Heaven's War

by David S. Goyer

  Rachel automatically opened the Slate in her lap, calling up the image of her mother, Megan. “You mind?” she said.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. Even though he wore the Slate on a strap, even though it had the same mass as a print magazine, he was tired of lugging it through tunnels and while running for his life from hostile Long Legs.

  Tired of worrying about losing it. Not that the unit was going to be much use when its battery died...tomorrow or next week, what difference did it make?

  Oops, he was back to thinking about death. Stop it. Think about this control center Yvonne promised. Where you can fly the starship...access the other habitats...

  Pav looked at the inkings on his arm. He remembered being obsessed with getting one. It was the one thing the vyomanaut’s kid could to do make himself momentarily cool, to remove himself from the science geek world and put him firmly into music. He wished he had a pen right now. There was a perfect spot to draw something...Captain of Keanu would be good. Or Long Legs Killer.

  Rachel sniffed. Yvonne and Zhao were too far away to see, or pretended not to, but the girl was crying.

  It was just one more annoying thing, from being angry all the time or weepy half the time, or too smart-ass or too needy or not fast enough or too young or whatever...he wasn’t sure he liked this girl at all.

  But he would have been pissed if she’d been leaning on Zhao or Yvonne instead of him—

  The railcar simply stopped.

  And the lights died.

  “Please tell me this is normal,” Rachel said.

  “Did your voices tell you about this?” Zhao said to Yvonne.

  Yvonne’s body language was all the answer Pav needed. She slowly pushed up against the wall behind her, shaking her head slowly. Trying to tune in? Pav wondered.

  Cowboy got to his four feet.

  The only light was from the screen of the Slate.

  “Can anyone hear ventilation?” Zhao said.

  “We’re still breathing,” Yvonne said. She worked her way to the open side of the car and looked out. “Hey, I see something ahead of us.”

  And she clambered down and out.

  Cowboy followed her as if commanded.

  “Well,” Zhao said, “do as our Revenants do.”

  They were a hundred meters short of an opening. With Yvonne eagerly leading the way, Cowboy dogging her heels, Pav, Rachel, and Zhao followed.

  “Is your Wi-Fi working again?” Pav called. He had the Slate slung over his shoulder again. He wished he had his own Wi-Fi—or some way to contact Nayar and the others in the human habitat. They must believe them all dead by now.

  Suddenly the lights and power returned. As one, the humans and the dog all looked back at the railcar, which was making lively sounds again. “Is that going to move?” Zhao said.

  “Let’s not find out,” Yvonne said. “Besides, we’ve arrived.”

  The transition was quick...up a set of broad, slightly too-tall steps (Pav had to help Rachel), across an aged and faded tile surface, then through another tunnel much like the one that first gave them access to the human habitat.

  The interior of the control habitat was so bright it hurt Pav’s eyes. Blinking, he was able to see a brilliant, gridlike set of structures stretching to the far side of the habitat...which appeared to be smaller than the human one. It was like looking at a circuit board the size of a city...from the inside.

  “You know, Yvonne,” Zhao said behind Pav, “I’m very glad you have that guidance in your head. I can’t imagine what task we’re supposed to be accomplishing...or where we would start.”

  “So where do we go?” Rachel said. She was sounding more and more impatient.

  Yvonne looked from side to side. “We’re meeting someone.”

  “Who?” Zhao said.

  Yvonne smiled. “Our guide, okay? Things are a bit confused. There should be a Beehive somewhere along here.... Everyone split up and see if you can find—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Pav said. “We split up and we’ll never find each other again.”

  “We don’t split up and we may never find the thing we’re supposed to meet.”

  “Fine,” Zhao said. “Rachel and the dog and I will take this direction, along the wall. A hundred meters, and then we return to this place. You and Pav do the same the other direction. If we don’t find our mystery alien, we do another search.”

  Rachel was about to protest, but Yvonne simply said, “Back in a few.” And took off.

