one,” Williams said.

“It’s not the galaxy image. There was also the DNA one, and a third that we decided was a schematic of Keanu itself.”

That news energized Zack Stewart. “We never saw anything like that, and I was here when we found it!”

“Bangalore got a ghost image from Lucas’s helmet cam hours after you passed by,” Makali said. I don’t think he even saw that angle—”

“What do you remember? It might be important.”

“Not much. A big sphere with a dozen squat tubes inside it, all connected by spidery lines.” She gestured in frustration. “But I can’t seem to find the right viewing angle.”

“Nothing we can do, then,” Dale said.

“There’s something else,” Makali said. “When we processed the galaxy image, we saw several illuminated or indicated points.” She turned to Williams. “Remember that?”

“Hell, no, we never got that far with it.”

“Oh. Well, there were at least six of these points, and they were all clustered. They were in our local stellar neighborhood, if you will.” She pointed at the Marker. “Now there’s only one bright spot.”

“So it’s changed in the past week,” Zack said.

“Oh, yes.”

“Was it damaged, do you think?” Valya said. “By the detonation?”

“Not damaged,” Makali said. “Affected, maybe.”

“What is this ‘detonation’?” Valya said.

“He means that the
Destiny
crew carried a small nuclear device to guard against alien organisms or actual creatures being brought back to Earth,” Makali said. “It was set off by Yvonne Hall.”

“I had no idea!” Valya knew there had been an explosion aboard the
Venture
lander, an event so devastating it had crippled the nearby
Brahma
spacecraft, too. But that was all. “Dale, did you know?”

“No. But I’m not surprised.” To Zack he said, “Let me guess: You didn’t know the thing was on board.”

“That would be correct,” Zack said.

Valya felt sicker than she had during her worst moments inside the object. It only confirmed the brutal things her Russian and later Indian friends and neighbors had said about the United States and its disregard for international norms.

No,
she told herself.
Don’t surrender to that emotion. Be a professional.
“What about these bright spots?” Valya said.

Makali said, “We concluded that they told us where Keanu came
from. Waypoints, stops along its galactic voyage. They seemed to match up with exosolar systems….”

“And what about now?” Zack said.

“Now I think it’s telling us where Keanu’s
going
.”

“Which is where? Back where it came from? Or the next stop on the journey?”

“Speaking of going,” Dale said, “what’s the plan?”

Zack indicated the different tunnels around them. “We should explore these shafts and see where they lead—”

“If anywhere,” Williams said.

“Well,” Makali said, “there are five of us and four branches.”

“I’m sorry,” Valya said, and she felt no shame in admitting it, “but I have no interest in exploring a tunnel by myself.”

“Fine,” Zack said. “You and Dale take that one.” He pointed to the tunnel on the far right, and quickly assigned the others, too. “We don’t have clocks,” he said. “And we have no idea how long these suits are good for. Take fifteen minutes or your best guess, see what you can see, and report back.”

Dale immediately headed for the right branch. “Wait!” Valya heard herself saying. Although physically she felt fine—better than she had in years—she hated not having anything to contribute, to being reduced to following Dale Scott around.

But she persisted, following him into the dark tunnel. Within ten minutes they had negotiated one major twist and found themselves staring at a brilliant spot of light. Dale loped forward into the clearing, where, arms outstretched, he bent backward to look up. “Looks like a shaft that goes to the surface,” he said.

“Are there any other openings?”

He turned around twice. “None that I can see.”

When they gathered again, the verdict was two shafts of some sort—“Possibly exhaust ports for propulsion,” Williams suggested—one flat-out dead-end (Makali: “There was a blank wall”), and one collapsed tunnel.

“Okay, that clarifies things,” Zack said. “The Marker suggests that
Keanu is moving. Given the tools we’ve got, which would be none, the best way for us to know for sure is to get to the surface and look.” He pointed to the opening.

Valya knew Dale well enough to realize that he was spoiling for a fight. He did not want to go beyond this point.

But suddenly Makali took off.

“Now what the fuck?” Dale said.

“I don’t know about you,” Zack said, “but I’m inclined to follow her.”

“How’s it going, Mr. Mayor?”

Her arms free of sleeping or writhing baby for the first time today, Sasha Blaine plopped down next to Harley Drake.

“Could be better.”

Sasha brushed her red hair back from her face. In spite of all the stress, lack of sleep, and shortage of soap and water, she looked remarkably healthy and happy.

Another reminder that she was too young for poor old Harley Drake. “It’s not as though I needed a lesson in the futility of politics. Two days as HB mayor…hell, everyone is coming to me for decisions they could easily make themselves.”

