“What do you want?”
“The materials in this place seem to be a very advanced form of plasm—nanotech assembly material,” he added, seeing that Nayar, like many his age, was unfamiliar with the term. “I’ve got some hands-on experience with it. Why not let me see what I can do with it?”
“What do you honestly think you can do?” Nayar said. “This is an alien environment, designed by beings thousands of years more advanced than we are!”
“Designed for us,” a voice said to Jaidev’s right. Daksha.
“You said we should make ourselves useful. I think I can be useful.”
Daksha joined them. “Me, too.”
“Into the Temple, then,” Nayar said. “Both of you.”
The director turned away, clearly expecting nothing.
Nevertheless, Jaidev felt better. He had taken one step toward improving everyone’s lot...and redeeming himself.
But first...Daksha. “What do you know about plasm?”
“Beyond the name itself? Nothing.”
Jaidev stared at the man. To think that fifteen minutes earlier, Daksha had struck him. “Will you work for me?”
“You’re the expert.”
“Come on, then.” Jaidev Mahabala didn’t expect to find lithographic molecular knowledge in this group, so one pair of helping hands was as good as the next.
Besides...what better way to plot a bit of revenge than to have his assailant at his mercy?
ARRIVAL DAY: HARLEY
The hours after landing and “merger” of the two groups were consumed by greetings, shouts, jostling, complaints, and what Harley soon judged to be unreasonable joy.
How had their situation changed? There were now two more human refugees, since Zack had no tools and damned little useful information that the Houston and Bangalore groups didn’t already possess.
Brent Bynum said as much to Weldon and Jones. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said as they trudged toward the Temple, Harley wheeling with help from Sasha and feeling every meter in his shoulders. “I’m sick happy that Stewart survived. He’s the only one who knows what happened here.
“But unless he’s got an alien spacecraft gassed up and ready to go, he’s in the same damn fix we are.”
Harley had more important things to consider. He had not intruded on the painful reunion between Rachel and Zack. Given Megan Stewart’s death in an accident that was Harley’s responsibility...throw in this mysterious rebirth...well, there was nothing he could offer. Best to stay away.
Especially when Harley heard Zack tell Rachel that Megan was dead...again. The girl had collapsed, understandably. Harley wondered how Zack could be on his feet, much less coherent.
Then he wondered what had gone wrong. He realized he had a growing list of questions.
But now Rachel was on her feet, wiping her eyes, nodding, forcing a smile, in every way proving her strength and resilience.
And Zack was patting Harley on the shoulder. “What are the odds?”
“Of what?”
“You and Rachel winding up here.” He blinked, looking tired but happy. “Everybody else, too.”
There was no possible way Harley could avoid asking the next question, though he did lower his voice: “What happened with Megan?”
Zack stared at the earthen floor of the habitat, unspeaking, his shoulders heaving with barely suppressed sobs, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. “I wish I knew what to tell you. She was...here,” he said. “For two days, Harls, I had her back. I heard her. I saw her. I...touched her. It was like...every damn song about loss. That one last look.” He raised his face and smiled bitterly. “You know what? That’s a pretty fucking overrated idea. Take it from one who knows. The second separation is worse than the first.”
Harley considered that thought, and realized he could not address it or even express it. “Did she die somehow, or...”
“A Sentry took her,” he said, a phrase that meant nothing to Harley. Then Zack added, “It was the same kind of beast that killed Pogo.”
Harley raised his head slightly and was startled and horrified to see that behind Zack, dozens of people had gathered. It was not only Sasha, who was at the front of the throng, her arm around Rachel...and Weldon, Jones, and even Bynum. It was Pillay, the Indian woman, and Vikram Nayar...and several Americans and Indians he had no way of knowing.
Their faces were alight, reminding Harley of a classic Bible movie...the Israelites waiting for Moses to give them the Ten Commandments.
