Heaven's Fall (25 page)

“You’ve never hidden things from me before—at least I don’t think you have—”

“I have not,” Pav said.

“So why are you starting now?”

“Because I don’t know what happened for certain!”

Now Tea spoke: “What about Taj?”

“No word.”

Xavier glanced at Yahvi; her eyes and nose were red from her cold, but now it looked as though she’d been crying, too. “Can we catch a brother up?” he said. “And maybe Zeds would like to know.” The Sentry had followed him to the gathering.

Rachel gestured for Pav to speak. “The other convoy,” he said, clearly struggling for the words. He sighed. “There was an incident.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Pav!” Rachel said, as snappish as Xavier had ever heard her. “They’re dead, isn’t that what you and Chang said? All killed on the road to the other airport?”

Xavier felt sick, though not, when he thought about it a second time, terribly surprised. He waited for Pav to add detail. “The report—Chang got it, and so did your driver—is that a highway bridge failed. Both limos went into the road below and turned over. One of the trucks was damaged, too. No word on the ambulance. The entire party is reported to be dead.” Pav quickly pivoted to face Tea. “And so far we don’t have definitive information on who was in the convoy at the time. I know my father said he was going along—”

“To help with the ruse, yes,” Tea said bitterly.

“Taj is not among the dead,” Chang said. He had just gotten off the phone. “There are four fatalities, including Warrant Officer Pandya—” Here Chang nodded toward Warrant Officer Singh. Xavier was surprised at how that news struck him; he’d assumed Pandya was the spy, not a supportive member of the team.

Not someone who would risk his life for them—and lose it.

“Two others were injured and evacuated. Taj is not among them, that’s confirmed.”

“Do we know where he is?” Pav said.

Chang shook his phone. “Still working on that.”

“We should never have left Sanjay,” Rachel said. “He’s unprotected at Yelahanka.”

“I believe the reason Taj stayed behind was to find a moment to remove Sanjay,” Chang said. “That was the plan.”

“Which one?” Yahvi spoke for the first time. “I can’t keep these plans straight.”

“Plan 3C,” Xavier said. “Not that I want to forget about Sanjay, but here’s a stumper: What about us? We got in the truck this morning with this as our destination. Well, folks, here we are . . . standing in a cold empty hangar in the rain.

“Are we flying to China? Are we catching a boat to Japan? What’s the deal?”

“Just wait,” Pav said.

Out on the runway, a small jet broke through the low clouds, swiftly touching down and rolling out. Xavier would not have been able to identify aircraft types in 2019 beyond big and not-so-big, so he was useless with this one.

But it was not big . . . a corporate or executive jet.

“Is this our ride?” Yahvi said.

Pav put his arm around her. Xavier noticed that he exchanged a look with Chang before answering: “Yes.”

“Who are they?” Rachel said.

“Friends,” Edgar Chang said.

“I asked my
husband
,” Rachel said, more gently than Xavier expected.

Pav smiled, trying desperately—Xavier thought—to return a bit of humor to this tense situation. “It might be better to call them ‘old friends never met,’” he said.

The jet was taxiing right up to the front of the hangar; the noise of its twin engines effectively eliminated further exchanges.

Zeds looked intrigued. Tea was grim, her arms across her chest. Yahvi blinked and seemed miserable. Pav had his arm around Rachel.

Now Xavier got a good look at the plane . . . sleek, white, clearly twenty meters from tip to tail. Two pilots were visible in the cockpit. Rows of windows confirmed that it was some kind of passenger craft.

On the tail . . . a baby kangaroo? The word surfaced from his deep memory: a wallaby.

“Is this from Australia?” Xavier shouted. The engines wound down just as he opened his mouth, making him sound so much louder than necessary that the others—even Chang and Singh—laughed.

Singh’s lighter moment didn’t last long. As the engines fell silent, Xavier and the others could hear latches on the cabin door being opened. As the door swung down, becoming a ladder, Singh raised his pistol, covering the hatchway.

