Heaven's War (43 page)

“Hey, we’re the
human
race,” Dale said, sarcastically. “We rule, don’t we? We kick alien butt. We’re the meanest, smartest—”

Valya slapped Dale on the arm to shut him up. “Enough!” She turned to Zack and Makali, saying, quietly, “I think we should join forces with Dash.”

“In spite of my objections?” Zack said.

“Because our other options are poor,” she said, “and because I believe Dash can help us return to Earth.”

“He doesn’t have a vesicle,” Makali said.

“But he does,” Valya said, looking surprised.

“What do you mean?” Zack said. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the pool. “The Sentry prisoner has a
vesicle
?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But when we learned how we’d arrived here, he told me all about them: the way they’re ‘grown,’ the fact that there are usually three of them in storage…he said something about the Builders doing everything in threes, but I’m not sure that wasn’t a joke—”

Zack was on his feet. Makali said, “What are you planning to do? Dive in there and wake it?”

Zack hesitated, then grinned. “That would be pretty pointless, wouldn’t it?”

Dale spoke up again. “Yeah, some people really hate being awakened.”

Zack slumped with the rest of them. “So we wait,” he said, them smiled grimly. “Conserve oxygen, okay?”

“You’re quiet,” Rachel Stewart said.

Pav, Rachel, and Zhao had been following the wandering, uncertain lead of the being that called itself Yvonne Hall through a maze of structures. They were too blank, too solid, too lacking in architectural style to be called buildings. They were just big blocks towering over them.

“Is anyone talking?”

“No, but you’re the closest thing to a functioning adult we have…I was hoping.”

It had taken him several hours to learn to properly hear this girl’s voice. She continued to say things that were frivolous and inappropriate…until you realized that her tone was actually quite serious, and that she might even be voicing what everyone was thinking—and afraid to say aloud. He couldn’t decide whether it was immaturity or a supreme wisdom beyond her years.

Or, possibly, the voice of her father. Zhao’s research had suggested that Rachel was, in manner at least, clearly Zack Stewart’s child.

“Try her again.” He nodded at Yvonne’s back.

“No, thanks,” Rachel said. “I figure she’ll tell us what we need to know, when we need to know it.”

The resurrected woman—“Revenant,” as Rachel and Pav called her—had simply given them orders and marched off. She was a bit unsteady on her feet, and every few dozen meters she was forced to stop, retching or just trying to steady herself.

The young man, Pav, had tried to help. “Do you want to rest?” he’d asked her, only to be waved away. “We’ve given you the only water we’ve got—”

“You have to follow me,” Yvonne had said, her voice as raw as that of a lifelong smoker.

“Where?” Pav had demanded.

“Where they tell me!” she said, an answer that was incomplete, thus unhelpful, and a little disturbing, especially when she said, “It’s like I’ve got a GPS in my head. Someone is telling me where to go, and it kind of hurts when we stop or go off course.”

That had been fifteen minutes ago. Zhao hoped that wherever they were headed, they were closer. He was about to collapse from lack of water, lack of food, and exhaustion.

As he trudged next to Rachel, he saw Pav stopping ahead of them. He turned carefully to his left, bent as if trying to see or hear.

Then quickly back to Rachel and Zhao. “Did you hear that?”

Zhao had heard nothing.

Then it didn’t matter, because the missing dog emerged from an “alley” and launched itself at Pav. “Cowboy!” Rachel shouted, running to join the scrum.

Yvonne Hall stopped and turned back. For a moment, Zhao feared some kind of biblical rebuke. But she blinked, shook her head, and, sounding for the first time like a normal human being, said, “Is that a
dog
?”

The dog seemed to think Yvonne was perfectly normal, because it trotted over to her. She bent for the ritual licking and patting as Rachel explained, “He’s a Revenant, like you.”

Which left Yvonne almost smiling. “Whatever you say.”

Zhao was emboldened, gesturing to the habitat around them. “Do you know what this place is?”

Yvonne raised her head from the canine interaction and looked at him for a long moment, the way one responded to a query about directions from a stranger on a street.

“They tell me it’s for ‘processing,’” she said.

“I wish you’d tell us who ‘they’ are,” Pav said.

“Whenever I…put that question in my own head, what comes up is ‘Builders.’”

“Architects?” Rachel said.

“Yeah.”

“My dad said that’s what happened when my mom came back. She was kind of channeling the Architects.”

“Let me tell you,” Yvonne said, “it isn’t easy. It’s like having…five earbuds and a bunch of direct neural inputs all going at the same time. It’s making me sick, for one thing, and I’m not really getting what I want to know, not in any coherent fashion.”

She blinked again, but this time there were tears. “I was really dead.”

Rachel looked to Zhao, as if to say,
What do I tell her?

“Yes,” Zhao said, firmly. His position was always
Work from the facts
. “Do you remember anything of dying?”

“White light. Burning. Falling. Drowning. Falling some more. If I believed in hell, I’d think that’s where I was. There’s something I have to show you. It’s important. That’s all I know, that and the feeling that once we’re there, some of the noise in my head will stop.”

And they resumed their journey.

Zhao had not been a popular child, not with his brother or playmates. One of the reasons was the fact that he
was
a brother: every other boy in the neighborhood (and there were only a few girls) was a single child, an honored son…and saw Zhao as an unfair ally in sports and war games.

The other reason? Zhao never believed any of the stories the other boys told, not about Chang Liu’s father being a taikonaut or Du Jincheng’s DVD of
Halo III
and especially not Mrs. Yang showing her breasts to Mang Senlin—even once, much less twice.

His constant refrain? “Show me.”

