“By default, we’re starving it,” Nayar said. “We don’t know what it uses for nourishment, anyway.”
“What if the critter takes being starved as a hostile act?”
“Yeah, like me with the Objects,” Weldon said. One of the Indian engineers laughed, but only for the time it took Nayar to shoot him a cold look.
“Tomorrow we try adding different substances to its environment. Water, for example, to see whether it reacts.”
“That would be fine,” Harley said. He couldn’t imagine what good or bad it would do. But he needed Nayar and his team happy, and if playing Mr. Wizard with an alien bug would help—
“Thank you,” Nayar said. He signaled to Jaidev and the others, and they all headed for the ramp and the upstairs.
Watching them go, Harley noticed Camilla sitting quietly in a corner, apparently having watched the whole exchange.
He rolled toward her. Even though she seemed alert, she looked pale, even sickly to Harley. There were actual shadows under her eyes. Knowing she couldn’t understand him, he smiled and pointed to her arm. “Better? Bueno?”
She seemed to understand, nodding politely. Sasha must have scrounged a Band-Aid from the RV or another source. It covered the wound.
Then he pointed at the bug and the dish. “You can go over there, if you want.”
Hesitantly, she went over to it. With a glance back at Harley, as if for permission, she sat, smoothly assuming a posture that in Harley’s world could be attained only by a yoga instructor, or a rubber-jointed child.
“Shane,” he said to Weldon, “can you get Sasha for me?”
“Have you forgiven me yet?”
Harley almost jumped. He had been so intent on the girl that he hadn’t noticed Sasha sneaking up behind him.
“Shouldn’t I be asking for forgiveness?” he said.
She sat down next to him and took his hand. “No. My father always told me, if you’re ever in a personal argument and it turns out that you are objectively right, apologize at once.” She smiled.
“I accept?”
“Correct response.”
“How’s the baby? Chandra.” He was pleased that he remembered the name.
“Sleeping. One of Chitran’s friends is talking to the engineers about getting some baby food out of the dispenser upstairs.” She lowered her voice. “One of the Texans is on the trail of a cow, whether to milk it or—” She shook her head. “What do you need?”
He told her about the Woggle-Bug and Nayar’s plan. “Since this appears to be an alien life-form, I wanted to know more about where it came from. Could you ask Camilla when or were she got bitten? And how she’s feeling?”
Sasha smiled, then sat down next to Camilla, who had been examining the bug and its habitat with a fervor Harley associated with children and beloved TV cartoons. The girl seemed pleased to see Sasha, hugging her and jabbering in German.
“She says she’s tired and hungry. And she got bitten at the plate.”
“The what?” It turned out, plate was what Camilla called the node where she had duplicated Valya Makarova’s lipstick. Which raised other questions in Harley’s mind. “Yeah, how did she know about this plate? Did she just find it by accident? Are there others?”
More German. Camilla seemed to be answering freely and with enthusiasm. “She just knew to go there. And there are others.”
“How many?”
“She doesn’t know. She just...knows when she’s near one, and she’s passed at least”—she checked with Camilla again—“three others.”
Four duplicating nodes. “What I want to know,” Sasha said to Harley, “is how the plates are different from the dispenser in the Temple.”
Harley’s head began to hurt whenever he considered these matters. “I think Camilla’s magic plates are for straight duplication, places where the habitat concentrates enough raw material, programming, and power to copy something.”
“I wonder if it could copy food? Or a cat?” she said.
“Don’t know.” And don’t care much for the implications.
“The Temple’s dispenser is far more sophisticated. It’s got more power, more raw materials”—so Jaidev theorized; no one had yet found a pipeline for goo—“more processing, more whatever. You can make something from nothing. I’m guessing, at the plate, you can only copy what you bring.”
Sasha patted Camilla on the shoulder and stood up.
“God, can you imagine what it would be like if we had something like this back home?”
