Heaven's Fall (27 page)

“We’ll be at Darwin in an hour.”

Rachel looked up. The plane had flown into darkness; the cabin lights seemed brighter. She must have dozed off in her incredibly comfy chair. The lack of recent thumps and bumps allowed her to sleep.

Now Edgar Chang loomed above her.

“Then what?”

He sat next to her, looking even older than he had in their first meetings. Rachel judged him to be in his midsixties . . . she wondered what he had done wrong in his career to be the point man for an operation like this.

Or look at it another way,
she thought; maybe Chang was the senior editor of some publication and took this assignment because he wanted it done properly . . . and because it was unique.

She wondered if he would tell her, if she asked. But first things first—

“You wanted to reach Free Nation U.S.”

“As soon as possible, yes.”

“That’s what I’m working on.”

“What does that mean, ‘working on’?”

Chang smiled and held up his notepad. “It means sending a lot of e-mails to a lot of people in very different locations, including some in Free Nation U.S.”

“I thought all that was firewalled.”

“As close to a hundred percent as you can get. But, you know, the U.S. is a big place with a lot of open space. Somewhere on some border or out on a prairie—or in the middle of Chicago, maybe—someone has a secret tower and is beaming a signal off some satellite the Aggregates think is dead.”

“And what are you learning?”

Chang rubbed his face. Rachel suspected that he had not slept in a day, likely longer. “There are three ways you sneak into Free Nation U.S.”

“Walk, fly, or swim?” Pav said, behind her. Rachel patted the chair next to her. She still felt the need to punish her husband a bit, but it was silly to isolate him from important information.

“That’s what they were doing when I was living in Houston,” Rachel said. Illegal immigration was one of the issues that rose and fell in importance, like the price of gasoline or summer temperatures.

“Some of that still happens,” Chang said. “And a good thing, because that’s what we’re going to be doing. Our choices are to fly across the Canadian border, hike from northern Mexico into Texas, or swim into California.”

“Which do you recommend?” Pav said.

“Which method is
safest
?” Rachel added.

Chang looked harried. “
None
of this is safe! If you’re thinking of this as some kind of tourist excursion, put that right out of your heads. You are, or will be, once word is out that you’re not in Delhi or China, the world’s most wanted fugitives. The Aggregates will do everything they can to track you and capture you.”

“We know that,” Rachel said. “Let’s go back to how, or where?”

“Or what you would do if you were in our situation?” Pav said, pointing at Chang.

“Word is that crossing from Mexico, either to California or Arizona, is still the easiest.

“But that raises the larger question: Where do you want to go in Free Nation U.S.? And what do you hope to do there?”

Rachel wasn’t sure how to answer Chang—or even if she should. When you stripped away the nonsense about trade or sightseeing, the core of
Adventure
’s mission was reconnaissance. They needed to know the extent of Reiver Aggregate domination of Earth, since clearly it didn’t extend to Southeast Asia.

Only then would they be able to consider doing something about it. Assuming they could do anything at all.

But before she could offer Chang some vague nonanswer, Pav spoke again: “Let’s just say this, Mr. Chang: We want to get into the western U.S., and as soon as possible. It would be helpful if we also had a nearby base of operations.”

Chang closed his notepad. “Then that is what we will try to do. I’ll know more when we reach Darwin.”

“When will that be?” Rachel said.

“Less than an hour.” He considered the situation. “We ought to be in cell phone range already. . . .” He reached for his jacket, which was slung across the next seat.

“Is that secure?” Rachel said. God, now she was sounding like Pav!

“As secure as any broadcast signal can be,” he said. “But if you’d rather I waited until we landed—”

At that instant a cell phone rang somewhere in the cabin. Rachel and Chang looked around.

More than a little embarrassed, Pav grinned as he raised his cell phone. “Yes?” he said. Then, as if it would help, he put his free hand over his other ear. “You’re breaking up—”

Pav nodded, then clicked off. To Rachel he said, “It’s my father. He’s going to change locations.”

“I’m still amazed that you have these things,” Rachel said to Chang.

“Cell phones? The networks were built a generation before the Aggregates arrived. They’ve infected them, of course—waged cyberwar. But it’s one area where we’ve fought them to a draw—”

The phone rang again and Pav answered it. “I wonder what news he has?” Rachel said.

“Speaking of news,” Chang said, “our first task, once we’re settled in Darwin, is to release some information about your ‘escape’ and other activities.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“To satisfy the organizations that fronted you the equivalent of ten million dollars.” Chang gestured at the plane. “Edgely’s friends provided the plane—not the fuel, not the pilots. That all costs money.”

“Got it.”

“And you’ll need every penny where you’re—”

“Oh fuck no.” That was Pav, suddenly looking stricken.

Rachel gasped. She knew without hearing—

“Sanjay’s dead.”

SITUATION REPORT

Five of the six members of the Keanu mission
Adventure
departed Yelahanka AB Monday morning, ostensibly headed for Delhi. Sources at Yelahanka suggest that they are actually planning to leave India and make their way to Free Nation U.S.

The sixth member of
Adventure
’s crew remains at Yelahanka.

This clandestine maneuver seems to have been necessitated by two separate attacks on the crew, both attributable to forces funded by, or, in the first case of the submarine-launched missile attack, overtly answerable to the Aggregates.

All Aggregate-controlled military forces have elevated their alert status from yellow to orange and seem to be actively pursuing the
Adventure
crew, treating them as a hostile force allied with, though not controlled by, India or China.