  As Pav hurried to catch up, he wondered why Zhao had teamed them the way he had. An adult in each team, probably. It would have made more sense to put Rachel with Yvonne, but Pav could tell that Zhao didn’t like him. He really didn’t seem to like Indians, period.

  Suddenly the lights in the habitat died, leaving them in the most total darkness Pav had ever experienced. The drone of machines, the whisper of wind or airflow...sounds Pav hadn’t consciously noted, those were gone, too.

  “Uh, here we go again?”

  “My voices just went silent, too,” Yvonne said.

  “What do we do?”

  “Well, the last time the power went out—” Before she finished the statement, the lights and power resumed, though not without a disturbing shower of sparks and arcing from somewhere nearby.

  “Yvonne, is this place falling apart?” Pav had a tough time thinking of a millennium-old alien starship as needing maintenance...but on further consideration, why not?

  “There,” she said.

  A giant creature, easily twice the size of a human being, like some kind of ancient knight, but with four arms, sat on the bench like an old man in a park.

  She sent Pav back to the rendezvous point to meet Rachel and Zhao. “We found him.”

  “Found what?” Zhao said.

  “An Architect.”

  For a young man who never expected to ever meet an alien creature, two in one day was almost too many for Pav. Even so, trying to be calm and grown-up...Pav thought Yvonne and the Architect seemed like an unhappy couple. The alien was still slumped, almost immobile, its two legs sticking out like logs, its four arms limp like spaghetti...while Yvonne stood directly in front of him. She looked like a pilgrim making an offering to a badly designed stone god.

  Zhao approached Yvonne, speaking so softly that Pav and Rachel, left behind, couldn’t hear. Cowboy simply flopped on the ground, happier than he’d been in a while, apparently willing to see what these creatures got up to.

  Only now did Pav notice that the Architect was partly covered in the same coating as the earlier Revenants. “I think he’s just come back from the dead,” he whispered to Rachel.

  “That’s not good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because all the Revenants take a while to boot up.”

  That had certainly been the case with Yvonne. And, judging from the Architect, here, too.

  Yvonne turned away from the alien and walked toward Pav and Rachel. “God, this is so frustrating.”

  “What’s wrong?” Pav said, suddenly alarmed. “Isn’t he the one you’ve been hearing in your head all along?”

  “No! At least, I don’t think so. I think he was just reborn like me.”

  “My dad said my mother could speak directly to her Architect.”

  “I can speak to him,” Yvonne said. “I’m just not getting much back.”

  “How much speaking did you do when you were just...alive again?” Pav said, looking at Rachel, as if to say, Shouldn’t we ask this?

  Yvonne frowned. “Good point. But we don’t have all the time in the world.” She tapped her head. “My Wi-Fi was pretty clear on that.”

  “Yvonne, come back here!” Zhao said. “Bring Rachel, too!”

  Zhao had stayed with the Architect, essentially keeping the giant alien company. As he and the others approached, Pav saw Zhao stand on tiptoes to touch one of the Architect’s “hands”—which flexed, then folded up, as if the alien were doing a curl.

  “What the h
ell are you doing?” Yvonne said.

  “Just testing our friend,” Zhao said. “He seems to be in distress.”

  “Noted,” Yvonne said. “Now what?”

  Zhao pointed at Rachel. “I heard her talk about her mother. And it occurs to me that the Architect might know about her and about Zack Stewart, too—”

  The mention of Zack’s name caused the Architect to stir and stand up to its complete, towering height. For Pav it was like watching a building being erected...and took a considerable amount of time. They’re slow, he realized.

  “He’s trying to tell me something,” Yvonne said. She put her hands to her head and groaned. “God, it’s just so...noisy!”

  Zhao put his hands on Yvonne’s shoulders, rubbing them like a trainer with a boxer. “Relax, find the message...he obviously wants to communicate with us. You just have to allow it.”

  Yvonne’s tortured expression suddenly relaxed. To Pav, it was as if the woman had just found the right channel on a radio. “He says, ‘I am the Builders or the Designers or Architects.’ Plural.”

  “Is there more than one of them in there?” Pav said. The creature was big enough to hold multiple personalities.

