Heaven's Fall (5 page)

But during a trip to the Cape he had been injured in a car crash that took the life of Megan Doyle Stewart—wife of astronaut Zachary Stewart (and later a Revenant). He had lost the use of his legs, a condition that persisted for years on Keanu.

Harley was an adaptable man and he made the best of his situation, but even after Keanu technology managed to make him mobile again, those special habits died hard. He was no longer used to seeing eye-to-eye—in every sense of the phrase.

“Exile hasn’t been good to you, Dale. You look like the Unabomber, and the blue bag is a bad fashion choice. Maybe you ought to come back to the habitat.”

Dale had believed he was long past the time when Harley Drake could insult him. He felt that he had thrived in exile. But Harley’s words forced him to touch his face, recognize that he wore a patchy beard. His hair was long, too, what there was of it: bald on top, his fringe reached to his neck.

Even his face had changed: His nose was bent, thanks to an accident a decade ago. And there were markings . . . tattoos of a sort . . . on one cheek and both arms and lots of other places Harley Drake could not see.

And Dale’s clothing? The faded sky-blue jumpsuit modeled after the uniform he and Harley had worn in their NASA careers was looking shabby. “You know how it gets,” he said. “Live alone—”

“I have no idea. What is it you want? Food? A bath? Better clothing?” Here Harley almost spat the word: “Forgiveness?

“And what the hell did you ask? Get what moving?”

“Keanu.”

“We turned it around years ago. You were there.”

“Turning it around and guiding it into Earth orbit are two entirely different challenges.” He smiled. Harley said nothing.
Fine,
Dale thought. “I came here to help you out and maybe offer a trade.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way—or maybe you can take this the right way—but I don’t think you have anything to offer.”

“There’s trouble with Rachel Stewart.”

Now he had his attention! “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I know that she and Pav and four others landed on Earth yesterday, in India. I also know that you are in touch with them, but not as much as you’d like to be—or should be.”

“Fine, and no big secret, by the way. So what?”

Before Dale could answer—he hesitated because he was still not sure exactly what he wanted to reveal—both men heard Harley’s name called.

Looking concerned, Sasha Blaine arrived, a whirling vision in scarves and long red hair. She was in her early fifties—a dozen years younger than Drake—taller than most men and, with a bit of added weight, larger, too. Dale knew that she was fiercely intelligent—emphasis on
fierce
—a Yale mathematician who had the bad luck to be working in Houston mission control at the time of the
Destiny-7
fiasco, and the Big Scoop that followed.

She had never liked Dale. “Get away from him, you son of a bitch.”

“We’re just talking, Sash,” Harley said. It didn’t seem to satisfy Sasha; she stood there with arms folded, as if daring Dale to launch a personal assault. “Dale was just about to tell me how he knows the details of Rachel’s mission.”

This information didn’t lessen Sasha’s annoyance to any detectable degree. She simply said, “Bullshit. He’s been living in caves for years.”

“I’ve been spending most of my time in the Factory,” Dale said. “The rest of you should visit. You might learn something.”

“Like what?” She was still ready to spring at Dale.

“Like the fact that your big secret surprise landing was not only expected all over Earth, the vehicle was attacked. And whatever you’ve got planned next, it’s not going to work.”

Now Sasha turned to Harley, who said, “I think it’s worth a listen.”

“Then,” she said, “he can come back to the Temple. For however long it takes to hear him out . . .” And she turned to Dale: “Then you go back to the hole you crawled out of.”

The day
Adventure
returned to Earth, Dale Scott returned to the Beehive, his first visit to the human habitat in three years.

As Harley and Sasha’s greeting showed, he hadn’t asked permission. While his former hab-mates had their mayor and council, they never had sufficient reason to establish a police force, much less an immigration service. There weren’t enough of them. They were also pretty well behaved.

In fact, with the exception of Zhao Buoming, a former Chinese intelligence agent and murderer (he killed a man on the Houston-Bangalores’ first day aboard Keanu), now solid citizen, Dale Scott was the community’s most notable bogeyman. His crimes fell into categories like “vagrancy” and “petty theft” (which implied private property, a fairly dubious concept given the way the HBs operated), or “failure to contribute communal labor.” Guilty of that charge!

It really came down to, “Scott, you have a bad attitude.” Well, shit yes. It had ruined a marriage and an astronaut career and had made his life on Keanu miserable.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t tried to change. During the weeks that followed his arrival, his overland explore with Zack Stewart and Makali Pillay and Wade Williams and Valya Makarova—a space trek that may have saved Keanu from the Reivers!—Dale had consciously and openly tried to listen to others, to do what job-jar tasks needed doing, to share, to smile.

To no avail. True, Zack Stewart, Wade Williams, and Dale’s lover, Valya, had been killed in the big trek. Also true, while the Reivers on Keanu had been exterminated, untold numbers had escaped, not only stealing the only obvious means of transport off Keanu but surely heading for Earth.

For some reason Makali, the Aussie-born exobiologist who was just as much a part of the overland trek to the Sentry habitat as Dale, escaped all blame for what went wrong.

After a year of sanctions that resembled the silence that offenders received at military schools, Dale finally confronted Harley Drake. “What did I do wrong?”

“You lost Zack Stewart. Williams died. Your girlfriend, too.”

“You know the conditions were insanely difficult. Makali and I were lucky to survive!”

“I know. And you’re a pilot, so that’s your story and you’re sticking to it.”

“Come on, Harls! Are people saying I killed the others? Wouldn’t that be kind of suicidal?”

“People are saying,” Harley said, “that you might not have tried very
hard
to save them.”

“I didn’t want to save Zack Stewart?”

“You mean the guy who kicked you off ISS and ruined your life?”

