Heaven's War

by David S. Goyer

  “It will be powerful but appropriately sized,” Yvonne said. “Our job is to deliver it and activate it.”

  “Then what?” Zack said. “The lights come back on, we find our way back to the habitat, great. But the Reivers are still running loose, right?”

  “Correct,” Yvonne said. “But with Keanu’s systems up and running again, there will be...sanitary measures.”

  Zack recognized the words. Dash had used them to describe the blasted habitat of the crab creatures. Dale caught it, too. “Okay, note to the Skyphoi: We have a say in sanitary measures. No zapping of the human habitat.”

  But he seemed too tired to say more, and Zack, realizing there would be more and trickier work after a reboot, felt the same.

  He reminded himself of his NASA training. Follow the checklist, one step at a time. The reboot would be a big one.

  He had handed Yvonne the Tik-Talk at that point. Then, with some distance yet to travel, seeing that Dale and Makali were sunk in one corner, Rachel and Pav clinging to each other and holding hands, the dog resting its head on its paws, and Yvonne tearfully talking to her father...all of his charges accounted for...Zack allowed himself to close his eyes.

  And fell into the deepest sleep he had known in days, since before the arrival of the vesicle Objects...likely before his launch from Earth on Destiny-7.

  He was in a crowded bus or a subway car much like this railcar...in his dream, he was aware of the similarity...but pressed up against him was Megan. She looked younger, as she had when they first met and fell in love, long before the astronaut or journalist or parental years.

  And they kissed, lips on lips, his hand sliding into her shirt...again, as he and she and they often had, falling into a sweet surging stupor that he wanted to last and last and last and—

  He woke. No one was moving except the door. The railcar had stopped. The interior was dark, the only illumination a series of flickering lights from somewhere outside.

  And he felt...elated. Not aroused, though there was a bit of that, just happy for once. He was a bit rested, that was good.

  It was like the early weeks of his first space station mission, once he’d passed that crucial thirty-day point, becoming not only physically acclimated to life in microgravity, but at home with the long days, the isolation, the small joys of making an experiment work, or just creating a meal.

  It was a mind-set suited to life off Earth...life on Keanu, perhaps.

  “Everybody out,” he said, “end of the line.”

  A pair of Skyphoi were waiting. As Zack and the others approached, one of them extruded a silvery package, which clattered to the ground.

  Zack was distracted by the swirling gasbags as they kept shifting positions, and by the look on Rachel’s face, which varied from wonder to terror.

  But now he finally focused on the package...a silvery suitcase that looked a lot like the Personal Preference Kits astronauts carried on missions—the containers for personal items, patches, photographs, school pennants.

  He wondered why the Skyphoi had used it, but only for a moment. He touched Yvonne’s shoulder and said, quietly, “Is that where they put the nuke on Venture? In one of the PPKs?”

  She nodded. “The Skyphoi like to use templates that we would recognize. That way they know what we can carry.”

  “I wish they’d picked something else,” he said.

  Now one of the Skyphoi started moving away, farther up the tunnel. “Where do you suppose he’s going?” Makali said.

  They found an answer with the second Skyphoi, which dropped behind them and, strangely, began to expand, like an inflating balloon. “I think we’re being herded,” Zhao said.

  “No,” Makali said. “Defended.”

  Zack heard a growling buzz from somewhere down the tunnel...through the semitransparent body of the second Skyphoi, he could see swiftly moving shapes. “What the hell is that?”

  “Oh, God, Daddy, it’s a Long Legs.”

  Before he could ask for clarification, Pav said, “A type of Reiver.”

  “Commander,” Dale said, “we’ve gotta go.”

  Zack picked up the case. It was so light he wondered if it actually held anything useful. What did you use to reignite the power core of a starship? Well, Dr. Stewart, that depends on the nature of the core—anti-matter? Or something even more exotic?

  He didn’t need to know. He just needed to make it work.

  As the second Skyphoi fought its rearguard action, the humans followed the first creature up the tunnel...Zack, Rachel, and Yvonne in the lead, Zhao and Pav and Cowboy right behind...Makali and Dale at the rear.

  “So the plan,” Zack said, huffing and puffing, “is this: Enter the core, place the unit within, get out. How long do I have?”

  “I don’t know,” Yvonne said. “I really, really wish I could tell you, but I’m out of info.” She nodded at the floating Skyphoi. “They control the ignition. They’ll know.”

  Zack wanted to scream with laughter. All the decisions he had made, from the crazy gravity gauge trick on Brahma to throwing the rover off the side of Vesuvius Vent, to confronting the first Architect to going overland from the shattered Beehive to the Sentry habitat...each one had been his to make, his to live with.

  Now he was a courier for implacable, uncommunicative, unknowable aliens.

  And not only his life, but the lives of every human on Keanu—and very possibly the lives of the entire human race—depended on them.

  There was a universal lesson in that somewhere. But he was too tired and frustrated to appreciate it.

  The Skyphoi brought them to a side shaft and a Membrane. “This is the core?” Pav said.

  “Might be the entrance to another shaft,” Dale said. He turned to Zack. “Okay, Commander, hand it over.”

