There was one dead in the Brahma crew, too: Dennis Chertok could be added to his butcher’s bill.
And Megan, of course.
And now Wade Williams. Possibly Valya.
“Don’t mumble,” Makali said. “We’re almost at the bottom.”
“Williams,” he said.
“Worry about him later, Zack. Come on!”
And just like that, they were at the bottom, on level ground, at least, picking a path through rubble. “Someone went this way recently,” Makali said. To Zack it sounded as though she were panting now, too.
He didn’t have the strength to dispute or query, but Makali continued. “I saw two long, scraping tracks,” she said. “Frozen stuff, bright yellow like the goo that made the skinsuits.”
As they reached the broad, now-familiar access tunnel and left Keanu daylight behind, Zack found his voice. And apparently, his mind. “Maybe it’s from Dale and Valya.” He hoped they were ahead of them.
“It looked like the tracks we saw leading away from Brahma.”
Deeper and deeper. Their suits had no lights, but the optics shifted into some kind of night vision. He could see Scott ahead of him, Valya in his arms.
They had stopped at the shimmering curtain that was another Membrane. Seeing it, Zack laughed out loud.
“It’s funny?” Makali said.
“I’m just relieved it’s here...I made a big assumption that this vent would have the same features Vesuvius did.”
He hurried forward, taking Valya by the arm. “How are you?”
She was swaying. “Look,” Scott said, pointing to her skinsuited legs.
A crack was forming even as Zack watched. “Let’s go. Everyone, through the Membrane!”
It was just as he remembered it...walking into a chamber filled with bubbles of varying sizes, from pea to marble, that clung to the skinsuits. “Just keep walking,” he said, not sure whether Valya could hear.
But she was still upright, still moving. Deeper and deeper they went. Surely they were no longer in vacuum—
Through a final cascade, like a rinse at a carwash, and they were out...standing in another Beehive annex.
Makali and Dale Scott pushed through moments later.
“Holy shit,” Makali said.
Zack shared the sentiment; this Beehive was obviously a cousin of the one in the human habitat, but far older. It looked used, almost abused. Most of the reincarnation cells were broken, their fluids dried or dissipated. “They’re bigger here,” Makali said.
Yes, while they came in different sizes, most cells here were far larger than those Makali had seen, even those sized for cattle or crocs.
“Oh my God!” Zack turned away from his examination of the Beehive just in time to see Valya’s skinsuit enter its terminal phase, cracking into pieces and flaking off to dissolve in a cloud of dust. Pieces of it clung to her, but clearly not in any logical pattern—one on her right arm, one around her breasts.
Wide-eyed with understandable fear—“Do it,” Zack said; “we’re all going to have to!”—she took the first breath.
And immediately began gasping and wheezing.
Makali looked at Zack. Even swathed in the skinsuit and hidden by the goggles, her expression was obvious: Oh no!
But Valya waved off assistance and began breathing more comfortably. “It’s okay,” she said. “Feels like oxygen. It’s just...the smell! And it’s cold!”
Zack could feel his suit going terminal. There was a moment where he thought, I can’t breathe, but it passed. Overall, it was like having a wetsuit drop away.
He immediately understood why Valya’s first breath was so difficult. There was air, yes, but probably less than humans wanted—it was like being at a mountain observatory above three thousand meters. Cold, too.
And the smell! Like the worst rotting fish he’d ever encountered. He almost gagged.
Scott and Makali’s suits began to dissolve now, too. They were all committed to entering this new habitat—
“Zack,” Valya said. He was facing her, his back to the rest of the Beehive. She pointed past him.
A creature blocked the passage—a tall, multi-armed being Zack recognized as a Sentry, the same kind of alien that had killed Pogo Downey.
And Megan Stewart.
RACHEL
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t move.
And something nasty was happening to her face.
Suddenly she inhaled, choked, coughed, spit, and, terrified, began to thrash.
Okay, you can breathe! She was hot, still couldn’t see, but air was coming in, going out.
A gooey film covered her eyes. The same goo pinned her like an insect in a science experiment.
For a moment. With a bit of effort, she was able to tug her right arm free of the goo and wipe her eyes. The only difficulty was that someone or something kept bumping her and, strangely, wiping her face.
“Stop that!” she screamed, though she heard nothing and started coughing again. Finally she got both hands free and cleared her eyes.
She was still in the passage, more or less sitting up, though cocooned in a settling, hardening, drying sea of goo...and Cowboy was flailing around in it, too.
He barked. At least, his gooey muzzle opened twice. No, she couldn’t hear. Goo in her ears, too.
Her first move was to grab the dog. He seemed terrified. No wonder; he’d been in the dark for hours, and now he’d been swept up in some kind of tsunami. “It’s okay, boy, everything’s okay,” she said, knowing the words made no sense, but hoping the sound of a human voice would calm the animal.
And when he grew calm, so would she.
A human touch seemed to work. The dog began licking her face again. Normally this would have been annoying, but this was not a normal situation.
She did more work on her ears, wiping away some of the goo, improving her hearing considerably. “Pav!” she called. “Zhao! Where are you guys?”
