Heaven's Fall (26 page)

It was already over by the time Taj and Kaushal reached the ICU.

“He expired without ever regaining consciousness,” the senior surgeon said. “Time of death was one forty-five.”

Taj rubbed his face. He was torn between relief—he had judged Sanjay Bhat’s injuries to be fatal the moment he first saw him—and a growing sense of panic. “Let me see him.”

The surgeon stood aside and allowed Taj and Kaushal into the room where Sanjay lay. The IV and other lines had been removed and the sheets rearranged after what, to judge from the pile of bloody cotton and bandages on the floor, must have been a frantic struggle to save the
Adventure
engineer.

The secrets this man held! The things he had seen! The places he had traveled . . . outside the heart of the solar system! Yet he had died as a result of a stupid missile strike!

Then there were the various plans Pav and Rachel had discussed with him—assuming Sanjay recovered, they wanted him flown to their destination. “Wherever we have our cargo,” Pav had said.

So much for plans.

Remilla entered, looking shocked. “Oh my God.”

“He’s gone,” Kaushal said, unnecessarily.

“What do we do?”

“I’ll call Rachel and tell her,” Taj said. He indicated that he wanted to get out of the room, and the others followed.

“Then what?”

“He has a brother,” Kaushal said, looking to Remilla for confirmation.

“I’ll get in touch with him,” Remilla said. “But then what?”

“What?” Taj said.

“The body!” Remilla said. “What do we do? Have a funeral? Ship him to his brother?”

“Let me talk to Rachel,” Taj said.

So much for rest.

Day Four

MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2040

Where did they go?

For two generations prior to the arrival of the Aggregates, tabloids and mass-market television shows feasted on stories of “alien abductions,” in which lonely humans would be plucked from deserted highways—never from downtown urban streets—and taken off for bizarre sexual or medical examinations in spacecraft.

What about alien disappearances? The crew of the Keanu-based
Adventure
spacecraft has vanished from the base near Bangalore where they were sequestered.

One report had them moving to Delhi, but that turned out to be false—fortunately, since an accident involving what was believed to be the Keanite convoy killed two and injured two others, according to incomplete information released so far.

We are sure of this: No one is speaking about the “aliens” present, not even the Keanites’ representative, Edgar Chang, who also seems to have gone dark.

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
,
MONDAY, APRIL 16, 2040

“How long have you been in touch with this Edgely character?”

“Not long,” Pav said. “And not often.”

The plane bumped, one of many since taking off from Bengaluru.

It was an executive jet, a thirty-year-old Gulfstream 605, according to Edgely. They were flying low over the Indian Ocean and, in Rachel’s opinion, coming far too close to nasty-looking storm clouds. The occasional bumps only convinced her that she was in the hands of crazy people.

And Pav had made this happen without telling her!

It wasn’t all bad. The turbulence probably added up to twenty minutes out of seven hours of flying. As for the rest of the time, well, the cabin was really luxurious: wide leather seats, soft lighting, carpet. There had been food and beverages shortly after takeoff, served out by Edgely and the two pilots—both Chinese, one male, one female, both younger than Rachel would have believed.

The takeoff had been swift and steep, with Edgely jokingly talking about “avoiding SAMs,” which Pav later identified as “surface-to-air missiles.”

“Like the thing that shot
Adventure
.”

“Correct.”

Which made her even more nervous than she had been. All during the escape from Yelahanka she had been focusing on China—what she knew, what they could do there, how long it would take them to move on. The shift to this aircraft and Mr. Colin Edgely and a destination in Australia had forced her to change her mind, never a happy or easy adjustment.

Especially when it was Pav pushing her. “It’s all right,” he had told her, as they shoved the last of their boxes into the cabin. (Only two thirds of their precious cargo would fit in the aircraft’s hold.) “I arranged this.”

“Without telling me.”

He had made one of his teenaged-boy faces, which infuriated and charmed her, in equal parts.

Then they had said good-bye to Singh and taken off.

Now, Zeds sat on the floor toward the rear of the cabin. Yahvi was next to him. Both were gazing out the windows, apparently rapt. Tea was with them, curled up in a seat asleep.

Xavier sat in the midcabin flipping through a datapad Edgely had brought while also examining several Australian newspapers. He had been quizzing Edgely and Chang about their destination—which would be Darwin in northern Australia—and flying time, which would be eleven hours. “Why Darwin?” he had said, saving Rachel the question.

“Within our range,” Edgely said. “And fairly out of the way. Too many prying eyes and ears in Sydney or Melbourne.”

Rachel had tuned them out, however, in order to have a private moment with her husband in the forward cabin, who assured her again that his contacts with Edgely had been recent and limited.

“Well, color me relieved,” Rachel said. She had never been good at disguising sarcasm. In fact, as Pav once told her during an argument, it was her default setting. “I can’t believe you just surprised me like that.”

“I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“Since when are you responsible for my hopes? I need facts! I had a right to know!”

