Heaven's Fall (38 page)

The cars arrived at the loading complex outside the human habitat with a screeching bump. Everyone but Dale exited automatically and wordlessly, even though it appeared there was a turn in the rail that would allow the cargo car to move directly into the habitat.

But Dale chose to follow Makali and Zhao, who walked swiftly, their team members forming up behind them, not only creating a security barrier—deliberate? Or just habit?—but keeping Dale from hearing their words. It was obvious they were talking about the Beehive, and that all were agitated, even steady, unexcitable Zhao.

From the entrance, the whole of the habitat spread out like a landscape painting, neat little buildings clustered among fields and forests, the Temple dominating it all. It was a more pleasing view than Dale’s last, over his shoulder during the half-light of “night.” He was amused to realize that he had spent sixteen years away from the human habitat, and was now making his second entrance in the same day.

“Keep up, everybody. It’s at the far end.” Dale wondered why Zhao had to remind the others where the Beehive was located, but realized that two of the vesicle makers were in their twenties and had likely been brought to Keanu as small children with no experience of the place.

Or it might just have been a sign that Zhao liked to tell people what to do.

They reached the Temple within fifteen minutes, where Jaidev was waiting on the steps. “Harley and Sasha are already on their way,” he told Zhao. Only then did he spot Dale. “Why the hell are you back?”

“You welcomed me earlier, remember?” Dale said. “You wanted to keep me, too.”

Jaidev turned away, as if he could no longer bear to think about this.

As they continued their journey, Zhao asked what had happened. “You know little less than we do,” Jaidev said. “Jordana Swale was near the mouth of the Beehive and noticed a strange light.”

“I don’t know her.”

“She’s one of the senior farmers,” Makali said. “I know her. Very well grounded. I bet she didn’t investigate by herself.”

“She came to the Temple first,” Jaidev said. “I wasn’t here and Harley was busy . . .” Here Jaidev glanced at Dale. Then he decided the information wasn’t worth hiding. “. . . talking with Rachel. So Sasha went off with Jordana.

“Fifteen minutes later Jordana was back again, saying one of the cells was active.”

“That’s a lot of back and forth for one woman,” Dale said, unable to resist. “Haven’t you guys reverse-engineered the Segway yet?”

Everyone ignored him, which diminished Dale’s glee not one bit.

The distance from the Temple to the Beehive end of the habitat was seven kilometers, a distance that, when added to his other movements for the day, made for a challenging walk. He began to feel tired. His feet hurt.

Nevertheless, he appreciated a phenomenon he had never experienced on Keanu. Every few hundred meters, more HBs joined them, slipping out of the fields one by one, or emerging from buildings in larger groups. The moving throng grew to more than a hundred, a significant percentage of the population of the habitat. Zhao, Makali, and Dale had to push their way through a crowd. It reminded Dale of a scene from some old movie about Moses.

There were so many people jammed into the narrow entrance that Dale found himself being jostled. “Sorry,” the person next to him said. It was a young man, blond, long-haired, clearly nervous. “I don’t know you,” Dale said, extending his hand. “Dale Scott.”

“Hey, the hermit!” the young man said. “Nick. So this must be auspicious, if you’re here.”

“We’ll see,” Dale said. He was growing more uncomfortable. Too many people . . . too many chances for conversations he didn’t want to have.

But Nick hadn’t finished with him. “Were you around the last time the Beehive worked?”

“Yes. It was sort of operating for almost a year after arrival.” Or so he remembered. But that had been for terrestrial animals . . . no human Revenants had emerged after Yvonne Hall, and she had not come from this place. (There were other Beehive-like structures within Keanu, even a long-unused one adjacent to the Factory. Dale had never seen evidence that they still functioned.)

The idea of humans returning from the dead, originally repellent, had consumed many hours of thought over the years. He was more tolerant of the idea now. He had often wondered if Zack Stewart, going to his death in Keanu’s core, had assumed or hoped he would be reborn . . . even for a handful of days.

Now Harley Drake emerged from the Beehive, not only offering the hope of information, but giving Dale a reason to excuse himself from the conversation with Nick.

He got close enough to the front of the crowd to hear Jaidev say, “Harls, what’s going on?”

“Sasha’s in there with Jordana,” Drake said. “One of those cells is definitely active.”

“What size is it?” That was Zhao, always practical.

“Human.”

“Okay, then,” Makali said. “Who’s died?”

“What kind of question is that?” Harley said.

“She’s probably wondering if that might give you some idea of who is going to become the next Revenant,” Dale said. There was no reaction from Jaidev, Zhao, and the others in front of him. True, there was a lot of noise and he might not have been heard. But it was just as likely that he was being ignored.

Oh well. That might be changing—

Makali Pillay was upset by Harley’s response. “Don’t bite my head off.”

“Sorry,” Harley said.

“This is a strange situation,” Jaidev said. “I frankly don’t know what to do.”

“This is fucked up,” Harley said. “But it’s really what I just heard from Rachel.” If Harley was worried about Dale’s presence, he didn’t show it. “Things are just as bad as we thought down there. The team is in the same shape they were yesterday, but they’re on a long haul to try to reach this Reiver weapons site, and even when they get there . . . it’s five against a few hundred thousand.”

“We knew that,” Jaidev said.

“We knew we were sending a handful of people on a scouting mission. Now we have the intel, and it’s terrifying.” Dale was about to try to inch his way closer when Harley said, “Get over here, Dale. You might surprise us and be useful.”

Harley quickly hit the high points of his Rachel tag-up, concentrating on the new Reiver facility with what was surely a beam weapon capable of striking Keanu.

Dale suddenly understood Harley Drake’s agitation. “We need the vesicle to be launched as soon as possible.”