“Okay, you saw the landing. We pulled some orbital shenanigans and got down ahead of Brahma. The moment we landed, Keanu pulled its own maneuver and put itself in orbit around Earth. So we knew we were into strangeness.
“Yvonne and I did the EVA, the vent blew, and she got hurt; Taj and his crew came to the rescue.
“We went down into the vent together, Pogo Downey and me, Lucas and Natalia. We found ramps and a Marker and the membrane, all these signs that we weren’t exploring a NEO, we were entering an alien starship...which we’d known from the time Keanu maneuvered.”
He closed his eyes. To Harley, Zack seemed to be reading another man’s after-action report rather than giving testimony.
“Right off the bat, we met...something. A big alien; it carried this...vest with tools and some kind of layer of fluid. Strong. Faster. Bam—Pogo got killed. And we retreated.”
“What was this creature?” Harley said.
“The Sentry; that’s what we called it, anyway.”
“What happened to it?”
“Oh, it died. I don’t know whether we did something to kill it, or it was in the wrong environment.” He thought again. “Then, those of us who were left, we began meeting others...Natalia, Lucas, me.
“That was where we found Megan. The machines or systems here had rebuilt her or had her reborn.” His voice grew thick and ragged. “So we had two days together...”
“Do you have any idea how it happened?” Shane Weldon said. “How this...resurrection worked?”
Zack was struggling, but he, too, had stepped back from the emotional precipice in order to deal with the mechanics. “They told us a few things—”
“‘They’?” Harley suddenly felt like the Grand Inquisitor but couldn’t help it. He was also aware that Sasha, Rachel, Weldon, and likely Bynum were listening.
“The Architect, the builder or operator of the NEO.”
“You talked to one?”
“Sort of.” Just to one side, Harley saw Sasha Blaine slipping an arm around Rachel, holding her closely. “I only communicated through Megan.”
“So she was, what, channeling this Architect?”
“A good way to put it. Anyway, it has to do with the properties of space...the way information, which would be everything from sound to images to the atoms in our blood and muscles to whatever tiny bit of electrical sparks make up a human personality, is never actually lost. It just takes different forms. And these guys are able to access it.”
“I think I said this once before,” Harley said. “But that’s one serious fucking search engine.”
Zack merely blinked. The concept would have been overwhelming at the best of times, and these were far from that.
Harley turned to Weldon. “Are you expecting me to shed some light on this?” the former mission manager asked.
“You’re a systems guy. Is this plausible?”
“Harley, I’m a also propulsion guy and a communications guy and a life support guy, too, and I have no idea how these Architects managed to make those things work...and I interfaced with them. So when you start talking about—what were you guys on the Home Team calling it? ‘Morphogenetic fields’ and stuff like that—I’m as dumb as the next person.”
Harley didn’t know what to say and didn’t have to respond, because Gabriel Jones showed up looking agitated.
“Zack, I hate to do this to you,” Jones said. “But the, uh, rest of the natives are restless. Can you talk to them?”
Zack stood,
stretched. He forced a smile and aimed it at Rachel. “I don’t think I have any choice.”
ARRIVAL DAY: ZACK
With Jones and Weldon flanking him, and Harley, Sasha, and Rachel trailing, Zack walked to the front of the Temple and up the wide ramp that led to its entrance. With no special call to attention, the nearly two hundred refugees grew quiet even before Jones could ask for quiet.
“Friends from Houston—Dr. Pillay, Vikram Nayar, and friends from Bangalore—we’ve been through a lot. To help us know more about where we’ve wound up, and how we might go forward...Zachary Stewart, commander of Destiny-7.”
He had no outline in mind. All he could say was, “Thank you, hello, everyone.”
Then he had begun to speak, as clearly as he could, though nowhere near as forcefully as he would have liked, about the basic facts of their situation. Jones acted as moderator, making sure to elicit questions from Pillay and Nayar in particular.