A thin, middle-aged white male with a crest of blond hair stuck his head out. “Don’t shoot!” he said, hands up. “We come in peace!”

Xavier saw Singh glance at Chang, who nodded. The weapon was lowered.

Pav stepped forward, hand extended. “Mr. Radhakrishnan, I presume,” the man said. His Aussie accent was so strong that
Radhakrishnan
sounded like “Redda kishen.”

“My wife, Rachel,” Pav said. He quickly introduced all of them, ending with Zeds . . . which caused the Aussie fellow to step back and look up.

When this happened, Yahvi grabbed her mother and said, “Who is this man?”

The man heard her and turned. “Oh, sorry, got your names, forgot to offer mine.” He smiled. “Colin Edgely, young lady. Among my other notable accomplishments, I am the man who discovered Keanu.”

Rachel said, “I thought that name was familiar. Lovely to meet you, and why are you here?”

Edgely looked at Pav, who cleared his throat and said, “He’s come to rescue us.”

Mr. Kalyan Bhat of Hebbal, Bengaluru, Karnatka, admits he was shocked by the news that humans had returned from the Near-Earth Object Keanu. “I lived near the control center,” he said. “I saw the object rising into the sky.” He had a special interest in the event, though Kalyan—who was only thirteen—didn’t know it at the time.

“My older brother, Sanjay, was in that thing. I didn’t find out for a week.”

That shocking news contributed to the death of the boys’ mother, Sima. “She was fighting cancer and doing well, but losing Sanjay like that . . . she gave up.” Sima Bhat died two years later.

Kalyan and Sanjay’s father, Mahavir, a clerk with the State Bank of India in Hebbal, lived until 2037. “I know that losing Sanjay affected him, too. Every year, on the anniversary of the object’s takeoff, he would lock himself in his room.

“But when I tried to get him to talk about Sanjay, he wouldn’t. There was only one picture of my brother in our house, in my father’s bedroom.”

As for Kalyan himself, he served in the Indian army during the conflicts of 2029–2031, and became an engineer with DMC Electronics.

“I was thirteen when Sanjay was taken,” he said. “I can’t wait to see him.” He added, “It’s like something from an old story—a castaway returning, or someone coming back from the dead.”

As for the rumors that Sanjay was injured in
Adventure
’s crash landing, he said, “I hope they’re wrong. And if he was injured, I hope he’s recovering.” Has ISRO or another agency been in touch with him?

“No.”

TIMES OF INDIA
FEATURE,
APRIL 15, 2040

“You said they were going to China!”

Taj was heading for his car when Melani Remilla caught up with him.

They were in the same garage where the
Adventure
convoy had departed earlier that day; Taj had spent the hours since then essentially locked in the conference room, working his phone and calling up news reports on the screens.

The accident on the road to Bengaluru International had shocked him—which in turn surprised him. He had not only agreed to the idea of a second, clandestine convoy . . . it had been his idea! He was the one who always feared that the
Adventure
crew would be targets of violence, and not just from the Aggregates.

Tea often teased him that no matter how cynical he sounded, he was still a romantic. “Poor Taj! Loves flowers and pretty girls and the Moon . . . has to pretend about guns and treachery.”

No matter. Knowing Rachel and Pav and the others had lifted off from Bengaluru meant he could go home for a few hours, before returning to the Sanjay vigil—and trying to decide his next move.

Once he got rid of Remilla. “Didn’t we all believe they were going to China?”

“That doesn’t answer my question, sir!” If Taj had any doubts that Remilla was upset, they vanished.

“Until an hour ago,” he told her, and he wasn’t lying, “the only information I had was that the crew
would
be going to China. Edgar Chang was arranging it.”

“Then who took them to Australia?”

Here Taj was on trickier ground, since he had suspicions, though no data. “That I cannot tell you.” Strictly true, if not especially illuminating.

He had known Remilla for more than twenty years, since the
Brahma
days, first as a young female spacecraft engineer specializing in environmental systems, which could not have been an easy job, given the male-dominated ISRO world.

