He needn’t have worried. Suddenly the “face” was clear.
It was not only a humanlike face, it was a face he recognized.
Zack Stewart had seen more impossible sights in the past eight hours than most humans saw in a lifetime. Hell, more evidence of alien life than any humans had seen all through history.
But what he saw in that Beehive cell was so unexpected and impossible that by contrast the wonders of Keanu’s interior were a strip mall in Houston.
The face he saw clearly now, brown eyes opening, mouth gasping, was that of his dead wife, Megan.
Part Three
“SOME FRAGRANT NIGHT”
The Crew Systems Division wants it known wide and far: WE DID NOT AUTHORIZE Commander Stewart’s actions with the rover. During training, there was ONE discussion between engineers and crew regarding rover mass and center of gravity. Flinging the entire vehicle into a crater was NOT DISCUSSED OR CONDONED.
DRAFT MEMO FROM CHIEF, JSC CREW SYSTEMS
“Someone’s emerging!”
Harley Drake looked up as Sasha Blaine shrieked. “Calm down,” he told her, trying to make sense of the image on the screen that showed a suited Brahma crew member on the camera side of the membrane. Intelligence and outside-the-box thinking were sometimes a piss-poor substitute for operational cool. “Which one is that?”
More subdued, Blaine settled back into her chair. “No stripes on the suit, so it’s got to be Lucas.”
“He must be talking to Brahma.” Harley reached for his headset and within seconds was plugged into the cacophony of voices—Lucas and Taj and Vikram, the Bangalore flight director, Tea and Kennedy, all were talking over each other. So much for coolheaded mission control ops. . . .
Meanwhile, all around him, the Home Team swelled in numbers. (During the dead time with no link from the astronauts, several had wandered off in search of food. For all Harley knew, some had simply gone home; there was no penalty for early withdrawal.) With each arrival, the chatter inside the room rose geometrically.
Which was why Harley barely heard the words, “Pogo is dead!”
“Everybody shut up!”
The room went quiet, and everyone was able to hear Josh Kennedy’s voice. “Break, break, Lucas: Say again.”
Finally the link was silent, except for the vague hiss and crackle of the basic wave. “I repeat, Pogo Downey is dead.”
Another beat of silence, and then the questions exploded from both mission controls. Harley eventually realized that Something Big and Mobile had shown itself inside Keanu, and that someone—it was unclear who—had shot at it, and Pogo had been cut down.
The other members of the Home Team were plugged in now, too, listening but unable to speak. Their faces showed their disbelief and horror at not only what had happened, but how fast.
Though he had a scientific bent, Harley Drake had only a dim sense of the painstaking and tedious accretion of data points that most often led to big breakthroughs. Even in space ops, things happened slowly.
Today was different. First the news that Keanu was likely artificial. Then the stunning series of jabs—the ramps and passages, the membrane.
Now a regular goddamn torrent of new marvels was gushing over them. These alien markers. The huge inner chamber. “Sounds like Burroughs’ Hollow Earth,” said Williams, to annoying titters from around the table.
Air pressure inside this chamber? Variable gravity? A source of illumination?
Fractal corals. Water. Wind. Weather.
And, oh yes, some kind of hostile entity.
Images of the environment began appearing as thumbnails arrayed around the main picture on the big screen.
But Harley couldn’t appreciate them. He kept thinking about Patrick Downey—good old Pogo—dead! “Home Team for Josh,” he said into his mike, hating to interrupt the ops, but not hearing the information he needed.
It took Kennedy a moment, but he said, “Josh for Harley: Speak.”
“I hope this is still encrypted.”
There was a long beat. “Wait, yes,” the flight director said. “Our feed is. Don’t know about Bangalore.”
“No matter. Somebody’s got to get to Linda Downey immediately.”
“Shit, yes. On it. Thanks!” On another screen, this one showing the live feed from inside mission control, Harley could see Kennedy tapping the incoming capcom, Mr. America Travis Buell, on the shoulder and pointing him out the door—
To tell Linda Downey she was now a widow.
Harley suddenly remembered his own role as CACO: Rachel Stewart would need reassurance, too. “I’m going to the family room,” he announced to the Home Team, as if anyone cared. All were too busy oohing, ahhing, and otherwise babbling over the wonders and horrors from Keanu.
Before Harley could disconnect his headset, he heard: “Harls, Shane.”
“Don’t you sleep?” On a normal space mission, even one to deep space, mission control teams were required to go home and rest up between shifts. Shane Weldon should have been home for dinner three hours back, in bed by now. But then Harley should have left the Home Team, too.
“Based on what I’ve seen today, I may never sleep again.”
“I hear you—”
“There’s a shitstorm headed your way now, Harls. Our White House friend Bynum has lit up the board. We’re simultaneously embargoing all transmissions—”
“Shane, I’ve got to get to Rachel.”
“Got it. Just a heads-up. Call me if you start to drown.”
The Home Team was closer to the family room than mission control. Still, given Buell’s head start, he shouldn’t have arrived just when Harley did.
Harley knew the veteran astronaut; he was usually conscientious. “What the fuck is taking you so long! It won’t be fun, but this is your new job—”
“I know, Harley!” Every astronaut knew. Back in the 1960s, Ted Freeman had been killed in a Saturday morning T-38 crash . . . and a reporter reached the widow with the news before NASA did. Nobody wanted that to happen again. Buell waved his cell phone. “They just told me Jones is coming. . . .”
“What, so he can drown her in tears? Get in there and do what you were told.”
To his credit, Buell opened the door immediately, though the suddenness of the gesture and the clearly troubled look on his face was a blatant warning to everyone inside: Bad news was coming. “Ah, Linda, I have to talk to you.”
Downey’s wife slowly rose to her feet, reaching for one of her children as she did. Harley was right behind Buell, projecting a calmer manner, he hoped. “Rachel, step outside with me. Everybody else, too.”
Rachel and her friend Amy shot out of the room as if jet-propelled, so fast they almost collided with Gabriel Jones and one of his staffers as they arrived.
“Sorry, folks!” Harley used his chair to block the door, allowing the other friends and family to exit around him.
“Harley—” Jones had his best fatherly face on.
But Harley exited the room and closed the door behind him. “It’s being handled.”
He turned to Rachel. “Your dad is fine.”
Of course, to the others—friends and family of Patrick Downey—Harley might just as well have shouted, “Your man isn’t!”
Harley was anticipating another blast of questions; instead, he saw shock, disbelief, fading hope. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jones said, having to settle for breaking the news to someone other than the widow, “there has been an accident on Keanu. Colonel Downey has been lost.”
Harley shook his head. There was never a good place to hear news like that, but some places were better: to learn in a hallway that your brother, father, next-door neighbor was just killed in some freak space accident....
As the sobs began to swell around him, he rolled to Rachel, who was huddled with her friend. “Outside,” he told them.
The moment they exited the building, into the humid Houston evening, Harley told Rachel about the membrane, the markers, the Beehive, the entity that had apparently attacked and killed Patrick Downey.