It seemed that Zack’s ordeal was about to end, with the groups breaking off to start their basic tasks, when a voice shouted:
“You haven’t explained why you did this to us!”
In the last few minutes, Zack had sensed a steady rise in the general grumbling. The shared elation—We lived through the trip!—was fast wearing off, driven away by thirst, hunger, and exhaustion.
Nevertheless, that question—based on the accent, shouted by one of the Bangalore group—was shocking, for both its vehemence and content.
“My wife,” he said. His voice was weak; he doubted he’d be heard by half the crowd. He took a breath. “My wife learned from the Architects that they needed us, that we had a purpose—”
“We weren’t asked!”
“Neither was I,” he said. He noticed a young man—Chinese, likely—stepping out of the mass of people and edging his way toward the front.
“But you were here!” a different voice said, overlapping with the first speaker. “You and your crew started a war!”
Jones leaned over to him, trying not to be obvious. “One of the Bangalore flight controllers.” That was helpful information; who else would have known about the nuke?
Zack tried to say something: “No one really knows what happened—” Well, he knew about the Sentry attacking Pogo Downey. Had it been unprovoked? Hard to tell. This was humans encountering aliens, for Christ’s sake! It had gone badly, no question. The attack had led to the detonation of a nuke, no doubt about that. (A nuke Zack had not known about and, if asked, would not have accepted.)
But the crowd was getting out of control, with lots of yelling and finger-pointing. Most of the Houston people who knew what had happened were up here with Zack. But Zack could see advocates, of a sort, Texans arguing with Bangalores.
“Oh, shit,” Harley said. Zack suddenly thought of Rachel and turned; she was a few meters behind him, standing with Sasha, both looking alarmed, but both safe. “What is it, Harley?”
“I just saw Dale Scott.”
Dale Scott? He was a former NASA astronaut that Zack knew from his first International Space Station tour...where Zack, as a new arrival, had realized that Scott was not performing well and recommended his early return to Earth. “I heard he was working with Taj’s team.” Taj had been the commander of the Indian Brahma spacecraft—the other set of human explorers who had landed on Keanu.
“Yeah, well, now he’s here.”
Zack found Scott; the man was standing off to one side next to what had to be a Russian woman. (Where had she come from?) But he wasn’t agitating...he stood with arms crossed, a smirk on his face.
“Harls, we’ve got to get a handle on this.”
Gabriel Jones was doing his best, trying to shout above the crowd, “People! People, calm down! This isn’t doing anyone any good—”
That seemed to work. The volume dropped noticeably. The shoving stopped.
Just then, however, Zack heard a voice not from the crowd in front of him, but from his left.
“Zack Stewart should not be leading you!”
That voice was American.
“Oh, Christ, it’s Bynum,” Weldon said.
Zack had no idea who “Bynum” was, which Harley knew. “He’s the prick the White House sent to spy on us,” Harley said.
Before anyone could stop him, this tall, thin, balding, agitated fellow in white shirt and dark slacks—the only American who dressed like the Bangalores—had reached where Zack stood with Gabriel Jones.
“Dr. Jones, may I say something?”
Before Jones could say no, Bynum turned to the crowd. “Almost none of you know who I am, so let me introduce myself. I’m Brent Bynum, and I’m the deputy national security adviser. At the time of the, uh, incident, I was at the Johnson Space Center.”
The crowd responded with feeble murmuring—clearly they were all hungry, worn down—but Bynum acted as if the lukewarm response were equal to the roar of the party faithful at a political convention. “Those of you who can, please translate this for our friends from India.
“You’ve heard talk about leadership here, and responsibility. It’s all well and good, but everyone is overlooking one major point: I am the only government official here.”
He paused, spreading his hands. “Unless there’s someone out there, someone from the government of India, perhaps? No?”
Weldon turned to Harley. “What does he think he’s doing?”
“Next thing you know, he’ll break into a chorus from Evita.”
