A refugee camp in Louisiana. It looked like refugee camps all through history, she imagined: emaciated people, eyes staring out of dirty faces.
What should have been a beautiful mountain in Montana . . . its top sliced off by a machine that appeared to be a giant cousin of the mud dredger. An avalanche of slag was pouring down one side, spilling onto the landscape.
Downtown Cleveland, leveled as if hit by a nuclear weapon.
Then a factory in El Paso, Texas, row on row of some kind of vehicles. Yahvi realized there were hundreds, and they looked a bit like the military tanks she knew from history class, but bulging with nasty-looking weapons, not just a single cannon barrel. Their turrets were transparent on top and showed that each was driven by a Reiver.
The last . . . a desert landscape, likely Arizona or Nevada . . . and a row of squat, newly built (well, they were shiny and a couple looked unfinished) towers stretching far into the distance, where a mound of some kind rested.
“We have thousands of such images, of course,” Taj said. “These are merely samples.”
“We’ve seen similar,” Rachel said. “But what is it like? This is the middle of the twenty-first century . . . with radio, TV, Internet, nations just can’t be . . . isolated.”
“Of course they can!” Pav said. “When I was a kid, there was North Korea. Albania before that.”
“But this is North America!” Rachel said.
“And South America, too.” Xavier was indicating several videos they hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Here is the situation,” Taj said. “On the surface, the Aggregate Nations look and act much as they did before.
“Internet access to the Americas and much of Europe is firewalled. It sort of works—but you never know what’s not going through or coming out.”
Pav was shaking his head. “How did this happen? Didn’t we fight?”
Taj shrugged. “Yes. There are still outbreaks, revolts against the Aggregates . . . and places where their control is far from absolute.
“But you probably know their advantages better than I. They aren’t susceptible to most weapons—only to vast amounts of heat, electricity, or chemical-biological attack, which is incredibly difficult to field outside a laboratory or a small battlefield.
“And their initial arrival, eighteen years ago, was not immediately detected.”
“No one tracked their vesicle?” Rachel said. She knew that NASA had tracked the hell out of the Houston version.
“It landed in the South Atlantic, entering over the Antarctic, just like you. There were almost no detectors looking that way, and those that did judged it to be a big meteoroid.”
Since no one knew, the Aggregates had time to establish themselves and launched their own strikes.
“It started with plagues—from serious influenza right up to substantially more deadly things resembling SARS and Ebola.
“Countries wanted to close their borders, and did. Immigration and travel were restricted—and the barriers remain.
“It stretched to cyberwarfare, doing to data networks what they did to human beings. It’s simplistic to say, that’s all it took . . . but in truth, that’s all it took.”
Rachel lowered her head for a moment, a gesture Yahvi recognized. It meant she was getting to serious matters. “How difficult would it be for the six of us”—Yahvi was happy she was still including Sanjay—“to travel to the United States?”
“Openly? As voyagers from Keanu?”
“Let’s say yes.”
“Possible. I’m sure you’d be officially welcome everywhere on the planet, even in Free Nation U.S.” He smiled, not pleasantly. “And totally restricted in anything you heard or saw or did, or tried to do.”
“What if we traveled less openly?”
“That would be quite difficult,” he said. He actually glanced left and right, as if being watched, lowering his voice. “And the first trick would be getting out of India.”
Now Rachel stood. “Then it’s time we took those steps. Did you say our media agent was waiting?”
“Agents. And I’ll get them in here as soon as possible. But first it would be helpful to take some questions from the press.”
Yahvi wanted to run. But a look from Rachel caused her to freeze where she was.
She was beginning to wish she had never come to Earth.
QUESTION: For General Radhakrishnan—
TAJ: I am not part of this press conference.
RACHEL: Oh, please—if we have to do this, you do, too.
(laughter)
QUESTION: What are your thoughts, seeing your son for the first time in twenty years—and learning that you have a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter!
TAJ: It’s been a great pleasure.
QUESTION: Would you like them to remain on Earth?
TAJ: I haven’t considered that.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040
TAJ
Bangalore and the Committee had been in careful communication with Keanu for months prior to Adventure’s landing. Careful for the obvious reasons—the NEO’s return was apparent to anyone with a telescope. Taj had seen rumors online before any official word reached him, and he was close to the top of the list of those who would be informed.
It was mutually decided that ISRO would acknowledge the “apparent return” of the Near-Earth Object Keanu, and the “hope” that its presumed human inhabitants were alive and well . . . but with no disclosure of the fact of direct contact, nor of the content of any messages.
Some information was exchanged, of course, but the continuing conflicts between India and China on the one side, and the so-called Free Nations of the Americas and Europe on the other, distracted most people from the Keanu story.
There were those in the astronomy community, not to mention various fringe groups around the world, who kept the matter alive. But they had little hard information—at least as far as Taj and the Committee knew. (He had learned early in his military career to never make the mistake of assuming that you had the only intelligence!)
