“Us, too,” Rachel said.
“Chasing the dog?” Zhao stepped back to look up the shaft. “I was actually quite careful. I’m not sure I wasn’t pushed.”
Rachel looked at Pav. Even in the low light, she could see his eyes widen, as if to say, Weirdo! “Well,” he said, “I don’t think the dog is the only animal on the loose up there....”
“I would have smelled or heard a dog,” Zhao said. “This was a person.”
He stepped from side to side, trying to get a better look up where they’d come from. “Hey, up there!” Without much success, he tried to pull himself up on the rocky wall. “We’re down here!”
“What are you doing?” Rachel said.
“He’s still up there,” Zhao said.
She and Pav both looked toward the top of the shaft. Zhao was right; somebody’s head popped into view, then out again.
“What the hell?” Pav was getting angry. “Help us out!” he shouted. “Throw a rope or something!”
Nothing. “Can you hear us?” Pav shouted.
Still no response, but the figure appeared for another instant.
“Who is that?” Pav said.
“I think it’s Camilla,” Rachel said.
“The Portuguese girl?” Zhao said. “If she was the one who pushed me, I’m going to fire my martial arts trainer.”
“Camilla!” Rachel called. “Get my father!”
“Can she hear us?” Pav said.
“She’s ten meters away!” Zhao said.
Then the opening—not large to begin with—got smaller.
“What the hell?” Pav said. “Is she putting stuff in the opening?”
“Hey, Camilla!” Rachel shouted. Zhao, too. And Pav.
Their pleas had no effect. The opening above them suddenly closed, leaving them in darkness.
Rachel wasn’t sure, but it seemed that the strange little Portuguese girl had walled them in.
MAKALI
Feeling as if she could run forever, Makali Pillay led the charge up the ramp out of Vesuvius Vent. In a ragged line, with Zack closing in on her, Williams—surprisingly—in third, followed by Dale and Valya, they emerged into the harsh bright sunlight of a Keanu day and quickly headed upward to the surface.
She had only studied the imagery of the original exploration by the Brahma and Destiny crews...the snowy, shadowed crater with the obviously artificial ramp spiraling up one side. But she remembered the ramp as relatively clean, bare rock. Now it was covered with debris...easily avoided or jumped over, but obviously new.
And great swatches of snow were gone, especially in the higher reaches. “It looks so different!” she said.
“Setting off a nuke will do that,” Zack said.
Makali and now Zack were taking giant leaps as they gained altitude. “Careful,” Zack said. “It’s easy to overshoot in microgravity.”
Makali acknowledged the warning without really altering her actions. She judged the vent to be at least thirty meters deep, a hole big enough to swallow a ten-story building. She also realized that as they got farther from the junction and the tunnels, gravity seemed to diminish sharply. She lost traction once or twice but was saved from a spill by Zack. “What did I tell you?” he said.
In the exuberance of exploration, and low gravity, Makali found it hard to slow down. Even Williams was springing up the ramp not far behind.
“Let’s be smart about this,” Zack said, trying to get Williams’s attention. “There’s no guardrail!”
Makali thought his worries were unfounded. To her it was obvious that a fall from the ramp would be slow and painless...assuming you even hit the base of the vent at all. She knew that most asteroids and other astronomical bodies were so small, so lacking in mass, so bereft of gravity that a human runner could easily reach escape velocity.
Thinking about that made her worry more about becoming a human satellite of Keanu than about a serious fall.
Reaching the top, she and Zack stopped as quickly as the slick surface and low gravity would allow.
Williams was not so ept. He lost his footing and landed on his backside, sliding up to and into Zack and Makali. Makali was afraid they would topple like bowling pins, but Williams only bounced and spun.
By the time she and Zack had helped the writer to his feet, Dale and Valya had reached the top of the ramp, too.
“Hey, Makali,” Dale said, as soon as he was within touching distance. “Now that we’re here, mind telling us why you took off?”
