Heaven’s Fall

by David S. Goyer

  And it would leave nothing but a scorched Earth behind.

  This was not only tragic for humans . . . it was unhappy news for the Aggregates, too. Though they were more robust than humans and terrestrial animals, they were still vulnerable to destruction from exposure to high heat or radiation.

  Carbon-143 could not replicate the reasoning or motivation for the construction of the Site A Ring. It did suggest that the entire formation of formations considered Earth to be, at best, a temporary jumping-off point . . . that its ultimate destination lay across time and space.

  ANALYSIS: Aggregate Carbon-143 did not want to remain at Site A or indeed on planet Earth after First Light.

  QUERY: Would she share this information with Dehm?

  Yahvi Stewart-Radhakrishnan is a remarkable young woman.

  It’s not her looks, though they are striking, or her exotic heritage—she is the granddaughter of two pioneering astronauts, including India’s first, General Taj Radhakrishnan.

  It’s that she’s the first teenager to visit Earth.

  That’s right—Yahvi was born in the human habitat of the Near-Earth Object Keanu, arriving in Bangalore last week with her parents aboard the spaceship Adventure.

  Today she is shopping in Shanghai. What has she learned from her week on Earth? “You’ve all got so much stuff here! And everything is so far away!”

  The biggest difference between her friends on Keanu and the young women she’s met so far? “Music and clothes! We really don’t have them.”

  EXCLUSIVE WEB AND ’CAST FROM EDGAR CHANG

  I never said any of this!

  YAHVI TO EC

  RACHEL

  The landing on Guam—which took place late morning, local time, under a clear tropical sky—had been a trial. While the storm-related bounces and jounces had ended, the approach seemed to require a dozen different turns, some wrenching, all of them tedious.

  Yahvi was still locked in Zeds’s embrace; Rachel decided to leave her there, since the Sentry could protect her as well as any seat belt.

  It was Tea who lost patience first. “Chang, tell us what the fuck we’re doing. I hope this isn’t evasive action because someone wants to shoot us down.”

  Hearing that, Rachel sat up straight. But Chang said, “Guam is safe to approach. Steve is just maneuvering to get us in a traffic pattern so we appear to have flown from China.”

  During the final minutes, Rachel twisted and looked back at Xavier, who had his head down in his makeshift lab. “What do you suppose he’s doing?” she said to Pav.

  “I think he’s made a fresh start,” he said.

  “Here? I thought the power was too low or too intermittent or there were too many bumps—”

  “Xavier is a resourceful guy. You know . . . he’s the kind of guy where you lock all the doors and he still crawls in through the window.”

  When they had glided in and then finally come to a stop at another dismal cargo terminal, Rachel and Pav, Tea, Chang, Edgely, and especially Yahvi and Zeds were eager to get out of the plane.

  Xavier chose to remain behind. “I need another hour,” he said.

  Pav was going to pursue the argument, but Rachel grabbed his arm. “Let him be,” she said. “We need that transmitter.”

  The layover in Guam was much like the one in Darwin, except for daylight, the predominantly Asian Pacific staff, and the more decrepit nature of the buildings. “How long will we be on the ground?” Rachel asked Chang.

  The agent already had his face in his datapad. When he raised it to answer, he was more vague than Rachel liked. “Longer than Darwin,” he said. “You can eat, take showers.”

  “‘Longer than Darwin’ is fairly imprecise,” Rachel said, unwilling to let Chang evade the question. “It doesn’t take more than an hour to refuel, right?”

  Chang and Edgely exchanged a look, which infuriated Rachel. “Goddammit,” she said. “You two better tell me what’s going on or we’re going to have serious problems.”

  Her anger was fueled by fatigue, of course, but also frustration at being at the mercy of two people she didn’t really know . . . on a world that was as alien to her as Mars or the Architect home world might be.

  Fortunately, Edgely was always eager to share. “We’re waiting on a second plane.”