“Maybe. But it’s a good sign. They trust you. They’re thinking of themselves as part of a community and not just freelancers.”

“It’s terrifying, Sasha. I don’t have the answers! I’m finding out how the Temple works right along with Nayar and a dozen other guys. In fact, given that they’re real engineers, unlike me, they walk in there knowing a hell of a lot more about moving walls and strange appliances and what any of it does.”

“You got the whole water business sorted out.”

“Nayar, not me. And it didn’t take a lot of political genius to say, ‘girls today, men tomorrow.’ The food thing…everybody’s off hunting and gathering. We just organized them into groups. So at least we’ve got food coming in. And this Xavier Toutant guy came up with garbage disposal on his own. Not my idea. I mean, that’s all I’ve got on my side of the ledger. Shall we look at what’s going wrong?” He began to tick them off with his fingers. “Zack Stewart has gone off to investigate the objects or vesicles—and, by the way, where the hell did that word come from?”

“One of the ISRO engineers.”

“It’s driving me crazy. Fucking engineers, always inventing names for things that already have perfectly good names. Where was I? Right, Zack goes for vesicles, somehow winds up at the Beehive—where, based on one message from Dale Scott, things aren’t going too well. Thanks for that, Dale. Very useful…Rachel Stewart is missing.”

“She’s a teenage girl,” Sasha said.

“I know, but I’m still responsible. I’m the reason she’s here.” He could feel his face flushing, but he simply couldn’t stop himself. “I’m the reason Megan Stewart
died
and
everyone
is here!”

He took a breath. “What else? Gabriel Jones is seriously ill and I haven’t had thirty fucking seconds of privacy to be able to nail him down on what the problem is. And the icing on the coffee cake…someone murdered the little mother, not only depriving the baby of its primary care, but forcing you to take the job—”

“You know I don’t mind,” she said. She was rocking back and forth, clearly upset.

“And last, but not remotely least…her death has created a goddamn mystery for us to worry about. So, really, in addition to being small-town mayor and de facto long-duration space mission commander, I’m supposed to be a criminal investigator, a judge, a logistics manager, a technical program director, and a social worker. It’s a lot for a guy who’s really just an airplane jockey—”

He stopped. He was worn out by his own vehemence. And he was finally hearing what he was saying.

“Finish it, Harley. You really live to fly airplanes and, what, nail cocktail waitresses?”

That was pretty close; Sasha knew him quite well for an acquaintance of only a week. “It’s a lot for a guy who’s in a wheelchair.”

He knew it was lame, but he also knew he’d overdone the complaining. The wheelchair card was the closest thing to a trump he had in his conversational deck. “Let me start over. What’s up?”

Sasha laughed out loud. “God, Harley, I came to tell you to hang in there, that you’re doing great and everyone thinks so.”

That wasn’t the response he’d expected, and it made him angry again. “Sorry for being such a disappointment.”

“Lighten up, Harley. Remember, we’re as good as dead; everybody knows and doesn’t need a reminder! Stick to the basics. ‘How are you doing?’ ‘Fine!’ ‘Fine!’ I mean, you could just ask me about the baby.”

“Okay, how’s the baby? What’s his name?”

“Her.”

“Her name.”

“Chitran never said. She never said a word that I heard. I’m calling her Chandra. It means ‘moon.’”

“Is it okay to say I think it’s a nice name?”

“Not yet.”

And she got to her feet. She was a tall woman and would have looked down on Harley in his best days. From the chair? She looked like an angry Amazon. “Oh, and by the way—I’m just fucking fine, too!”

She walked off, leaving Harley Drake more alone than ever.

“I think this is far enough.”

Pav had simply stopped walking. They had been at it for twenty minutes or so, using the Slate to light their way.

Rachel said, “But we haven’t found anything.”

“Exactly. We haven’t heard or seen the dog. Nothing’s changing here. No turns, nothing to see. This tunnel could be fifty kilometers long.”

“Unlikely.”

“Fine, then.” He seemed really irritated. “We’re running down my battery.”

“Too bad! Afraid you won’t be able to access your porn collection?”

There was a pause. With the light off, Rachel couldn’t see Pav’s expression or posture. His voice, however, showed that he was hurt. “Why the hell would you say something like that?”

She felt mean. “Sorry. I’m just…frustrated. Where is the stupid dog? How do we get out of here?”

“Don’t know and don’t know. Which is why I want to go back to the opening. I keep thinking someone will come looking for us.”