God, he was an irritating human being. Had she been his commander on a long-duration mission, she wouldn’t have just sent him home early...she would have ejected him from the airlock. “Because we were about to turn back and go into the tunnels,” she said. “This would be my only chance to walk onto the surface of Keanu.”
“Well, is it worth it?”
“Look for yourself.” Her first impression was that she had entered a world possessing only two colors: black and white. Even the advanced adaptive optics of her skinsuit struggled as she looked from surface to sky.
Makali had seen as much imagery of Keanu’s surface as anyone. It looked like any other large, icy comet or asteroid...rocks interspersed with ancient ice and snow, visually a lot like Iceland in the winter.
No longer. While the distant hills looked much the same, here most of the snow was gone...and in its place lay a shiny, smooth surface. “What the hell is this?” Zack said.
“I take it it looked different a week ago.”
“Correct.” He walked onto the shiny material, toeing it. “These are actually big plates,” he said.
As her eyes adjusted, Makali had seen edges, too. “Do you suppose this is the real outer skin of the Architect’s starship?” Williams said.
“It’s not uniform,” Dale Scott said. He had walked off a dozen meters. “The plates end here.”
Makali surveyed the area at the top of the vent. “Yeah, it looks as though there’s plating all around the rim.”
“It’s as if Vesuvius were built, not found,” Valya Makarova said.
“Well, they used it and the other vents like giant rockets,” Dale said.
Wade Williams wasn’t wandering around the shiny white plates. He pointed to the sky. “Raise your eyes, friends.”
Makali did, not seeing anything but black for several seconds. Oh, there it was! Planet Earth, a bright crescent in the sky across the vent, forty degrees above the horizon.
“It looks smaller than I expected,” Makali said.
“It’s a lot smaller than it was last week,” Zack said.
“So we are moving,” Williams said. “I suppose it would be prudent to figure out where.”
“And how to turn around before it’s too late,” Zack said. “Come on.”
“We landed two hundred meters from here,” Zack said. “Brahma wasn’t much farther.” He was already moving; Makali sensed that he was tired of explaining his actions to Dale Scott.
She wondered, briefly, what Dale Scott would look like sailing over the rim of Vesuvius to the hard ground thirty meters below.
The Venture landing site was a sheet of greenish ice, likely discolored by the heat of the nuclear blast. In the center, ten centimeters of a lonely gold landing leg stuck out. Its top was melted. “That was Venture,” Zack said.
“Dear God,” Williams said. “That whole spacecraft—a two-billion-dollar item—vaporized.”
“Along with two of my crew,” Zack said.
“And one of Brahma’s team,” Valya added.
Unbidden, she put her arm around the former Venture commander—clumsily, but heartfelt. Makali could hear labored breathing; she realized that Zack Stewart was struggling with his emotions.
Well, he was entitled. Makali felt as though she’d been through enough fright and wonder in the past four days to last several lifetimes...and Zack Stewart had been living at the same intensity for three times as long. She was amazed that he was upright.
Dale was looking around. “S
o where was Brahma, anyway?” His question broke the mood, but he had the grace to speak softly.
Makali launched herself. She knew the landing site—at least, as it had been the day both spacecraft touched down. She remembered Bangalore Control Center’s worries about orbital maneuvers and who landed first. What a waste of time and energy that had been.
The distance from the melted Venture landing leg to the Brahma site was no more than five hundred meters. Both spacecraft, NASA’s Venture and the Coalition’s Brahma, had been targeted for Vesuvius Vent, so their proximity was no accident. Still, it must have been thrilling to be on Venture watching Brahma touch down so close...or to have been on Brahma’s flight deck seeing Venture already waiting on the icy ground.
But where was Brahma? She was still on the green ice, though it was no longer uniform; there were patches of regular ice now, and even some rocky areas. Had she gone the wrong direction?
“Zack, over here!” It was Williams. “I found Brahma.”
