“She came to the Temple first,” Jaidev said. “I wasn’t here and Harley was busy . . .” Here Jaidev glanced at Dale. Then he decided the information wasn’t worth hiding. “. . . talking with Rachel. So Sasha went off with Jordana.
“Fifteen minutes later Jordana was back again, saying one of the cells was active.”
“That’s a lot of back and forth for one woman,” Dale said, unable to resist. “Haven’t you guys reverse-engineered the Segway yet?”
Everyone ignored him, which diminished Dale’s glee not one bit.
The distance from the Temple to the Beehive end of the habitat was seven kilometers, a distance that, when added to his other movements for the day, made for a challenging walk. He began to feel tired. His feet hurt.
Nevertheless, he appreciated a phenomenon he had never experienced on Keanu. Every few hundred meters, more HBs joined them, slipping out of the fields one by one, or emerging from buildings in larger groups. The moving throng grew to more than a hundred, a significant percentage of the population of the habitat. Zhao, Makali, and Dale had to push their way through a crowd. It reminded Dale of a scene from some old movie about Moses.
There were so many people jammed into the narrow entrance that Dale found himself being jostled. “Sorry,” the person next to him said. It was a young man, blond, long-haired, clearly nervous. “I don’t know you,” Dale said, extending his hand. “Dale Scott.”
“Hey, the hermit!” the young man said. “Nick. So this must be auspicious, if you’re here.”
“We’ll see,” Dale said. He was growing more uncomfortable. Too many people . . . too many chances for conversations he didn’t want to have.
But Nick hadn’t finished with him. “Were you around the last time the Beehive worked?”
“Yes. It was sort of operating for almost a year after arrival.” Or so he remembered. But that had been for terrestrial animals . . . no human Revenants had emerged after Yvonne Hall, and she had not come from this place. (There were other Beehive-like structures within Keanu, even a long-unused one adjacent to the Factory. Dale had never seen evidence that they still functioned.)
The idea of humans returning from the dead, originally repellent, had consumed many hours of thought over the years. He was more tolerant of the idea now. He had often wondered if Zack Stewart, going to his death in Keanu’s core, had assumed or hoped he would be reborn . . . even for a handful of days.
Now Harley Drake emerged from the Beehive, not only offering the hope of information, but giving Dale a reason to excuse himself from the conversation with Nick.
He got close enough to the front of the crowd to hear Jaidev say, “Harls, what’s going on?”
“Sasha’s in there with Jordana,” Drake said. “One of those cells is definitely active.”
“What size is it?” That was Zhao, always practical.
“Human.”
“Okay, then,” Makali said. “Who’s died?”
“What kind of question is that?” Harley said.
“She’s probably wondering if that might give you some idea of who is going to become the next Revenant,” Dale said. There was no reaction from Jaidev, Zhao, and the others in front of him. True, there was a lot of noise and he might not have been heard. But it was just as likely that he was being ignored.
Oh well. That might be changing—
Makali Pillay was upset by Harley’s response. “Don’t bite my head off.”
“Sorry,” Harley said.
“This is a strange situation,” Jaidev said. “I frankly don’t know what to do.”
“This is fucked up,” Harley said. “But it’s really what I just heard from Rachel.” If Harley was worried about Dale’s presence, he didn’t show it. “Things are just as bad as we thought down there. The team is in the same shape they were yesterday, but they’re on a long haul to try to reach this Reiver weapons site, and even when they get there . . . it’s five against a few hundred thousand.”
“We knew that,” Jaidev said.
“We knew we were sending a handful of people on a scouting mission. Now we have the intel, and it’s terrifying.” Dale was about to try to inch his way closer when Harley said, “Get over here, Dale. You might surprise us and be useful.”
Harley quickly hit the high points of his Rachel tag-up, concentrating on the new Reiver facility with what was surely a beam weapon capable of striking Keanu.
Dale suddenly understood Harley Drake’s agitation. “We need the vesicle to be launched as soon as possible.”
“It’s within a day,” Zhao said.
“Make it happen,” Jaidev said.
“Then I shouldn’t be here.” Zhao turned to Makali. He was serious about returning to the vesicle habitat.
“We might as well wait a few more minutes,” Makali said. “Let’s see what the big deal is.”
As Harley’s debrief continued, Dale stepped back . . . most of the other HBs had formed their own clusters. One, largely younger, had formed around this Nick: They seemed eager, even happy.
Another group was older, largely Bangalores. They looked like mourners at a funeral. . . . Dale suspected that they had lost a friend during the past year or two and were hoping that they might be witnessing a miracle.
They’d obviously forgotten how short-lived these miracles had been—
“There’s Sasha!”
Dale didn’t recognize the voice, which came from somewhere behind him.
It was Sasha Blaine, in all her statuesque red-haired glory.
And, leaning on her—he was having trouble walking—was a man Dale didn’t recognize. He was naked, or nearly so, wearing some skinlike covering.
“Oh my God,” Makali Pillay said. “Is that—?”
“Yes,” Jaidev said.
“That’s Sanjay Bhat.”
QUESTION: What have you missed most about life on Earth?
