Heaven's War (36 page)

He had to remember, too, that for all her physical fitness and hearty Aussie cheer, Makali was still an academic with limited operational experience, much like Zack when he first joined the astronaut office. She wasn’t used to dealing with this kind of stress.

“Zack, are you leaving us?” Valya’s voice sounded in Zack’s ears.

“No!” he said. “Just looking for a route to the bottom!” In spite of his professional optimism, he was forced to admit that Makali had some support for her verdict; there was no obvious ramp wrapping around the inside of the vent cone, not on this side. The crater wall itself had crumbled in places, spilling tons of rock to the flat bottom.

Zack was suddenly worried that even if they found a way down, the tunnel into the expected habitat would be blocked.

Wouldn’t that just be the shit?

“Over here!”

Had he heard that? Makali calling to him?

“Zack! Dale, Valya, over here!”

Zack quickly retraced his steps, catching up with Dale and Valya, who had not managed to get far. “I see the ramp now!” Makali said.

Zack could see her now…a third of the way around the rim of the vent, half a kilometer distant, literally jumping up and down like a child saying,
Pick me!

Dale and Valya ran right past Williams’s body, and Zack considered leaving it where it was, to hell with honors to comrade or science experiment.

But one lesson he had learned in his NASA career was this: When you make a good plan, stick to it.
Better
is often the enemy of
good enough
.

He made sure to pick up Williams’s body.

“It doesn’t go all the way to the top,” Makali was saying. “That’s why we couldn’t see it.”

Makali was being generous when she described the ramp the way she did; the top ten meters of the ramp had collapsed some time in the past.

“Is there no other way down this? A second ramp?” Scott said.

“I didn’t see anything,” Zack said. Makali said the same thing at the same time.

“How do we get down?” Valya said. She sounded tired; her suit was likely close to failing.

“Jump,” Zack told her.

“I can’t!”

“We don’t have time to fuck around. Dale, grab her and start running.”

Dale Scott might have been a greedy, petty prick…but he knew that time was short and physics was their friend.

He literally picked up a struggling Valya, circled back to give himself a running start…then sailed off the rim, down a distance equivalent to the height of a two-story building…and slid, ass first, down the ramp.

Makali turned to Zack. “Can you handle this with the body?”

“Dale just did.”

No more arguments. She took her flying leap, landing more or less on her feet and skipping to a controlled stop.

Looking at the gap, at the sheer rock face below the ramp itself, at the appalling distance straight down…he hesitated.

Idiot. As if you’re going to live another hour in this suit—

He was airborne before he knew it, but his takeoff foot slipped and he realized he had made a bad launch.

He hit low, just below his knees, and flopped forward on his face, skidding into the vent wall, meanwhile losing the body in his arms.

He might have had low gravity working for him, but he had ancient stone working against him. He felt as though he’d been tackled in a football game—could even taste blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten his lip.

The impact stunned him. For the first time in his life, he lost consciousness—likely only for a few seconds. But it was terrifying.

Then he was being helped up. Makali. She was speaking to him, but he couldn’t seem to hear her. Nevertheless, he let her drag him farther down the ramp, toward the blessed darkness below.

His indicator was indigo now.

Blind, deaf, exhausted, he simply trudged down the ramp. With each step, he felt the growing sense that exploring space with him was a bad deal.

Look at the record. Dale Scott kicked off the International Space Station, the first and so far only person to suffer that fate.

Then there was his
Destiny-7
crew. Yvonne dead. Pogo dead, brought back to life, then dead again. (Did that count as one loss, or two? He knew what Dale Scott would say.)

There was one dead in the
Brahma
crew, too: Dennis Chertok could be added to his butcher’s bill.

And Megan, of course.

And now Wade Williams. Possibly Valya.

“Don’t mumble,” Makali said. “We’re almost at the bottom.”

“Williams,” he said.

“Worry about him later, Zack. Come on!”

And just like that, they were at the bottom, on level ground, at least, picking a path through rubble. “Someone went this way recently,” Makali said. To Zack it sounded as though she were panting now, too.

He didn’t have the strength to dispute or query, but Makali continued. “I saw two long, scraping tracks,” she said. “Frozen stuff, bright yellow like the goo that made the skinsuits.”

As they reached the broad, now-familiar access tunnel and left Keanu daylight behind, Zack found his voice. And apparently, his mind. “Maybe it’s from Dale and Valya.” He hoped they were ahead of them.

“It looked like the tracks we saw leading away from
Brahma
.”

Deeper and deeper. Their suits had no lights, but the optics shifted into some kind of night vision. He could see Scott ahead of him, Valya in his arms.

They had stopped at the shimmering curtain that was another Membrane. Seeing it, Zack laughed out loud.

“It’s funny?” Makali said.

“I’m just relieved it’s here…I made a big assumption that this vent would have the same features Vesuvius did.”

He hurried forward, taking Valya by the arm. “How are you?”

She was swaying. “Look,” Scott said, pointing to her skinsuited legs.

A crack was forming even as Zack watched. “Let’s go. Everyone, through the Membrane!”

It was just as he remembered it…walking into a chamber filled with bubbles of varying sizes, from pea to marble, that clung to the skinsuits. “Just keep walking,” he said, not sure whether Valya could hear.