  “To fly us?” Pav said.

  “To fly in formation with us,” Chang said.

  “Why?” Rachel said.

  Chang sighed. “We have almost no hope of entering Free Nation airspace undetected.”

  “I thought we were flying into Mexico!”

  Edgely slipped into teacher mode, growing almost indecently enthusiastic. “Oh, we are! But we come close to Free Nation airspace. They will track us. As you already know, they have air-, land-, and sea-based military.”

  “The other plane is actually a decoy,” Chang said.

  Edgely placed his hands in front of him, palms down, right hand half a dozen centimeters above the left. “When we reach Free Nation’s radar range, we will be flying one above the other, at different altitudes.

  “The two planes will show as a single blip. As we get close enough to the western coast of North America to be tracked with some fidelity, our plane will descend below tracking altitude and divert into Mexico while the target plane will turn north and fly parallel to the California coast.”

  “Are you expecting it to be attacked?” Pav said.

  “Yes,” Chang said. “But the transponder will show that it’s a Chinese commercial aircraft—it will be contacted and warned off, and will turn back.”

  “You must have found some brave people to fly that thing,” Tea said.

  “Expensive people,” Chang said.

  “But also brave,” Edgely said. “They have a narrow fuel margin. They have to fly toward California long enough to draw all the tracking—”

  “And targeting,” Chang said.

  “—but not so long that they exhaust their fuel. They have to turn around and head back to Hawaii. There’s no place else for them to land.”

  “Meanwhile,” Rachel said, “where are we?”

  “On the ground in northern Mexico,” Chang said.

  You hope, Rachel thought. And I hope so, too.

  Two hours later her spirits had improved. She had showered, eaten, and assured herself that her daughter was also fed and cheered up and that Zeds was as good as he could be.

  Tea had managed to clean up, too. “I feel so shallow, but I really enjoyed that,” she said. They were alone in a hallway on the second floor of the hangar building, where an executive had a fancy suite that included a private bath. Rachel had used it first, then gone for a bite with Pav while Tea took her turn. Now Tea regarded her. “So, how is all the shit you’re dealing with?”

  Rachel smiled. “There’s no way back and nowhere to turn.”

  “All you can do is go forward with your eyes open and your head high.”

  “Even if it kills me.”

  Tea laughed. “I’m with you, Rachel. Right behind you maybe, so I don’t catch the first bullet. But whatever happens, we’re all in it, too.”

  “That’s what bothers me,” Rachel said. “I don’t mind risking my life—”

  “But you’ve got Pav and Yahvi—”

  “And all the others.” She blinked and just started crying. “I already lost Sanjay!”

  “You didn’t lose him,” Tea said. “If the Reivers hadn’t shot your ship, you wouldn’t have had that rough landing. They killed him, not you.”

  “They injured him. But I left him to die. . . .”

  “Oh, honey, I talked to Taj. Your poor Sanjay was dead the moment they took him out of your ship. You did what you had to do . . . you acted, you led. You got us out of there.”

  “To what? Being flown across the Pacific by people we don’t k
now? Waiting for a decoy plane so we don’t get blown out of the sky trying to invade America?”

  Tea regarded her. “Take it from one of your team . . . you’re doing great. Keep moving forward.”

  Tea’s words did their magic: Rachel felt comforted, though she suspected her improved feeling might also be due to being clean, or possibly just her hearty lunch.

  No matter the source, she would need all her strength. She desperately needed to connect with Keanu and Harley Drake, because key information needed to be sent . . . and decisions made.

  Her first target was Xavier, who was proudly emerging from the plane as promised, almost two hours after landing. “Here’s our transmitter,” he said, holding out a misshapen gray box the size of a pillow as if it were the gift of the ages. Rachel wanted to laugh. Raised in the United States for the first fourteen years of her life, she thought machines should be like Apple products, smartly designed, symmetrical, polished . . . not the wacky lumps that passed for them on Keanu.