With the tunnel so filled with plasm and the sound so deadened, she didn’t expect a response.
They might be dead, she realized. Before long, she might be dead, too.
Then Cowboy barked—she could hear him now—and struggled out of her arms. He began digging at a mound of goo to her left...which quickly revealed itself to be Pav, who was shouting in Hindi.
Zhao was to Pav’s left. They were both alive, trying to extricate themselves.
Rachel dug in and helped. Allowing for a considerable amount of struggle as well as grunting and groaning, it went quickly. Rachel realized that the goo was not only hardening, it was drying out, turning to powder.
Pav was able to stand up and hug her. “Thank you,” he said, his voice muffled and old-sounding.
Cowboy bumped up against Pav. Though there was almost no light, they could see that the dog’s coat was crusted with goo. Flakes fell off every time he moved.
And even with all this activity around him, Zhao just sat there, head down. “Come on, get up,” Rachel told him.
“We have nowhere to go,” Zhao said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rachel said. She and Pav tugged Zhao upright. “Are you just going to sit there and wait to die?”
“At the moment, that seems to be the practical choice.”
Rachel understood his feeling. In that first instant after regaining consciousness, feeling herself trapped, blind, deaf, she had considered simply...letting it all go.
Some force inside her had taken charge and made her fight. And now she was glad she had. Yes, the situation was grim. But everything about her situation on Keanu was that way.
She would be letting her father down if she simply died. Maybe it was that simple.
“We’re walking,” she said. “That way.”
That way was simply farther down the passage in the direction they had just been carried by the wave of goo. It didn’t seem smart to go back the way they had come.
She just hoped they would find an escape before their little sup
ply of water ran out, along with their energy.
The good thing—the only good thing—about the goo was that in an hour’s time, it dried up and flaked off, leaving little residue.
The bad thing—being buried continued to have a bad effect on Zhao, who seemed numb. Rachel and Pav had had to wipe the stuff off him; he wasn’t much help. Even after he could breathe and stand up, he was pretty much a zombie.
After an initial burst of enthusiasm about being alive, Pav wasn’t much better. “Do we just keep walking until we drop?”
“If the only other choice is sit here until we die, yes.” She realized she had to do better than that, even for herself. She patted Cowboy, who was happily walking with them and not getting one step ahead. “The dog seems fine. Maybe he found water or a way out.”
“If he did,” Zhao said, emerging from sullen silence, “why is he still trapped with us?”
For a moment, Rachel wondered if she and Pav and Cowboy wouldn’t have been better off if Zhao had never emerged from the goo. Even back in the habitat, her initial impression of the man hadn’t been positive. He was a spy and a foreigner.
Until Rachel ran into the beings that built Keanu and killed her mother, Zhao was the closest thing to an alien she had ever met.
“When I figure out how to ask him,” she said, “I’ll let know you.”
An hour after their bath in plasm goo, Rachel and Pav looked and felt the same as they had before.
The passage looked the same. There had been no further appearances of the gravity marble. The dog had been content to trot with them, bumping into their legs for reassurance. Things weren’t exactly good...but they could have been worse.
And Pav had resumed talking. “Hey, Rachel, how far do you think we’ve walked?”
Rachel knew a human could cover half a dozen kilometers in an hour, with a steady walk. But their progress had not been steady. On the other hand, they had easily walked for three hours. “I don’t know. Ten kilometers?”
“How long was the habitat?”
“Less than that, from where we started.” There was no point ignoring the obvious problem. “But we haven’t been going in a straight line.”
“Yeah,” Pav said. “We could be going around the end of the habitat.”
“Right!”
Zhao spoke up now, too. “Or completely away from it into the interior of the NEO.”
Rachel had an idea, something her mother had taught her. “Would that be so bad?”
Zhao turned to face her. His expression showed disbelief bordering on anger, which was an improvement over his zombie-like silence. “If we want to return to human beings with human food, yes.”
“How do we know there isn’t water and food elsewhere in the NEO?”
“We don’t!” he said. “We don’t know anything!”
“Oh, we know a little, don’t we?” she said, making sure to keep walking, dragging Zhao and Pav and Cowboy with her. “I mean, look,” she said, waving at the passage around them. “We know that somewhere, there was a race of beings that just wanted to let the universe know they existed. So...they took one of their moons—”
“Whoa,” Pav said. “We don’t know this was one of their moons.” With the authority only a sixteen-year-old boy could assume, he said, “Planets like Earth can only have one.”
“Turns out Earth used to have a good-sized second moon,” Zhao said.
“That’s just a theory,” Pav said. Rachel smiled to herself, not that anyone could see her expression in the near-darkness. Pav’s getting into the game.
Zhao said, “A theory with more foundation than your assumption that the Architects originated on a planet like Earth.”
“Fine,” Pav said. “But am I wrong if I say that, somewhere in the galaxy, there’s a race that has the power to leave its home planet, fly across space, reach this planetoid, and put some kind of engine on it to move it into orbit around its home planet? Or that they spent a century or five centuries hollowing it out, creating habitats, rewiring it, replumbing it?”