“Come on, Brent,” Gabriel Jones was saying. “We can talk about the rights of man once we’ve had some food and water. And you should know, Zack was not responsible—”
“I was in mission control, Dr. Jones. I saw how badly First Contact went. And Stewart was the commander. If he’s not responsible, who is?”
Zack couldn’t take it anymore. He got in Bynum’s face. “You’re right. I was the commander. I am responsible for what happened, good and bad. What do you propose to do with me? Confine me? Execute me?”
Bynum seemed surprised by Zack’s willingness to confront him. Typical horse-holder, Zack thought. He has no idea what it’s like to make decisions that you can’t take back.
“No one’s suggesting that,” Bynum said, his voice suddenly pleasant and conciliatory. “My point, however, is that the fact that you were commander of Destiny and Venture doesn’t necessarily make you the leader now.” He gestured at Jones and Weldon. “Which is what people seemed to be saying.”
“Don’t worry,” Zack said. “I’m the original ‘if elected, I will not serve’ type.”
“You’re still not getting it,” Bynum said. He turned to the others. “None of you are getting it.”
He pointed at Zack again. “You aren’t the leader because we aren’t going to have leaders anymore.”
He dropped his arm and turned to the crowd. He scanned it for a moment, then fixated on a young black man standing near the front with a backpack in his arms. “You there,” he said. “Is that yours?”
“What?” the kid said.
“That backpack and what’s inside it. Does it belong to you?”
Allowing for the time it took non-English speakers to absorb that statement, the crowd quickly fell silent. “I found it,” the young man said. “And you know where, too.”
“That’s my point. I do know; I know that you have no more right to that backpack than anyone else here. You just picked it up.” He smiled. “Maybe you should just give it to your neighbor. It’s just as much his as it is yours.”
“Maybe you should kiss my ass.”
The crowd was growing agitated again. Zack wanted to take Rachel and slip out the back door, leaving this all behind.
Too bad there was no back door.
Bynum stepped forward. “Listen, it’s very likely we are here for the rest of our lives. Which means we will have to find ways to work together. Our society can and should be a clean sheet of paper! We can’t survive doing things the bad old way. We can’t afford ‘personal property’! There is n
o ‘mine’—everything here belongs to everyone. Share and share alike!”
Zack looked at Harley, who smirked and said, “That boy sounds like a dang Communist to me.”
Weldon shrugged. “No surprise there, given where he worked....”
The young man was charging toward Bynum. “Then why don’t you give back the gun?” Zack realized that he was American; surely his accent suggested Louisiana. Before he reached the White House man, the younger one turned and said to the crowd, “He didn’t tell you that, did he? How many of you have guns?”
There was a long moment. Bynum smiled and slowly reached behind him...drawing a shiny Colt pistol from his waistband.
“He’s right. I have a gun. I found it, just like Xavier here found his backpack filled with goodies. Does that give me authority? Does this gun make me more right? On Earth it did. Is that how we’re going to live here? Is that how we’re going to present ourselves to the beings that made this place, that brought us here? How is that working for us so far?”
Bynum was talking about nonviolence, but to Zack he looked crazy, on the edge of something terrible. If nothing else, he looked like a man who really wasn’t familiar with weapons, the way he kept waving the Colt around.
Zack stepped back, wanting to put himself between Bynum and Rachel. As he moved, his peripheral vision picked up a man moving parallel, but the opposite direction...toward the front of the crowd. Zack took a closer look, saw that the man was Asian, short, chubby—
“Daddy!” Rachel said.
Zack turned at her voice and saw the muzzle of Bynum’s pistol aimed directly at him.
Before he could react, behind him there was a pop, then a second.
Brent Bynum was standing with his arms stretched out, like Christ on the cross. He sank to his knees.
The Asian man moved out from behind Zack. He had shot Bynum.
Suddenly many people were yelling, and three or four started pointing and fighting.
Heaven's War Page 7