Heaven's War (37 page)

After an initial burst of enthusiasm about being alive, Pav wasn’t much better. “Do we just keep walking until we drop?”

“If the only other choice is sit here until we die, yes.” She realized she had to do better than that, even for herself. She patted Cowboy, who was happily walking with them and not getting one step ahead. “The dog seems fine. Maybe he found water or a way out.”

“If he did,” Zhao said, emerging from sullen silence, “why is he still trapped with us?”

For a moment, Rachel wondered if she and Pav and Cowboy wouldn’t have been better off if Zhao had never emerged from the goo. Even back in the habitat, her initial impression of the man hadn’t been positive. He was a spy and a foreigner.

Until Rachel ran into the beings that built Keanu and killed her mother, Zhao was the closest thing to an alien she had ever met.

“When I figure out how to ask him,” she said, “I’ll let know you.”

An hour after their bath in plasm goo, Rachel and Pav looked and felt the same as they had before.

The passage looked the same. There had been no further appearances of the gravity marble. The dog had been content to trot with them, bumping into their legs for reassurance. Things weren’t exactly good…but they could have been worse.

And Pav had resumed talking. “Hey, Rachel, how far do you think we’ve walked?”

Rachel knew a human could cover half a dozen kilometers in an hour, with a steady walk. But their progress had not been steady. On the other hand, they had easily walked for three hours. “I don’t know. Ten kilometers?”

“How long was the habitat?”

“Less than that, from where we started.” There was no point ignoring the obvious problem. “But we haven’t been going in a straight line.”

“Yeah,” Pav said. “We could be going around the end of the habitat.”

“Right!”

Zhao spoke up now, too. “Or completely away from it into the interior of the NEO.”

Rachel had an idea, something her mother had taught her. “Would that be so bad?”

Zhao turned to face her. His expression showed disbelief bordering on anger, which was an improvement over his zombie-like silence. “If we want to return to human beings with human food, yes.”

“How do we know there isn’t water and food elsewhere in the NEO?”

“We don’t!” he said. “We don’t know anything!”

“Oh, we know a little, don’t we?” she said, making sure to keep walking, dragging Zhao and Pav and Cowboy with her. “I mean, look,” she said, waving at the passage around them. “We know that somewhere, there was a race of beings that just wanted to let the universe know they existed. So…they took one of their moons—”

“Whoa,” Pav said. “We don’t know this was one of their moons.” With the authority only a sixteen-year-old boy could assume, he said, “Planets like Earth can only have one.”

“Turns out Earth used to have a good-sized second moon,” Zhao said.

“That’s just a theory,” Pav said. Rachel smiled to herself, not that anyone could see her expression in the near-darkness.
Pav’s getting into the game.

Zhao said, “A theory with more foundation than your assumption that the Architects originated on a planet like Earth.”

“Fine,” Pav said. “But am I wrong if I say that, somewhere in the
galaxy, there’s a race that has the power to leave its home planet, fly across space, reach this planetoid, and put some kind of engine on it to move it into orbit around its home planet? Or that they spent a century or five centuries hollowing it out, creating habitats, rewiring it, replumbing it?”

Pav smiled, clearly enjoying his fantasy. “Or that they put some kind of shithot miracle motor inside it, anti-matter, maybe? And then they put some of their people aboard and sent it into space?”

“It’s obvious that
something
like that must have happened,” Zhao said. “But why would anyone do such a thing?” Listening to his growing agitation, Rachel feared she was going to be personally challenged to justify the Architects and all their actions. “Exploration?”

“How about invasion?” Pav said.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Although I can’t imagine what you would find on another planet that would be worth a trip of a thousand or ten thousand years. What? Water? Slaves?” She had heard some of this from her father. He would often sit with her and watch old sci-fi movies like
Independence Day
or
War of the Worlds
…but he would never sit quietly.

“How about our music?” Pav said.

“What, they came here for Beethoven?”

“A thousand years ago they wouldn’t have heard of Beethoven.”

“You were the one who suggested music,” Rachel said. “Besides, they could get our music by listening. They wouldn’t have to
come
here.”

“He just means art,” Zhao said. “Which is as valid an argument as any, given the utter lack of information.” He not only seemed engaged in the conversation, he was actually striding out with purpose. “Exploration, maybe. Invasion, no. But there is another motivation: the search for new products and ideas.”

Pav laughed out loud. “That’s China for you. ‘Give us your ideas and we’ll build them more cheaply than you. And sell them back to you.’”

Zhao’s head turned to Pav with such energy that Rachel expected a punch to follow. But the Chinese engineer and spy merely smiled. “That has been China’s philosophy for thirty years,” he said. “We learned it from the Japanese and the Americans and the English before them.”

“Speaking of business,” Rachel said, “I wonder how expensive something like Keanu is. I mean, could the Architects afford to build one, or a hundred?”

“And how does it support itself?” Zhao said, clearly warming to the subject. “Are these habitats filled with objects or machines or materials that can be traded?”

“I don’t think so,” Pav said. “If they came here to trade spices and furs, why did they scoop us up? As I recall, they weren’t even stopping until we landed here.”

“Maybe the landing showed them that we might have something worth trading,” Rachel said. She was having a tough time concentrating on these subjects—normally they would have bored her. And she thought she might be seeing a turn in the tunnel ahead.

The others said nothing, however, and the dog stayed where he was, pacing them.

“But then why did they acquire two hundred human beings?” Zhao said.