PAV RADHAKRISHNAN: My family, of course. I only recently learned that my mother passed away several years ago. I have been fortunate to reconnect with my father.
QUESTION: Anything else?
PAV: New faces, I guess. There are fewer than a thousand of us. I attended secondary schools that were larger. (laughs) Sometimes life on Keanu feels like high school . . . in a submarine.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040
RACHEL
“We’ll be passing the Channel Islands in the next ten minutes,” Colin Edgely told Rachel.
Ten minutes earlier, Pav had awakened her with a gentle touch on her shoulder. She had been reclining in an airline seat under a thin blanket, dreaming about the Architect’s home world. The giant alien she had encountered that first week on Keanu had been dead for twenty years, yet a day rarely passed without some thought of him . . . where his people had come from, what they wanted, where they had succeeded in their quests.
Where they had failed.
Jaidev and the other HBs had devoted considerable effort to walking back Keanu’s trajectory, but with the limited resources available to them—and too many unknowns, such as the actual amount of time that had passed since Keanu’s original launch—they had never been able to settle on a particular star, much less a planet.
Which had not stopped them all from speculating about the type of world that would be home to creatures like the Architect, a large, low-density planet on the scale of Jupiter, but with a breathable atmosphere and tolerable temperatures. Rachel had formed a clear vision of the place, naming it “Homestead” and imagining endless pink steppes, blue mountains, black forests, and white cities that literally floated in the thick atmosphere. Her Homestead was familiar enough that she had dreams about it.
But today’s had not been happy. She had felt incredible sadness and impotence as she watched a flying city literally fall out of the sky, slamming into a blue mountain rang
e and being torn apart, Architect bodies scattered—
But it was just a dream, the side effect of an otherwise solid night’s sleep. And some kind of strange, dreamlike mirror of the sadness she felt about Sanjay, and the frustrations she experienced with Adventure’s ongoing mission.
Okay, she thought, I have to start turning this around. Be active, not passive. She almost launched herself out of the seat.
Stretched across the entire row behind Rachel, Yahvi was still asleep. Pav was moving to wake her, too, but Rachel stopped him. “How long has she been out?”
Pav smiled. “No idea. I was dead to the world for five hours.”
“Let her sleep as long as possible. It’s not as though there’s anything she can do until we get to Mexico.”
“If then.”
“Well, we didn’t bring her so we could get work out of her.”
“I just think she’d be happier all around if she had a job.”
Yahvi had talents that might be useful. Sanjay and her other teachers had frequently taken Rachel and Pav aside to praise their daughter’s potential, especially in math. So far, however, Yahvi’s greatest accomplishment was getting her own way. “We can turn to her when we need someone verbally beaten into submission.”
Then Rachel slipped into the lavatory for a moment, peeing and washing up, emerging to find Chang busy with his datapad, creating his fantasies about the adventures of the Adventure crew.
Colin Edgely was ready with coffee and his geographical update. “Two hundred kilometers northwest of Los Angeles,” he said. “We’re flying parallel to the coast and should be turning east within half an hour. With luck, we’re on the ground shortly afterward.”
“What happens to you two once we’re in Mexico?” Rachel said. “I assume this plane goes back to where it came from.”
“Yes, Chang will turn around and fly back to China by various means,” the Aussie astronomer said. “As for me—” Here his face grew rosy with embarrassment. “I’d like to come along.”
“Don’t you have students to go back to? Or your family?”
Edgely grinned. “Family knows I’m on my voyage of personal discovery. I met my wife through Kettering, you know.” Until this moment Rachel hadn’t known that Edgely had a wife.
“As for school, I took a leave. My boss isn’t a member of Kettering, but he’s sympathetic to the mania. Everyone in Alice Springs knows a bit about space tracking and such, anyway.”
“So you want to come along.”
“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” he said. “To see this through.”
To see this through. Rachel wondered what that meant. “I don’t think we’d have gotten this far without you,” she said, with total sincerity. “So stay as long as you want, as long as you know—”
“That it could be risky? I understand.” He gestured toward the left-side windows. “The riskiest maneuver is almost upon us, in fact.”
They faced so many unknowns. The first hour after taking off from Guam, she and Pav, Zeds, and Xavier had huddled in the rear of the plane, going over their options.
Pav told them that Chang had arranged for them to land in northern Mexico, near the city of Rosarito. “That country is filled with secret landing strips from the drug days, but few are equipped to handle a jet.” He had smiled. “Nevertheless, we have found one.”
They would then drive overland to the coast, where they would board a small sub. “This definitely sounds like a smuggling craft,” Xavier had said.
“No question. There’s barely room for all of us.”
“Do we have to smuggle drugs, too?” Zeds said.
For a moment none of them realized that the Sentry was joking. “No,” Rachel said, laughing, “only our own cargo.”
They would be put ashore somewhere on the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego, final destination to be decided en route. “The Free Nation Federales keep changing their countermeasures,” Chang said, “so our sub captain will be doing the same.”
“So this does still occur,” Rachel said. “Drug smuggling.”