“Yeah,” Harley said, “like American manufacturing after container ships opened up China, times a thousand. Total fucking disaster. Assuming a big ship from Earth ever shows up, I’d advise the commander to quarantine this habitat and make sure none of that magic stuff got out for about five hundred years.”
“I don’t understand that! You could end poverty and hunger!”
“Oh, come on, Sasha. We could have ended poverty and hunger any time since World War Two. The technology has existed. It’s the will. All this think-it-make-it would do is destroy manufacturing. The only jobs would be for people who haul the raw materials around and tend the power plant. You really want to impress me? Show me the big nuke or anti-matter core that keeps the lights going in this place. That’s technology Earth could use.”
She pointed a finger right in his face. “You know what’s really stupid?”
He braced. “Tell me.”
“Arguing about this.”
He laughed. She smiled and wagged her finger in a substantially friendlier manner. “But you are a dark man, Harley.”
“You knew that when you hooked up with me.”
“Actually, I didn’t know anything about you before I showed up in Houston.”
“We’re even, then. Wait—” Harley realized that Camilla was singing that little song Xavier had mentioned, the one with “rato.” “She keeps doing that. Any idea—?”
Sasha was shaking her head. “It’s not German. It sounds like ‘rat’ and ‘wall’; those are the only two words I sort of understand.”
“She said she was hungry. We should get her some food.”
She went away with them to the upper floor.
Harley occupied himself with leadership tasks for a while, among them setting up a “food rotation” with Weldon and Nayar.
Every now and then he would stop and think, Come on, Zack! You know the drill! Don’t leave a buddy hanging! Check in! Come back!
When he rolled past the Woggle-Bug terrarium on his way out, he noticed that where there had been one...there were now two.
Odd. “Sasha! Shane! Anyone!”
ZACK
Dale said, “Zack, I think Wade’s stopped breathing!”
Hearing that message, three words compressed to one came unbidden to Zack Stewart: “Shitandgoddammit!”
They were within sight of Mt. St. Helens Vent, which meant they were no more than half a kilometer from a Membrane, and possible rescue. Or escape. Or improvement in their really difficult situation.
Given that, Zack didn’t want to stop. He truly didn’t want to have that reason to stop. “How do you know?” he said.
“He stopped talking ten minutes ago.”
Zack hadn’t noticed, largely because the skinsuit-skinsuit communications were spotty and he’d already grown used to relative silence from the rear of their little column. “Wade!” he said. “Wake up, please! Talk to us!”
No response.
He could hear a faint echo as Dale tried the same tack, with no better results. “I’ve got to tell you, he feels like dead weight.”
“Zack, for God’s sake, stop so we can check him!” That was Valya, her voice blaring inside Zack’s skinsuit cap. He hadn’t realized she was only a meter behind him.
Fine, he stopped. So did Makali, who was actually ahead of him.
They ran to meet Dale, then helped lower Wade Williams.
He’s right, Zack thought. Dead weight. To Makali, he said, “Can you see his
eyes? Anything?”
“I’m trying. These fucking bug eyes...” Wade had given the skinsuit goggles the name, appropriately enough, from classic sci-fi.
“Do something!” Valya said.
Dale was growing more agitated. “It’s not like we can do CPR, honey!”
“Oh, shit,” Makali said, suddenly rocking back from Williams.
She had a piece of his skinsuit in her hand, from his head. “It just...peeled off!”
As Zack and the others watched, unable to take any kind of action, Wade Williams’s skinsuit began to crack and vaporize, as if melting from within. “Oh my God,” Makali said. “It’s just like the vesicle!”
Then Williams’s entire body shuddered and clenched, as if dumped in icy water. In a way, it was like that, as his skin came into contact with the extreme temperatures of Keanu’s nearly non-existent atmosphere—an effective vacuum—both unbelievably hot and chillingly cold.
“Help him!” Valya screamed.
All Zack could think to do was place his hands on Williams’s chest. He felt as though he were trying to keep the poor man from exploding. Williams’s blood was trying to bubble; skin, muscle, and bone were holding it in.