  “It says, ‘We have no time for debates or education.’” Yvonne looked at Rachel. “‘We knew your parent.’”

  “Which one?” Rachel said. “My mother? My father?”

  “‘Both!’ and he’s quite emphatic about that.” She closed her eyes for a moment. There were tears now. “He just gave me a blast of imagery and...God, emotion about your mother. God, Rachel, I’m so sorry...I had no idea.”

  Pav tried to keep his mouth from simply falling open. Only on Keanu would a woman who had been brought back from the dead be expressing sympathies to a girl who had lost her mother—or was it because she had been brought back to life only to lose it a second time?

  “Does he know my mother? Can he talk to her?”

  The Architect made a gesture with all four arms, as if embracing all of them. It was so fast and large that it caused the dog to bark.

  The Architect bent down to look at the dog, which only increased the barking. “Dammit, control that animal!” Zhao said, amusing Pav, who had no control over Cowboy.

  But he did kneel and try to soothe the dog, a move that put him squarely in the shadow of the giant Architect. No wonder the dog was tense.

  “What happened to my mother?” Rachel said. She was almost frantic. “What happened to her?”

  “‘She died.’”

  “I know that! I saw her body! But how?”

  “‘Conflict with the Race of Guards,’” Yvonne said.

  “The Sentries?” Rachel said. “Yes, my father said she had been killed by a Sentry—”

  “Just like Pogo Downey,” Yvonne said. “The first time.”

  Rachel was practically jumping up and down.

  “‘Your father is alive. He is a prisoner of the Sentries.’”

  That news hit them hard. “How could that happen?” Zhao said. “Have the Sentries invaded the human habitat?”

  “‘Your parent left the habitat,’” Yvonne said. “‘He is fighting the same war we are.’”

  “What war?” Pav said. He couldn’t just stand to one side trying to keep the dog quiet.

  “‘The war we are losing.’”

  Zhao was growing impatient, and for once Pav agreed with the Chinese agent. “Who are we supposed to be fighting, and why?”

  “‘I or we have contained the Reivers,’ whoever they are, though the emotion associated with the word is incredible fear and loathing,” Yvonne said. “‘You let them loose inside us,’ he says.” She added, “I’m not sure I know what he’s talking about.”

  Zhao replied, “I don’t see how humans could have released or unleashed these Reivers, no matter who or what they are. We’ve only been present a couple of days. We were barely surviving—”

  “And until the dog fell down the hole, we were trapped in that habitat,” Rachel said.

  Yvonne was shaking her head. “Our friend is quite certain of this. ‘Your people,’ meaning you and me, ‘gave them access.’”

  “Fine, we screwed up, though I still don’t see how, or what difference it makes,” Pav said. “I want to get back to the others.”

  “‘You can’t,’” Yvonne said, “‘the return route is already infected. The Reivers must be contained, and their access to—’” She frowned. “I’m getting the image of a big white blob of some kind, something called a ‘vesicle.’ Ah, ‘their access to the vesicle has to be prevented.’”

  It took a moment for Zhao to convince Yvonne that what the Architect meant was the same type of vehicle that had brought the Houston and Bangalore groups to Keanu. “Why would these Reivers want or need a vesicle?”

  “To get off this ship?” Rachel said.

  “‘To invade and infect,’” Yvonne said. “And the image was Earth. These Reivers want to take over Keanu, then use a vesicle to invade and infect Earth.”

  “We still don’t know what these things are!” Pav said. He was getting a headache, almost certainly from hunger...and from being chased and pushed and terrified for the entire past day, or four days.

  Zhao was more deliberate. To Yvonne he said, “When the Architect says ‘Reivers,’ what do you see?”

  “Really? Bugs, at first. Nasty black-colored bugs, only edged...like Legos. But they...build up, assemble, aggregate into...” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Oh, shit, that explains it. The Reivers aren’t bugs, just tiny, machine-based life. And they serve as building blocks for all kinds of other, more complex and capable creatures. We’ve already run into one. That Long Legs anteater thing was a Reiver assembly.”

