Heaven's Fall (51 page)

“As far as you’re concerned, we’re just a guided meteoroid.”

“Meteor at the moment,” Zhao said. “A meteoroid when we enter the atmosphere.” He smiled, but not happily. “And a meteorite if all that’s left is a smoking hole in the ground.”

“Becoming a kinetic energy weapon—a giant cannonball—is one of the options, correct?” Sanjay said.

“Yes. Worst-case scenario, we simply crash into this Reiver facility at high speed. That ought to wreck it.”

“And us.”

“I did call it a worst case.”

In the event the vesicle survived its landing—or crash—and if Zhao and team were able to operate undetected, other substances could be delivered via data networks. “That covers everything, I think,” Zhao said.

“What’s the primary landing site?”

“Aquatic, coast of California. The vesicle will do its thing”—which meant rotate, absorbing terrestrial material while dispersing water-and aerosol-borne weapons—“and we will signal Rachel and the others and hope they can rendezvous.

“Then,
bam!
” Zhao clapped his hands. “Weapons launched,
Adventure
crew rescued, off we go, home to Keanu.” Now he regarded Sanjay. “You knew all this.”

“We have to change it.” So said the voices in his head, quite insistently now.

“To what?” Zhao spoke so loudly that Makali and the others stopped moving.

“To landing as close to the facility as possible, as soon as we can.”

“Exposing ourselves to attack? The Reivers flew a vesicle to Earth twenty years ago. We have to assume they know how to breach or destroy one. Hell, we could probably be destroyed by American missiles if we get pounded often enough! And,” he said, not waiting for Sanjay to continue his argument, “we lose our waterborne weapons and probably the aerosols, too. Why would we march into this war with a third of our army?”

“The mission is changing.”

“I don’t see it.”

“You don’t have my perspective.”

Zhao sneered. “This is your Keanu link talking to you.”

“You don’t believe it? You used to.” Sanjay remembered Zhao’s tales of his encounter with the Architect, his interactions with Zack Stewart and especially the Revenant Yvonne Hall.

“Seeing Dale Scott as a proponent made me reevaluate Keanu’s taste in messengers.”

“Dale Scott is not in contact with Keanu—”

“I rather think he is, insane as that sounds—”

“Not the way I am!” Sanjay said.

“For God’s sake, Zhao!” Makali joined the argument. “Dale Scott never
died
. Dale Scott never became a
Revenant
!” She pointed at Sanjay. “This is how Keanu and the Architects communicate with us! Listen to him—or call Jaidev and Harley and have them tell you the same thing.”

Zhao blinked. “You’re right,” he said, his voice notably softer and quieter. “I am forced to admit that the pressure is affecting me.” He was a brilliant and capable man, the most versatile of all the HBs with his skills in manipulating people as well as machinery. But who could function normally when dealing with the fate of the Earth? “What is the new plan?”

Makali and the other four had not resumed their work but rather drifted closer to Zhao and Sanjay. What was being said might mean whether they lived or died.

“We are no longer a weapons platform; we are now a courier ship. The goal is to get me close enough to the Reiver facility, as soon as possible, to contact Rachel and her team directly.”

“We can’t get there in much less than ten hours,” Zhao said. “Maybe we can accelerate and shave an hour or two.”

Sanjay could feel the response that data triggered. Pleasure, but also more urgency. “Do it, then.”

“What’s so important that you have to tell her?”

“Keanu’s systems know what the Reiver facility is—it’s called the Ring—and what it’s for.”

“Which is?”

“To teleport a Reiver army to the Architect home world.”

“You just lost me.”

Sanjay felt a pressure in his skull so intense that he thought he was having a stroke. His vision blurred for a moment, then returned. “You don’t need to understand it. I don’t. But you need to accept it.”

“The Reivers are opening a portal to another planet . . . in another star system? If they could do that, why did they ever bother with Keanu or the vesicle?”

“It’s new technology for them. Untried.”

“So maybe it won’t work.”

“We can’t take that chance.”

“Doesn’t that argue in favor of our original mission?”

Sanjay shook his head. He shared Zhao’s position, but he was no longer speaking entirely for himself. “Even if we successfully launch all our weapons, some Reivers will survive . . . and we will have killed thousands or even millions of human beings.”

Zhao appeared frustrated. “I just don’t see how taking control of the Ring solves the problem of Reivers on Earth. Wouldn’t it be better to blow up the damn thing and kill them all?”

“Keanu has a plan for the Ring.”

“Oh. And the Reivers?”

“Some will be destroyed. But there is a . . . greater need.” Sanjay struggled to articulate the message. The flood of images and data was so intense and so diverse that he couldn’t accept it. “I . . . I’m no longer certain that Keanu wants the Reivers destroyed, if that’s the price.”

Then he vomited, explosively, with all the horrific side effects that meant. “Oh, Jesus,” Makali said.

His discomfort was short-lived. As he accepted water and stopped shaking, he said, “Here’s how we take control, and why.”

As he started speaking, he saw an expression he never thought he would ever see on Zhao Buoming’s face:

Surprise.

And then, something that surely passed for excitement. Then Zhao said, “I hope the entire plan doesn’t rest on us alone.”

Sanjay felt a jolt like a bolt of lightning in his head, and a shiver up his spine, a form of confirmation. “It doesn’t,” he said, both relieved and disappointed. Relieved because it doubled the chances that this crazy idea might work.

