Heaven's Fall (43 page)

“And since we’re all being calm about things,” Xavier said, hoping to keep everyone’s attention on him, not his cargo, “I would love to know how you found us.”

“I don’t have that information,” Counselor Nigel said, “and probably couldn’t tell you if I did. Please be aware, however, that entry to Free Nation airspace is tightly controlled. Any unauthorized aircraft was in danger.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Xavier said. Then he shouted, “Zeds!”

All heads turned toward the Sentry, who, bent over like an old man, paused midway through in the cockpit door. As they looked away, as innocuously as he could, Xavier kicked the connecting tube free of the Plan B container. “Wait for me at the bottom of the stairs!”

The only giveaway was the smell of residual Substance K poison in the tube.

The ruse seemed to have worked: Xavier stepped away from the printer, past Counselor Nigel and his two companions, and was about to be grabbed by the soldiers when he had another thought. “Can we wait just a second?”

He started digging through the Substance K cargo. “Don’t do that,” Counselor Nigel said. He and his male companion tackled Xavier before he could examine more than four boxes.

But that was sufficient. As he was gently but firmly hauled forward and toward the cabin door, he carried with him the sight of a small unit stuck to the bottom of one of the containers.

It was a bug, almost certainly some kind of tracking device that had told Free Nation U.S. and the Aggregates exactly where Rachel’s crew was at all times.

Fucking Kaushal.

The lamestream media has been telling us for years that the Aggregates brought peace and prosperity to North America—that’s only the biggest of their lies.

But now they are ignoring the stories of some kind of migration, all the units and formations moving to the southwest, apparently Arizona.

At the same time Keanu is back and sending ships here. Will we be seeing some kind of landing in the desert? If so, will it be Aggregates leaving?

Or more of them arriving?

Or something even worse!?!

POSTER TREYNOLDS, TRUEPOST.COM,
APRIL 20, 2040

“L minus eighty-five,” a woman’s voice said, as Counselor Kate swiped a key and opened the door to Ring mission control.

“You’re sure you’re not giving me too much time?” Whit said. He joked when nervous. Amazingly, few people ever understood that.

“This is an emergency. We had a dropout.”

The twenty hours between his bizarre encounter with Aggregate Carbon-143 and the terminal count to First Light were the strangest and most exhausting in Whit Murray’s life.

His THE handler, Counselor Kate, had found him just seconds after the Aggregate creature departed. “Come with me,” she said. “You saw the clock.”

Fifteen minutes later he was inside Ring mission control, a windowless room whose walls were screens showing the Ring structure and elements, some of them close-ups of pipes and electrical connections, others of nasty-looking military hardware, still others landscapes. Overall, it reminded Whit of old footage he had seen of the moments before rocket launches . . . the giant frosted tubes, the cables, the gantries, the wisps of vapor.

Although every human in the room seemed calm, there was no chatter, no sound except for labored breathing. It was the tensest environment Whit had ever experienced. For a moment he regretted possessing his “talent,” or at least letting it be discovered. “Here,” Kate said, showing him a new station in the last row, which was empty.

The cubicle looked a lot like his former station—the same chair, the same keyboard and screen. What was different was a cyberlink headset and gloves. “Put these on.” Kate picked them up and prepared to help him.

“I’ve worn them before,” he said, though to play games when he was thirteen, not to help control a beam of energy strong enough to microwave a planet.

The headset and gloves were warm, as if someone else had just removed them. Whit wondered what had happened to the previous wearer—on a break, he hoped, as opposed to being taken out and executed for some kind of failure. He wanted to ask Kate what “dropout” meant, but this wasn’t the moment.

She wasn’t leaving him, however. “I’ll be with you.” She sat down at the unused station next to Whit’s and donned her own headset and gloves.

Then, as his eyes, ears, and brain adjusted to the link, as he felt the familiar meld with the system (he had a mouse pad but would also be able to access new data with the twitch of a facial muscle), Whit forgot about Kate and actually ceased to worry about his role.