Taj concentrated on arranging the mechanics and protocols for arrival and reception. He had firsthand experience of such an event—one of four humans on Earth who did—and it had not been pleasant.
Returning from their disastrous missions to Keanu in August 2019, survivors Tea Nowinski, Lucas Munaretto, Natalia Yorkina, and Taj Radhakrishnan had splashed down in the Destiny-7 spacecraft four hundred kilometers west and north of Los Angeles, not far from the Channel Islands.
In terrible shape—dehydrated, starved, filthy, and worst of all, incredibly traumatized by the utter, catastrophic failure of their mission—they were taken aboard a NASA recovery ship.
There they were separated and put in separate rooms—not staterooms, but tiny crew cabins that had been slightly modified to serve as temporary quarters for NASA astronauts. Taj had hoped and expected that he would be met by an ISRO doctor. That had been his first question after alighting from the rescue helicopter, drinking a considerable amount of juice (which he immediately vomited) and taking the shortest and best hot shower of his life.
It was aboard the ship that he learned that many of the Brahma control team were gone—some of them killed in the impact of a Keanu-launched object that destroyed the control center but eventually scooped up several dozen humans and took off with them.
The same thing had happened at Houston . . . which explained the absence of Shane Weldon, the Destiny flight director. Veteran astronaut Travis Buell came to welcome them instead.
Tea, Natalia, and Lucas crowded into the cabin at that point. They all looked better than they had upon exiting the Destiny spacecraft, without in any way looking good.
“Good,” Buell said, “now that you’re all here. I’m telling you you’re in quarantine.”
“We
were always going to be in quarantine, Trav,” Tea snapped. She had flown to the Moon with Buell and, Taj knew, had not come away from the experience with a good relationship with the man.
“For two weeks,” Buell said. “This, unfortunately, is indefinite.”
“I’m a citizen of India,” Taj told him. “Natalia is Russian, Lucas Brazilian. You have no legal grounds to detain us.”
“Actually, we do,” Buell said, smiling. “You three entered the United States illegally. None of you are even carrying passports.”
Taj remembered wanting to laugh. The idea that a crew of space travelers might make an emergency landing had been considered for decades, especially after the first Russians to return on a space shuttle turned out to be without passports. His Brahma crew had carried appropriate papers—
—which had been vaporized on Brahma.
“But you brought us here!” Natalia said.
Buell seemed to be aware of the ridiculousness of the situation. “I suspect that will be a factor in your favor, should this ever get to a hearing.”
“What in God’s name do you hope to accomplish?” Tea said. “It’s not as though we’re planning to hide anything. You know the worst of it, anyway. Everybody does.” Indeed, four dead, two vehicles lost, human history changed.
“If anything,” Lucas said, “we’re eager to talk.”
“See, that’s the problem,” Buell said. “It isn’t the postflight debrief that worries everyone. We know you’re pros. You’ll tell us every detail.
“It’s these other . . . events.” He was talking about the miraculous reincarnation of Megan Stewart and several other humans—including Pogo Downey, killed on Keanu, then revived. “It’s bad enough that there are all these rumors around.”
“What kind of rumors?” Natalia snapped. As far as Taj knew, the Russian cosmonaut had never met Buell before. It was surprising how quickly she had developed a dislike for him. “We can’t possibly know what’s being said here.”
Buell stared at all of them. “I’m just going to call them zombies, for the moment. Space zombies is the term.”
“Travis,” Tea said, “you know what happened up there.”
“Do I?” he said. “I don’t know jack, right now.” Buell was quite religious, even by American standards. The idea that alien entities had the ability to bring people back from the dead, even briefly, with no more effort than humans would expend in accessing a website . . . surely that had to have shaken his faith. It had caused Taj to begin to develop his own new sense of Greater Powers in the universe. “But one thing I know is this: We aren’t going to allow any of you to be out in public discussing this.
“Not until we all agree on what happened—”
“—and what will be said about what happened,” Lucas finished. The World’s Greatest Astronaut was nothing if not quick to pick up on things.
As a further demonstration—as if being sequestered on a ship were insufficient—Taj and the others found armed U.S. Marines in every corridor and on every deck as they steamed toward California. “What do they think we’re going to do?” Tea said. “Swim for shore?”
It was only after they reached Vandenberg, the day after splashdown, that Buell took Taj aside in the crew quarters. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I asked them to have someone else do this.”
“Do what?” For a moment Taj had the crazy idea Buell was going to do something to him. That was how fatigued and stressed he was . . . and how bizarre the situation.
“This Bangalore Object, when it struck, damaged the center—”
“Yes, you said it caused damage and killed a dozen people.”
“It also,” Buell said, shaking with tension and momentarily unable to continue. He took a breath. “It also enveloped at least one hundred others on the grounds. It appears to have taken them into space.”
“And my son? Pav?”
“He is officially counted among the missing and presumed—”
“Presumed what, Buell? Captured by aliens?”