Disappointed because it doubled the chances that Keanu would no longer need him, and he would die as quickly as the earlier Revenants.

QUESTION:
For Mr. Toutant, what is your role in the
Adventure
crew?

TOUTANT:
Movie star. (laughter)

QUESTION:
Seriously.

TOUTANT:
Well, I’m not a pilot, I’m not a politician, so (pats his ample stomach) call me ballast.

QUESTION:
You’re not answering.

TOUTANT:
You pick up on things.

INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040

Dale Scott had spent years flying Air Force jets on combat missions and routine patrols.

Then, during his decade at NASA, he had access to the sleek T-38 jets, which gave him even more hours of high-performance exhilaration.

He had been also launched into orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

None of those experiences approached the thrill and satisfaction he felt in “flying” Keanu, even though his active role lasted less than fifteen minutes.

He had made his way back to the Factory in less than an hour—there was nothing like compulsion, anger, and good directions to shorten a trip.

The control center that Keanu guided him to was a structure he had passed dozens of times over the years. He recalled making plans to check out the place, but that applied to fifty other buildings as well.

When he arrived, he realized that he had stuck his head inside at least once in a dozen years . . . finding nothing but inert, incomprehensible machines and displays.

Today, however, these items were alive and working, as if waiting for him.

By now the messages inside his head had resolved with impressive clarity; he knew exactly what screens to touch, in what order, with what timing.

He executed the intricate series of commands, feeling a glow of satisfaction each time he was successful.

With the final touch, he believed that he felt a shudder in his feet . . . Keanu’s propulsion system coming alive.

On one central screen, entire rows and cells of figures began to change.

“Houston, we have ignition,” Dale said.

Another screen lit up with the most detailed Keanu schematic he had ever seen—not for the first time in his exile, he wished for an iPhone so he could capture that image. Jaidev Mahabala, Sasha Blaine, and Harley Drake—indeed, any one of the HBs—would have introduced money to the human habitat just to be able to buy the thing.

It showed the spheroid of the NEO, of course; that wasn’t surprising. Also visible: a number of habitats that Dale recognized, including the Factory. What fascinated him was seeing at least twice as many habitats as he expected, along with a network of tunnels and passages far more extensive than his explorations had revealed.

There was the core, too, a central cylinder running roughly south to north and containing Keanu’s primary power source, the fusion generator Zack Stewart had died restarting.

Near both poles of Keanu were a dozen tubes that were different from the internal tramway or Substance K piping . . . these had a slight conical shape, like trumpets, with their mouths appearing to reach Keanu’s surface.

Of course, Dale realized: These were scoops for sucking up interstellar gas and other materials to fuel the power core. (The schematic showed that there were other methods of gathering fuel or energy, including a network of grids on the NEO’s surface.)

Spaced equidistantly around Keanu’s equator and poles were smaller tubes that Dale recognized as propulsion jets.

And, finally, three other passages . . . vesicle-launching tubes.

Ultimately the schematic was a hodgepodge of different systems added over time. What else would one expect from a ten-thousand-year-old starship? It was likely that none of the equipment was original . . . that it had all been redesigned, upgraded, remade over the millennia.

And, given the variety of habitats, by different races, each with its own technology, and its own relationship to the now-absent or extinct Architects.

Humans were latecomers, Dale realized. And in twenty years had done nothing!
We don’t even know what we’re living in,
he thought.

But for the moment, one human had been empowered. Dale Scott had activated Keanu’s propulsion system for the second time in human history. The first activation, twenty years ago, had stopped Keanu’s flight out of the solar system and put the NEO on a long, slow trajectory back toward Earth.

That event had been controlled from the Temple, but only the way that a human space mission could be “controlled” from a backup center . . . basic commands could be given, but little else. The real calculations and decisions took place in the primary centers.

Here in the Factory node, Dale had finer, more precise control than the Temple.

He needed it, because he was not only blasting Keanu out of its circular orbit four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth.

He was sending it on a collision course toward Earth.

He wondered whether Jaidev and the others knew that. In the past month, Keanu had made a burn of its system to slow down enough to be captured by Earth’s gravity, so, Dale knew, the backup node in the Temple was still active. But would anybody be watching? Would its rudimentary displays suddenly flash red or sound some kind of alarm?

He would have loved to see the look on Harley Drake’s face when he realized that someone else had taken the stick and was flying his NEO.

There was still work to be done, of course. An object the size of Keanu—over one hundred kilometers across—and flying at a velocity that was steadily increasing to ten or twenty thousand kilometers an hour needed to be able to tweak its trajectory.

Because the idea was not to
hit
Earth.
The idea was to fly close, within a thousand kilometers, possibly even lower, on a certain path over a certain spot at a certain time.

Dale hoped that someone on Earth would be aiming a camera at Keanu as it approached—and then he realized that every human on the fucking planet would be watching the sky! Having a bright white NEO the size of a major asteroid growing bigger and bigger would send people running for hills and shelters . . . at least, those too stupid to realize that the impact of an object the size of Keanu would be a civilization-ending event.

(The rock that had killed the dinosaurs was a third the diameter of Keanu.)

The smarter ones would hold each other’s hands, say their prayers, confront their fate, watching in horrified wonder as the shiny thing grew monstrous in the sky.

What a show that would be!