Pav smiled, clearly enjoying his fantasy. “Or that they put some kind of shithot miracle motor inside it, anti-matter, maybe? And then they put some of their people aboard and sent it into space?”
“It’s obvious that something like that must have happened,” Zhao said. “But why would anyone do such a thing?” Listening to his growing agitation, Rachel feared she was going to be personally challenged to justify the Architects and all their actions. “Exploration?”
“How about invasion?” Pav said.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Although I can’t imagine what you would find on another planet that would be worth a trip of a thousand or ten thousand years. What? Water? Slaves?” She had heard some of this from her father. He would often sit with her and watch old sci-fi movies like Independence Day or War of the Worlds...but he would never sit quietly.
“How about our music?” Pav said.
“What, they came here for Beethoven?”
“A thousand years ago they wouldn’t have heard of Beethoven.”
“You were the one who suggested music,” Rachel said. “Besides, they could get our music by listening. They wouldn’t have to come here.”
“He just means art,” Zhao said. “Which is as valid an argument as any, given the utter lack of information.” He not only seemed engaged in the conversation, he was actually striding out with purpose. “Exploration, maybe. Invasion, no. But there is another motivation: the search for new products and ideas.”
Pav laughed out loud. “That’s China for you. ‘Give us your ideas and we’ll build them more cheaply than you. And sell them back to you.’”
Zhao’s head turned to Pav with such energy that Rachel expected a punch to follow. But the Chinese engineer and spy merely smiled. “That has been China’s philosophy for thirty years,” he said. “We learned it from the Japanese and the Americans and the English before them.”
“Speaking of business,” Rachel said, “I wonder how expensive something like Keanu is. I mean, could the Architects afford to build one, or a hundred?”
“And how does it support itself?” Zhao said, clearly warming to the subject. “Are these habitats filled with objects or machines or materials that can be traded?”
“I don’t think so,” Pav said. “If they came here to trade spices and furs, why did they scoop us up? As I recall, they weren’t even stopping until we landed here.”
“Maybe the landing showed them that we might have something worth trading,” Rachel said. She was having a tough time concentrating on these subjects—normally they would have bored her. And she thought she might be seeing a turn in the tunnel ahead.
The others said nothing, however, and the dog stayed where he was, pacing them.
“But then why did they acquire two hundred human beings?” Zhao said.
“Maybe they trade people, not stuff,” Pav said, shooting a gotcha smile behind Zhao’s back at Rachel.
“Nonsense,” Zhao said. “If anything, they would be trading information, which really wouldn’t require a vessel this size or a mission lasting thousands of years. There would be...no point.”
“Speaking of lack of points,” Rachel said, “do you really think Keanu was a giant starship filled with aliens or machines?” She knew it was all speculation, but she had a strategy. Megan Doyle Stewart had once told Rachel, “Some people don’t want to talk, or think they don’t, especially after a trauma like a train crash or a tsunami. Get them to argue. Get them talking about money or religion or politics, and they’ll open right up.”
And it had worked! Rachel had been burdened with two men who were like statues, and in order to get their spirits back from wherever they were hiding, Rachel had provoked them into an argument! Pav had picked up on it!
Maybe he wasn’t so dim. “What else would it be?” he said.
“Well,” she said, grateful again for the hours of space-related chat that her parents had bored her with, “if you don�
�t have some magic stardrive, you know that anything you launch is going to take thousands of years to reach its destination. Machines simply don’t last, right?” She directed the last question at Zhao.
“It’s difficult to think of materials lasting a millennium,” he said, “much less anything that uses heat or energy or moving parts.”
“So, what I think they did,” Rachel said, and she really was enjoying this, “is they had this goo, this nanostuff, that didn’t have moving parts and wasn’t some kind of brittle material. It was just the stuff you could make anything out of, assuming you had enough energy. They probably didn’t have to bring a thousand workers to Keanu...they didn’t have to build anything. They’d already built it on their home planet.” To Zhao, she said, “Whatever it looked like. They sent the goo and the instructions here. It built itself. And it keeps building itself.”
Zhao laughed. “But the instructions! The programming! The macro controls...I can’t imagine the complexity, the processing power. It’s as if...you might need a good chunk of the time and energy of an entire star!”
“Maybe that’s what they had,” Rachel said. “They were doing whatever they were doing a thousand or ten thousand years ago.”
“I can’t see it,” Zhao said.
“I see it,” Pav said.
“Oh, really—” Zhao’s tone was sarcastic, but he never finished the sentence.
“Not your argument,” Pav said. “That.”
He pointed ahead of them, where there was more light—and sufficient light to see shapes and structures.
Cowboy barked and took off.
Rachel began jogging toward the light.
“Looks fresh,” Pav said.
Rachel and Pav arrived within a couple of minutes to find not only an intersection where another passage crossed theirs...but one of the branches opened into a small Beehive.
And, as Pav had noted, fairly recently; the walls were dripping and the cells pulsed with light.
“Maybe that was what all that goo was doing,” Rachel said. “Flowing down here to, I don’t know, rearrange things.”
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