“I’m afraid that is exactly what we think. We’ve been able to track both Objects and they are returning to Keanu.” He glanced at his watch. “Predictions are that they will land there in less than two hours.”
“That’s impossible!”
“And yet . . .” Buell was trying to be sympathetic. “Look,” he said, “I have children. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose one—or to have one taken from me like this. I can tell you that NASA and the Coalition are doing everything we can to figure out what is happening, and what we might do.”
“I take it a rescue mission is off the table.”
Now he saw the Travis Buell that NASA and America loved . . . the feisty, get-’er-done Buell. He seemed to grow several centimeters. “Nothing is off the table, Commander.”
But, of course, it was. Within days Keanu had propelled itself out of Earth orbit, resuming its journey into deep space, taking with it 187 humans from Bangalore and Houston.
Including, he learned from a frantic Tea Nowinski, Harley Drake, Shane Weldon, and Rachel Stewart.
Mrs. Remilla and ISRO had been as unenthusiastic about a Landing Day press conference as Taj but were overruled by the government types, notably Suresh Kateel. “The Adventure crew members must show themselves and be seen answering questions as soon as possible,” Kateel said in their final pre-arrival meeting.
It was odd, because Kateel had never spoken on the subject when it came up earlier—indeed, had rarely spoken at all. He was one of those silent “horse-holders,” to use a NASA term, so common in large organizations, possessing titles like secretary or deputy, but who wielded immense power.
Kateel was an older man, heavy, bespectacled, unremarkable by any objective standards. Yet when he finally uttered an opinion, even Melani Remilla closed her notes and considered the matter decided.
Only Taj had been sufficiently brave, or foolish, to ask why the crew’s appearance was so important.
“To prove that they have arrived and are safe,” Kateel said. His whole manner suggested that he was not used to making explanations. “Most of all, we want them to address the Revenant business.”
That, at least, Taj understood. During the Brahma-Destiny mission he had been forced to accept the bizarre notion that a dead human being could not only be resurrected—but could have his or her soul somehow located and extracted from the universe at large to be recombined with a new version of the person’s body.
The simple notion that human souls persisted beyond death was, to Taj’s mind, the most important discovery in human history.
Yet it had been relegated to second place because it occurred the same week in which humans learned that there were indeed other intelligent races in the universe.
And that our encounters with other races were not fated to be benign.
It was only after returning to Earth that Taj had truly begun to appreciate the enormity of the Revenant discovery. He had not decided what he thought of it yet; it was one of those matters that a true philosopher could spend several lifetimes contemplating, and he was not a philosopher.
He had noticed, however, that the discovery led to a sharp rise in religious fervor among both Hindis and Muslims. He had half-expected the proof of life after death to lead to a rise in martyrdom—how many more suicide bombers could be recruited from fanatics who knew for certain that part of them would definitely survive past the moment of detonation? But Taj had not seen this. Of course, given the Big Brother state that India had become, it wasn’t likely he would have—
“This Revenant matter has led to rumors that have evolved and darkened for twenty years,” Kateel was saying. “We require the appearance of normality.”
There had been no discussion of a truly open press conference. Only that a small group of screened and selected reporters, using equipment provided to them by
the Signals Intelligence Directorate, would be allowed to quiz Adventure’s crew for an hour, if that, using a list of questions approved by Kateel himself.
So it was that, shortly after Taj’s exhausting presentation on the Aggregates, four men and two women were admitted to the conference along with a camera crew of two.
Rachel, Pav, Yahvi, and Xavier were seated at the head of the table where formerly Taj and Mrs. Remilla had been. It was Mrs. Remilla who made the brief introduction, explaining in the most general and uninformative way that Adventure traveler Sanjay Bhat was “indisposed.” This was followed by a silence that was almost comical, as if the anointed reporters had misplaced their script.
The alien Sentry named Zeds? “Zeds will not be available for this event,” Mrs. Remilla said. The imagery on the conference room view screen had changed from strategic global data to an image of Adventure on the ground at Yelahanka. The window showing Zeds had been closed. Taj wondered if the Sentry could still access the room. He was not a reporter and had no love for the profession, but surely the chance to question a living, breathing, articulate alien was exciting beyond measure—the thing you dreamed about doing!
This group of reporters had clearly been cowed by Kateel or the intelligence services, because they accepted Remilla’s bland restrictions with no visible protest.
Finally, these reporters began to ask the expected questions. To Rachel and Pav, about life on Keanu, what they missed, what they didn’t miss. How long they planned to stay. “As long as you’ll have us,” Pav said, smiling in what his father thought was a forced manner.
Interesting questions, from Taj’s point of view: How long will Keanu remain in Earth orbit? Have you returned permanently?
And here Rachel offered a dazzling smile and said, “That answer is the same,” which told no one anything.
Are you in contact with Keanu? “Yes,” Rachel said. Can the rest of us contact them? “Very soon,” Rachel said.
Heaven’s Fall Page 7