But she was already deeply into the process. She had opened the case, removed the false front, and entered the first set of codes. She felt stupid, slow, and numb . . . the drugs doing their work.
She was not planning to die. This was just a contingency move, to allow Houston to come up with an answer.
The countdown started from ten minutes. Be cool, she told herself. You can stop it at any time.
She picked up the Item and stepped toward the front windows. “Can you see this? It’s a bomb, and it’s armed!” There was no sign of Downey, no word on the radio.
Then Yvonne heard a different sound, not the thump of rock against the rugged cabin wall, or the more frightening crack of impact on the window. This was a more distant clang.
An alarm sounded on the control panel, two indicators suddenly red.
Fuel tanks! Downey had managed to poke a hole in one of them, and it was big enough to create a cloud of freezing vapor: Yvonne could see it from the left front window.
“Pogo,” she radioed, knowing she sounded tired and pathetic. “What the hell are you doing? This fucks all of us. . . .”
Houston was on the line, Jasmine Trieu sounding strained. “Venture, we show a drop in hydrogen tank two—”
“I know,” Yvonne snapped. “Pogo!” she shouted.
It took almost ten seconds. “I’m at the hatch,” he said. “Put your stupid bomb in the lock, button yourself up, and open the outer door. And I’m counting, too. Up to ten, when I put a hole in another tank. One, two . . .”
She considered her options. “Houston, can you hear this?” Goddamn time lag. The clock on the Item showed 6:30 and counting. “What do I do?”
Gabriel Jones was back on the link. “Yvonne, it’s your father again . . . we are talking to Downey. He’s not responding. But I want to say again, don’t do anything—”
Then the whole damn lander shook. Pogo must have really blown that second tank.
The entire left side of the console, all the systems related to ascent engine and propellants, was red red red. There was not going to be a liftoff, no rendezvous with Destiny, no return to Earth. Pogo had fucked her completely. Zack, Tea, all of them were going to die here.
Slumped against the bulkhead, she reached into her suit and grabbed the key on her neck chain. Three minutes, now less. She could shut it down....
“Yvonne, talk to me—”
Another clang. Downey was determined to wreck Venture! Maybe if she tried a different approach . . . She got to her feet and stepped to the window. “Pogo, let’s talk this over. I’ll . . . I’ll shut off the timer.”
There he was, out front, arm raised. He launched what looked like a snowball right at the window.
Direct hit.
The last thing Yvonne Hall saw was the crack in the outer pane suddenly mirrored by a deeper one in the inner pane. Part of the window blew out, beginning the swift, permanent, fatal venting of Venture’s atmosphere—
Two meters behind her, the timer on the Item reached zero.
Oh, shit.
MOST FREQUENT LAST WORDS OF PILOTS IN CRASHES
In pain, exhausted, infuriated, Pogo Downey saw the puff of air and the spewing of Plexiglas fragments. This was the coup de grâce—already hobbled by two plumes from punctured tanks, the Venture was like a wounded bull in the arena.
Yvonne would not survive this. But the vacuum inside the Venture would allow the outer hatch to unseal, allowing Downey access to the Item, giving him a weapon.
No. Between one step and the next, Downey saw the entire lander expand and fragment.
As brains, bone, blood, and whatever it was the Architects had used to rebuild him vaporized, he had a fraction of a second to realize he was dying for the second time.
You’re surprised that they’re lying to us? NASA stands for “Never A Straight Answer!”
POSTER ALMAZ AT NEOMISSION.COM
On the screen in mission control, Harley saw Yvonne at the forward station. He was not wearing a headset, so he could not hear the exchanges, which were clearly fraught: Prime capcom Jasmine Trieu had tears in her eyes while the secondary communicator, Travis Buell, was throwing his hands in the air.
And Gabriel Jones, in headset, was seated between them, pounding on the desktop.
Harley had seen the intense knot of controllers around the lander consoles, specifically the propellant team, and knew there was some kind of problem.
As if they needed more problems. Where were Zack and Tea? Communications were reestablished, but no one seemed to be calling them.
Then the screen went to snow.
And all the Venture consoles went white, as the constant flow of temperatures, pressures, and other indicators ceased to make sense, or just ceased all together.
“Venture, Houston,” Jasmine Trieu was saying. She repeated it.
Gabriel Jones slumped. Shane Weldon put his arm around him and said, “Get Bangalore on the line.” Then he shouted, to no one in particular, “Do we have a telescopic view?”
It only took a few seconds, but some clever operator in a back room called up a long-range view of Keanu from some Earth-based telescope.
The screen now showed a silvery crescent . . . and an expanding cloud in the upper portion, roughly the area where Venture and Brahma had landed.
“I take it that’s not another eruption,” Brent Bynum said.
Harley Drake realized that they had lost Venture, and with it any chance of bringing his friend Zack Stewart and his crew—Revenants or not—home again.
Part Four
“IN THE WIDE STARLIGHT”
Any idea what caused that flash on Keanu surface? We saw it in Australia.
POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM
“Did you feel that?”
Tea and Taj had reached the membrane and were about to drive through when something strange happened. “I saw it,” Taj said. “The inner surface of the membrane—”
“Yeah, it fluttered,” Tea said. “But I felt some kind of ripple or vibration. Not a quake, I don’t think.”
“It’s hard to tell from here.”
“Then we get out.”
Normally the procedures to egress from rover Buzz would have taken fifteen minutes, most of them to allow pressure to drop so the hatch could be opened. But Tea and Taj had simply not bothered to close the hatch. Indeed, they had driven from the campsite to the membrane without donning their suits.
“Do you smell something funny?” Taj asked.
“No,” she said. “But I’m surprised my senses are working at all.” This wasn’t quite the truth; her eyes had definitely noted the rippling of the membrane. And even swathed in the increasingly dirty, sweaty EVA undergarment, she had definitely felt a tingling akin to the forerunner of a thunderstorm on a midwestern summer day.
And since she was running through the sensory spectrum, Tea motioned for Taj to freeze. “I hear something,” she said, though she could not have described it.
“More wind?” Taj said. “I think I hear it, too.”
Tea held out her hands. “It’s not much. I can’t really feel it.” She noticed that the vyomanaut had the Zeiss in his hands, dutifully recording images. “What’s your magic radio telling you?”
Taj shook his head and showed her the instrument panel on its back, which had a signal indicator just like that on Tea’s cell phone. “No bars.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I never had more than one deeper into Keanu. We’re closer now, so it should be better.”
“Unless there’s suddenly a bunch of rock in the way.” Tea’s mind had instantly fixed on a horrible concept. “Do you think maybe there’s been a landslide out there?” All through the journey into the junction, she had had to remind herself that although it looked like a West Virginia coal mine, the passage was larger and had remained open for likely thousands of years.