Then, after the arrival of the Aggregates and the subsequent wars and plagues, when India had no money for space exploration aside from spy satellites, Remilla had moved into program management, becoming the last woman standing.

Their interactions over the past year, all of them involving the Keanu return, had been completely professional. He knew nothing of her personal life, though he had some memory of a husband somewhere, and a grown son. During those contacts, Taj had found Remilla to be smart and open—possibly too open when it came to dealing with sharks like Kaushal—but too prey to emotion when things didn’t go her way.

Like now. “But you have had more information than the rest of us!”

“Why are you surprised? My son is one of them!”

“So he was telling you secrets!”

“I was spending more time with him than anyone else,” Taj said, losing patience with this woman. “So, yes, I undoubtedly heard more than you or Kaushal did.”

“You should have told us!”

“I told you everything that was important.”

Remilla frowned. Clearly she had no goal other than to express frustration at losing control of a situation that was never in control. “What are they going to do now?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said, though he was convinced that, ultimately, the Aggregates were their target. Pav had told him a bit about the Houston-Bangalores and their successful eradication of the Reivers on Keanu twenty years ago. Of course, sanitizing a Near-Earth Object was one thing . . . cleansing half a planet, quite another.

“Will you promise to tell me when they are back in contact?”

“Of course,” he said, not at all sure that he would. Remilla’s only role now was to make sure that
Adventure
remained unmolested, and that Sanjay Bhat was safe until he could be transferred.

Those happened to be Taj’s jobs, too. And he was going to fail at both if he did not get some sleep.

Remilla offered a conciliatory hug, and finally left him.

Taj climbed into his car and started it up, hoping that the drive to his apartment would be trouble-free. He and Tea had spent most of their married life living on Raisina Hill in New Delhi, close to the Ministry of Defence. But with news of Keanu’s looming return, they had moved to Bangalore.

It had not been an easy year and a half for Tea. In fact, the entire last decade had been a challenge for his wife. When the Aggregates erected their financial and other walls around the United States, she had faced a choice: Return and submit to the new order, or stay away . . . and lose her pension.

She chose to stay away, and found herself having to make a living as a former astronaut, first woman to walk on the Moon, in a world that had no time for space exploration.

(It wasn’t about survival: Taj could support both of them on his general’s pension and other investments. But naturally Tea resisted that.)

She had finally found a way to keep busy, making speeches to female students in secondary schools and college classes about opportunities in science and technology—ISRO supported it; more to the point, so did the Ministry of Defence. (The more engineers it could enroll in the coming war with the Aggregates, the better!)

But it was not a happy existence. Tea had grown unhappy, with her work, her future, with India . . . with Taj.

And now she was off with Rachel. Taj was grateful that she finally had something worthwhile to keep her busy. He was quite unhappy, though, that neither of them had been able to work together—he with the “secrets” he had learned from Pav, she with . . . whatever she was gleaning from Rachel—

He had barely pulled out of the garage when he saw movement in his peripheral vision; it was Kaushal with two of his guards literally running out of the hospital. He spotted Taj’s car and clearly ordered the guards to pursue him.

Taj chose to hit the pedal and keep driving.

It was ultimately a foolish maneuver. His car was an underpowered electric Tata Sanand III, good for cheap, comfortable commutes, useless for flight.

He was also restricted to Yelahanka Air Base, with its many speed bumps, stop signs, and competing vehicles.

All of which meant that he didn’t get far . . . Kaushal’s Jeep caught him at the exit gate.

“Why are you running away?” the wing commander said. He was wide-eyed and angrier than Taj had ever seen him.

“I wanted to go home.”

Kaushal just stared. It was likely that he was as exhausted as Taj, and almost as likely that he realized it. “You should answer your phone,” he muttered. Taj was carrying two of them, but only the one that would connect him to Kaushal was on his person. His official unit was in his briefcase. “And you need to come with me, now.”

“What is this all about, Kaushal?”

“It’s the
Adventure
man Sanjay.”