  “Where do they come from?” Zhao said. “Did they grow here?”

  “‘No,’” Yvonne said, still using that distant tone that suggested she was directly channeling the Architect. “‘They were...not scooped up. They invaded. They...can live almost anywhere, high pressure, vacuum. They attached themselves to another race, were hidden in them.’”

  “All right then,” Zhao said. “We seem to have some idea of the problem. What can we possibly do to help? This is the control center, correct? You wanted us here?”

  “‘Having you here was logical before the infection and invasion. System is already corrupted, failing. There is only one race that might provide assistance...their name is Skyphoi.’”

  “Who are they? Yvonne, you were in the museum, too—”

  “Yes, we saw them: the big gasbag jellyfish things—”

  “And where are they?”

  “‘The next habitat.’”

  “Let’s go, then,” Zhao said. “Is the transport system still safe?”

  “‘No system is uncorrupted,’” Yvonne said, “but I’m getting the clear impression we’re using the railcar.”

  “We?” Pav said.

  Before Yvonne could answer, the giant Architect began to move.

  “Yes, we’re all going, and right now.”

  “While we’re doing that,” Rachel said, “if you don’t mind, can you tell everyone back in the habitat that we’re alive and what we’re doing?”

  GABRIEL

  “I just don’t know what to do with her,” Harley Drake said, his voice tired, his eyes red with fatigue.

  What passed for a Houston-Bangalore Council had gathered on the ground floor of the Temple. Harley Drake, Shane Weldon, Vikram Nayar, and Gabriel Jones were there with Sasha Blaine and the accused, Camilla.

  To Gabriel, Harley, the crippled former astronaut and new mayor of HB, seemed worn and distracted, brightening only when turning to Sasha Blaine, who was sitting with Camilla, offering comfort while asking the girl a few gentle questions.

  Neither activity was producing results. The only thing Camilla seemed capable of doing was reciting a few lines of doggerel in Portuguese.

  Gabriel and Bynum excluded, all three adult males had taken turns trying to interrogate Camilla.... Had she “hurt” Chi
tran? Had she let the bugs into the habitat? If yes to either, why?

  It had not gone well. Camilla seemed feverish, certainly skittish, understandably so. And, while Gabriel had been an inattentive and largely absent father, even his limited experience with his daughter, Yvonne, had educated him to the impossibility of getting a girl to do anything she didn’t want to do.

  Also present, the Revenant Brent Bynum, largely silent, though Gabriel had watched him clutching himself, his head moving ever so slightly from side to side, as if engaged in an important internal conversation.

  Which was likely.

  Matters were complicated by a “war room” mood, too. Drake had dispatched Xavier Toutant and several other HBs to find out what the hell was going on elsewhere in the habitat. (It looked to Gabriel as though there were several fires.) They had not yet returned, adding to the general frustration.

  The moment Harley Drake gave voice to his exasperation, Brent Bynum stood up. “You’re wasting your time with the girl,” he said. “I can tell you everything she knows.”

  “Except what she did and why!” Drake snapped.

  “I can tell you that these Reivers are the greatest threat we face,” Bynum said, persisting. “Not just to humans here in the habitat, but to the Architects and, frankly, everything we know in the universe.”

  “Jesus Christ, Brent,” Harley Drake said. “I can see where they’d be pests. Maybe even a danger to our...fragile situation here. But a threat to the entire universe? I have a hard time with that.”

  “That’s because you’re not allowing yourself to think on the proper scale, Drake. You’ve only interfaced with their most basic, but still lethal mode...They have several other modes, each one bigger, more capable, much nastier...right up to an aggregate the size of this planetoid. The universe is a strange place, or do you need further evidence? Look,” Bynum said, “think of the Reivers as intergalactic locusts, consuming all energy, useful matter and information in their path. They leave nothing behind. They can be any size, almost any form.”

  “Von Neumann machines?” Nayar said. In case the others didn’t know, he added, “They act like self-replicating nanoprobes.”