Heaven's War (61 page)

The Revenant girl Camilla waited for him. She had been sitting in the darkness. Now she rose.

Odd how this child seemed to haunt these moments.

Even odder that he kept having them.

“Everyone back at the Temple is wondering what happened to you,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t understand.

To his shock, she said, in English, “Regrettable. I became infected. I became an instrument of the enemy. It was like a fever—I could only sing this little song from my childhood about ‘
ratos.
’ I was warning you—”

“About the Reivers.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re no longer constrained.”

“Oh, no. I’m destroyed,” Camilla said. “But the infection is contained within me. When I die, it dies, too.”

For the first time since reconnecting with Rachel, Zack grew alarmed.
This isn’t right.
But the only comment he could offer was, “I’m sorry.” Then, feeling that to be inadequate, added, “Your communication skills have improved.”

“We are able to work more efficiently with young subjects,” she said. “I speak for the Architect.”

“I figured.” He looked around. “Do you know the way to the core?”

She immediately turned to the shaft across from them and pointed. “Okay,” he said. “Are you coming with me?”

“The effort is straining my body,” she said. “I have very little time.”

What did that mean? Was she going to sit down and die here? He held out his hand. “I’ll help.”

And, stumbling as another quake jolted them, she took Zack’s hand.

Steadying himself as best he could, he slung the kit over his shoulder.

It was like walking into the first few meters of the Beehive, though longer and straighter. Zack was grateful for the distance, since it allowed him to ask, “Do you take messages to the Architect, too? To Keanu itself?”

“That is the nature of communication. We hear you.”

“That’s good,” he said. They passed through another Membrane, the curtain shimmering in response to the quaking and shuddering. “Because this reboot and saving you, the ship, is only half the battle.”

“What else do you want?”

“To save Earth,” he said, surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth. “I want to keep that vesicle from reaching my home planet. Nothing else matters.” He imagined the Reiver vesicle splashing down in the ocean, or touching down in some remote forest or mountain range. How long would it take for the nasty little creatures, exposed to sunlight, awash in oxygen and soil and hydrogen, to start reproducing at some fantastic rate?

He pictured the beautiful blue-and-white sphere of Earth, as he had seen it close up from the space station, and far away from
Destiny
. Now add a black spot of contagion in the middle of the USA. How quickly would it spread? How long before the entire North American continent was that horrible color, awash with Reiver templates?

The world?

And what would it mean? Would people die? Quite likely, just as swiftly and horribly as they would if a mutated Ebola virus struck.

Or would Earth and humanity be transformed into something mean, ugly, Reiver-like.

“The war isn’t on your planet,” Camilla said. “The battlefield is elsewhere.”

“I think the battlefield is everywhere,” he said. “The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll start to win.”

She was silent for several moments. Then: “We were unsuited to fighting the Reivers. Too old, too fragile, too large scale.”

“Too large scale?”

“Our reactions, our thought processes—they are simply too slow. We can’t compete against creatures who live in fractions of fractions of a moment. They can make a million decisions in the time it takes us to make one. And there are other flaws, too.”

Zack said, “So consider this: We’re a few hundred humans in a ten-thousand-year-old ship. We might be able to help you with one battle when Keanu gets wherever it’s going, but if I were you, I’d want seven billion weapons—I’d want the entire population of Earth working as a team.”

“You can’t promise that, and mobilizing your entire population is impossible. We had a difficult time collecting two hundred, and you are still not a fighting unit.”

“That may be our strength,” Zack said, afraid he was losing the most important argument in human history. “Think of us as bridging the gap between you and the Reivers. We’re smaller, faster, capable of operating in discrete units. But we are still individuals. We’ll never act as a bloc, the way they do.”

Then she said, “We are still suspicious. Consider your actions here.”

“Individuals make mistakes. Groups of individuals make bigger ones. It’s how we learn and change.”

A long silence. Finally she said, “If you accomplish the restart, we will consider turning the vessel around and returning to Earth.”

That would have to do. He hugged the girl, a bit of a trick with the rattling and shaking all around them. He wanted to laugh out loud. He
thought of his friends and surviving family members—his poor parents and the hell they must have gone through this past two weeks—and all the workers in the space community, not to mention the astronomers who had discovered the NEO in the first place…the look on their faces when they realized that Keanu was heading back!

Assuming, of course, that he succeeded—

They stumbled into a vast brilliant cylinder tens of kilometers tall. Zack felt like a microbe at the focus of a telescope.

High above them, what appeared to be a brown dwarf star floated…fading even as Zack watched.

“We have little time,” Camilla said.

“What do I do with this unit?” Zack said. “Is there a switch or a trigger?”

“Oh,” she said, “you triggered it by carrying it through the last Membrane. Drop it there.”

