Heaven's War (40 page)

And that he was going to die.

Along with several massive globular clusters of plasm, the quintet seemed to be aimed at one of the open spaces…what might have been a city park in a terrestrial city, but oblong in shape, and huge.

At this height—even as it rapidly decreased—Pav couldn’t tell what the park surface was. Not green grass, certainly…it was yellowish in color.

He hoped it wasn’t brick or stone—

“Take my hand!”

Distracted by the spinning, growing landscape, Pav hadn’t seen Zhao flying up to him…with Rachel, Cowboy, and the mummy (who now looked more like a black female in a disappearing covering), all strung out behind him, Rachel holding Zhao’s left foot and clutching Cowboy’s paw, and the mummy, like flying children from Peter Pan.

Pav grasped Zhao’s hand, felt himself tugged and turned.

Now!
With his other hand, he clutched the Slate to his chest and braced for the fatal smash—

He landed on his right side, and found that instead of being flattened and killed…he splashed, then bounced!

As he did, however, he slammed into Zhao, catching a shoe against the back of his head—and that hurt.

Then he skidded and settled, just in time to see Rachel and the mummy making their own inelegant landings.

He was lying on his back on what felt like sabudana pudding, thick and yielding. And, fortunately, either not too deep…or just thicker with depth. He was able to sit up.

Aside from what would surely be a lump on the back of his head, he was unhurt.

The others were arrayed around him, each one rising or sitting. “Is everybody okay?”

“Fine,” Rachel said. “God, that was freaky.”

“Where’s the dog?”

“I lost my grip the last few meters,” Rachel said, looking around. “Cowboy!” she called.

Zhao was slow to respond. “I may have turned my ankle.” He was trying to stand.

The mummy was seated facing them, giving Pav his first real look at this stranger, the human female wearing a layer of brownish material that had been torn off in various places, notably her face, which showed her dark skin.

“Namaste,”
Pav said, adding, in his native language, “Do you speak Hindi?” Then he said, “What about English?”

“She speaks English,” Rachel said. She had gotten to her feet and now stood at Pav’s side.

“How do you know something like that?” Zhao said.

“She knows me,” the mummy said, turning to Pav. “
Namaste
to you, though.”

Pav flinched. He knew that voice, too. And, as she continued to peel off the second skin, the face.

It was Yvonne Hall, flight engineer for Zack Stewart’s
Destiny-7
crew…the first human to step onto Keanu’s surface.

And who had died here more than a week ago, vaporized in a nuclear blast.

The introductions were quick and, to Pav, strangely low-key. “Yvonne, Zhao. Zhao, Yvonne.” “Nice to see you again,” and so on. Pav thought they should be shouting, that each of the humans should be jumping up and down.

Maybe they were too tired or weak. Or maybe they had just seen too many crazy things. Their supply of wonder and amazement had been used up.

Certainly Yvonne seemed used up. She stared at the plasm pooled around her feet, raising her head to speak, then slumping, like a puppet on strings.

“You’re sure it’s her,” Zhao said.

“It’s her,” Rachel said. “She used to come to our house for Fourth of July.”

“Yeah,” the woman said, her voice raw and raspy, “it’s me. But I wouldn’t blame anyone for doubting it.” She blinked, as if getting used to seeing after being in darkness. “I feel…” She was unable to complete the sentence; she began to shiver, as if her whole body were regaining functioning. Well, Pav thought, if this was really
Destiny
astronaut Yvonne Hall, and she had been brought back to life, that was what was going on.

Zhao knelt beside her, taking her by the hand. “What do you remember? What happened?”

Yvonne focused on him and finally forced a smile. “First, you guys
tell me what the hell you’re doing here. I’d have to have been dead for fifty years before I’d believe that NASA could send you three to Keanu. And looking at these two”—meaning Pav and Rachel—“I know it hasn’t been fifty years.”

“More like a week,” Pav said.

“Okay, tell me how. But first, can we get out of this shit?”

The trip to “shore” was like a slog through coastal mud—amazingly tiring, even for a distance of less than a hundred meters.

Without discussing it, the group had simply headed en masse for the nearest “dry” place, which was an open space between two tall, featureless buildings. Rachel was the first to emerge. “Careful,” she said. “There’s some kind of step here.”

Pav saw that there was a solid border around the giant pool of plasm. He had to pull himself up, another procedure that was far more taxing than he expected. “Is gravity higher here?” he said aloud.

“I think it’s just that stuff,” Rachel said. “It grabs you.”

“This plasm…it looks like the same sabudana that got pumped through the tunnels,” Pav said.

He saw that Yvonne was struggling to extricate herself, so he stepped back in to help her. Then he helped Zhao, who was trying to hop on one good ankle. Eventually they were all together, bent over and panting, in what looked, Pav thought, like an alley in a terrestrial city—minus the graffiti, dirt, and noise.

“What did you call this?” Rachel said.

“Sabudana,” he said. “Like tapioca.”

“Okay.” She sniffed. “Sure doesn’t smell like pudding.”

“I don’t believe it’s supposed to be edible,” Zhao said.

“Too bad,” Pav said. “I could eat a liter or two.”

Suddenly Yvonne stepped away from them, vomiting against the nearest wall.

Rachel was already with Yvonne, holding her from behind as she retched. “I’m all right,” she kept saying, clearly lying.

She was sobbing now, too. And who could blame her? Pav knew few
of the details, just that the American
Venture
lander had carried a small suitcase nuclear weapon…and that to protect the vehicle from some menace—Pav didn’t know exactly what—Yvonne Hall had detonated it, destroying
Venture
and
Brahma
, which had landed nearby, and vaporizing herself.