Dale closed his eyes. This conversation had taken place near the interior wall of the human habitat . . . the one opposite the Beehive. Looking back toward the Temple, three kilometers distant, Dale had been able to see evidence of progress and industry . . . fields under cultivation, small structures built, people moving with purpose.

They had all done well in the first year . . . avoiding starvation and plagues and the sort of conflicts that frequently—automatically?—afflicted small human groups in isolation.

Dale had tried to be part of it. He had wanted to work with the Bangalore magicians Jaidev and Daksha, the geniuses who devised the “poison pill” that killed the Reivers, who then turned their considerable skills to learning and operating Keanu’s proteus printing and fabrication system, turning out everything from T-shirts to coffee cups, from penicillin to sweet corn. He possessed a degree in engineering, didn’t he?

So, it turned out, did most of the HBs. It wasn’t really a surprise, given that the Bangalore Object scooped up staffers from ISRO mission control.

“There’s a huge delta between thinking a guy did you wrong, and killing him.”

“Letting him die,” Harley had said. “But I take your point.”

Accompanied by Camilla, the child Revenant, Zack Stewart had died a hero’s death, carrying a thermonuclear trigger into the deadly core of Keanu in order to reboot its power system. Dale had been so impressed that for several moments, perhaps hours afterward, he had forgotten what a smug, arrogant, entitled prick Stewart was. “I can’t believe that’s the reason no one is talking to me.”

“Some people are talking to you, Dale. I am.” Which was true, but irrelevant. Dale Scott and Harley Drake had too much history to overcome. They would always talk, even if it meant arguing.

“You’re not enough, Harls.”

Harley Drake shook his head, then said, “Okay, it’s more than that.”

“So you acknowledge that I do have a problem.”

“You are no one’s idea of a team player. You are all too willing to let other people work so you don’t have to. You will screw any woman who gives you a moment’s opportunity.

“And, worst of all, I think, you can’t be throwing around terms like
haji
and
camel jockey
and expect people of Hindu extraction to like and trust you. I don’t even know what the fuck you were thinking—I mean,
camel jockey
?”

Dale opened his mouth to protest that he hadn’t used such terms, or wouldn’t if he thought about it, but the
camel jockey
confirmed it. The automatic use of derogatory terms just came easily to him by nature—nature reinforced by two unpleasant tours of duty in Iraq thirty-five years earlier.

“Can I apologize?”

“I’d recommend it,” Harley said. “I wouldn’t put much hope in a reprieve.”

“So this is some kind of life sentence.”

“It’s a small group with a long memory. All you can do is give it time.”

Giving things time was never one of Dale Scott’s talents. If the HBs were going to isolate him, he would simply withdraw.

And he had . . . ultimately to his great benefit.

Thinking of long-dead Zack Stewart, Dale felt a bit smug and entitled himself as he accompanied Harley and Sasha deeper into the human habitat. As he met the eyes of original HBs and the first generation—
yavaki
was what they called each other: “young ones”—Dale sensed their defensive pride in their tidy fields and residences, in the cute little walkways and gardens.

Yes, it was nice, but it was also suffocating.

He never understood everyone’s doglike attachment to the human habitat. Yes, it was where they all arrived—and the place that the Architect/Keanu had modified for them. But Keanu was around a hundred kilometers in diameter, and mostly hollow. It could have held twenty equally useful habitats.

Harley had tried to find as many as he could. It had not been easy; up to the week after his arrival on the NEO, to the moment of core reignition, Keanu had possessed a series of subway car–like pods that zipped through the same web of tunnels that allowed nano-goo to flow.

The cars still existed, and still looked as though they were functional, but the control system had ceased to operate. It was as if Zack Stewart’s brave, self-sacrificing reboot had brought Keanu back online in safe mode . . . basic systems like propulsion and life support working, but none of the extras.

So Dale had been limited to the habitats he could reach on foot, which turned out to be four: the Sentry space, which was aquatic and filled with what he considered giant lily pads. And Sentries. Dale had not enjoyed his first visit to the Sentry habitat, when he was in flight and Sentries were the enemy. And while hostilities had ceased by the time of his second visit, it was an oppressive place: wet, damp, smelly.

Adjacent to the Sentries was a dead habitat, one that he and Zack Stewart and crew had crossed in their inner space trek. Poking around in that ruined landscape was fascinating and also bittersweet, because it reminded Dale of his dreams of exploring the Moon—dreams that had largely been killed by Stewart.

Dale had also ventured into the realm of the Skyphoi—that was the way he thought of it—the air-based creatures who communicated by changing colors and seemed blissfully unaware of such mundane matters as buildings or vehicles or, as Dale had proved, visitors.

The Skyphoi habitat was cylindrical in cross section, like the others Dale knew, but was filled with a thick atmosphere and clouds of living things, like airborne algae, and lacked a proper floor. Entering it, Dale had had to descend to the lower hemisphere, an incredibly disconcerting voyage that reminded him of a hike he had taken to the bottom of the Grand Canyon . . . without the charming scenery or the Colorado River.

No alien entity had landscaped the lower half of the Skyphoi cylinder, either, so it was filled with boulders and fissures (even in Keanu’s relatively benign internal climates, weathering still left its mark, especially over a few thousand years) and tons of debris, garbage, and what surely had to be Skyphoi guano.

The smell alone had been enough to cause the intrepid explorer to turn back. Then there was the suffocating, potentially toxic Skyphoi atmosphere.

No, Dale had probably spent more time in the Skyphoi habitat than any human, but the competition was non-existent.

And the Skyphoi remained a mystery, the darkest of the three bad habitats.

Dale didn’t really want to criticize his fellow HBs for their lack of curiosity, but he was pretty sure that he was the only one who had seen them all, who would know much of anything about them, firsthand. At least on purpose.