Heaven’s Fall

by David S. Goyer

  Sanjay had taken perhaps a dozen steps and was beginning to feel as good as he had ever felt when the vision in his left eye changed, not so much distorted as overlaid with another image.

  What the hell—?

  He felt a growing pressure at the back of his skull, and now his right eye was affected, too. The overlay resolved itself into the image of what looked like a giant egg. But that was swiftly replaced by . . . unknown faces, figures, landscapes.

  Inside his head he registered . . . static, voices in languages he didn’t know, even music.

  Then one word: Ring. It repeated, Ring, ring, ring.

  He blinked but kept walking and smiling, telling himself, This is normal, this is temporary, this is not the beginning of my Revenant sell-by moment, right up to the moment where he fainted and fell on his face.

  “Are you awake?” Maren’s voice in his ears, low, almost a whisper; her face in his field of view, brows furrowed.

  They were in the Temple now, second floor, Sanjay’s work home for most of his adult life. Sanjay had been given a pair of trousers and a loose shirt. He was flat on his back on a couch; Maren was sitting on the floor next to him, his hand in hers.

  He managed a quiet “Mmmm,” but squeezed her hand and pulled her even closer.

  His vision cleared. The tableau was utterly familiar and at the same time totally disorienting. Physically and mentally, he had prepared for weeks to leave Keanu—possibly for good. He had had terrific, painful arguments with Maren. “Why do you have to go?”

  “I know more about the vehicle than anyone.”

  “And why did you have to be the expert?”

  “I don’t know. It’s in my nature.”

  Maren’s worst fears had become fact. There was always a risk with any space mission. Adventure could have exploded on launch. It could have suffered engine underperformance and drifted into a useless orbit, fatal to its crew.

  Its thermal protection system could have failed. Even a small navigation failure would have caused them to miss Earth entirely, dooming them.

  Then there was the possibility—certainty, it turned out—that they might be fired upon.

  The method and likelihood of a return to Keanu remained uncertain.

  When Sanjay considered the nature of the Adventure vehicle and mission . . . well, the odds might have actually been weighted in favor of failure and death.

  And so far, he had experienced a little of both.

  Yet . . . he had made it back. He was in his lover’s arms again.

  So why did he feel so guilty?

  He realized that Sasha, Harley, Zhao, Jaidev, and several others were nearby, either staring at him with obvious concern or pretending not to. “How long was I out?” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Harley said. “We had to carry you.” A typical Harley comment, which Sanjay appreciated.

  “Sorry about that.”

  Maren was looking at his face. “How do you feel?”

  A good question. He felt fine, except for the lingering pressure in his skull. The voices and other sounds were still present. Images kept flickering through his vision . . . they were less intrusive, but still present. It was as if his brain had learned to manage the flow of extraneous data during the fifteen-minute blackout.

  And flow of data was what he had to be experiencing. Sanjay knew that one suspected reason for the Revenants’ existence had been to communicate, to serve as a bridge between humans and alien intelligences who had not only a different language but unusual biologies and, for that matter, wildly unfamiliar frames of reference. He had heard, for example, that the Architect seemed to possess a sense of time that was far slower than that of humans . . . the same way that an insect’s sense of time passing would be far faster.

  Sanjay had become a bridge. Fine. His goal was to be a good bridge . . . and to still be standing more than a week hence.

  “A little rattled,” he told Maren and the others. “Hungry.”

  So they fed him typical Keanu food, which, given that he was ravenous, was the best thing he had ever tasted. (Another list of regrets for dying when he did . . . no chance to eat a proper Earth meal.) As he ate, he made sure to exchange reassuring looks with Maren while trying to answer questions from Jaidev, Harley, Sasha, and Zhao.

  There were the expected ones. His last memory. His first sight and sounds upon revival. “Do you remember anything from in between?” Zhao said.

  That question was surprising only because it came from pragmatic Zhao, the last human Sanjay would ever have expected to take interest in life after death.