But not prettily. There was a second clench, then another rippling spasm.
A last breath escaped from his lips, turning to vapor, then icy crystals. Williams’s body immediately hardened, as if surrendering to the environment.
Zack uttered a silent prayer from his youth. Let the angels watch over him.
Assuming angels could turn their eyes to this part of God’s universe.
“Tell me he was dead before...that,” Valya said.
“I believe he was,” Zack said. “Terminally unconscious.” He believed it, too.
“Well, that’s that,” Scott said.
Allowing for the limitations of the skinsuit, Valya hit Dale as hard as she could. “How can you be so callous? The man just died!”
“Shut your face! I carried him! And now we’ve got to get moving!”
“Knock it off, everyone,” Zack said.
Makali helped to defuse the situation. “Dale, what was the last thing he said?”
“What’s the—?” Scott caught himself. He realized that Valya not only was shocked by what she’d just witnessed, she was terrified that she was next. “Ah, I think it was, once I had him on my shoulder, he said, ‘The view from here is tremendous.’”
“Good. Something to remember and tell his family,” Makali said.
Assuming we’re ever in contact with Earth again, Zack thought. Assuming we live past the next hour.
A lot of assumptions.
“I want to leave,” Valya announced. “My indicators are almost as blue as Wade’s!”
“Good idea,” Dale told her, suddenly Mr. Supportive. “Are we going?”
“One thing,” Zack said. Since Williams’s body weighed almost nothing, Zack elected to carry it. This wasn’t just courtesy or a desire not to leave a comrade on the battlefield—
The others hadn’t realized it yet, but Zack would never forget: People who died on Keanu didn’t necessarily stay dead.
They didn’t need to have died here, and apparently their bodies could be torn asunder, too.
What would happen to Wade Williams if his body were returned to the Beehive?
God help him, Zack took Wade Williams’s body with them as a science experiment.
“Zack,” Makali said, “Why did Williams’s suit fail so quickly?”
He would have loved to know that answer, though it was still fairly far down the list of Keanu questions he wanted answered.
“I can think of two possibilities,” he said, shifting the body as he turned to check on Valya, who was being hustled along by Dale. “One is that he was a lot older than the rest of us, and the suit burned up more of whatever that suit burned keeping him alive.
“The other is...” And here he hesitated, because it was a theory that had been taking shape ever since he and Megan had met the Architect. “The other is, Keanu is really old, on the order of a thousand years, maybe ten thousand years.”
“Yeah, I saw that alien ship. It looked as though it had been sitting there a long goddamn time....”
“I think that a lot of this place’s advanced, miracle technology is malfunctioning or breaking down or worn out.”
“So his suit just...failed.”
“One possibility.” He looked for Valya. She and Dale were ahead of Zack and Makali now. Yeah, I’d be hurrying, too. “Valya, how are you doing?”
He couldn’t hear her reply, but Dale Scott flashed a clumsy thumbs-up.
Even though the white tiles remained regular and flat, it seemed to Zack that they were walking uphill. “There’s the rim!” Makali said.
She ran forward, passing Valya and Dale.
“There’s no way down!” Makali announced that grim news as Zack, now feeling out of breath and worrying about his own blue indicator, reached the rim. He set Williams’s body down.
Mt. St. Helens Vent, on first, fragmentary glance, was larger than Vesuvius, and less symmetrical. Given the rockfalls and other features, it also looked older.
“What do you mean, no ramp?” Dale said. He and Valya had just caught them.
“What she means,” Zack said, “is that we can’t see a ramp yet.” He turned directly to Makali. “Right?”
But she didn’t answer...instead she began loping around the rim of the vent.
“Zack,” Dale said, “we need to get Valya out of that suit ASAP.”
