Heaven's Fall (19 page)

QUESTION:
Sounds like magic.

RACHEL:
Or just technology that’s far more advanced than ours. What would Ben Franklin have thought of a computer? We also needed one other thing to make the proteus work, and that was Substance K, which is essentially nanotech goo. Almost everything in Keanu was made of it. After living there for twenty years and eating food derived from it, I’m probably made of Substance K.

INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040

Xavier Toutant was not part of the big negotiations. It was not his thing, though during the prelaunch preparations he had been quite amused to hear Rachel and Pav and Harley Drake and the others talking about rights deals and money, since not one of the HBs had dealt with the subject since the day they were scooped off Earth in 2019.

Maybe that showed how shortsighted they all were, or possibly they had evolved past such mundane concerns.

At the moment, however, Xavier Toutant was consumed by his job, his mission, which was cargo.

The crew had only taken basic travel gear off
Adventure
—clothes, a little food, toiletries. Everything else that might have been interesting or useful remained aboard the spacecraft, including their own Keanu-built Slates and 3-D printing gear, but most important of all . . . a ton of goo.

Which was what Xavier had been calling it since the day he’d arrived on Keanu as a nineteen-year-old junior fry cook and failed pot dealer. The Bangalores came up with several names for it—NanoTech Slurry, Building Block, and mostly Substance K—but it was still the raw material that, they had discovered, filled whatever part of the interior of Keanu that wasn’t good old rock. There were even pipes that allowed Keanu’s control system to pump huge gobs of the stuff from one place to another.

The HBs had never learned how to make more of it. Keanu had vats and pools where it was obvious that goo was “grown” from raw materials that you would find in space (water being number one). They had built their own “pipeline” to transfer goo from these pockets back to the human habitat. Maintaining and redirecting that line was one of the most time-consuming jobs in the whole habitat.

Because the things you could do with the goo were . . . anything. Feed it into your proteus, then imprint it with assembly data, and you could make it into a metal machine or a composite structure or a cow or a bowl of gumbo—bowl
and
gumbo, which seriously impressed Xavier the cook.

In the past, goo had been used to make actual human beings. They didn’t live long, but that wasn’t the fault of the goo.

But it was what made life on Keanu possible. (All the habitats started out as giant empty chambers with a layer of goo that could be “rearranged” into soil, plants, buildings, and then some of the items already mentioned. Built to suit: Humans got an Earth-like habitat, Sentries got an aquatic one, Skyphoi got whatever the fuck they lived in, and so on.)

Adventure
had several tanks of goo stored on the lower deck of the vehicle, right below the control module they had lived in for four days. It was Xavier’s job to make sure it was still there.

And to figure out how to transfer it, store it, and make it useful.

Because—and this was the real reason Xavier ducked out of the media agent auction—the goo and the “magic” 3-D proteus printing were going to fund the mission, not the crew’s “personal stories.”

Xavier was happy to spend his time making that a reality. His other goals here on Earth were minimal. All he’d left behind was his momma, and she was close to death the day he was scooped up in 2019. His first mission, once he was able to use a computer, or whatever they called it these days, was to find out when she’d died and where she was buried.

Taj, who in Xavier’s mind was turning out to be a good guy, and Wing Commander Kaushal, perhaps a bit less good, offered up a cargo truck, willing hands, and a weapons bunker after Xavier told them, “I’ll need secure storage for whatever I take off
Adventure
.”

“For how long?” Kaushal said.

“On the order of two weeks.” The figure was anywhere between two days and infinity, so two weeks seemed a good compromise.

Did Xavier need refrigeration or temperature control? No. Were there special handling needs? Well, yes—he may have suggested that there was a chance of a dangerous radiation leak.

Which made Wing Commander Kaushal unhappy. “What were you thinking, bringing radioactives to my base?” The look he shot at Taj said, pretty clearly,
I’m not doing this—!

But Xavier and Pav had war-gamed this argument. “Do you have depleted uranium cannon shells?” he said.

Kaushal stared back. “I can’t answer that.”

“Fine,” Xavier said, “let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you
might
have a case around here somewhere. One case of those shells emits more radioactivity than our entire two tons in a year.”

This seemed to mollify Kaushal. It was the absolute truth without being the whole truth: The goo emitted no radiation at all.

But Xavier wanted Kaushal and his team to think it did. It would keep prying hands and eyes away.

He was introduced to Chief Warrant Officer Singh, a man of forty so dark and fat he could have been Xavier’s twin. The man’s grim, businesslike manner gave no hint of brotherly affection, however. It was clear he regarded Xavier with suspicion.

Singh’s team included four others in descending seniority and age: a sergeant, a corporal, and two leading aircraftsmen. The latter two were probably twenty years old.

There was another warrant officer, Pandya, who was Singh’s opposite in almost every way: ten years younger, fifty kilos lighter, relaxed and often smiling.

He deferred to Singh perfectly, which confirmed Xavier’s hunch that he was the representative of the Indian intelligence services.