He just took in the experience, literally feeling the pulse of power as it built throughout the Ring system, being pulled from grids all over the western Free Nation U.S. One window showed him the grid and the flow of electrons. Another displayed the storage.

Then there was the array of mirrors that would catch the initial burst of energy and shape it. There were hundreds of them—a figure Whit knew as a number, but something quite different as an experience. He felt them all as petals of a gigantic silvery flower, each quivering in a gentle breeze.

In another window was the glory of the portal itself, still a rotating, vibrating wire frame (its shape responded to minute shifts in the aiming of the mirrors) thousands of meters tall . . . like a ghostly sun hovering over the Arizona desert.

He had access to the strike force, too, the rows and rows of vehicles poised to roll through the portal the instant it opened.

And they would be arriving on some other planet, an idea Whit still found unlikely.

Wait, here was a window that showed the target planet!

“Counselor Kate,” he said, a bit tentatively. Who else would be listening?

“Yes, Whit.”

“Is there some window or program I should be working in?”

“Not today. This is your orientation. We anticipate adjustments after First Light and will be conducting daily sims until launch. Your job is to get to know what’s in those windows, because you might wind up working in any one of them.”

Much as Whit disliked the sound of daily sims, especially with the end result being the irradiation of Free Nation U.S., he loved being given permission to roam freely.

He had always heard that the Aggregate networks had everything you could possibly want to know. It was the Internet plus the undernet plus whatever the aliens knew. And once you had access, you had total access.

Granted, humans would be unable to understand much of what they would find . . . but that still left a considerable amount of data, such as that dealing with humans and what happened to them.

Like Whit’s parents.

Not just yet, though. Better to see what exactly is going on—

“Sixty minutes,” the countdown lady said, seemingly whispering right inside his head.

Excellent. As the count progressed, Whit glanced at the operational windows on his screen only long enough to be sure things were still going forward.

The rest of the hour was a glorious dive into a pool of wonder . . . the Aggregate data on the world they planned to invade.

The only drawback was that, unlike other data screens at Site A, which were optimized for human use, specifically human users of English with Arabic numerals, the material on the target world retained Aggregate marking and terminology.

Nevertheless, images needed no captions. And there were no obvious limits to access.

As Whit had come to expect, the material was displayed like a tree, starting with an image of the world itself . . . a sphere with multicolored horizontal bands (red and orange at the poles, becoming bright blue at its equator) and a series of rings around its equator. The planet seemed large even though Whit could not read the scalar notations and saw nothing to compare it to. Maybe it was the resemblance to Jupiter or Saturn.

Interesting: Where Saturn’s rings, seen close up, were clearly made of billions of fragments of ice and rock, a quick zoom in showed that the fragments in this world’s rings were uniform cubes.
Of what?
Whit wondered.
Or why?

As the view shifted, Whit saw another startling image of structures beyond the rings . . . at least three moons, all in an orbit that had the same inclination, an obvious sign of artificial placement.

The view swooped close to one of the moons, revealing gridlike structures on a surface that resembled, in many places, a cue ball. It reminded Whit of images of Keanu taken by the departing
Destiny
astronauts back in 2019 as encrusted soil and ice on the NEO’s surface boiled off and revealed similar smooth material below. Were these distant moons cousins of Keanu? Was he seeing starships under construction?

It was impressive and even terrifying to think that the inhabitants of this planet had the desire and ability to move and reshape rings and moons.

For that matter, what was this planet’s
name
? Every window bore the same notation, but in Aggregate lettering and figures. He would have loved to have just that single term translated, though it was entirely possible, given the Aggregates, that their designation for the target world required a string of sixty-odd figures.

Whit decided to just think of it as “Rainbow,” since the progression of its banding seemed to match up with the visible spectrum seen in a rainbow.