  Sanjay would have been the second least likely, and no matter how he replayed his moments of death and new life, he found no interregnum, no region between, no halfway-between-heaven-and-hell moment. “No. As far as I can tell, there was no gap.” He snapped his fingers. “It was that fast.”

  Maren seemed upset by the whole notion, not that Sanjay could blame her. “How did this happen?” she was saying.

  “Don’t question it,” Harley said. “Gift horses and all that—”

  Unsurprisingly, this caused Maren to collapse in sobs.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Harley,” Sasha said.

  “I’m a little curious, too,” Sanjay said. “I mean, we knew that Keanu had the ability to . . . find an individual human soul and—”

  “Please don’t call it a soul!” Maren said.

  “Fine, a human identity, a personality . . .” As he uttered these terms, he noticed changes in the signals inside his head, as if he were taking part in a kind of guessing game.

  “A morphogenetic field,” Jaidev offered. Then he smiled. “Whatever the hell that means.”

  That term resonated inside Sanjay’s head. “My particular morphogenetic field was apparently tracked and then retrieved for, uh, reuse?” He smiled at Maren as he said that. She shook her head at the wickedness of it all. But she had stopped sobbing. “I don’t think we’re ever going to know how,” he said. “But maybe we can figure out why.”

  “Keanu wanted you back. That’s why,” Jaidev said.

  “Which is obvious and still tells us nothing,” Zhao snapped.

  “Keanu also seems to be monitoring us,” Sasha said. “It’s bad enough if it’s watching or listening. It’s terrifying to think that somewhere inside Keanu is a . . . a computer system that understands English and Hindi. But I can accept that. I can imagine it. What I don’t know is if Keanu is reading our minds.”

  “Unlikely,” Jaidev said.

  “And manipulating morphogenetic fields is likely?” Harley said.

  “We can’t know the answers to those questions,” Zhao said. “Not yet. But add this to our list: Assume Keanu has been monitoring us all along, tracking our movements, growth—”

  “Births, deaths,” Sasha said.

  Zhao nodded. “Especially deaths. And ask . . . why did the Beehive stop working? We thought it had been damaged in the rebooting of the core. Right now it seems as though Keanu just turned it off.”

  “And eventually turned it back on,” Sanjay said. “I can’t say I’m unhappy it did.”

  Maren had returned, snuggling up to him and taking his hand.

  Now Harley looked at the others, making some nonverbal exchange of information. Then he turned to Sanjay. “Would you be willing to talk to Dale Scott?”

  “Why not?”

  As Zhao went to retrieve Dale, Sanjay said, “When did he turn up?” Harley and the others briefed him on Dale’s sudden return. “Wait, he knew about our troubles?” Sanjay had to laugh. “He actually knew more than I did!”

  “You had an excuse,” Harley said.

  “Yeah, I was pretty dead.”

  Maren got up. “I don’t like this.”

  “You don’t even know Dale Scott,” Sanjay said.
>
  “Why are you doing this?” she said. “Why are you putting yourself through it? You should be resting—”

  “I’ve had enough rest,” Sanjay snapped, immediately regretting his sharp tone. He did not want to quarrel with Maren. But he faced challenges that were greater and more important, frankly, than their relationship. “Sorry.”

  She looked at him, then shook her head. “Find me when you feel like it.” And walked away.

  As Maren left, she passed the arriving scarecrow of Keanu, Dale Scott.

  The moment Sanjay saw Dale, the noise inside his head increased. He could feel his heart rate spiking—the imagery was clearer now, the sounds less chaotic.

  Something was definitely happening.

  Then Dale Scott put his hands to his head.

  “Are you feeling that, too?” Sanjay said.

  “Probably.”

  “What do you see or hear?”

  “The vesicle, mostly,” Dale said.

  Which confirmed what Sanjay had thought. “We’re on the same wavelength.” He knew all about the vesicle and the plan to use it as a secret strike weapon against the Reivers.