Pav couldn’t imagine being in a situation where he would pull that trigger, knowing he would be killing himself dead dead dead.

Even if, as it turned out, it was not so permanently dead.

Then, to wake up…where? In some kind of alien cocoon?

Pav wanted to vomit in sheer sympathy.

“Here,” Zhao said, offering Yvonne the water bottle—which still had a couple of centimeters of water in it! He’d been holding out on them. Fucking figured.

Rachel was rubbing Yvonne’s back, looking and acting very grown-up. It was fascinating how different this teenage girl turned out to be. She wasn’t completely a brat, anyway.

“This is so…strange,” Yvonne said. “One second, I was…fighting off Downey. Then…I’m in some vat of some kind, trying to breathe—”

“We know,” Rachel told her.

“How can you know?” Zhao said. “None of us can know what this is like!”

“I talked to my mother after she came back,” Rachel said, suddenly sounding like someone twice her age. “I haven’t had the experience, okay, but I’ve been thinking about this for days now.”

“It’s not just…coming back,” Yvonne said. She was steadier on her feet now. “It feels as though I just saw that timer count down to zero about fifteen minutes ago. I was there, then I was nowhere.” She forced a smile. Then she pointed to Pav. “Then you tackled me. Why’d you do that?”

“To save you,” Rachel said, “from a cat’s-eye.”

“Which is what?” Before Pav could venture an explanation, which was sure to be argued by Zhao, Yvonne waved her hand. “Never mind about that. I think I could ask a million questions and still not run out.” She raised her eyes to the unfamiliar structures around them. “What happened to me, where we are. And what the hell
you
people are doing here.”

Rachel’s account of the twin vesicle/Objects, their launch at Bangalore and Houston, and their “collection” of almost two hundred humans, took several minutes. It would have been completed more quickly, but Yvonne kept interrupting. She was especially troubled by the connection between her detonation of the nuke aboard
Destiny
and the launch of the Objects. “So you’re saying
I
caused it? Nobody has any idea what was going on there…what my orders were! I mean, look at this place! Are they saying I was wrong?”

“Nobody is making any judgments,” Zhao said. Fair enough; in Pav’s view, based on subsequent events, the Coalition and NASA would have been better off staying away from Keanu—or, if they had to land, bombarding the place. “Everyone understands that you were only following instructions.”

“Shit, yeah! They should ask the White House or headquarters. They could ask my
father
about my instructions.”

Mention of Gabriel Jones caused Rachel and Pav to look at each other. Zhao knew of the relationship between the JSC director and Yvonne, too. He gestured to Rachel. “Go ahead, tell her.”

“Tell me what?” Yvonne said.

“Your father was one of the Houston people who got scooped,” she said.

“He’s
here
? My father is here?”

Pav thought Yvonne was about to collapse. He and Zhao took her arms, but she steadied. “Okay, okay.” She was shaking her head, as if recovering from a punch. “The others in the crew? Tea, Zack. The
Brahma
guys…”

“Tea, Taj, Lucas, and Natalia went home on
Destiny
,” Pav said.

“On
Destiny
?” Pav had to explain the bizarre “snowplow” landing the orbiting
Destiny
had made on Keanu’s surface.

“Where’s Zack Stewart?”

“With us,” Rachel said. “Well, with the others back in the habitat.”

“Good. He’s a good guy.” Yvonne still looked uncertain. “You know, as we talk, I’ve got another input. It’s sort of a voice, but not a voice.”

“In your head?” Pav said.

She nodded. “It’s like having…sound and some kind of video streaming right past your ears and eyes.”

“What about?” Zhao asked.

Yvonne closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears.

“Yvonne,” Rachel said, only to have Yvonne flap her hands and shush her.

“Let me think! Jesus!” She walked away.

Rachel turned to Pav. “Did you ever see Cowboy?”

He wanted to laugh; with all this, the girl thought about the dog. “No.” Just the one sea of plasm was large enough that it was possible the dog had splashed down some distance away, unseen but still safe. It could have hit another lake.

But the animal could just as easily have slammed into one of these buildings. “We can start looking whenever we—”

Yvonne suddenly returned, all business. “Okay,” she said. “I think I’m getting used to what’s going on. Somebody or something is telling me or making me feel things. And they can make it kind of urgent. Right now they or it are telling me there’s something we all need to see.” She looked up, then scanned the tops of the buildings. “It’s that way,” she said nodding forward.

Zhao was shaking his head. “We have no time for sightseeing. We need to find a way back to our habitat.”

Yvonne turned to look at him. She was taller than Zhao and loomed over the Chinese spy by half a head.

Her expression was odd, too. “We said, you need to see this.”

We?
Pav looked at Rachel, then Zhao. Suddenly none of them felt inclined to argue.

From the time Jaidev was seventeen until he was fired by Vikram Nayar, his life had consisted of work or furtive sex. Money, status, none of those had mattered. It was all about doing the work and finding a partner for the night. Or the hour. Or the next hour. So far, life here in the Keanu habitat had been much the same.

Minus the sex.

In the few moments in which he was not consumed with the giant toy store that was the Temple and all its wonders, Jaidev tried to prepare himself for a celibate life among the Houston-Bangalores.

Now, basic demographics suggested that a group of 180 or so humans, all but a few of them adults, would have at least three dozen gays, if you believed the information so widely believed in the community. Other studies might drop that number to ten or so.

That was hardly a dating pool, at least by Jaidev’s standards. Especially when you had to allow for the fact that some or half of those in the community might be women.

Of course, Jaidev was well aware that he might not be facing old age—or a life span that stretched more than a few days or weeks.