  “It’s my job, Dale.”

  Dale nodded toward Rachel. “Your daughter disagrees.”

  “He’s right, Daddy,” Rachel said. “Let someone else do this. Please!”

  Zack looked at her dirty, pretty, exhausted, distraught face, seeing traces of her mother. “I’d draw straws, but we don’t have any,” he said. That wasn’t enough, for either of them.

  He took his daughter’s hand and led her away, to where they were directly under the floating, flashing Skyphoi...the closest thing to a zone of privacy. “I love you, Rachel—”

  “Don’t say that! It means you think you’re never going to see me again.”

  “I am going to see you again. In a few minutes, the moment I drop this thing off.”

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “Mom went away, then she came back, then...” She collapsed against him, sobbing.

  He couldn’t allow himself to do the same. Be a father. Be a leader.

  “Look, honey, baby girl.” He kissed her. “Look!” He finally got her attention. “We’re all...information. That’s what the universe is. And it never really dies, okay? But it has to keep changing. That’s why the Reivers are bad—they’re frozen, they don’t get worse and they never get better. We may have to die or go away or change state to get better.”

  “I hate that.”

  “Don’t hate it. It’s the most miraculous thing humans have ever discovered.”

  Saying it aloud, he almost convinced himself. But all around them, the air began to grow stagnant. Temperatures were dropping.

  There was an ominous rumbling, as if Keanu were suffering death throes. Maybe that’s what a NEO’s death is like, Zack thought; it breaks up, scattering itself across space....

  He had to act now. One last hug, one last kiss. “I’ll see you in a little while. Go with Makali.”

  He turned to the others. He was almost shouting. “This isn’t a suicide mission. I’ll meet you guys right here once I’ve got this bad boy working again.”

  He never let go of the unit. If he did, he’d never pick it up again.

  He pointed to the Tik-Talk, which was now in Zhao’s hands. “Tell Harley that I expect a decent meal for the first time. Something
in a steak should do it.”

  Then, picking up the package, he stepped into the Membrane, and fell into darkness.

  There was almost no gravity in the shaft. Zack was barely aware that he was falling.

  The landing was soft, featherlike, so gentle that he was able to tuck his knees up—just like living in microgravity aboard the International Space Station—and land on both feet.

  He wasn’t steady; the entire chamber continued to rock, like Los Angeles with aftershocks. It made every movement more difficult, more urgent—

  He ended up in another ancient stone tile chamber with five shafts leading in different directions. Before he had to confront the decision of which to take, he saw that he wasn’t alone.

  The Revenant girl Camilla waited for him. She had been sitting in the darkness. Now she rose.

  Odd how this child seemed to haunt these moments.

  Even odder that he kept having them.

  “Everyone back at the Temple is wondering what happened to you,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t understand.

  To his shock, she said, in English, “Regrettable. I became infected. I became an instrument of the enemy. It was like a fever—I could only sing this little song from my childhood about ‘ratos.’ I was warning you—”

  “About the Reivers.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re no longer constrained.”

  “Oh, no. I’m destroyed,” Camilla said. “But the infection is contained within me. When I die, it dies, too.”

  For the first time since reconnecting with Rachel, Zack grew alarmed. This isn’t right. But the only comment he could offer was, “I’m sorry.” Then, feeling that to be inadequate, added, “Your communication skills have improved.”

  “We are able to work more efficiently with young subjects,” she said. “I speak for the Architect.”

  “I figured.” He looked around. “Do you know the way to the core?”

  She immediately turned to the shaft across from them and pointed. “Okay,” he said. “Are you coming with me?”

  “The effort is straining my body,” she said. “I have very little time.”

  What did that mean? Was she going to sit down and die here? He held out his hand. “I’ll help.”

  And, stumbling as another quake jolted them, she took Zack’s hand.

  Steadying himself as best he could, he slung the kit over his shoulder.

  It was like walking into the first few meters of the Beehive, though longer and straighter. Zack was grateful for the distance, since it allowed him to ask, “Do you take messages to the Architect, too? To Keanu itself?”

  “That is the nature of communication. We hear you.”

  “That’s good,” he said. They passed through another Membrane, the curtain shimmering in response to the quaking and shuddering. “Because this reboot and saving you, the ship, is only half the battle.”

  “What else do you want?”

  “To save Earth,” he said, surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth. “I want to keep that vesicle from reaching my home planet. Nothing else matters.” He imagined the Reiver vesicle splashing down in the ocean, or touching down in some remote forest or mountain range. How long would it take for the nasty little creatures, exposed to sunlight, awash in oxygen and soil and hydrogen, to start reproducing at some fantastic rate?

  He pictured the beautiful blue-and-white sphere of Earth, as he had seen it close up from the space station, and far away from Destiny. Now add a black spot of contagion in the middle of the USA. How quickly would it spread? How long before the entire North American continent was that horrible color, awash with Reiver templates?

  The world?

  And what would it mean? Would people die? Quite likely, just as swiftly and horribly as they would if a mutated Ebola virus struck.

  Or would Earth and humanity be transformed into something mean, ugly, Reiver-like.