  “I can speak for all of us, I think,” Sasha Blaine said, “when I tell you that you two are freaking us out.”

  “Sorry,” Dale said. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to tap into the Keanu system. I don’t think I’ve mastered it.” He pointed at Sanjay. “But you’ve got it.”

  Yes, he realized, as images and data seemed to come into focus, arranging themselves in accessible columns. He had glimpses of Keanu, both its interior and exterior. He saw Earthscapes, too . . . not just India and the Pacific, but a desert and a giant structure of some kind.

  It was all linked, and he could feel the connections without being quite sure how it fit together. Nevertheless, the feeling was electrifying—almost worth dying for.

  Almost.

  “When do you launch the vesicle?” Sanjay said to Zhao.

  “Within hours,” Zhao said.

  “I need to be on it.”

  Day Eight

  FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2040

  No word now from Colin. It’s three hours past the time when he should have reached his destination.

  Anyone? Anywhere?

  I’m getting a bad feeling. . . .

  POSTED ON KETTERING GROUP,

  APRIL 20, 2040

  XAVIER

  The transition from free flight and nervous optimism to airborne captivity and depression took, Xavier Toutant guessed, about five seconds.

  That was for him, and he was, as his momma and numerous employers used to say, slow on the uptake. He suspected that for Rachel and Pav, Yahvi, Chang, and Edgely, it was more or less instantaneous.

  As for Zeds—

  “What is happening?” the Sentry said. He had been in a quiet state akin to hibernation for several hours. It was, Xavier knew, a way of conserving his suit’s resources. And no doubt a means of coping with the tedium. He had been able to offer Xavier little assistance beyond holding large items, and the need for that had passed quickly. Xavier’s job soon became monitoring the proteus as it prepared the two biological packages.

  And with their capture, to finish at least one of them before they landed.

  “Okay, you probably saw, we’re being escorted,” Jo Zhang said. She finally opened the cockpit door ten minutes after the destruction of the decoy plane and the turn toward the coast.

  “By whom?” Chang said. He seemed the most shocked of the group.

  “Those are U.S. Air Force planes,” Jo said.

  “Old ones, too,” Pav said. “F-22s. They were flying those when I was a kid.”

  Rachel was slumped in her seat, rubbing her temples. Xavier knew that look; he had seen it frequently in the endless, contentious planning meetings for the Adventure flight. “What about Benvides and Quentin?” she said.

  Jo hesitated. “I could tell you I don’t know, but you don’t need bullshit right now. Their plane was destroyed.”

  “Thank you for your honesty,” Edgely said.

  Even from the rear of the cabin, dividing his gaze between the proteus next to him and the backs of everyone’s heads, Xavier could see that Jo’s blunt statement had not made Rachel happy. Her eyes filling with tears, she was shaking her head with great agitation. “Did we have any warning?” she said.

  “Nothing,” Jo said. “One moment we were doing just fine, preparing to break off, the next . . .”

  The only thing keeping Rachel from getting out of her seat and confronting Jo was Yahvi’s condition. The girl was sitting next to Rachel, hunched, probably hugging a pillow to keep from screaming. Rachel put her arm around Yahvi and leaned in to her.

  Questions were still flying around the cockpit, from Chang and Edgely and Pav to Jo. None of the answers provided any information to Xavier . . . nothing he didn’t already know, that is.

  They were screwed.

  Jo finally said, “I’ll let you know the moment we learn anything. Right now, we’re just following our escorts.”

  Leaving his machine to its final assembly, Xavier had started moving forward. “Any idea where?” he said.

  “We’re flying north over the Los Angeles basin,” Jo said. “Steve thinks we’re headed for Edwards, since that’s the nearest military base.”

  Xavier sat down next to Rachel. He’d always wanted to see Edwards. Living in Houston on the fringes of the space program and its culture of aviation, Xavier had grown quite familiar with the famous California base and its history of exotic aircraft and space shuttle landings.