  Xavier, who clearly had a more charitable view of these products, noted Rachel’s resistance. “It works,” he said. “I just tested it.”

  Given the size of the unit, they had to find her a table in a relatively private place in which to work. Then she had Xavier tell Pav she wanted to be left alone, a feeling that surprised her, since she was so reliant on him.

  She was realizing that she needed to regroup, to run through her internal list of tasks. It was how she had functioned best as mayor, as some version of the “leader” Tea had cited—indeed, how she had functioned best as wife and mother.

  Her biggest weakness was that she still relied on Harley Drake and Sasha Blaine, and on Jaidev and Zhao and Makali Pillay and so many others for not just support, but to be the mature ones, the better informed.

  To be her parents. Rachel was sufficiently self-aware to know that she had never recovered from losing Megan, then Zack, along with her entire life on Earth, within two years.

  She had disagreed with all of them at one time or another, or found them to be in error on one subject or another. Now, here on Guam, on her way to a terrifying Reiver Aggregate facility in the former United States . . . she tried not to feel panic, to wish for one of the adults to confidently guide her.

  She reminded herself she was not twelve again, but thirty-four, older than the men who had worked in mission control during the Apollo program . . . older than soldiers, sailors, pilots . . . older than Jesus when he went to the cross.

  So why didn’t she feel more sure of herself?

  Maybe no one did, not even generals or presidents or ship captains in the middle of storms.

  None of it mattered, anyway. Unless Rachel surrendered the authority the others had granted her, giving up and telling Pav or Edgar Chang to make the decisions from this moment on . . . Tea’s advice was the only one to follow.

  Forward.

  Xavier’s transmitter worked beautifully. The moment Rachel switched it on, she heard Harley Drake’s voice as clearly as if they were in adjacent rooms inside the Temple. “About time,” Harley said. He was never one for idle chat. As long as Rachel had known Harley, it seemed that conversations rarely began, they just resumed.

  They had a tremendous amount of catch-up to do, about the decoy trip out of Yelahanka, the flight to Darwin, the Chang-Edgely involvement . . . the nature of the Reiver Ring in the United States, and their plans for the ultimate assault on it.

  Ultimately, their conversation lasted fifty minutes and left Rachel with a headache that affected her vision.

  The most maddening aspect was the four-second lag between the time her words left Earth and were received on Keanu, and vice versa. Rachel had experienced it to some degree on the voyage from Keanu to Earth, but not like this. It turned what should have been a conversation into a series of statements.

  Finally, she had been compelled to discuss the terrible thing that had happened to Sanjay. “We had gotten the message,” Harley said. “We’ve already told the community and held a service.”

  Then Rachel had to admit that they had done nothing of the sort for their colleague . . . that she had abandoned him in the hospital at Yelahanka, that she had no idea what had happened with his body—

  “Stop yourself,” Harley told her. “You left him with Taj, and that’s all you could do under the circumstances. I don’t want you to beat yourself up about this any longer, is that clear?”

  Rachel reluctantly told Harley that she would.

  Then Harley said, “By the way, Dale is working in league with Zhao.”

  “I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” Rachel said, not feeling that way at all.

  “We’re watching him very carefully,” Harley said. “And Sasha tells me we are about to lose you. . . .”

  The signal ended abruptly, as the antenna on Keanu’s surface rotated below the horizon as seen from the Pacific Ocean.

  The exchange left her feeling better—at least Harley and the others knew Rachel’s situation. It was up to them to execute their half of the operation, or rather their two thirds of it.

  For the first time on her trip to Earth, Rachel began to feel as though she was the beneficiary of some decent luck.

  They would need it. By returning to Earth orbit, she and the other leaders had essentially painted a big red target on the Near-Earth Object, bringing Keanu within range of some kind of Reiver planet-killer beam.

  Rachel was turning toward Xavier, to thank him for the use of the communicator, when Edgely arrived.

