Heaven's Fall (49 page)

“How are you doing?” she asked Xavier, once they had all established that they were largely in one piece.

“Been better.”

“And you, Zeds?” she said.

“I share Xavier’s state.”

That was a surprise; Sentries were usually quite reticent when it came to emotional responses, especially expressions of weakness. Rachel assumed that the de la Vega and THE interrogations produced results from humans . . . what had they gotten from the Sentry?

Then the fun began.

For some reason the Aggregates seemed to think that the Sentry knew more about the Keanu assembler than the humans. Zeds was a capable operator, as was Pav, but neither was at Xavier’s level.

Xavier had to talk Zeds through the demo.

Before it really got started, there was a heated discussion about what the proteus could do—and should do. Xavier was clearly trying to be cagey. “It’s only as good as its input,” he kept saying.

“What kind of input?” de la Vega said. “Electronic? Paper? A model?”

And there Xavier was stuck.

Rachel had to save her friend. “Most of the inputs are preloaded on Keanu,” she said. “Without access to its data banks, we are limited to producing only a handful of items.”

From behind her came the voice of an Aggregate: “What handful of items did you have preloaded?”

“Weapons,” she announced. She didn’t bother to address the Reiver that had spoken; she knew that to talk to one was to talk to all of them.

And she didn’t have to force herself to smile when she added, “Devices that will kill Aggregates.”

Xavier just stared at Rachel. Even Pav looked shocked. “Yay, Mom,” Yahvi said.

A murmur passed through all nine humans, too. “Don’t worry,” Xavier said, picking up on Rachel’s lead. “The weapons aren’t active.”

And then Zeds said, “Yet.”

“Then,” a different Aggregate said, “we will destroy these devices and the materials they use, for our own safety.”

“Let’s not be hasty,” Rachel said. “Just because the proteus was preloaded with weapons doesn’t mean that’s the
only
thing it can produce.”

“But anything that might be useful requires input from Keanu,” de la Vega said. He gave off an air of smug superiority mixed with hostility. Even if she didn’t blame him for Chang’s death, Rachel would have enjoying punching the man in the face.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “I believe I said that.”

“But . . . we don’t have those inputs.”

He talked to her as if she were in grade school. Rachel took a breath. When she lived in Houston, her mother had insisted she learn not only to swim, but to dive. There she had been . . . eight years old on the low board at the Clear Lake YWCA pool, trying not to scream at Megan Stewart for making her feel afraid. She had closed her eyes and dived, smacking her belly and filling her nose with water.

That was how she felt at this moment. “We can get a huge variety of downloads when we regain communication with Keanu.” She addressed de la Vega. “You removed transmitters from our skulls.”

For a moment she thought the man was going to lie or evade. But then: “Yes. Are you telling us to put them back in?” His tone made it clear that wasn’t going to happen.

“Unnecessary. You have systems that can easily communicate with Keanu. You could put us on the line and monitor everything we say.”

“Conceded. But you haven’t convinced me that we should.”

Rachel glanced at Pav. She took another breath, hoping she could make this convincing, when her husband said, “Look, you just had a major failure of some kind. You have undoubtedly lost unique equipment and devices that can’t easily be reproduced, or certainly not quickly.” He pointed at the proteus. “That’s what our machine can do.”

“Why do you think we’ve had a failure?”

The trio of THE officers that had dealt with Yahvi displayed their first touches of human vulnerability. They actually got uncomfortable; one of the two men blushed and cleared his throat, a clear sign of nervousness.

“We can see the evidence in the sky,” Yahvi said. “And everyone on this base seems to be freaked out. They wouldn’t be doing that unless something just went wrong.”

De la Vega wasn’t giving anything away. But the blushing THE counselor said, in the quietest possible voice, “We confirmed an event.”

De la Vega turned to the young man with genuine surprise. “Well, then,” he said. “Let’s stipulate that we could use some assistance—”

“Take us to the facility,” Rachel said. “Let us see the damaged equipment, get its specs and all available data, and feed that to Keanu. They will process it and download instructions to the printer.” She nodded toward the towering piles of Substance K. “We can’t replicate something the size of a rocket, but we can make several modest-sized electronic components and a whole lot of small ones.” She smiled again. “If that would be of use.”

“Wait here,” de la Vega said, turning and walking out. His two deputies followed, one of them shooting a look at the guilty THE counselor that expressed a remarkable amount of scorn and pity.

Pav, Tea, and Xavier couldn’t help jumping up and down like schoolchildren. “Hold on,” Rachel said. “I’m not sure we ought to be celebrating.” Especially, she thought, with half a dozen THE goons and double that number of Reiver Aggregates watching.

“This is true,” Zeds said. “We may only be helping the Reivers complete their weapon while merely postponing our own destruction.”

Tea slapped the Sentry on the chest. “Oh, come on, haven’t you heard the saying, ‘Live to fight another day’?”

“No.”

“Well, now you have!”

Rachel glanced at Yahvi. Her daughter had refrained from celebrating but was nodding her approval. Which filled Rachel with good feelings the way praise from her parents used to.

God, our roles are truly reversed—

More quickly than Rachel would have believed, de la Vega and his scornful assistant were back. “We will be leaving within the hour,” he said.

This statement kicked the Aggregates into motion. They gathered up the 3-D printer and the boxes of Substance K. “Hey,” Xavier said, regaining his sense of humor, “careful with that shit! You need it more than we do!”