  “The war isn’t on your planet,” Camilla said. “The battlefield is elsewhere.”

  “I think the battlefield is everywhere,” he said. “The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll start to win.”

  She was silent for several moments. Then: “We were unsuited to fighting the Reivers. Too old, too fragile, too large scale.”

  “Too large scale?”

  “Our reactions, our thought processes—they are simply too slow. We can’t compete against creatures who live in fractions of fractions of a moment. They can make a million decisions in the time it takes us to make one. And there are other flaws, too.”

  Zack said, “So consider this: We’re a few hundred humans in a ten-thousand-year-old ship. We might be able to help you with one battle when Keanu gets wherever it’s going, but if I were you, I’d want seven billion weapons—I’d want the entire population of Earth working as a team.”

  “You can’t promise that, and mobilizing your entire population is impossible. We had a difficult time collecting two hundred, and you are still not a fighting unit.”

  “That may be our strength,” Zack said, afraid he was losing the most important argument in human history. “Think of us as bridging the gap between you and the Reivers. We’re smaller, faster, capable of operating in discrete units. But we are still individuals. We’ll never act as a bloc, the way they do.”

  Then she said, “We are still suspicious. Consider your actions here.”

  “Individuals make mistakes. Groups of individuals make bigger ones. It’s how we learn and change.”

  A long silence. Finally she said, “If you accomplish the restart, we will consider turning the vessel around and returning to Earth.”

  That would have to do. He hugged the girl, a bit of a trick with the rattling and shaking all around them. He wanted to laugh out loud. He thought of his friends and surviving family members—his poor parents and the hell they must have gone through this past two weeks—and all the workers in the space community, not to mention the astronomers who had discovered the NEO in the first place...the look on their faces when they realized that Keanu was heading back!

  Assuming, of course, that he succeeded—

  They stumbled into a vast brilliant cylinder tens of kilometers tall. Zack felt like a microbe at the focus of a telescope.

  High above them, what appeared to be a brown dwarf star floated...fading even as Zack watched.

  “We have little time,” Camilla said.

  “What do I do with this unit?” Zack said. “Is there a switch or a trigger?”

  “Oh,” she said, “you triggered it by carrying it through the last Membrane. Drop it there.”

  Zack did as Camilla directed. Before the unit left his hand, it began to throb, grow warm, grow heavy.

  The girl drifted forward, deeper into the cylinder. “Not that way,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Camilla stopped, spread her arms as if in benediction. Then turned to Zack with a smile.

  Zack didn’t need to ask the next question. Camilla’s posture told him everything. “We aren’t getting out, are we?”

  “If the device is used properly, we have no chance of survival.”

  Oh God, he thought. He exhaled once, twice, three times. With the rocking and rolling motion of the NEO interior, he felt like a captain on a sinking ship.

  There was the case, glowing with a white-hot brilliance, like a doorway opening to heaven—

  Sadness hit him like a hammer. Good-bye Earth and friends and NASA and Michigan and Mom and Dad and strawberries and clean sheets and sunrises and the stars and kisses and music and Rachel and Megan and—

  Holding hands, he and Camilla walked into the holy light.

  Epilogue

  And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

  REVELATION 12:7–8

  We’re still here.

  KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, MUCH LATER ENTRY

  RACHEL


  Rachel was shocked at how much the gravesite had changed since her last visit. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of visiting. There was always too much to do. And the memory of her parents was still strong. She still thought of them every day.

  Even after twenty-one years.

  Besides, while the remains of her mother’s second body were buried here, there was only a stone to Zachary Stewart’s memory. He had never returned from the power core.

  She had often relived her last conversation with Yvonne, who died less than a day after Zack entered the shaft that dropped him into Keanu’s power core. Yvonne had clearly wanted to comfort Rachel on her loss, even as she was dying.

  “Why are the Reivers so bad?” she remembered asking Yvonne. “Couldn’t we find a way to work with them? Aren’t they just information arranged differently?”

  “Exactly,” Yvonne said. “They are perfect machines for the collection of energy and its use. Their only purpose seems to be replication.”

  “Isn’t that what we do?”

  “No,” Yvonne said. “We have love and free will, and our information grows and changes...”

  “The Reivers are where information goes to die.”

  And if we don’t stop them, Rachel had concluded, that’s what the universe becomes. Dead.

  Her deputy mayor got her attention. “Do you wish to remain in private?”

  Sentries were always so deferential, a state that would have startled any of the Houston Bangalores in their early encounters with the aquatic race. Their motives, their incomprehensible savagery, all combined to make them unwelcome crewmates. But years of negotiation and, frankly, mutual evolution had not only resulted in a truce—they had created a kinder, gentler type of Sentry. If they were going to be useful in a war on Earth, they would have to step out of their comfort zone.

  Sentries would have to be the warriors they once were. Because that was what they were facing.

  When the Reivers launched the vesicle, they also commanded Keanu’s propulsion system to fire a long, sustained burst, not only accelerating the NEO to its greatest speed, but depleting its onboard fuel supply so thoroughly that it took years—decades—to replenish.