  “The second plane is on approach.”

  Greetings! Emerging from radio and other silence to say . . . all is well.

  I’ve been traveling, seeing the sights, working on fulfilling a lifetime dream. (For those of you who have been following me for twenty years, you know what I mean.)

  Which is all I can say here. “But soft, we are observed!”

  Hoping for some news I can talk about soon!

  COLIN EDGELY TO THE KETTERING GROUP,

  APRIL 18, 2040

  DALE

  “What exactly do you know?”

  Once he had penetrated the vesicle factory and been confronted by Zhao, Dale knew he could no longer escape. Zhao had closed and locked the exit from the habitat, even though Dale was fairly sure he could still find a way out.

  But he didn’t particularly want to. Something in his head—not the map, but some part of the connection with Keanu’s controlling intelligence—told him that this was where he needed to be, and possibly that Zhao was the one human to meet.

  The former spy had shed his Skyphoi environment suit and was busy checking on the odd-looking, lumpish proteus-created controls that operated a set of spray guns and other devices that were slowly but steadily building the vesicle. He was talking to Dale, but not concentrating on him.

  “Shouldn’t I be asking you?” Dale said.

  Now Zhao turned away from his work to face him. “I realize you can’t help being an ass, but please try. Surely you know that Harley told me you had resurfaced with some vague warnings.”

  “I wouldn’t call them vague.”

  “And you still have the incredibly annoying habit of picking on a modifier and arguing about that instead of the substance of an entire sentence. Fine, to repeat while also expanding: What exactly do you know about the dangers to the Adventure crew?”

  “That their approach had been detected and tracked, that some hostile force fired on them . . .” Dale trailed off, since Zhao kept nodding as if he already knew that much. Well, if he had talked to Harley, he did.

  “Anything specific?”

  Dale weighed his answer. During his trek from the human habitat, he had felt a growing certainty that Rachel and her team were in danger again. But in order to fully access the Keanu data banks, Dale needed to engage in his naked interface . . . and there had been no opportunit
y.

  Nevertheless, earlier memories seemed to have grown clearer. “The Reivers have a big project that is about to go live. When they pull the trigger, a lot of humans are going to die.”

  “Did you tell Harley this?”

  “No. It wasn’t—”

  “I should take you back to the habitat and lock you up so everyone can hear your big secrets. You did escape, correct?”

  “Ask Harley. He kept insisting I wasn’t a prisoner, or that if I was, it wasn’t his decision.”

  “Oh, you were. And in a sense, are.” Zhao smiled, never a happy look. “But then, so are we all.”

  Zhao nodded beyond Dale. He turned and saw half a dozen HBs approaching, two women among them, and one of them, amazingly, appeared to be Makali Pillay, the Aussie exobiologist who had shared Dale and Zack Stewart’s long, weird trek across the surface of Keanu. They did not seem hostile; they didn’t even seem to notice Dale, but rather fanned out to work on the vesicle. Zhao said. “To be honest, there’s no point in locking you up. Things are moving too fast. We actually need some help.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Getting this ready for launch.”

  “To Earth?”

  “Well, it’s not going to the fucking Moon!”

  “But you already sent Adventure there!”

  “And look how that’s going! They’re in everyone’s crosshairs. I know it seems like we sent six people up against an entire planet, but come on, Dale. We’re going after the Reivers, but not with Adventure.”

  He pointed to the giant, almost-complete vesicle. “With this.”

  Like all of the HBs, Dale Scott had arrived at Keanu in one of two vesicles . . . giant sample return craft launched by Keanu toward Earth.

  There had been a third Object, which the Reivers had used twenty years ago to make their escape. Dale had never discovered how to fabricate another one; in the many areas of the Keanu library he had accessed, he had never even found a reference to the vesicles.

  Which meant nothing more than that there was a vast amount of information about Keanu he had yet to learn.