Heaven's War (47 page)

And so did Sasha Blaine. She touched his shoulder. “Our timing really sort of sucks, doesn’t it? It would have been fun to, you know, meet normally.”

“Yeah. But on the bright side, we’ve packed a whole lifetime of adventure into a week and a couple of days.”

“There’s that,” she said. “You know, in spite of that cynical, bitter exterior, you are pretty much a glass-is-half-full guy.”

He laughed. “Not exactly. Do you want to know what kind of things go through my head at a time like this?”

“Do I?”

He pointed to the growing smear of multiplying Woggle-Bugs. “If we manage to kill every one of those things,” he said, unable to keep from smiling, “do they all come back as Revenants? I’m hoping that there’s some sort of personality threshold the Woggle-Bugs don’t reach. Maybe they’re all one big entity…when a few of them die, it’s like, I don’t know, skin cells that flake off a human.”
Keep trying,
he thought.
Eventually you’ll convince yourself—

Xavier Toutant appeared in the entrance. Seeing Harley with Sasha, he marched directly toward them. “Xavier, you look like a man with a message,” Harley said. In fact, he looked worn out and troubled.

“Mr. Weldon’s on his way back. Said to alert you.”

Oh, shit, he’s got Camilla.
Harley immediately pictured the unpleasant scene in which he ruthlessly interrogated a nine-year-old girl.

But when Weldon arrived, he didn’t have Camilla. He was escorting a naked adult male who was moaning, weeping, and wheezing, an unholy trinity of unattractive activities.

It was Brent Bynum.

Building a raft—that worked fine. They wound up using one entire side of the shed, which was large enough to easily hold the four humans. Removed from the structure, the material proved to be light, like balsa. “I think it’ll float,” Zack said, in that bright, chirpy way that made Dale Scott want to drown him.

“Fine,” Dale said, wondering why it was his job to keep the group focused on operational details. Probably because he had been an engineer and a fighter pilot—an operational type—while Zack and Makali and even Valya were academics. “How do we get this thing moving across the water?”

“Paddles?” Makali said. She had already been at work, stripping several long, narrow pieces of material from the shed. She began searching for some kind of thin, flat flap that could be attached to the base of the paddle.

They settled on one of the leftover tiles for the shed, attaching it with cable. Which worked for one sweep before separating.

“That ain’t good.”

Even Makali, usually so sure of herself, looked worried. “Zack, what are we going to do?”

Zack turned to the Sentry. “Do you see what we’re planning?”

“Yes,” the alien said through its translator. “You wish to construct a platform to allow you to float.”

“Correct. But we lack propulsion for the, uh, platform.”

“Obviously.”

“Can
you
provide it?”

“I don’t fucking believe this—” Dale said, but Valya shushed him again.

“Easily,” Dash said. “I’ve been ready to do so for an entire cycle.”

Which was how the four humans wound up floating on a thin slab of Sentry shedding across the vast, unpleasant sea of the habitat…propelled by Dash.

Now Dale Scott dozed and remembered his Navy days, not that you ever felt much in the way of gentle ocean swells on the carrier
Ronald Reagan
. (If you could feel a ship that size rolling on the water, it was time to be worried.) But Dale had spent some time in smaller boats. The motion was soothing; it made him reflective. He touched his Hulk medallion, finding reassurance in its presence.

He thought about these Sentry creatures and how they had wound up with a colony on Keanu. They’d developed spaceflight; the abandoned vehicle on the surface proved that. Quite an achievement for folks that seemed to spend most of their time in the water.

(And swam so strongly and gently. Dash had submerged himself behind the raft and proceeded to nudge it forward with each long, regular stroke. Dale had amused himself by counting to ten between nudges.)

Had they ever found spaceflight to be more practical and useful than humans had? Hard to tell; all Dale Scott knew was that NASA’s
Destiny
and
Venture
program was hanging by a thread the day Keanu was discovered in the sky. The space agency had managed to pull off a pair of lunar landings, creating a brief buzz of public interest that lasted about a month, and soon subsided into boredom if not outright hostility over the expense (large) compared to the return (zero).

Zack’s mission, redirected to Keanu instead of the Moon, would have likely been the last. There was hardware in the pipeline for two more, but the budget cutters were sharpening their little blades. The Coalition program,
Brahma
, might have been able to mount a second landing mission in five or six years, depending on a variety of factors.

No human had yet to devise a good rationale for these programs behind prestige, “science,” and the nebulous idea that watching an astronaut bouncing across the lunar surface was somehow going to encourage kids to sign up for calculus…so they could build another limited vehicle to allow another group of astronauts to bounce, and so on. Dale had found that argument the weakest of the three.

Had the Keanu mission changed all that? Humans now knew they
weren’t alone in the universe…better yet, from a motivational standpoint, humans also knew that the other beings in the universe could show up on their front door and behave quite badly.

Yeah, it was going to be raining money on the big aerospace companies…and Dale Scott wasn’t going to be able to run around with his own bucket.

If he didn’t already despise Zack Stewart for destroying his astronaut career, the fact that his actions had cost him the chance to make a fortune would have put him at the top of Dale’s shit list.

He regarded the ragged, stubbly man in the soiled long johns, curled up in the center of the raft, his back to Valya—who had her own place on Dale’s shit list.

Makali had stayed awake, content to fiddle with the black box she had liberated from
Brahma
. She had asked Dale a technical question once—“Do I need an external device to play this back?”—and he had told her no, that the unit was designed all-in-one, a recorder with sound, video, data, and playback.