“Look,” he said, “this is your mission. You’re the leader. You always have been. You know I don’t question that. But I first heard from Edgely twenty years ago, remember!”

Rachel had not remembered that fact, until Pav reminded her that the Australian astronomer—who had been one of the first discoverers of Keanu as a teenaged amateur in the outback—had sent several messages to the NEO as it departed Earth orbit and the inner solar system back in 2019.

The message had contained warnings about the arrival of the Reivers, later known to most humans on Earth as the Aggregates.

“That was all it was,” Pav said. “He posted, I don’t know, four or five warnings. I responded with a few messages of my own—where did they land? What are they doing? But never got a response. It was as if we were just leaving messages on a bulletin board somewhere.

“Then, once we started moving back into range of Earth communication, I thought it would be fun to check my old address . . . and found that Colin had continued to post updates on the Reiver invasion for years!

“So I transmitted a hello to him . . . he’d kept the old address just in case, and we exchanged literally three new messages, just me telling him a team would be landing, likely in Bangalore, and that we might need help. Everything else”—he gestured at the plane—“was up to him and his friends.”

Rachel glanced back at Edgely. He wasn’t much older than she was. “So, what has he been doing all these years?”

“He teaches high school science somewhere in the Northern Territory, he said.”

“So a high school science teacher was able to pull off this big rescue, with a very expensive private plane?”

“He’s had this group of, hell, I don’t know what you’d call it . . . fanboys or enthusiasts, who kept tracking Keanu and passing stories back and forth for the past twenty years.”

“This Kettering Group?”

“Yes,” Pav said. “They even have a website.”

Rachel looked at Edgely. He was thin, even gawky. He was still so happy and excited to be talking with travelers from Keanu that he was bouncing up and down in his chair. Even though he was forty, give or take a year, it was easy for Rachel to see him as a lonely sixteen-year-old astronomy geek, more comfortable with telescopes than girls. “Pav, darling, did it ever occur to you that some or all of those messages could have been Reiver plants? That he has a lot of powerful friends and inside information . . . for a high school science teacher?”

“Quite a lot, actually.”

“What convinced you that he was for real?”

He exhaled, then made another goofy face. “Tenure?”

“Meaning?”

“It was just clear to me that the messages I saw now, in the past year, were from the same geeky guy.

“And, maybe I just went on instinct. He was promising nothing, just offering an escape route. Even that never came up until I’d texted him that we’d been attacked and were hoping to get out of Yelahanka.

“And, well, he told me that one of the Kettering guys had made a ton of money—” He smiled and took her hand. “If it makes any difference, I hated not telling you.”

“Then we’ve got that in common.” Rachel knew her words were harsh, but her tone was conciliatory. Pav slapped his hand over his heart, as if he’d been shot. Then, wisely, he got up and moved down the cabin.

She was prepared to forgive him, though it might have to wait until they reached Darwin.

Or North America.

There was no room in their relationship for secrets. That was something they had both discussed and agreed on almost twenty years ago, when they first drifted together.

They had not liked each other originally, not during their first real meetings on Keanu, as Scoop refugees from Bangalore (him) and Houston (her). (Both thought they had a passing introduction in the past, on Earth, a logical assumption, since their fathers were both space travelers who had shared a space station mission. But they had been too young then to remember much.)

Then they had shared a wild, intense adventure exploring the innards of Keanu in the company of a dog—and later a Revenant, and still later an actual Architect.

Some relationships are forged in “foxhole” moments, as Harley Drake described them.

Not Rachel and Pav’s. After the Keanu core reboot, they had returned to the human habitat exhausted by each other’s company and were thrown into the chaos of the post-Reiver struggle for survival.

Of course, the fact that Rachel had seen her father, Zack, going to his death at the climax of that adventure may have contributed to a desire to distance herself from anything or anyone that reminded her of it.

But that hadn’t lasted. The blunt reality: There weren’t many suitable mates their age. Only eleven other teens had been scooped up in Bangalore and Houston. There were five infants.

The mean age of the rest of the HB population was just over thirty.

Which meant that if Rachel was going to have a boyfriend or a husband close to her age . . . it was going to be Pav or one of four other boys.

She avoided the question for some time. Between ages seventeen and nineteen she had engaged in an intense erotic relationship with Zhao, then in his thirties, the former technical spy from the People’s Republic of China—the man who had gunned down Brent Bynum on the first HB arrival day.

Zhao had later proven his stability and value to the entire community . . . and perhaps it was the fact that he was neither a Houston nor a Bangalore that eventually attracted Rachel.

That had ended eventually. She was just too young for Zhao. His concerns were never hers.

And she had drifted back into Pav’s orbit. Looking back, she wasn’t sure how it happened, or why, except that one day she realized that she rather liked him. And he was acting very nervous and uncertain around her—

They went off alone one night, and were rarely apart after that.

They had arguments, of course. Disagreements about political matters, practical issues, though not about the things Rachel remembered couples fighting about: money, rivals, whatever.

They had no secrets. Until now.

As far as Rachel knew.