This personality trait—which he defined as healthy skepticism—had served him in his intelligence work.

He wasn’t sure it was serving him on Keanu. Start with the vastly improbable scooping of Bangalore humans by a giant alien space bubble, to use terms that would have come out of Chang Liu’s mouth in 1998.

Then the arrival on the NEO, the discovery of the highly unusual events of the
Destiny
and
Brahma
missions (Zhao had known that there had been a Close Encounter, but few of the details), and the astonishing
business of Megan Stewart’s resurrection two years after her death, followed by, apparently, astronaut Pogo Downey’s return from a more recent fatal accident.

What had driven Downey, anyway? Some twist in his personality? Zhao’s research pegged the astronaut as extremely religious, suggesting that his death and resurrection might have unhinged him. Or was it a more rational desire to protect Earth from infection by the dangerous entities aboard Keanu—?

Zhao could sympathize with both motives. He was still emotionally numb from the wonders and terrors of his experiences since leaving the habitat, which, looking back, now seemed like a haven of sanity and logic. Being trapped in mysterious tunnels! Swimming in a stream of plasmlike goo!

Then falling to what surely should have been his death, only to survive…and find himself in the company of resurrected astronaut Yvonne Hall!

The only truly logical conclusion was that he had actually been killed when a kinetic-energy weapon struck Bangalore. Perhaps, as Yvonne suggested, this was some kind of hell. Certainly he had been shown a great many things…he just didn’t know what they all meant—

They were skirting another lake, this one filled with churning bluish fluid, when the dog suddenly began barking, and not the friendly sounds even Zhao recognized.

Warning sounds, complete with growls.

With a clap of thunder so loud the sound flattened them, the lake exploded. Thrown flat on his back, Zhao could only watch in amazement as a gusher of blue fluid shot toward the roof of the habitat…to disappear into a rooftop portal.

It was over within seconds, the only evidence of the massive eruption being the empty lake…and a misty rain.

“God, that tastes awful!” Rachel said, wiping her mouth.

“Don’t drink it!” Pav said, but it was difficult, since they had been coated with the fluid.

“Will it hurt us?” Zhao asked Yvonne. “And what was it?”

“Good questions,” she said. “I’m putting them both in the queue. Meanwhile, we’re here.”

Zhao immediately classed the structure—four stories tall, and twice as wide, looking much like the Temple in the human habitat—as a public building of some kind. It just had a more majestic aspect, like British colonial centers in India.

Except that whereas those would face a broad avenue or a public square, or even this bizarre exploding lake, this rested at an odd angle to those next to it. At least two “alleys” simply dead-ended here, as if this building had been dropped into the neighborhood long after the others.

Yvonne stopped in the front, with Pav, Rachel, Zhao, and Cowboy looking the place over…and waiting. “Okay,” Rachel said. “We’re here. Now what?”

“We go in.”

The building not only wasn’t barred or locked…it wasn’t even closed in; an entire side was open to the elements, such as they were. Or visiting strangers, in their case.

Entering its shadowy interior, Zhao was struck by the sheer size, the darkness, and what appeared to be illustrations along the walls.

“It’s like a museum or something,” Rachel said. Actually, to Zhao it was a planetarium; the exhibits were star fields. As they approached the first one, a solar system emerged from the stars…one more step and a giant green planet grew prominent.

There was no actual lighting, but the exhibits—there was no better word—provided their own light. “I count a dozen of them,” Yvonne said.

“
You
counted, or the voices in your head?” Zhao said.

“The voices are quiet right now, thank God.”

“Whoa!” Pav said. “Check this out!”

He had gone closer to the first planet exhibit. “What happened?” Rachel said.

He simply took her by the hand and pulled her with him. “Oh!” she said.

The planets disappeared, replaced by a landscape—and several alien beings. They were two-legged, but with three appendages. Their world, judging by the illustration, was heavily industrialized and densely populated.

“Okay,” Rachel said, “we’re being shown different worlds, and the beings who live there, right?”

“I have no better suggestion,” Zhao said. He had shifted to the next one, which showed a ringed world and several moons. The landscape on display was mountainous, covered with patchy ice, and drenched in a dark rain. The inhabitants were squat, flat creatures…alien centipedes.

A third world, a banded gas giant like Jupiter, showed no surface landscape at all, but rather a sea of clouds and floating islands of vegetation…and beings that reminded Zhao of jellyfish.

The fourth…brilliantly scarlet desert, and an alien whose head looked like the bleached skull of a long-dead steer, wearing a monk’s habit.

Rachel was already two exhibits ahead of him, in front of the first Earth-like world Zhao had yet seen…though this one looked to be ninety percent ocean. “This creature looks like the Sentry my father talked about.”

Before Zhao could go closer, Pav said, “You know what these guys have in common?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Clothing.” It was true; even the alien jellyfish wore delicate armor of some kind.

“What did you expect?” Rachel said. “They’d be naked?”

“In all the sci-fi I used to watch, aliens usually were naked.”

“Maybe they’ve all eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Life and Death,” Yvonne said. Zhao knew what she meant, but Rachel and Pav looked at her as if she were gibbering. “The Garden of Eden,” she explained. “Adam and Eve were running around, happily naked, until Eve took a bite of the apple and got Adam to do it, too. Next thing you know…loincloths. Don’t know why I remembered that. I haven’t looked at a Bible since I was twelve.”

“Maybe the voices in your head are Christians,” Zhao said. “Speaking of the voices, we’re hungry and thirsty and I think we need to know what’s going on.”

“In a minute,” Yvonne said. “It’s not as though they just shut up…it’s just that the volume dropped. It’s like I have ringing in my ears, only all through my head.”