Xavier had two trucks and the cherry picker at his disposal—quite a fleet for a guy who had never owned a car and hadn’t driven in two decades. They headed to the landing site directly after breakfast on the second day, Xavier jammed into the first truck cab with Singh and a driver. Two heavyweights in that small, crammed space, and no air-conditioning. It was the longest half kilometer Xavier had ever ridden.

April in Bangalore was like April in New Orleans, or Houston. Humid and, even before ten in the morning, headed for high heat. Xavier said as much to CWO Singh, who shrugged, as if he were weak. “April is the hottest month here, though not the wettest. That’s August.”

“That’s good,” Xavier said. “We only have to risk heatstroke, not drowning.” The driver, one of the enlisteds, laughed—to be silenced by a glare from Singh.

They parked, then grabbed masks and gloves, and, once the cherry picker was back in operation, Xavier rode up to the
Adventure
hatch.

All the way up he kept noting the strange tilt to the vehicle and debating the need for additional support—a frame, maybe, or even some kind of jacks under the busted fin. The ship rested on hard-packed earth, so Xavier wasn’t worried
Adventure
would sink. But it felt wrong to have it looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

One thing he noticed once he reached the hatch level—downtown Bangalore itself, glittering towers that had been lost in the haze, or simply not in his eye line, during his hasty exit yesterday. He started feeling sick and faint, so weak that he had to wrap his gloved hands around the railings of the cherry picker basket. How many millions of people lived here? Nine million? In India altogether, a billion?

He was no stranger to numbers on that scale. Houston had a million people when he lived there, the United States more than a quarter billion.

But for the past two decades he had lived in a habitat ten kilometers long and five or so wide, with fewer than a thousand people. They did rub shoulders from time to time, but he never ever got the sense that he was crowded.

Now, though, even twenty kilometers north of the city center, in what was, by Indian standards, uncrowded suburbia, Xavier felt closed in, suffocated.

The heat didn’t help, of course. Nor did Xavier’s precarious perch atop a very old piece of Indian equipment.

Not wishing to disgrace himself by vomiting over the side, or even fainting, he opened the hatch and plunged into the cool interior.

Adventure
’s crew had left batteries running on low, essentially keeping the lights on and the environmental systems running. The sudden, relative cool made Xavier feel better—he wasn’t even bothered by the slanting floor.

He opened the hatchway to the storage module . . . all of the containers seemed to have come through the crash landing intact (something he’d worried about just before dozing off last night). There were sixteen identical units, each one about the size of a typical cardboard banker’s box from his youth. Fourteen of them held goo; the other two . . . equipment.

He could not off-load all of these things by himself, so he had to allow the enlisted men into
Adventure
. The four of them seemed uninterested in the exotic machine, acting as if they were entering the cargo hold of one of the rotting Antonov transports parked on the apron not far away. They plodded like robots as they set up a chain to pass containers along.

With the weight limits of the cherry picker, it took half a dozen trips down, then up, to get all the containers out of
Adventure
and into the trucks. Xavier realized that by supervising from above—obviously necessary—he had allowed Singh and especially Pandya free rein with the materials on the ground. Either one of them could have been hiding inside a truck, unseen, prying open a container.

Well, nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t too worried that they would find anything useful. . . .
Adventure
’s cargo was literally just packages of goo. Even the vital proteus gear was secreted inside goo.

Once everything was loaded up and the crane lowered, Xavier and the team headed for the holding area, a corner of a munitions storage bunker about two hundred meters from the ops area, across the runway. It was more exposed than Xavier liked—his particular bunker and its kin were rounded mounds, wisely separated by several meters of open space, with the whole complex bordered by several dozen yards of mud and grass inside a wicked-looking security fence. There were fences beyond that, marking the boundary of Yelahanka Air Base.

He would have preferred an actual warehouse, a building among other buildings, of course. So that, should the impulse strike him over the next day or two, he could make unscheduled or unescorted visits. True, he would face the usual challenges of evading security—locks, cameras, and whatever new toys had been developed over twenty years.

But he had always found that even layered systems are vulnerable at one point . . . with their human operators.

For example, as the enlisteds were helping him stack and arrange the containers near the entrance to the bunker (which proved to be empty; so much for the alert status of the Indian Air Force at Yelahanka), one of them, the most junior aircraftsman, dropped a container on its corner.

The box ruptured, not only exposing the inner sheathing but tearing it, allowing a puddle of goo to escape.

The young man’s eyes—the only expressive part of his face visible over his mask—went wide with fear, either that Xavier would have him arrested or that he might die from exposure.

The sudden silence was apparent to Pandya, who said from outside, “Everything all right in there, Mr. Toutant?” He gave Xavier’s name a beautiful French pronunciation.

“Just some final rearranging!”

Then he pulled down his mask and put on his most engaging face. “It’s not really dangerous. What’s your name?”

He slowly lowered his mask. “Aircraftsman Roi,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get a shovel or a—”

Xavier was already bending to the box, righting it and prying off the lid. “Take a look,” he said. “You’re the first on Earth.”