“Oh my, yes,” Chang said. “No government in human history ever stopped it, and even with all their extraterrestrial powers, the Aggregates haven’t, either.” He smiled. “In many cases, however, the smuggling has gone the other way . . . it used to be people into the U.S. from Mexico. For the past two decades, it’s been the other way.”
“Speaking of cargo, Chang,” Xavier said, standing and indicating several containers. “Your little team of mice will be busy arranging the next leg of our journey. But before we make a move, I need four hours to produce our pharmaceutical package.”
“Our what?” Pav said.
“The poison pill,” Rachel said.
“Oh.” In spite of his claims of having slept well, Pav was still, to Rachel’s eyes, a bit slow and unfocused . . . or he would have remembered a key backup portion of their strategy versus the Aggregates, which was to replicate the only strategy that had actually worked against the machinelike aliens: infect them with a fast-evolving, self-replicating poison that destroyed their ability to communicate and reproduce.
It had worked to cleanse Keanu of the Reiver infection twenty years ago, driving the survivors off the NEO and toward Earth.
No one expected success from the same formula, but Jaidev, Sanjay, and other great HB minds had discovered a way to mask a deadly bioweapon as something entirely different—a Substance K–derived battery that stored vast amounts of energy in a very small package. It had been the end product of years of research, since the HBs could use such a device . . . and the subject of an increasingly tedious series of jokes, as the HB researchers pondered the eternal question, “What do Reivers want?”
The cleverest aspect of the backup plan was the presence of an actual poison pill weapon much like the original 2019 version. “It works two ways,” Sanjay had said. “Either the Reivers spot and grab it, missing the real weapon . . . or they don’t see it and it kills them.”
All this supposed that Rachel, Pav, and company were captives, or worse, dead. So it was not an option Rachel had spent much time pondering.
Nevertheless, Xavier needed time to complete “assembly” of both packages. “Obviously we won’t move until you’re ready,” Chang told him.
“Just as obviously,” Rachel said, “the sooner we are ready to move on this Reiver ray gun, the better.”
“I leave those maneuvers to you,” Chang said. “I will remain in Mexico to complete my work, then—”
“Then what?” Pav said, an edge in his voice. “Run back to China in case we fail? Make sure you’re out of the blast radius?”
Chang blinked. When he spoke, he sounded tired. “I’m sorry if you feel I’m abandoning you, but I’m a journalist and a rather famous one at that. My absence from China has already been noted. My association with you is public. If someone sees me here—”
“They’ll know we’re here, too,” Rachel said. “You’re right, Edgar. You’ve worked wonders getting us this far. From this point on, the smaller our team, the greater our chance of surprise.” Rachel saw that Colin Edgely was looking away, as if trying to pretend he hadn’t increased the size of her team by twenty percent.
Rachel turned to Xavier. “The burden of this falls to you and me.” Both still had friends and even family in Free Nation U.S., most in the western half of the country. They would use their time in Mexico to make contact, and hopefully find one who would shelter them as they prepared for an assault on this Aggregate weapons facility.
Zeds’s comment was, “I am troubled that we have the potential to be detected and detained at almost any point.”
“So it’s a good thing that’s the whole idea, right?” Xavier said.
Jo Zhang, their co-pilot, emerged at that point, a broad smile on her face. “We’re right on track and on schedule.�
� She was, Rachel judged, in her midthirties—her own age—but seemed to possess a rangy confidence that Rachel lacked, much like Tea; maybe you had to be that kind of person to operate high-tech flying machines. Or maybe operating them made you confident.
“What about defenses?” Rachel asked. “If we ran into Free Nation forces off India, I would expect a lot more right off California.”
“We have access to, ah, certain information about Free Nation vessels. There are bases to the north and especially to the south, at San Diego. We’re pretty sure we’re tracking them all, and there are no threats at the moment.”
“How about aircraft and missiles?”
Jo shrugged, looking, for a moment, quite fatalistic. “They’re more difficult to track, especially since there’s no international air traffic control data here. And with missiles, well, they can be on the ground one minute, and in your tailpipe the next. But we see no unusual air activity at the moment, and if we do, our decoy makes a run for it and draws them off.”
We hope, Rachel thought, as Jo slipped away, into the lav.
Before leaving Guam, Rachel had insisted on thanking the pilots, not just Jo and Steve, who had skillfully flown them from Bangalore to Darwin to Guam, but the two who were to fly that decoy plane.
The decoy pilots turned out to be two grim ex-military jet jockeys, one of them originally from the U.S. His name was Benvides, and he was twenty years older than Rachel. “I remember your father,” he said. “I was just out of flight school when the Keanu mission happened. And the Objects hitting. That must have been . . . awesomely weird.”
“Let’s just say I was unprepared for it.”
Benvides laughed. It turned out that he and his family had been stationed in Japan when the Reiver Aggregate invasion occurred. “We wanted to go home, to join the fighting, if nothing else. But we couldn’t. There was no real war . . . it was like a total collapse within a few weeks.”
“Taj said it was like trying to climb a tree that had rotted from within.”
“If you realize that the rot happened overnight due to outside forces, yes. Anyway, I’ve been waiting twenty years to poke a stick in the Aggregates’ eyes, assuming they have eyes.”
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