This alert seems related to the recent consolidation of Aggregate formations in northern Arizona. (See bulletins of 1–7 April 2040.) The motive behind their apparent withdrawal from larger cities is still unknown and under investigation.

INTELLIGENCE REPORT, RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS WING,
DELHI, 18 APRIL 2040

Running through the habitat, naked, with his raggedy clothing in his arms, Dale was surprised at the ease of his escape.

And the fact that nothing and no one seemed to be moving. The silent stillness reminded him of deadly Sunday nights he had spent in various tank towns during his military career, episodes he had found to be unsettling and nerve-racking, though he could not have said why. After all, he had now spent a good deal of his life as a hermit, living in a place far more isolated than Ten Sleep, Wyoming, on a Sunday night in November. Yet the Factory habitat seemed abuzz with activity compared to the human one.

Maybe it was because of the landscape. The interior of the Factory was like a city, filled from one side to the other with structures of various sizes, some of them seeming, at times, to hum with unknown and likely unknowable activity.

The human habitat in this late hour, by contrast, was dominated by the Temple structure with a scattering of small cabinlike buildings leading from it. But even these were hard to see among the trees in the half-light.

There were no sounds at all. And strangest of all, no apparent movement . . . as if the HBs were toys that had had their batteries removed.

Even close to the “southern” or coreward end of the habitat, where the HBs had constructed a track and mining car system to transport Substance K, things were quiet, as if the equipment had not been used in days.

Dale was still reeling a bit from his communion with Keanu, however, and as he approached the core-side exit, he had one frightening thought:

He had
died
. The reason he saw no one, no movement, no life, was that he no longer existed in that universe. Given what happened with humans who died on Keanu, this wasn’t as purely terrifying a notion as it might have been—it was possible to come back.

Though not likely.

This dark fantasy persisted until Dale stubbed a bare toe on a small rock. The pain convinced him that he still lived . . . and encouraged him to put his clothes and sandals on.

Then, feeling as if he were once again completely back in the land of the living, he considered his options. He could return to the Factory and resume his explorations. He would survive; he might even prosper. Let Harley and Sasha and Jaidev and the others go to hell.

But Dale could not forget the original reason he had returned to the HBs . . . his knowledge of trouble for Rachel and the others on Earth, and his larger sense that something truly momentous and game-changing was about to happen . . . something that would affect Keanu.

There was nothing to be gained by returning to the Factory. His mission was onward, ever onward—to find Zhao and Makali.

His close contacts with Keanu left Dale with a three-dimensional real-time model of the NEO in his mind.

It proved to be a terrific guide when he slipped out of the human habitat and began prowling the tunnels that would lead him toward the Skyphoi habitat. (There was only one other choice: the route that led back to the Factory.)

He noted with amusement that the HBs had extended their mining-car operation toward the Skyphoi. The structure of rails, supports, and buckets occupied a third of the space of the tunnel. Like Dale, the HBs must have concluded that the Keanu railcars would never run again.

Or they were simply so desperate to sustain the flow of Substance K that they took the chance. (There were still big pools of Substance K inside the Factory. Dale half-suspected that the random noises he heard there were signs that the manufacturing system was still operating. If the HBs had bothered to find him, they might have saved themselves a lot of work.)

He moved swiftly across the floor of the tunnel, which was hard-packed smooth rock. Someone had strung a row of glowworms across the ceiling, giving some light. (One of the things that kept Dale from exploring every centimeter of Keanu’s passageways was the utter lack of illumination.)

As he approached the junction where entry to the Skyphoi habitat was located, Dale wondered if those gasbag creatures had given the HBs help in their operation. It seemed unlikely—and the schematic in Dale’s head was no help here, like a Google map that had not been updated.

The Skyphoi
were
involved; some kind of multicolored and asymmetrical piping took up half the entryway, which meant it was large. (The Skyphoi averaged five meters in diameter.)

It didn’t connect but ran parallel to the human mining car network that continued on past the Skyphoi nexus.

Dale wondered how long this had been going on, and who among the HBs had the ability to get the Skyphoi involved in anything human. Absent some kind of motivation—like the crisis in 2019 about Keanu’s dying power core—the gasbag creatures seemed to emerge only once every decade.

Dale was compelled to search farther. And now, for all his years of wandering within the NEO, he found himself entering Keanu Incognito.

When he accessed the map inside his head, he grew convinced that he was working his way deeper into Keanu’s interior . . . as if this particular branch of passageway were a coil winding tighter and tighter around some central shaft. He was amused to realize that, setting aside his eventual need for food and water—which he hoped to find farther on; it would be troublesome as well as humiliating to be forced to return to the human habitat—he could probably accomplish an internal orbit of the NEO . . . the three-dimensional squiggles in his mental map suggested that this passage might eventually lead him back to the Factory, the long way around.

It would still take days, but what a journey! Unfortunately, this voyage was not one of exploration. It was to deal with a crisis.

And, based on what he was seeing now, a mystery.

To Dale’s surprise, the mining track and Skyphoi tube continued on. He wondered where they would lead—his Keanu map was fuzzy regarding the space directly in front of him. He assumed there would be another habitat, possibly two . . . but how big?

And who or what would be living in them? If anyone or anything?

Wait! Whether it was the Keanu map inside his head or his own heightened senses, Dale realized that he was being followed!