He was pointing to a large silver can lying on its side. It looked as though some giant foot had tried to crush one side of it, but it was still amazingly intact.
Yes, Brahma, pride of the Coalition...the first mission beyond low Earth orbit ever flown by astronauts who weren’t Americans...and here it was, space junk, blown on its side and destroyed by a fantastically misguided decision.
Makali skipped closer and was startled at how large the vehicle was. “It’s tall, even on its side,” she said.
“Twenty meters high, five across at its widest,” Dale Scott said. Of course, Makali thought; he had worked closely with the Brahma teams. “It looks as though the crew cabin is sort of intact.”
While the lower or left half of the spacecraft showed severe damage, crushing, and melting, the conical nose looked scorched, but whole. “Makes sense,” Williams said. “The return capsule’s designed to withstand the heat of reentry. Heat from a pocket nuke wouldn’t be an order of magnitude worse in this environment.”
“How comforting,” Valya said, not hiding her sarcasm.
“I want to go inside,” Scott said. “If the interior is intact, I guarantee you there’s food and water, enough for a crew of four for a week. Some tools, who knows what else we’d find that might be useful.”
Makali hadn’t been thinking of useful supplies, either, but of sheer curiosity. “There are two hatches, right, Dale?”
Scott was loping around the nose of the craft. “Correct. The EVA hatch on the lower deck, and the side hatch on the return vehicle.”
“Stupid question, but are they locked?”
“Not the EVA hatch. But there might have been a guard on the return vehicle, something you’d enable only on reentry. You know, to keep someone from blowing the thing in flight.”
Makali was searching for the EVA hatch, a squarish piece of metal a meter and a half on each side. “I can’t remember,” she said. “The Brahma crew was not aboard when the bomb went off, so that hatch would be open?”
“Correct,” Scott said.
“Got it,” Zack said. He was on the opposite side of the wrecked spacecraft. Makali circled around the left, skirting the twisted legs and shattered propulsion module. Valya followed her.
Williams was with Zack. They were pointing to a slab of crumpled metal on the underside of Brahma. “There’s the EVA hatch,” Zack said, “open—
“—and completely inaccessible,” Williams finished.
Makali had to agree; Brahma had fallen on the side where the hatch lay open, crushing it and burying it. “It might be possible to push it back,” Williams said.
“Maybe,” Zack said. “But that material looks jagged and we’re wearing...skin.”
“Hey, good news and bad news, friends,” Dale Scott said. He was at the Brahma’s front end. “I found the return vehicle hatch.”
The rounded nose of Brahma, and the silvery skin, looked singed on one side, the one facing Venture and the blast. Other than that, and the fact that the vehicle was on its side, it looked intact, much as Makali remembered it from pictures.
Of course, none of those pictures showed it with its circular hatch open, flopped to one side like a small access platform. “Didn’t you say it was locked?”
“Only a possibility,” Scott said.
“Locked or unlocked, why is it open now?” Williams said.
“From the blast?” Zack said. “Or from being tipped over?”
“Not the hatch I knew,” Scott said.
The five of them were circling the nose and the hatch, as if wary of going closer. The hell with this, Makali thought. She skipped right up to the hatch, which was almost at eye level. Her skinsuit wouldn’t allow her to pull herself up to it, but low gravity meant that she could hop fairly high, high enough for a peek inside.
“The cockpit looks intact,” she said. “And some of the displays are still lit.”
“How is that possible?” Valya said.
“Brahma’s batteries were good for another week,” Scott said. “If the cockpit is still intact, it means that the force of the blast probably wasn’t severe enough to sever the connections.”
“Are we going to talk about this all day?” Makali said. “Or is someone going to give me a boost so I can get inside?”
Even though she had more than a layperson’s familiarity with the Brahma cockpit, Makali’s entry was quite disorienting. Had Brahma been in its nominal, upright position, the hatch opened to the right, allowing ingress and egress to the middle two of four couches. But those two couches folded under the other two for orbital or landing operations.
