Heaven's Fall (34 page)

“The other plane is actually a decoy,” Chang said.

Edgely placed his hands in front of him, palms down, right hand half a dozen centimeters above the left. “When we reach Free Nation’s radar range, we will be flying one above the other, at different altitudes.

“The two planes will show as a single blip. As we get close enough to the western coast of North America to be tracked with some fidelity, our plane will descend below tracking altitude and divert into Mexico while the target plane will turn north and fly parallel to the California coast.”

“Are you expecting it to be attacked?” Pav said.

“Yes,” Chang said. “But the transponder will show that it’s a Chinese commercial aircraft—it will be contacted and warned off, and will turn back.”

“You must have found some brave people to fly that thing,” Tea said.

“Expensive people,” Chang said.

“But also brave,” Edgely said. “They have a narrow fuel margin. They have to fly toward California long enough to draw all the tracking—”

“And targeting,” Chang said.

“—but not so long that they exhaust their fuel. They have to turn around and head back to Hawaii. There’s no place else for them to land.”

“Meanwhile,” Rachel said, “where are we?”

“On the ground in northern Mexico,” Chang said.

You hope,
Rachel thought.
And I hope so, too.

Two hours later her spirits had improved. She had showered, eaten, and assured herself that her daughter was also fed and cheered up and that Zeds was as good as he could be.

Tea had managed to clean up, too. “I feel so shallow, but I really enjoyed that,” she said. They were alone in a hallway on the second floor of the hangar building, where an executive had a fancy suite that included a private bath. Rachel had used it first, then gone for a bite with Pav while Tea took her turn. Now Tea regarded her. “So, how is all the shit you’re dealing with?”

Rachel smiled. “There’s no way back and nowhere to turn.”

“All you can do is go forward with your eyes open and your head high.”

“Even if it kills me.”

Tea laughed. “I’m with you, Rachel. Right behind you maybe, so I don’t catch the first bullet. But whatever happens, we’re all in it, too.”

“That’s what bothers me,” Rachel said. “I don’t mind risking my life—”

“But you’ve got Pav and Yahvi—”

“And all the others.” She blinked and just started crying. “I already lost Sanjay!”

“
You
didn’t lose him,” Tea said. “If the Reivers hadn’t shot your ship, you wouldn’t have had that rough landing.
They
killed him, not you.”

“They injured him. But I left him to die. . . .”

“Oh, honey, I talked to Taj. Your poor Sanjay was dead the moment they took him out of your ship. You did what you had to do . . . you acted, you led. You got us out of there.”

“To what? Being flown across the Pacific by people we don’t know? Waiting for a decoy plane so we don’t get blown out of the sky trying to invade America?”

Tea regarded her. “Take it from one of your team . . . you’re doing great. Keep moving forward.”

Tea’s words did their magic: Rachel felt comforted, though she suspected her improved feeling might also be due to being clean, or possibly just her hearty lunch.

No matter the source, she would need all her strength. She desperately needed to connect with Keanu and Harley Drake, because key information needed to be sent . . . and decisions made.

Her first target was Xavier, who was proudly emerging from the plane as promised, almost two hours after landing. “Here’s our transmitter,” he said, holding out a misshapen gray box the size of a pillow as if it were the gift of the ages. Rachel wanted to laugh. Raised in the United States for the first fourteen years of her life, she thought machines should be like Apple products, smartly designed, symmetrical, polished . . . not the wacky lumps that passed for them on Keanu.

Xavier, who clearly had a more charitable view of these products, noted Rachel’s resistance. “It works,” he said. “I just tested it.”

Given the size of the unit, they had to find her a table in a relatively private place in which to work. Then she had Xavier tell Pav she wanted to be left alone, a feeling that surprised her, since she was so reliant on him.

She was realizing that she needed to regroup, to run through her internal list of tasks. It was how she had functioned best as mayor, as some version of the “leader” Tea had cited—indeed, how she had functioned best as wife and mother.

Her biggest weakness was that she still relied on Harley Drake and Sasha Blaine, and on Jaidev and Zhao and Makali Pillay and so many others for not just support, but to be the mature ones, the better informed.

To be her parents.
Rachel was sufficiently self-aware to know that she had never recovered from losing Megan, then Zack, along with her entire life on Earth, within two years.

She had disagreed with all of them at one time or another, or found them to be in error on one subject or another. Now, here on Guam, on her way to a terrifying Reiver Aggregate facility in the former United States . . . she tried not to feel panic, to wish for one of the adults to confidently guide her.

She reminded herself she was not twelve again, but thirty-four, older than the men who had worked in mission control during the Apollo program . . . older than soldiers, sailors, pilots . . . older than Jesus when he went to the cross.