“Maybe they trade
people
, not stuff,” Pav said, shooting a
gotcha
smile behind Zhao’s back at Rachel.

“Nonsense,” Zhao said. “If anything, they would be trading information, which really wouldn’t require a vessel this size or a mission lasting thousands of years. There would be…no point.”

“Speaking of lack of points,” Rachel said, “do you really think Keanu was a giant starship filled with aliens or machines?” She knew it was all speculation, but she had a strategy. Megan Doyle Stewart had once told Rachel, “Some people don’t want to talk, or think they don’t, especially after a trauma like a train crash or a tsunami. Get them to argue. Get them talking about money or religion or politics, and they’ll open right up.”

And it had worked! Rachel had been burdened with two men who were like statues, and in order to get their spirits back from wherever they were hiding, Rachel had provoked them into an argument! Pav had picked up on it!

Maybe he wasn’t so dim. “What else would it be?” he said.

“Well,” she said, grateful again for the hours of space-related chat that her parents had bored her with, “if you don’t have some magic stardrive, you know that anything you launch is going to take thousands of years to reach its destination. Machines simply don’t last, right?” She directed the last question at Zhao.

“It’s difficult to think of materials lasting a millennium,” he said, “much less anything that uses heat or energy or moving parts.”

“So, what I think they did,” Rachel said, and she really was enjoying this, “is they had this goo, this nanostuff, that didn’t have moving parts and wasn’t some kind of brittle material. It was just the stuff you could make anything out of, assuming you had enough energy. They probably didn’t have to bring a thousand workers to Keanu…they didn’t have to build anything. They’d already built it on their home planet.” To Zhao, she said, “Whatever it looked like. They sent the goo and the instructions here. It built itself. And it keeps building itself.”

Zhao laughed. “But the instructions! The programming! The macro controls…I can’t imagine the complexity, the processing power. It’s as if…you might need a good chunk of the time and energy of an entire star!”

“Maybe that’s what they had,” Rachel said. “They were doing whatever they were doing a thousand or ten thousand years ago.”

“I can’t see it,” Zhao said.

“I see it,” Pav said.

“Oh, really—” Zhao’s tone was sarcastic, but he never finished the sentence.

“Not your argument,” Pav said. “That.”

He pointed ahead of them, where there was more light—and sufficient light to see shapes and structures.

Cowboy barked and took off.

Rachel began jogging toward the light.

“Looks fresh,” Pav said.

Rachel and Pav arrived within a couple of minutes to find not only an intersection where another passage crossed theirs…but one of the branches opened into a small Beehive.

And, as Pav had noted, fairly recently; the walls were dripping and the cells pulsed with light.

“Maybe that was what all that goo was doing,” Rachel said. “Flowing down here to, I don’t know, rearrange things.”

Zhao had finally caught up with them. Panting, he said, “Why were you running?” Then, seeing what was around them, he stopped. “Oh.”

“This looks like what my dad was talking about, a Beehive,” Rachel said. “And that is one of the pods that just hatched…something.”

Pav grabbed her arm. “Some
one
,” he said, pointing down one of the passages.

Looking a bit like a revived mummy from an old monster movie, a human figure was shambling away from them.

Rachel gasped. It had happened before; why couldn’t it happen again?

“Mom!” she called.

“Hey,” Pav said, grabbing her. “Wait.”

He pointed down the passage to their left, the one that terminated in the Beehive.

The entire cylinder was rippling.

“That’s not good,” Rachel said.

The ripples were moving toward them, and they looked bigger and stronger than anything she’d seen. A big, nasty cat’s-eye was headed directly toward them.

This had, without doubt, been the worst day of Valentina Makarova’s life. It wasn’t as long as the agonizing day when her father had been struck while walking drunk on a Moscow highway and been taken to a hospital to die. It wasn’t as physically taxing as the time she had contracted pneumonia and was out of her mind with fever and fear.

It wasn’t as disorienting as last week’s transit from Earth to Keanu in the vesicle.

But this day combined the worst of all three.

And it did not appear to be over yet.

In fact, confronting a large, terrifying alien just as she and Dale, Zack, and Makali had reached some kind of shelter meant there was only bad yet to come.

Valya knew she had not been an example of plucky pioneer spirit or gritty determination on the trek from Vesuvius Vent to this one. She had, in fact, spent most of the hike on the edge of hysteria—

To her amazement, Zack was right in front of the alien. Of course, there was almost nowhere else to go. Valya, Dale, and Makali were crowded behind him.

The Sentry was half again as tall as a human being, roughly symmetrical; it had a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs. But it also had two other pairs of arms protruding from its midsection. All arms ended in similar flaplike hands—each with half a dozen long fingers, at least two of them opposable.

The left lower arm was brandishing what looked a piece of aluminum tubing.

The creature was blue-green in color—that was either its skin or clothing or possibly armor. The skin looked shiny and hard to Valya.

The face was shadowed, hard to see. Complicating everything, the creature seemed to be swathed in the same flaking skinsuit material as the four humans.

“You know this thing?” Makali said.

“Its type. I’ve seen two,” Zack said. “Killed one.”

The Sentry, if that was what it was, remained motionless…like a jungle cat waiting to pounce, Valya thought. As Zack slowly moved side to side, apparently looking for a chance to dash around the Sentry, the alien reacted, rotating its big, thick body. On the second move, Valya saw something shiny and anomalous, a silvery piece of metal embedded in the Sentry’s back, and what looked like blood discoloring it.

Not that she had any right to think this, given her limited experience, but it seemed that the alien had trouble moving to its right.