  But not like this.

  “Will you be able to get anything finished?” Rachel was asking him.

  “One of the packages. Maybe.”

  “It should be—”

  “The second one.”

  Rachel nodded, as if to say, Thank God someone is doing what I need. “Should you be—?” Up here with me, she was going to say.

  “It’s on auto. I’m going right back. I just wanted to”—he shrugged—“see how you’re doing.” He inclined his head toward Yahvi, who had herself bent pretzel-like, head bowed, eyes closed, hugging a pillow to her chest.

  Rachel didn’t bother to fake a smile. “We’ll just see, won’t we?”

  Colin Edgely had been peering out the right-side windows. “Those are F-22s, for sure,” he said.

  “That’s what I said,” Pav told him.

  “Sorry, mate.” The Aussie smiled. “A bit nervous, I guess. Trying to find the silver lining.”

  “How’s that going for you?” Xavier said. He couldn’t help it.

  “Those planes got close enough to show that the pilots were human. How about that?”

  “That’s good how?” Pav was taking up the argument.

  Edgely was game, however. Xavier was fascinated by the way people responded to stress—including himself. He knew that he tended to wind down, to feel sleepy, like a small animal in the jaws of a larger, hungrier one. This couldn’t be true, of course; such a trait would have evolved out of existence due to the early deaths of its holders. So, fine, then, call it calm in the face of danger.

  Others, like Rachel and Pav, got tense and couldn’t hide it.

  Some, like Chang and Yahvi, became tense and quiet.

  Then there were those, like Edgely, who just got stupid. “It means we’re not dealing with Aggregates.” Not until we land, Xavier thought. As did everyone who heard this.

  “It’s Edwards,” Jo told them, popping her head out of the cockpit for a moment. “On the ground in ten minutes.”

  “Then what?” Pav said. He stood up and stretched. To Xavier, he seemed spring-loaded, ready to fight . . . someone.

  “Well,” Rachel said, “if they wanted us dead, they would have just blown us out of the sky like the other plane. So I�
��m guessing it’s prison and interrogation.”

  “Probably some kind of show, too,” Edgely said.

  “Colin, please stop speaking,” Rachel said.

  Chang finally spoke. “I’m guessing we should all belt in.”

  “Thank you for that,” Pav said, not hiding the sarcasm.

  “Who speaks for us?” Chang said.

  “Why would it matter?” Rachel said.

  Chang turned toward her. Xavier could see genuine fear on the man’s face. “Let me rephrase that: How are we to act? Do you plan to cooperate, or resist?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Rachel said. “Are you in a hurry?”

  “We might have different agendas,” Chang said.

  “Meaning you’ll, what? Surrender? Rat us out?” Hearing this, Xavier remembered that Chang knew something of their plans. His lassitude vanished, replaced by fear: Even in 2019, it was possible to drug a prisoner and get him to say every secret he knew. He couldn’t imagine that the Aggregates were less capable.

  He glanced back at the proteus, still laboring away. The second package wasn’t going to be done, anyway, but Xavier hated the idea that the Aggregates would know all about it the moment they shot his brain full of truth serum or the Reiver equivalent.

  “I can try to bargain,” Chang was saying. “My government might have some leverage. The question is . . . do you want to be included? Or is it everyone for himself?”

  “Given that we have no weapons,” Rachel said, “no idea where we are, and no cavalry to ride to the rescue, I am eager to tell you, sure, do what you can.”

  Even with Rachel’s cold, accurate description of the situation, to Xavier, fighting still sounded like a better idea than simply taking what the Aggregates handed out.

  Xavier sat through the by-now-familiar touchdown and used the longer-than-expected taxi to squeeze a few more precious minutes out of his 3-D printer. The package was not complete; he would need another hour, perhaps two. And clearly he wasn’t going to get it.