When Makali stepped through the hatch, she found herself looking up at the commander’s couch and its folded companion, and trying to stand on the other pair. The control panel was to her right. The “floor” of the spacecraft, and the access hatch to the lower, airlock deck, were above and to her left. The immediate left was taken up with the bulkhead covering Brahma’s ascent motor. Which was, she suddenly realized, filled with toxic fuels. She hoped there were no leaks.
The cockpit seemed dark, deserted, and cramped. Of course, the lower deck doubled as a habitation area, a fat doughnut surrounding the ascent stage. This was where the four Brahma travelers rode through launch, maneuvers, and touchdown on Earth.
Had they finally gotten home? The three surviving Brahma astronauts had joined Venture crew member Tea Nowinski aboard the Destiny orbiter, which, if Makali remembered correctly, had been crash-landed onto the surface here...and safely launched toward Earth.
She knew the crew members, some better than others. The Indian commander, Taj. How horrifying to have him survive the mishaps on Keanu, to return home and find that his son had been snatched away. Lucas Munaretto, so handsome and charming—and so unsuited to the rigors of spaceflight.
Makali barely knew Natalia Yorkina. But she had been good friends with Dennis Chertok, the oldest and most experienced member of the Brahma team—and its only fatality. Poor Dennis! So focused, so driven, so knowledgeable. He had spent almost two years in space on half a dozen different missions going back almost thirty years, every one of them marked by some equipment failure that he had been able to solve.
She wished he were here now.
“Looking for anything in particular?” Dale Scott was two steps behind her.
“Well, your food and water would be a good start.”
“Most of that would be below.” He edged into the cockpit with her, wrenching himself around to reach the access hatch. “It’s open, but—”
Makali could see past him. “Damaged.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I can even fit in there.”
“Forget it,” she said. “It would be great to have extra goodies, but they’d be gone in an hour.”
They both straightened up. Then, gingerly placing their feet on the sides of the couches, they moved away from the hatch and toward the control panel. “So, who did open that hatch?” Makali said.
“No fucking idea.”
�
��There must be something we can take, something that will be useful.”
“It’s a spacecraft, lady. Especially this module. It’s all instruments, controls, computers, comm, none of which is useful in our present situation.” He pointed to a panel mounted above them. “Since it’s technically a wreck, I suppose we could take the cockpit recorder....”
“There’s a black box?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not as though anyone expected Brahma to crash, or if it crashed, to be found. It was just a data storage device, all the uplinks, maneuvers, imagery.”
“I want it.”
Scott looked at her as if she were raving. “Why?”
“When we get back to the habitat, it will give me something to do.” That wasn’t the answer, of course. The black box held data, and data was her life. Especially data on exo-environments, possibly on the postblast environment. She had been nursing dark thoughts about the radiation levels here—
Scott braced himself in order to reach above his head and detach the recorder unit. “Whoa,” he said.
“What?”
He gestured at several cabinets directly in front of him. Because of her need to brace in midcockpit, Makali had not been able to see them before this.
Two cabinets had been ripped open, their covers literally torn from the hinges. One contained clothing that, she could now see, was dumped below her in the dark bottom of the cockpit. The other cabinet had been cleaned out.
“What do you suppose happened?” Makali said. “Is that damage from the crash?”
“Could be, but look lower.”
Below the vandalized cabinets was another damaged area...a third door that looked as though it had been punched in. It was jagged and some pieces were missing...and there was a film of frozen red or orange fluid on it.
“I think,” Dale said, “that someone opened the hatch and did some damage in here.”
“And to himself,” Makali said, deciding without any justification that the red fluid was blood.
Scott handed her the recorder unit. It was just too big to fit comfortably in Makali’s hand. Scott could see that as well. He must have learned something from his abortive ISS mission, because without being asked, he tore some netting from a corner of the cockpit. “You’ll need this,” he said, adding a tool kit and several pieces of cable and clips from another cabinet. “I don’t know how helpful it will be—
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