“Come back here now!”
Taj didn’t have to tell her twice. She clutched the camera to the front of her EVA long johns, turned, and hopped quickly over the ruts back to where she started.
She realized that the feet of her undergarment were going to be filthy, which was all going to wind up back inside the boots of her EVA suit. Bad protocol there.
“Did you feel that?” she asked Taj. “It was as if the camera was being pulled out of my hands.”
“I felt nothing.” He gestured at the camera. “I hope that effect didn’t erase the images.”
Tea hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that was the reason for the Temple’s magnetism.
Or not. How could she have any real idea? Nothing here was as it should be!
Taj was saying, “We’d better get back. However we’re going to deal with Keanu, it’s got to be easier as a team.”
Has anyone considered the possibility that Keanu—now proven to be an ALIEN SPACESHIP—visited Earth one or more times PRIOR to this? There is a suspicious periodicity to such major human events as the building of the Great Pyramids, discovery of writing and end of the last Ice Age, all approximately 3,500 years apart! Just saying!
POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM, AUGUST 23, 2019
Okay, new rule: post first, then drink. Not the way you have it, Jermaine.
POSTER ALMAZ, SAME SITE, MOMENTS LATER
“We’re calling them Revenants,” said Sasha Blaine, as the footage of an impossibly alive Megan Stewart froze on the screen.
Harley Drake raised his head and tried to reconnect with the chaos in the Home Team.
He had been thinking about Pogo Downey. He had lost colleagues and close friends before—a buddy who hit the ground in an F-22 during test pilot school, and another who was shot down by a SAM over Yemen. Those were just close friends; other second-tier acquaintances had died, too.
And, of course, there was Megan Stewart.
So he was quite familiar with the sensations experienced on hearing the news, the ashen looks on faces, the constant headshaking and confusion, and the rituals.
Except for those associated with death in space. He had joined NASA too late for the horrors of Columbia, when seven astronauts had been killed as their orbiter broke into pieces, burned up, then scattered itself across Texas and Louisiana thanks to an undetected breach in its thermal protection system.
Pogo’s death would be the top story on every news site around the world. What was it they said about Lincoln? “Now he belongs to the ages.”
Now Patrick Downey belonged to the Web pages.
All of them knew flying in space was risky—that you had, in essence, a one-in-fifty chance of being killed. You were actually far safer working in a coal mine for twenty-five years, or serving consecutive combat tours.
But knowing that didn’t make it easier. A friend was suddenly gone. Bad, but worse yet—killed by some unknown entity.
That was the true horror. . . . What in God’s name was running around loose inside Keanu that was capable of killing a man?
And wanting to?
There were reports that this thing, the Sentry, had died, too. Which was another problem. Better to have captured it, interrogated or studied it.
Harley was afraid for his friends on the mission. “Sorry,” he said, “what the hell does that mean?”
“Revenant is a French word,” Wade Williams said, winding up for another giant info-dump, “meaning a visible ghost or an animated corpse!”
But before he could take another breath, after which he would be unstoppable short of violence, Steven Matulka, one of the more socialized members of the Home Team, a generation younger than Williams, slapped his hand on the table. “For God’s sake, Wade!”
In the immediate silence, Harley noted the shocked look on Wade’s face—Matulka was a protégé of the older writer; this might have been the first time in a twenty-year relationship that the younger man had spoken up—and several bowed headshakes around the room. Sasha Blaine had her hand over her eyes.
“Speaking of rope in the family of the hanged man?” Harley said, offering a nod of thanks to Matulka. “Don’t worry, I’m not that sensitive.”
“It’s not that accurate, anyway,” Matulka said, with a by-your-leave gesture to Harley. “Megan Stewart’s earthly remains are here in Texas, so corpse is the wrong word.
“ Ghost doesn’t apply, either. According to the data we’ve received, those beings are corporeal. Flesh and blood.”
“I’ll give you flesh,” said Williams, unwilling to cede the stage for long. “Don’t know about blood!” It wasn’t as witty as he’d hoped. The room was silent again.
“I’ll give you this,” Harley said. “ Revenant sounds better than zombie. So, fine, use it. But you seem to be grabbing the shovel by the wrong end here. You’ve managed to come up with useful names for all these new things—”
“It’s a hard habit to break,” Blaine said. “If you name something, you own it.”
“Fine. Let’s consider Keanu and the membrane and the Sentry and the Revenants as proprietary. Publish your papers and claim priority. At what point do you start giving me, and by extension, the folks in there”—he aimed a thumb in the direction of mission control—“and the White House and the world some goddamn concrete data? Everything you’ve named could be a potential threat to our existence! Keanu maneuvers and seems to be inhabited. Fine, but by what? Is your Sentry a machine or a life-form? Either way, how can we communicate with it—or things like it—so no one else gets killed? What about the environment? Why is it changing so fast? How long does that go on? And there’s the big one. How the hell can there be people inside that thing? Formerly dead people the crew knows. That may be the freakiest question in human history.
“You’ve got some facts. Start giving me explanations that fit, or you might as well go home.”
Within moments, the dozen members of the team had broken into smaller groups . . . except for Williams, who was left by himself, busy pushing his glasses back up his nose.
Which gave Harley a terrible, wonderful idea. If there was one thing he hated more than having to answer reporters, it was having nothing to say!
Why not send members of the Home Team out to brief the world, one by one?
Better yet, why not send Wade Williams out there . . . he could soothe or baffle the press as needed, with the added bonus that work inside the Home Team would go faster and be more productive.
And Harley could worry about Rachel Stewart.
CROCKETT: So you’ve heard about what’s going on with the Destiny mission.
BOONE: You mean the alien stuff?
CROCKETT: Don’t you think it’s cool that our astronauts may have discovered intelligent life on another world?
BOONE: I’d be more impressed if they discovered intelligent life on this one. (WAH-WAH SFX)
CROCKETT: Seriously . . . there’s also this rumor going around that they’ve discovered souls . . . that these aliens are smart enough to bring dead people back to life.
BOONE: All I can say is, if they revive my uncle Eduardo, I’m not giving the money back.
KPRC RADIO “ALL-AMERICAN” GUYS, AUGUST 23, 2019
She was late again. She was supposed to be meeting with a producer, but something had gone wrong—goddamn Houston traffic, maybe—and she was half an hour behind schedule.