Zack did as Camilla directed. Before the unit left his hand, it began to throb, grow warm, grow
heavy
.

The girl drifted forward, deeper into the cylinder. “Not that way,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Camilla stopped, spread her arms as if in benediction. Then turned to Zack with a smile.

Zack didn’t need to ask the next question. Camilla’s posture told him everything. “We aren’t getting out, are we?”

“If the device is used properly, we have no chance of survival.”

Oh God,
he thought. He exhaled once, twice, three times. With the rocking and rolling motion of the NEO interior, he felt like a captain on a sinking ship.

There was the case, glowing with a white-hot brilliance, like a doorway opening to heaven—

Sadness hit him like a hammer. Good-bye Earth and friends and NASA and Michigan and Mom and Dad and strawberries and clean sheets and sunrises and the stars and kisses and music and Rachel and Megan and—

Holding hands, he and Camilla walked into the holy light.

Rachel was shocked at how much the gravesite had changed since her last visit. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of visiting. There was always too much to do. And the memory of her parents was still strong. She still thought of them every day.

Even after twenty-one years.

Besides, while the remains of her mother’s second body were buried here, there was only a stone to Zachary Stewart’s memory. He had never returned from the power core.

She had often relived her last conversation with Yvonne, who died less than a day after Zack entered the shaft that dropped him into Keanu’s power core. Yvonne had clearly wanted to comfort Rachel on her loss, even as she was dying.

“Why are the Reivers so bad?” she remembered asking Yvonne. “Couldn’t we find a way to work with them? Aren’t they just information arranged differently?”

“Exactly,” Yvonne said. “They are perfect machines for the collection of energy and its use. Their only purpose seems to be replication.”

“Isn’t that what we do?”

“No,” Yvonne said. “We have love and free will, and our information grows and changes…”

“The Reivers are where information goes to die.”

And if we don’t stop them,
Rachel had concluded,
that’s what the universe becomes. Dead.

Her deputy mayor got her attention. “Do you wish to remain in private?”

Sentries were always so deferential, a state that would have startled any of the Houston Bangalores in their early encounters with the aquatic
race. Their motives, their incomprehensible savagery, all combined to make them unwelcome crewmates. But years of negotiation and, frankly, mutual evolution had not only resulted in a truce—they had created a kinder, gentler type of Sentry. If they were going to be useful in a war on Earth, they would have to step out of their comfort zone.

Sentries would have to be the warriors they once were. Because that was what they were facing.

When the Reivers launched the vesicle, they also commanded Keanu’s propulsion system to fire a long, sustained burst, not only accelerating the NEO to its greatest speed, but depleting its onboard fuel supply so thoroughly that it took years—decades—to replenish.

One of the side effects of this fuel starvation and system crash had been the elimination of the Revenant function. No human had been reborn since the day of the power core restart, though some HBs continued to try. No animals beyond the dozen that had been released. It was only after Beehive technology was imported to the Temple system that experiments in 3-D manufacturing and plasm manipulation created a permanent animal population, though not without much pain and loss.

All the while, Keanu was moving farther and farther from Earth.

It had been difficult…not just eradicating the Reivers. The Gabriel Jones–delivered information virus, aka the bug zapper, had done most of the work, causing the machinelike beings to evolve themselves into unstable and unsurvivable forms that then crashed, collapsed, and died. All of them, from tiny bugs to Long Legs and other forms.

But it had taken years before humans were certain that there were no Reiver colonies anywhere on the interior or surface of Keanu.

Rachel was in her early twenties when the HBs, then numbering more than three hundred and living in two habitats, were able to fire Keanu’s engines again, braking the trajectory (which took five years) and firing the vessel back toward Earth.

With limited fuel, however, Keanu was never able to reach the same velocity…the flight “home” took three times as long as the flight out. Until recently, there had been no communication with Earth. It had taken years of experimentation with Keanu’s systems to develop such a system—and more years until the vessel was within range.

Then there had been a long series of debates—what do we know
about Earth? If the Reivers reached it, the entire planet might be infected, enemy territory.

So we wait,
Rachel thought. Until today.

Pav Radhakrishnan, her longtime lover and confidant, approached, edging in front of the Sentry. “Madame Mayor,” Pav said, relishing the term because he knew it irritated Rachel, “what are your orders? Do we answer Earth, do we stay silent and fly on by, or—?”

She rose. As she did, she happened to glance back across the habitat to the original Temple, now surrounded by Keanu-grown apartments and fabrication facilities. There were fields, roads, passages that connected to other habitats. The HB population now stood at close to one thousand.

So different from those first days.

Rachel turned to face Pav, and DSA, connate of DSZ, her best friend among the Sentries and her functioning first mate. “We’re not going to fly on by,” she said.