But she was still upright, still moving. Deeper and deeper they went. Surely they were no longer in vacuum—

Through a final cascade, like a rinse at a carwash, and they were out…standing in another Beehive annex.

Makali and Dale Scott pushed through moments later.

“Holy shit,” Makali said.

Zack shared the sentiment; this Beehive was obviously a cousin of the one in the human habitat, but far older. It looked used, almost abused. Most of the reincarnation cells were broken, their fluids dried or dissipated. “They’re bigger here,” Makali said.

Yes, while they came in different sizes, most cells here were far larger than those Makali had seen, even those sized for cattle or crocs.

“Oh my God!” Zack turned away from his examination of the Beehive just in time to see Valya’s skinsuit enter its terminal phase, cracking into pieces and flaking off to dissolve in a cloud of dust. Pieces of it clung to her, but clearly not in any logical pattern—one on her right arm, one around her breasts.

Wide-eyed with understandable fear—“Do it,” Zack said; “we’re all going to have to!”—she took the first breath.

And immediately began gasping and wheezing.

Makali looked at Zack. Even swathed in the skinsuit and hidden by the goggles, her expression was obvious:
Oh no!

But Valya waved off assistance and began breathing more comfortably. “It’s okay,” she said. “Feels like oxygen. It’s just…the smell! And it’s cold!”

Zack could feel his suit going terminal. There was a moment where he thought,
I can’t breathe
, but it passed. Overall, it was like having a wetsuit drop away.

He immediately understood why Valya’s first breath was so difficult. There was air, yes, but probably less than humans wanted—it was like being at a mountain observatory above three thousand meters. Cold, too.

And the smell! Like the worst rotting fish he’d ever encountered. He almost gagged.

Scott and Makali’s suits began to dissolve now, too. They were all committed to entering this new habitat—

“Zack,” Valya said. He was facing her, his back to the rest of the Beehive. She pointed past him.

A creature blocked the passage—a tall, multi-armed being Zack recognized as a Sentry, the same kind of alien that had killed Pogo Downey.

And Megan Stewart.

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t move.

And something nasty was happening to her face.

Suddenly she inhaled, choked, coughed, spit, and, terrified, began to thrash.

Okay, you can breathe!
She was hot, still couldn’t see, but air was coming in, going out.

A gooey film covered her eyes. The same goo pinned her like an insect in a science experiment.

For a moment.
With a bit of effort, she was able to tug her right arm free of the goo and wipe her eyes. The only difficulty was that someone or something kept bumping her and, strangely, wiping her face.

“Stop that!” she screamed, though she heard nothing and started coughing again. Finally she got both hands free and cleared her eyes.

She was still in the passage, more or less sitting up, though cocooned in a settling, hardening, drying sea of goo…and Cowboy was flailing around in it, too.

He barked. At least, his gooey muzzle opened twice. No, she couldn’t hear. Goo in her ears, too.

Her first move was to grab the dog. He seemed terrified. No wonder; he’d been in the dark for hours, and now he’d been swept up in some kind of tsunami. “It’s okay, boy, everything’s okay,” she said, knowing the words made no sense, but hoping the sound of a human voice would calm the animal.

And when he grew calm, so would she.

A human touch seemed to work. The dog began licking her face again. Normally this would have been annoying, but this was not a normal situation.

She did more work on her ears, wiping away some of the goo, improving her hearing considerably. “Pav!” she called. “Zhao! Where are you guys?”

With the tunnel so filled with plasm and the sound so deadened, she didn’t expect a response.

They might be dead, she realized. Before long, she might be dead, too.

Then Cowboy barked—she could hear him now—and struggled out of her arms. He began digging at a mound of goo to her left…which quickly revealed itself to be Pav, who was shouting in Hindi.

Zhao was to Pav’s left. They were both alive, trying to extricate themselves.

Rachel dug in and helped. Allowing for a considerable amount of struggle as well as grunting and groaning, it went quickly. Rachel realized that the goo was not only hardening, it was drying out, turning to powder.

Pav was able to stand up and hug her. “Thank you,” he said, his voice muffled and old-sounding.

Cowboy bumped up against Pav. Though there was almost no light, they could see that the dog’s coat was crusted with goo. Flakes fell off every time he moved.

And even with all this activity around him, Zhao just sat there, head down. “Come on, get up,” Rachel told him.

“We have nowhere to go,” Zhao said.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rachel said. She and Pav tugged Zhao upright. “Are you just going to sit there and wait to die?”

“At the moment, that seems to be the practical choice.”

Rachel understood his feeling. In that first instant after regaining consciousness, feeling herself trapped, blind, deaf, she had considered simply…letting it all go.

Some force inside her had taken charge and made her fight. And now she was glad she had. Yes, the situation was grim. But everything about her situation on Keanu was that way.

She would be letting her father down if she simply died. Maybe it was that simple.

“We’re walking,” she said. “That way.”

That way
was simply farther down the passage in the direction they
had just been carried by the wave of goo. It didn’t seem smart to go back the way they had come.

She just hoped they would find an escape before their little supply of water ran out, along with their energy.

The good thing—the only good thing—about the goo was that in an hour’s time, it dried up and flaked off, leaving little residue.

The bad thing—being buried continued to have a bad effect on Zhao, who seemed numb. Rachel and Pav had had to wipe the stuff off him; he wasn’t much help. Even after he could breathe and stand up, he was pretty much a zombie.