So why didn’t she feel more sure of herself?

Maybe no one did, not even generals or presidents or ship captains in the middle of storms.

None of it mattered, anyway. Unless Rachel surrendered the authority the others had granted her, giving up and telling Pav or Edgar Chang to make the decisions from this moment on . . . Tea’s advice was the only one to follow.

Forward.

Xavier’s transmitter worked beautifully. The moment Rachel switched it on, she heard Harley Drake’s voice as clearly as if they were in adjacent rooms inside the Temple. “About time,” Harley said. He was never one for idle chat. As long as Rachel had known Harley, it seemed that conversations rarely began, they just resumed.

They had a tremendous amount of catch-up to do, about the decoy trip out of Yelahanka, the flight to Darwin, the Chang-Edgely involvement . . . the nature of the Reiver Ring in the United States, and their plans for the ultimate assault on it.

Ultimately, their conversation lasted fifty minutes and left Rachel with a headache that affected her vision.

The most maddening aspect was the four-second lag between the time her words left Earth and were received on Keanu, and vice versa. Rachel had experienced it to some degree on the voyage from Keanu to Earth, but not like this. It turned what should have been a conversation into a series of statements.

Finally, she had been compelled to discuss the terrible thing that had happened to Sanjay. “We had gotten the message,” Harley said. “We’ve already told the community and held a service.”

Then Rachel had to admit that they had done nothing of the sort for their colleague . . . that she had abandoned him in the hospital at Yelahanka, that she had no idea what had happened with his body—

“Stop yourself,” Harley told her. “You left him with Taj, and that’s all you could do under the circumstances. I don’t want you to beat yourself up about this any longer, is that clear?”

Rachel reluctantly told Harley that she would.

Then Harley said, “By the way, Dale is working in league with Zhao.”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” Rachel said, not feeling that way at all.

“We’re watching him very carefully,” Harley said. “And Sasha tells me we are about to lose you. . . .”

The signal ended abruptly, as the antenna on Keanu’s surface rotated below the horizon as seen from the Pacific Ocean.

The exchange left her feeling better—at least Harley and the others knew Rachel’s situation. It was up to them to execute their half of the operation, or rather their two thirds of it.

For the first time on her trip to Earth, Rachel began to feel as though she was the beneficiary of some decent luck.

They would need it. By returning to Earth orbit, she and the other leaders had essentially painted a big red target on the Near-Earth Object, bringing Keanu within range of some kind of Reiver planet-killer beam.

Rachel was turning toward Xavier, to thank him for the use of the communicator, when Edgely arrived.

“The second plane is on approach.”

Greetings! Emerging from radio and other silence to say . . . all is well.

I’ve been traveling, seeing the sights, working on fulfilling a lifetime dream. (For those of you who have been following me for twenty years, you know what I mean.)

Which is all I can say here. “But soft, we are observed!”

Hoping for some news I can talk about soon!

COLIN EDGELY TO THE KETTERING GROUP,
APRIL 18, 2040

“What exactly do you know?”

Once he had penetrated the vesicle factory and been confronted by Zhao, Dale knew he could no longer escape. Zhao had closed and locked the exit from the habitat, even though Dale was fairly sure he could still find a way out.

But he didn’t particularly want to. Something in his head—not the map, but some part of the connection with Keanu’s controlling intelligence—told him that
this
was where he needed to be, and possibly that Zhao was the one human to meet.

The former spy had shed his Skyphoi environment suit and was busy checking on the odd-looking, lumpish proteus-created controls that operated a set of spray guns and other devices that were slowly but steadily building the vesicle. He was talking to Dale, but not concentrating on him.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you?” Dale said.

Now Zhao turned away from his work to face him. “I realize you can’t help being an ass, but please try. Surely you know that Harley told me you had resurfaced with some vague warnings.”

“I wouldn’t call them vague.”

“And you still have the incredibly annoying habit of picking on a modifier and arguing about that instead of the substance of an entire sentence. Fine, to repeat while also expanding: What exactly do you know about the dangers to the
Adventure
crew?”

“That their approach had been detected and tracked, that some hostile force fired on them . . .” Dale trailed off, since Zhao kept nodding as if he already knew that much. Well, if he had talked to Harley, he did.

“Anything specific?”

Dale weighed his answer. During his trek from the human habitat, he had felt a growing certainty that Rachel and her team were in danger again. But in order to fully access the Keanu data banks, Dale needed to engage in his naked interface . . . and there had been no opportunity.

Nevertheless, earlier memories seemed to have grown clearer. “The Reivers have a big project that is about to go live. When they pull the trigger, a lot of humans are going to die.”

“Did you tell Harley this?”

“No. It wasn’t—”