“We all do.” He watched Makali growing more and more distant. She must have expected an obvious, easily accessible structure like the ramp at Vesuvius. (He recalled his own shock at seeing it...the ramp was the first undeniably artificial alien structure humans had ever seen, and Zack was one of the first to do so. How quickly that seminal, world-changing moment had gotten lost in the avalanche of later discoveries.) Given the distressed nature of the Mt. St. Helens walls, Zack wasn’t ready to announce that there was no ramp.
He had to remember, too, that for all her physical fitness and hearty Aussie cheer, Makali was still an academic with limited operational experience, much like Zack when he first joined the astronaut office. She wasn’t used to dealing with this kind of stress.
“Zack, are you leaving us?” Valya’s voice sounded in Zack’s ears.
“No!” he said. “Just looking for a route to the bottom!” In spite of his professional optimism, he was forced to admit that Makali had some support for her verdict; there was no obvious ramp wrapping around the inside of the vent cone, not on this side. The crater wall itself had crumbled in places, spilling tons of rock to the flat bottom.
Zack was suddenly worried that even if they found a way down, the tunnel into the expected habitat would be blocked.
Wouldn’t that just be the shit?
“Over here!”
Had he heard that? Makali calling to him?
“Zack! Dale, Valya, over here!”
Zack quickly retraced his steps, catching up with Dale and Valya, who had not managed to get far. “I see the ramp now!” Makali said.
Zack could see her now...a third of the way around the rim of the vent, half a kilometer distant, literally jumping up and down like a child saying, Pick me!
Dale and Valya ran right past Williams’s body, and Zack considered leaving it where it was, to hell with honors to comrade or science experiment.
But one lesson he had learned in his NASA career was this: When you make a good plan, stick to it. Better is often the enemy of good enough.
He made sure to pick up Williams’s body.
“It doesn’t go all the way to the top,” Makali was saying. “That’s why we couldn’t see it.”
Makali was being generous when she described the ramp the way she did; the top ten meters of the ramp had collapsed some time in the past.
“Is there no other way down this? A second ramp?” Scott said.
“I didn’t see an
ything,” Zack said. Makali said the same thing at the same time.
“How do we get down?” Valya said. She sounded tired; her suit was likely close to failing.
“Jump,” Zack told her.
“I can’t!”
“We don’t have time to fuck around. Dale, grab her and start running.”
Dale Scott might have been a greedy, petty prick...but he knew that time was short and physics was their friend.
He literally picked up a struggling Valya, circled back to give himself a running start...then sailed off the rim, down a distance equivalent to the height of a two-story building...and slid, ass first, down the ramp.
Makali turned to Zack. “Can you handle this with the body?”
“Dale just did.”
No more arguments. She took her flying leap, landing more or less on her feet and skipping to a controlled stop.
Looking at the gap, at the sheer rock face below the ramp itself, at the appalling distance straight down...he hesitated.
Idiot. As if you’re going to live another hour in this suit—
He was airborne before he knew it, but his takeoff foot slipped and he realized he had made a bad launch.
He hit low, just below his knees, and flopped forward on his face, skidding into the vent wall, meanwhile losing the body in his arms.
He might have had low gravity working for him, but he had ancient stone working against him. He felt as though he’d been tackled in a football game—could even taste blood in his mouth from where he’d bitten his lip.
The impact stunned him. For the first time in his life, he lost consciousness—likely only for a few seconds. But it was terrifying.
Then he was being helped up. Makali. She was speaking to him, but he couldn’t seem to hear her. Nevertheless, he let her drag him farther down the ramp, toward the blessed darkness below.
His indicator was indigo now.
Blind, deaf, exhausted, he simply trudged down the ramp. With each step, he felt the growing sense that exploring space with him was a bad deal.
Look at the record. Dale Scott kicked off the International Space Station, the first and so far only person to suffer that fate.
Then there was his Destiny-7 crew. Yvonne dead. Pogo dead, brought back to life, then dead again. (Did that count as one loss, or two? He knew what Dale Scott would say.)
Heaven's War Page 25