Rachel and Amy were happy to comply. They were fine as long as no one decided to search Amy’s pockets.
The atmosphere inside mission control was completely different from that outside—serene, silent. The only sound was the familiar hiss of static.
On the screen, Rachel and Amy could see the top half of Yvonne Hall in her hammock. The rest of the view was Tea Nowinski, who kept bobbing up and down, clearly making some adjustment on the panel above the camera. When her face came into view, Rachel was horrified at the way she looked, with her hair ratted atop her head. Rachel knew ten times as much about makeup and clothing as Tea did. . . . One of the fun things about her relationship with Dad’s girlfriend was teaching her.
Of course, at the moment, Tea had other things to worry about.
Flight director Josh Kennedy spotted them and did a double take. He seemed about to drop his headset and approach them when—
“Okay, Houston, we’ve got a link again . . . holy cow!”
The big screen cut from the Venture interior view (which remained in a small picture-within-picture) to a dark exterior showing three astronauts, one NASA and two Coalition, with some kind of silver screen behind them. “Looks like they’re on television,” Amy said.
“They are on television,” Rachel said. Amy was starting to become annoying.
The Coalition pair was literally working on the camera, their helmets looming in front of the lens. The chatter on the air-to-ground was the Russian and Portuguese equivalents of phrases like Got it and Okay.
“What’s that shiny thing?” Rachel asked out loud.
Kennedy turned toward her. Once he registered the appalling fact that she was Zack’s daughter, watching this amazing feed live, he leaped into action, taking Rachel by the arm and trying to get her out of mission control. “We’re thinking it’s the outer door of an airlock.”
That was not what Rachel needed to hear. Her father had somehow fallen into a sci-fi movie . . . she wanted it to end. Come home! “Where’s my father?”
“Uh, he went through the airlock,” Kennedy said. Then, to the others in the room, “Anybody seen Harley Drake?”
Then Kennedy’s eyes went wide. Rachel turned to look at the screen. Amy and Jillianne grabbed her hands as everyone in mission control inhaled at the same time.
On the screen was a hand, then a waving arm. Her father’s. “Houston, Pogo,” Downey said. “Looks like Zack wants us to follow him.”
JSC DIRECTOR JONES: I can take three questions—
QUESTION: Given Hall’s accident, shouldn’t you be bringing the astronauts home?
JONES: Flight surgeons are monitoring her condition, which is stable. Yvonne herself has said that this vital exploration must continue.
QUESTION: Is there any worry that the Coalition craft contributed to the explosion?
JONES: The event on Keanu was a natural event . . . the only surprise was the actual timing.
QUESTION: What if there are further surprises?
JONES: The mission continues, of course. As we like to say, failure is not an option.
QUESTION: Are you worried about your daughter?
JONES: I’m worried about everyone in that crew!
PRESS BRIEFING ON NASA SELECT TV AND WEB
It took less than ten minutes for the other three to pass through the membrane, as Zack now called it. “One at a time,” Pogo had told his Coalition friends, “with me first.”
Now, completely disconnected from the camera and link they had managed to rig on the other side of the membrane, in contact only with themselves, the four moved swiftly across the rocky surface of a chamber that reminded Pogo Downey of Kartchner Caverns, the giant cave he’d visited while a college student in Arizona—huge, dark, unknowable.
Mindful of the one major limitation on all this activity—air and water supplies in their suits—he asked, “What’s the hurry?”
“I just . . . need to see this,” Zack said. He actually sounded out of breath. Was it exertion? Or excitement?
“What are these shapes?” Natalia said.
Pogo realized that over the thirty-or-forty-meter traverse from the membrane he’d seen shadows in his peripheral vision . . . had assumed they were just visual effects from four bobbing helmet lights hitting boulders or possibly stalagmites.
Idiot. He wasn’t in Kartchner Caverns. He was inside Keanu . . . it was strange how the mind kept laying familiar shapes onto alien ones.
Lucas went up to the nearest shape, shining his torch up and down. “It’s another marker!”
Indeed, it looked like another spiral galaxy or double helix, but larger and more detailed.
Zack didn’t have to ask any of them to take pictures, or do a radar scan. Lucas, Natalia, and Pogo swarmed the marker, recording every possible angle. Lucas had hauled a new camera from the sled, bulkier and less finished-looking than the other instruments. “What’s a Zeiss MKK?” Zack said.
At that moment, Pogo noted a wisp of vapor on the leg of the commander’s suit. “Boss,” he said, suddenly worried, pointing. “Check your pressure.”
But Zack didn’t seem worried. “This chamber is pressurized. Look at the ground . . .”
Pogo did, and saw a puddle. “Zack,” he said.
“I think it’s water,” the commander said quickly. “It appeared to be melt from my boots. Yours, too, I’m guessing.”
Natalia disagreed. “There’s more here than we were carrying.”
Then Lucas said, “I hear something.”
And Pogo realized he had been hearing it, too. “Is that the wind?”
“What the hell is going on?” Natalia said. She sounded nervous. Pogo couldn’t blame her. Puddles of liquid? Air pressure? Wind? Some of those conditions could exist on the surface of Mars, so it wasn’t unthinkable.
But on a NEO—inside a NEO?
“Let’s press on,” Zack said. “Time is our enemy.”
All four began to shuffle forward again, individually stopping to take images. Natalia was taking soil samples, scooping or scraping from the ground or the base of the markers (they’d passed half a dozen of them by now, each one clearly a cousin to the others, but all slightly different.) She held each one up to her microfocals before bagging it. Given the obvious fogging in her faceplate, she had to be getting frustrated.
“Hold up,” Zack said.
Pogo and the others had already stopped, because all of them could see the same thing now.
Whether it was the combined illumination from their helmet lamps or some other source, the walls of the chamber were now barely visible . . . enough that the astronauts could see that they were covered with cell-like hexagonal structures of varying size, ranging from two meters wide to multiples of that, more or less symmetrical.
“Looks like a beehive,” Zack said.
“I wonder where the bees might be.” Natalia again, still sounding unnerved. Given the unholy uncertainties they were facing and the nagging problems with her suit, Pogo sympathized.
But that kind of unease could be contagious. They’d already seen more evidence of alien life than any humans in history—cumulatively. Who knew what lay ahead—what was right around the next corner?
“Zack,” Natalia said, “what is our plan? Walk until we reach consumable limits, then turn back?”
“Essentially.”
“Yeah,” Pogo said. “Too bad this is such a short stay—and there’s no chance for a follow-up.”
“I really wish we had a better view,” Zack said. “More light.”
“Let me,” Lucas said. To Natalia, he said, “Do you have any idea of the oxygen content here?”
“Substantial, over a quarter,” she said, “but it’s raw data.”
“But it’s not pure oxygen.”
“No.”
To Pogo’s surprise, the World’s Greatest Astronaut skipped a few meters ahead and raised a fat pistol in his gloved hand.