He had then offered a helpful comment about which screws to loosen first, only to be ignored. So he had redirected his gaze…noting that, thanks to Dash’s unwavering nudges, they seemed to have made good progress, crossing more than half of the distance from Beehive Beach—itself located about a third of the distance from the “north” end of the Sentry habitat—to the “south,” where, Dash assured them, there was an exit.

Dale hoped so. The roiling mist allowed only brief glimpses of this far shore. It could be hiding other Sentries.

By now the raft had floated past half a dozen “islands,” though some of these pieces of land were actually peninsulas connected to a hard, dry surface that actually rimmed the habitat. (“We could have
walked
to the south end,” Dale heard himself saying to Stewart. And being ignored again. Well, to be fair, they hadn’t realized the habitat had a land border…and the raft was likely a quicker method.)

On those islands…some vegetation, of course, none of it familiar. And ancient-looking structures, most of them rounded rather than rectangular. Many of them had docks that extended over the water.

One interesting absence…no boats. Of course, if you were big and
lived in the water…why would you need a boat? Dale wondered just how long the Sentries had been captive here on Keanu. Hundreds of years, maybe. Could humans survive that? Would they have to?

Just then a creature of some kind breached far behind them…it was purplish, smooth, so large it was impossible to see more than a flank covered with tinier wriggling creatures, like krill.

The startling sight made Makali flinch so abruptly she caused the raft to rock. “Careful!” he told her. He looked back at the creature, but it had sunk out of sight.

Their actions caused a piece of the raft to detach, which was bad enough, but the stray third of a plank also attracted a small flying fish that shot out of the water, then disappeared before Dale could fully register its looks.

Except for teeth. The flying fish clearly possessed piranha-like teeth.

Makali hadn’t seen it and was already back in geek mode, holding up the black box from
Brahma
. “I’ve got something.”

At the sound of Makali’s voice, Zack stirred, blinking. Valya never moved. In their time together, Dale had learned that his Russian lover possessed the valuable ability to sleep deeply anywhere, any place. Had she been dozing on a couch when the Bangalore vesicle struck, it was likely she would have awakened in space.

“Good,” Zack said. “Can we see?”

Makali displayed the open black box for him—apparently never thinking to offer Dale a look.

Zack blinked. “It’s just data.”

“Wait for it.”

Lack of an invitation never kept Dale Scott from getting what he wanted. He shifted ever so slightly, so he could see over Zack’s shoulder.

Yes,
data
. The black box display was actually four displays: one showing the information on the control panel, a second showing data from the Bangalore Control Center. A third display was a camera view of the empty
Brahma
cabin, and the fourth an external shot.

The external camera was aimed at the
Venture
lander, visible like a silvery thumb on the horizon. Makali hit the fast-forward pad, which caused the numbers in the data displays to cycle.

Back to real time…the
Venture
lander ignited in a ball of white light. Within seconds, the
Brahma
data display froze, the BCC feed went black…and the internal camera tilted as the
Brahma
cabin was knocked on its side. (Knowing how fixed that camera was, Dale shuddered at the hammer blow that must have rocked
Brahma
’s cabin hard enough to move it.)

“Shit,” Zack said.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Makali said. More fast-forwarding. By now, Valya had stirred, though she couldn’t possibly see the tiny black box screen.

Makali had to stop and start several times. The interior camera simply showed a darkened cabin on its side.

Until a face appeared.

“Jesus!” Dale said. It was there, then it wasn’t…and then a shape could be seen moving around the cabin.

“Freeze that and play it back slowly,” Zack told Makali, entirely unnecessarily.

Stopped, the face was blurry…but there was enough resolution to see that it wasn’t human or Sentry. To Dale, it had a snout and two eyes, giving it some vague resemblance to an Earth-based animal like a greyhound. “Is that an Architect?” Makali said.

“Nope.”

“It was big, whatever it was,” Dale said, pointing to the way it took up volume in the
Brahma
cabin. “Lots of legs.”

“Long ones,” Zack said.

“Is it an organic being,” Dale said, “or a machine? It seemed to have edges and angles.”

“Maybe both,” Makali said. “It’s mechanical enough to survive in vacuum.” She showed the playback to Valya, who clapped her hand over her mouth in shock and horror.

“You know who might be helpful here,” Dale said, throwing out the latest in a series of suggestions likely to be ignored. “Dash.”

“Excellent idea,” Zack said. He glanced around. “How long before we make landfall?” he said.

“I make it another hour at least,” Makali said.

“Then let’s not wait.”

It took some rearranging of bodies to get Zack to the rear of the raft, where he could signal Dash.

Dale was left hanging on to the front and looking down. What he saw there made him hiss, “Zack, freeze!”

“What
now
?” Zack said. He was suspended in a ridiculous posture, holding the black box out in front of him.

“Look down, and keep quiet!”

Zack handed the black box back to Makali, then flattened out to peer over the side of the raft into the water below.

Two meters down, no more, lay a pod of sleeping Sentries!

Makali saw them, too. Then Valya, who barely stifled a scream.

As one, the humans clustered in the center of the raft. “How many were there?” Makali said.

“Two dozen at least,” Dale said. It looked as though an army platoon had decided to curl up together and take a nap…underwater.

“Can he be quieter?” Valya said, nodding to Dash. Each of the Sentry’s regular nudges of the raft resulted in a splashing sound.

“Why don’t
you
give our big friend that message?” Dale said.

“Why don’t we all just sit still and trust that Dash knows what it’s doing,” Zack said. “For all we know, they could have been down there the whole time!” He handed the black box back to Makali. “That can wait.”