Where was Rainbow? Almost certainly very far away. Whit wondered if the planet was a relatively close neighbor of Earth’s, possibly circling Alpha Centauri or some star like that. Probably not. A starship like Keanu could make the voyage from Alpha Centauri to Earth. A rational intelligence would choose that mode over the energy portal, if said energy portal left your departure planet a smoking ruin. . . .

But who ever said the Aggregates were rational? By human standards?

And who lived there? Were its inhabitants machinelike bugs similar to the Aggregates? Or something entirely different?

Maybe this was the home of the Sentries or the Skyphoi, some of the other aliens inhabiting Keanu. Either of them could have been Aggregate enemies.

Or humanoids?

So far Whit had to be satisfied with aerial views, satellite imagery showing broad rivers and immense forests, the usual mountains and plains. The undeveloped areas, if that was what they were, looked much like those of planet Earth, allowing for an unusual color tint (everything seemed more purple than green, though that might have been the Aggregate filtering, not true color). Whit guessed that undeveloped landscapes looked pretty much the same everywhere.

(It also seemed that Rainbow was prone to storms. Every relatively close image had a wall of menacing thunderclouds on the horizon. Wider angles had swirling cyclonic structures in their hearts.)

There were cityscapes, too, though, and these were something else . . . one of them covered an entire continent. Whit had seen images of urban sprawl from space, but human cities had winding rivers and freeways and obvious downtowns and parks and twisty streets.

Rainbow’s giant cities were like . . . well, they reminded him of circuit boards in their angularity and their utter lack of any apparently organic life.

Of course, he was still seeing everything from a great height. He blinked to see if there were other windows or tools—

Oh, much better. Suddenly Whit was falling very fast, like a passenger on a meteoroid or, more likely, some kind of space probe. Given the way the ground was rushing toward him, not a probe expected to be returned.

The image went black.

Whit clicked: Here was another view, from a more stable platform. Now he was flying above a purple Rainbow forest, thunderclouds ahead of him and likely making the ride a bumpy one (the imagery seemed to vibrate).

It was not just a visual experience: Whit could feel stinging wintry wind on his face, hear air rushing past his ears, smell a mossy fragrance so thick it almost choked him.

He spied a formation in the distant mountains . . . a giant dish embedded in a valley with a tall spike of some kind pointing skyward.

That image died abruptly, too.

A new one . . . now Whit skimmed across a body of water, then low tidal land as he approached a city. Unlike a human habitation, there were no suburbs, no gradual transition from open field to town, just an abrupt
here you are
, flying over blocky golden towers. The wind dropped; he heard a low, rumbling hum; he smelled smoke.

He was swooping low now, barely skirting the tops of the Rainbow buildings. (And unlike human buildings, roofs here seemed to be designed with as much care as the fronts. They probably had some function.)

Suddenly his platform, probably some kind of remotely piloted spycraft, made an abrupt turn and dive . . . now Whit could see creatures in the “streets,” and miracle of miracles, they were humanoid, though slow moving—

“Fifteen minutes.” Whit heard the countdown voice for the first time in three quarters of an hour. Had he been so absorbed in his “tour” of planet Rainbow that he’d missed the other announcements?

He gave the Ring windows more attention. Most were as they had been earlier: static views, graphic representations of power levels and aiming points, all moving in one direction or another.

One quadrant of Whit’s display had an orange overlay, however, and several figures pulsing in red.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a pair of operators emerging from their cubicles. One seemed quite agitated, gesturing so violently that a trio of THE officers immediately appeared.

Followed by a formation of Aggregates. That was never a good sign.

“Whit!” Counselor Kate’s voice hissed in his headset. “Get back to your screen!”

Whit realized he had poked his head up like a prairie dog. He turned away from what was becoming a scuffle and tried to concentrate on his screen, especially his views of planet Rainbow, the city, its slow-moving inhabitants.

He wondered when and how this imagery had been obtained—if Dehm and Carbon-143 were telling the truth, the energy portal was something the Aggregates had never used before. Not only had they never sent themselves or military hardware across the gulf of light-years, they hadn’t sent data, either. Both were subject to the same limitations.