People emerged from the Beehive, too. Not many, and not for long. Shortly after the arrival of 187 involuntary human immigrants to Keanu, the Beehive stopped reviving humans, stopped creating Revenants. The reason was unknown, maybe unknowable, but Dale suspected that everyone was relieved. Over the years, all of the HBs began to believe that the Revenants would never come again.
Harley Drake was the only real exception. Dale suspected that the former mayor of the HBs came to the Beehive every morning, ritualistically, to see if any additional Revenants had come back . . . or to make sure that they hadn’t.
Today, however, he found Dale Scott.
“Fuck you, Dale.”
“Nice talk.”
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“Not my intention.”
“Yet, it happened. You chose to lurk there instead of walking up to the Temple during working hours.”
“True,” he said, “but the Temple is so crowded with—”
“People who hate you?”
“As cruel as it is true.”
Only now did Harley meet Dale’s eyes. Until this moment Harley had been looking past him, at the stale-smelling maw of the Beehive. But it wasn’t rudeness or extreme caution that kept Harley from engaging; it was history. Harley had been a well-regarded test pilot and NASA astronaut up to two years before the whole Keanu debacle.
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.”