“It’s within a day,” Zhao said.

“Make it happen,” Jaidev said.

“Then I shouldn’t be here.” Zhao turned to Makali. He was serious about returning to the vesicle habitat.

“We might as well wait a few more minutes,” Makali said. “Let’s see what the big deal is.”

As Harley’s debrief continued, Dale stepped back . . . most of the other HBs had formed their own clusters. One, largely younger, had formed around this Nick: They seemed eager, even happy.

Another group was older, largely Bangalores. They looked like mourners at a funeral. . . . Dale suspected that they had lost a friend during the past year or two and were hoping that they might be witnessing a miracle.

They’d obviously forgotten how short-lived these miracles had been—

“There’s Sasha!”

Dale didn’t recognize the voice, which came from somewhere behind him.

It was Sasha Blaine, in all her statuesque red-haired glory.

And, leaning on her—he was having trouble walking—was a man Dale didn’t recognize. He was naked, or nearly so, wearing some skinlike covering.

“Oh my God,” Makali Pillay said. “Is that—?”

“Yes,” Jaidev said.

“That’s Sanjay Bhat.”

QUESTION:
What have you missed most about life on Earth?

PAV RADHAKRISHNAN:
My family, of course. I only recently learned that my mother passed away several years ago. I have been fortunate to reconnect with my father.

QUESTION:
Anything else?

PAV:
New faces, I guess. There are fewer than a thousand of us. I attended secondary schools that were larger. (laughs) Sometimes life on Keanu feels like high school . . . in a submarine.

INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040

“We’ll be passing the Channel Islands in the next ten minutes,” Colin Edgely told Rachel.

Ten minutes earlier, Pav had awakened her with a gentle touch on her shoulder. She had been reclining in an airline seat under a thin blanket, dreaming about the Architect’s home world. The giant alien she had encountered that first week on Keanu had been dead for twenty years, yet a day rarely passed without some thought of him . . . where his people had come from, what they wanted, where they had succeeded in their quests.

Where they had failed.

Jaidev and the other HBs had devoted considerable effort to walking back Keanu’s trajectory, but with the limited resources available to them—and too many unknowns, such as the actual amount of time that had passed since Keanu’s original launch—they had never been able to settle on a particular star, much less a planet.

Which had not stopped them all from speculating about the type of world that would be home to creatures like the Architect, a large, low-density planet on the scale of Jupiter, but with a breathable atmosphere and tolerable temperatures. Rachel had formed a clear vision of the place, naming it “Homestead” and imagining endless pink steppes, blue mountains, black forests, and white cities that literally floated in the thick atmosphere. Her Homestead was familiar enough that she had dreams about it.

But today’s had not been happy. She had felt incredible sadness and impotence as she watched a flying city literally fall out of the sky, slamming into a blue mountain range and being torn apart, Architect bodies scattered—

But it was just a dream, the side effect of an otherwise solid night’s sleep. And some kind of strange, dreamlike mirror of the sadness she felt about Sanjay, and the frustrations she experienced with
Adventure
’s ongoing mission.

Okay,
she thought,
I have to start turning this around. Be active, not passive.
She almost launched herself out of the seat.

Stretched across the entire row behind Rachel, Yahvi was still asleep. Pav was moving to wake her, too, but Rachel stopped him. “How long has she been out?”

Pav smiled. “No idea. I was dead to the world for five hours.”

“Let her sleep as long as possible. It’s not as though there’s anything she can do until we get to Mexico.”

“If then.”

“Well, we didn’t bring her so we could get work out of her.”

“I just think she’d be happier all around if she had a job.”

Yahvi had talents that might be useful. Sanjay and her other teachers had frequently taken Rachel and Pav aside to praise their daughter’s potential, especially in math. So far, however, Yahvi’s greatest accomplishment was getting her own way. “We can turn to her when we need someone verbally beaten into submission.”

Then Rachel slipped into the lavatory for a moment, peeing and washing up, emerging to find Chang busy with his datapad, creating his fantasies about the adventures of the
Adventure
crew.

Colin Edgely was ready with coffee and his geographical update. “Two hundred kilometers northwest of Los Angeles,” he said. “We’re flying parallel to the coast and should be turning east within half an hour. With luck, we’re on the ground shortly afterward.”

“What happens to you two once we’re in Mexico?” Rachel said. “I assume this plane goes back to where it came from.”

“Yes, Chang will turn around and fly back to China by various means,” the Aussie astronomer said. “As for me—” Here his face grew rosy with embarrassment. “I’d like to come along.”

“Don’t you have students to go back to? Or your family?”

Edgely grinned. “Family knows I’m on my voyage of personal discovery. I met my wife through Kettering, you know.” Until this moment Rachel hadn’t known that Edgely
had
a wife.

“As for school, I took a leave. My boss isn’t a member of Kettering, but he’s sympathetic to the mania. Everyone in Alice Springs knows a bit about space tracking and such, anyway.”

“So you want to come along.”

“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” he said. “To see this through.”

To see this through.
Rachel wondered what that meant. “I don’t think we’d have gotten this far without you,” she said, with total sincerity. “So stay as long as you want, as long as you know—”

“That it could be risky? I understand.” He gestured toward the left-side windows. “The riskiest maneuver is almost upon us, in fact.”

They faced so many unknowns. The first hour after taking off from Guam, she and Pav, Zeds, and Xavier had huddled in the rear of the plane, going over their options.

Pav told them that Chang had arranged for them to land in northern Mexico, near the city of Rosarito. “That country is filled with secret landing strips from the drug days, but few are equipped to handle a jet.” He had smiled. “Nevertheless, we have found one.”