“Your future is bright, Mr. Murray.”
And with that, the speaking unit stepped back in line, and the whole crew marched forward into the Nevada evening, in the general direction of the metro stop . . . Hell, he thought, maybe they were headed to the Atlantis for a round of roulette and a few drinks.
Whit would never know. He was left with his friends from THE.
He shifted his backpack. “Do I have to relocate?”
“Not far,” Counselor Margot said. “Department Two Hundred Ninety-Two is located in northern Arizona. You will also hear it called ‘Site A.’”
That was a relief. Because if THE had told him, Your new job is in Cairo, he’d have to get to Cairo tomorrow. Which would leave no time for packing: He would simply have to turn, get to McCarran, and get the first plane to Egypt, leaving behind whatever clothes and possessions he had in his locker.
There would be some allowance for the time change—but he would have to be there by close of business.
“How is this different from my current work?” Which was designing and testing subsystems for power beams.
“Our world is about to be invaded,” Counselor Kate said. Whit was getting the idea that her role in the team was to be dramatic.
His reaction must have shown skepticism. (In addition to having a face that encouraged people to get pissed off at him, his face hid nothing.) Counselor Hans hauled out his pad and displayed it to Whit.
It showed a surveillance camera image of a bullet-shaped vehicle, half-shadowed, obviously in space. “This vehicle took off from Keanu three days ago. It will land somewhere on Earth tomorrow, we believe.”
“What kind of invading force is that?” Whit said, never unable to keep from saying what he thought. “One ship against a planet?”
“One ship can unleash any number of devastating chemical, biological, or cyber weapons,” Counselor Hans said, sounding a lot like the kind of person who would coldly unleash any one of them. “And we cannot assume this will be the only one, merely the first of a possible wave.”
“I’m as concerned as I am intrigued,” Whit said, truthfully. “But what—?”
“We’re preparing to strike back, if necessary. A team has been in place for a year . . . but now it needs to be expanded with young, fresh minds like yours.”
“I don’t know anything about spacecraft or orbital mechanics,” he said. He didn’t even know enough about spaceflight to understand the possible jobs.
“The nouns change,” Counselor Kate said, smiling, “but the verbs remain the same.”
Before Whit could ask what the hell that meant, Counselor Hans said, “If you can understand fluid dynamics, you can do orbital mechanics.”
Okay, so he would be doing orbital mechanics now. Forget the two years he’d just spent on electromagnetic fields and plasmas, something he’d been studying since age fourteen. You didn’t say no. You wouldn’t die—not immediately. You’d just lose the Aggregates’ trust while winding up on THE’s shitlist, meaning you would be “offered” a position in the agro or enviro sectors, likely on some grim cropland or drowning seacoast, where lives tended to be shorter than in the cities of this great land.
That’s what happened to Andy Murray—and he lived two whole years after declining a transfer.
“No” never occurred to Whit.
Besides, he was intrigued. He had heard about the return of the rogue Near-Earth Object Keanu, of course. Even THE and the Aggregates couldn’t stifle that information. Like everyone, he knew the story of the savage takeover of the NEO by terrorists, the extermination of intelligent nonhuman life forms, and the NEO’s attempt to flee the solar system.
When Whit was thirteen, there had even been a TV series called Planet X that told an exciting story about humans landing on a Near-Earth Object and behaving stupidly—and discovering, among other things, that there were zombies on the NEO.
Or something like zombies. Dead humans brought back to life. For a while.
Everything went to shit and the humans—alive and formerly alive—wound up taking over and sailing the NEO out into the universe to fuck more people up.
It was supposed to be science fiction, but everyone said it had a lot to do with whatever had happened on Keanu before Whit was born.
Either way, these people sounded bad.
“It’s a scouting mission,” Counselor Hans said, “prelude to a full-scale invasion.”
“From space?”
“They’re going into orbit,” Counselor Margot said. “Not far away.”
“I’m in.” Whit wasn’t convinced, but he had no options.
It took maybe three seconds for Counselor Hans to squirt Whit’s new employment info data to his pad. “Good luck,” he said. “Earth needs you.” He sounded as though he actually believed it.
“You should get Transformed,” Counselor Margot said. Of course, Whit thought. There’s always the recruitment pitch.
“I’m thinking about it,” Whit said, as he put some distance between himself and the trio from THE. If he didn’t hurry, he was going to be too late to grab any food from the dorm’s cafeteria, and that would truly suck.
He would actually consider getting Transformed under one condition, which he could never utter aloud:
Bring back my father, you bastards.
Meanwhile, he had to be on their side.
Day One
FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2040
QUESTION: In all your time away from life on Earth, what did you miss most?
RACHEL: (long pause) Pizza.
INTERVIEW AT YELAHANKA,
APRIL 14, 2040
RACHEL
“It’s so big!”
Rachel Stewart’s first view of Earth, as she returned from two decades of exile, was a shock:
Earth looked exactly as she’d pictured it.
When she and her crew launched from Keanu, their Near-Earth Object habitat for twenty years (and currently making its own approach and preparing to go into an orbit beyond the Moon), their former home world looked like a fat whitish-bluish hemisphere. Rachel had learned long ago that the Moon was the size of a dime held at arm’s length. In her case, on launch day, Earth from five hundred thousand kilometers was about the size of a quarter.
Keanu and their transfer vehicle, Adventure, were approaching the planet from its southern pole, so what they saw, in the relatively few times cameras or windows were pointed earthward, was the Antarctic surrounded by ocean.
To Rachel’s surprise, having grown up with the threat of melting ice caps, Antarctica was still white and snow-covered. How deeply, she had no way of knowing.
But it was reassuring. Especially as Adventure’s speed increased as the vehicle flew closer—so much closer that Rachel revised “flew” to “fell,” since that’s what they seemed to be doing.
The only response to Rachel’s comment came from Zeds, the Sentry pilot, in his Hindi-tinged English. “I thought human childhood habitats looked small when revisited.” That’s what happens when you raise aliens as if they were human, Rachel thought. They grow up just as argumentative as their two-armed cousins. The sarcasm was apparent even through Zeds’s environment suit. (It was odd for Rachel to know that Adventure had originally been built by and for Sentries—but the Sentry pilot was the one forced to wear a suit.)
“Shut up and land this thing,” Pav said. That was her husband, Pav Radhakrishnan. Now thirty-six by Earth’s calendar, he had grown stolid and confident while still, in stressful moments, capable of acting like a hotheaded teen male.