As the aliens carried the equipment and cargo away, Xavier said to Rachel, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

He and Edgely, Pav, and Yahvi headed outside. Tea took Rachel’s arm. “That was really, really—”

“Stupid? Fatal?”

Tea smiled. “I was going to say
brave
or possibly even
cunning
.”

“Let’s hope you’re right and I’m wrong.”

Now, hours later, here they all were, at Reiver Central, after a brief, bumpy ride in the cargo section of a large military transport.

Given the way THE people clung to them, she felt that she and the others had been turned into an Aggregate formation. They could only seem to operate as a group of six, plus their minders.

Rachel had asked Yahvi about her THE trio, specifically the blushing male. “That’s Counselor Nigel,” she said. “He’s almost human.” She said this loud enough so Nigel could hear. Which was fine, since Rachel and company had no privacy.

Rachel turned to that trio, sitting across from her on metal chairs. “Thank you for being honest.”

“Honesty is a tenet of THE,” he said.

Pav was next to Rachel. He said, “Even though it can get you in trouble?”

“It’s not the honesty,” Counselor Nigel said. “It was my prior revelation of secured information that was troublesome.”

“What are they going to do to you?” Yahvi said.

“It won’t just be me,” Counselor Nigel said, glancing at Counselors Ivetta and Cory. “We operate as a unit. If the actions of one earn a reward, we all share. If the action of one earns punishment—”

“And what does that mean?” Rachel said. “Confinement? Twenty lashes? Loss of your snazzy black uniform?”

Counselor Nigel hesitated before answering. His features softened just enough to make Rachel feel some pity for him. “All of those, along with retraining or, in some circumstances, termination.”

Yahvi was shocked. “You mean you could be
executed
for what you told me?”

Now Counselor Ivetta spoke. “All three of us could be terminated.” Her humanity was showing, too: fear, and a desire to terminate Counselor Nigel for putting her in this situation.

“It will probably depend on how successful this is,” Counselor Nigel said, indicating Rachel and the plane.

“I’m sorry your lives are in my hands,” she said, not feeling very sorry at all.

“That’s true for all of us,” Zeds said out of the darkness.

It was after landing, while all of the passengers were waiting for the cargo ramp at the rear of the plane to drop, that Pav said, “I asked them to contact my father.”

“Good idea. Let’s make them work for us as much as possible, while we can.” Their phones had been confiscated on landing at Edwards.

“It’s not like him to go dark, not even leave a message.”

“We’ve hardly had coverage,” Rachel said.

“We’ve had some.” He indicated Tea, who seemed lost, distracted by some fascinating detail of the cargo plane’s interior. “She’s had no word, either.”

The aircraft had landed south of St. George, Utah, on a runway that looked raw and new, even in the darkness. (Rachel guessed it was between four and five
A.M.
local time.)

De la Vega and his assistants had flown with them—in a separate compartment, along with Aggregates and the proteus. Now the human leader divided the party into three groups, each one to be ferried by helicopter to the Ring.

“How much farther?” Colin Edgely asked de la Vega. Rachel felt sorry for the Aussie; he had only been trying to help . . . had been thrilled to play a role in this mission.

Now he was exhausted, a captive in a foreign land, surrounded by strangers, some of them hostile and murderous. By speaking to de la Vega he was essentially saying,
I don’t give a shit what you do to me
.

But the human leader simply said, “Forty kilometers. We can’t land an aircraft this size at the facility.” And turned to other business.

Edgely caught Rachel’s eye. He seemed to feel that he had accomplished something valuable, gained some vital information. Well, Rachel thought, whatever made him feel better.

Not that she was in any position to feel superior to Colin Edgely. Her presence here was due to the same random factors. Until August 2019, she had been a typical fourteen-year-old American girl. Yes, her father was an astronaut . . . but that only made her rare, not unique.

She had not dreamed of flying to other worlds, or living on them. Or having to become a leader of a community, and certainly not some kind of space warrior.

Maybe that was how it was for everybody, all those notable figures throughout history.

Time and luck—some of it bad.

Rachel, Tea, and Zeds were separated from the others—though not from Counselor Nigel and his crew—and put aboard a helicopter with Counselor Cory. Rachel didn’t like being separated from Pav and Yahvi, but at least they were together.

The Aggregates were all being loaded into a van instead of a helicopter. “Do you suppose they don’t like to fly?” Tea said, pointing to them.

“I think they are too numerous,” Zeds said.

“Truer words,” Rachel said. Tea laughed.

Before they could take off, Counselor Nigel returned and spoke to Rachel. “I’m sorry to say I have very bad news for you. General Radhakrishnan has passed away.”

Rachel took the news calmly, while thinking,
Poor Pav!
She had just said, “What happened?” when Tea groaned and reached out.

Oh, God,
Rachel thought. Counselor Nigel didn’t know that Tea was Taj’s wife.

Then the door was locked and the helicopter rattled into the predawn sky.

Rachel had managed to trade places with Zeds—quite a trick in the cramped helicopter cabin—in order to sit next to Tea, who shook with sobs during most of the trip to the Ring. “God, I’m a mess.”

“You just got terrible news.”

“Poor Taj,” she said. She shouted across the cabin at Counselor Nigel. “Did they say anything? What happened to him?”

“Only that he died yesterday in Bangalore.”