Harley knew that his Home Team was getting the feed from mission control. They knew what he knew. There was no reason for him to trundle right in there.
Or so he told himself. He really needed a moment to think. He wanted to strangle Brent Bynum—not in a personal sense, since the man was clearly just a messenger—but just to strike a blow against what his father would have called “institutional fuckheadedness,” the kind of arrogant blindness that believed you could put a nuke on a risky mission, then be surprised when it went off.
It was dawn in Houston, the air already thick, the buzzing and flapping of bugs and birds already audible, the sky to the east thick with rosy clouds. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.
Harley flinched. Wade Williams was lurking in the shadows, sitting on a concrete bench, a bottle in his hand. “I’m afraid I don’t have any orange juice, but . . .” He had a six-pack at his feet and offered a bottle to Harley.
Who took it. What the hell, he thought, twisting off the top. “How’d you manage to get this in here?”
“I may be a pompous ass—don’t argue with me—”
“Oh, I wasn’t.” But he smiled to take the edge off the remark.
“I know what I am and how I come across. All I can say is, I come from a long line of pompous asses. It’s what happens when you’re smarter than most people you meet, and louder, and unable to keep from making that clear.” He smiled and took a sip. “Anyway, I have a few fans squirreled away at JSC.”
“Cheers to your fans,” Harley said, taking a drink, and only then looking at the bottle: near beer. “O’Doul’s? Damn, Wade, I thought we were going to commemorate the serious shit we were in by getting loaded!”
“Not since 2012 for me, unfortunately.” He got a faraway look in his eye. “Still, just holding the bottle—the weight of it—helps me think.”
“And what are you thinking? I presume you and the team heard—”
“—All of it, the whole sorry mess.” The old man rubbed a hand across the stubble on his face. “I’ll say this for you, Drake. You and NASA sure know how to pack a thousand years of thrills into a few days.”
“It’s all kind of hard to believe, isn’t it? Last week we were thinking we were just damn lucky to have a chance to do a NEO landing without sending a crew on a nine-month mission, and now . . .”
“You’ve had First Encounter, Re-Encounter, Close Encounter—”
“—And Stupid, Senseless, What-Else-Can-I-Do-Wrong Encounter. That would be today’s.”
Williams actually shook with amusement. “I won’t ask you to believe that I’m in any way eager to stop living, but my gratitude at my continued existence has been seriously enhanced by this week . . . even allowing for the, uh . . .” He waved his hand at Harley. “What-Else-Can-Go-Wrong aspects?” He chuckled. “I lived through 9/ 11, but always thought that Pearl Harbor might have been more shocking. With this . . . now I have some idea.”
“This,” Harley said, “is like living through the week of the Crucifixion . . . or when that big asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.”
“True. Either way, it’s sort of a privilege to bear witness.”
“What was it Mark Twain said? About a man being tarred, feathered, then ridden out of town on a rail?”
“‘If not for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.’ Actually, it was Abraham Lincoln.”
“You’re the writer.” Harley looked at his bottle. “Are you sure this is nonalcoholic?”
“Fatigue and terror do strange things to the mind. Speaking of which,” Williams said, shifting to the lecture mode Harley knew so well, and hated, “I’ve been thinking. Thinking about what those fine folks you gathered have come up with.”
“Given that, so far, all I’ve gotten are some cute names—”
“Oh, we’ve got a model for your Revenants and such. The idea is, just as there is no true physical separation between your body and the universe—even when your core organism ceases to function, there are still atoms of moisture and skin and exhalation that linger, float off, whatever—the same thing applies to your mind, your soul, your life force. There is also some kind of physical connection between the electrical field that is you, Harley Drake, and the universe.
“Your carrier might be shut off. That is, you die. But the information lingers . . . like cloud computing, it’s all around us . . . accessible.”
“So our souls are some new kind of matter, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s one way to look at it. I mean, hell, the universe is largely made up of dark matter and energy, and we still don’t have a terrific handle on what that is or does. Why not some other kind of energy or information? It’s probably affected by gravity, too. The cloud of souls travels with the Sun.”
“Sounds like the opening line of your next novel.”
“Those days are gone, my friend. But the image is elegant, is it not?” He let the contents of the bottle slosh. “Everything that ever lived on Earth—or in the solar system—is still with us, in some fashion. It’s all information . . . the folks who built Keanu just know how to access it and repackage it.”
“They must have a pretty impressive search engine to pull Zack Stewart’s wife out of a library like that.”
“We suspect they got some clues or information from the arriving astronauts. We think the, ah, markers help. Scanned them, I think. Then they’re retrieved the same way the National Security Agency plucks a single cell phone conversation out of an entire city’s signals. Random frequency tracking, amped up a bit.”
“Yeah, a bit,” Harley said. “Then, of course, there’s the whole business of growing new bodies.”
“That’s just twenty-second-century Earth biotech, don’t you think? If we live long enough, we could have new carcasses, too.” Williams wheezed, tipped his bottle toward Harley. “We both could certainly use one.”
In shadow, another person came around the corner—female, tall, and, from the lingering odor, just off a cigarette. “Oh!” Sasha Blaine said. “There you are.”
“Caught,” Harley said. “We were about to head back in. . . .”
“Before you do,” Sasha said. “I’ve just had this mad cool idea and you should hear it in case it’s more mad than cool.”
“Hit me with it.” Harley was no longer convinced that the O’Doul’s was actually near beer; either that, or in his fatigued, stressed-out state, he was all raw emotion . . . because he suddenly, instantly wanted to hold Sasha Blaine. Gawky, too tall, too jumpy, it didn’t matter. He was in love with her . . . and there was a testament to the persistence of human emotions in the face of crisis.
Blaine blinked. “We heard that even though Venture and Brahma are gone, Destiny is still in orbit.”
“Yes.”
“And that five of the astronauts might still be alive.”
“Still good.”
“Which doesn’t mean much, because without Venture and Brahma, they’re trapped, and nobody has a vehicle that could be prepped and launched on a rescue for at least six months.”
“That would sum it up.” Harley had been so focused on the horror of this nuke that he had not gotten his head around the real collateral damage . . . the fact that the survivors were stranded with no hope of rescue.
Eyes closed, Blaine hugged herself, a set of gestures Harley always associated with brilliant, socially awkward types who were about to tell you something insane. Williams saw it, too, nudging Harley.
“Sasha,” Harley said, realizing he would have to drag it out of her. “What’s on your mind?”
“Why don’t we land Destiny on Keanu?”
What does it mean when you see the director of the Johnson Space Center collapsed in a corner? :( [ Wish I had a stronger emoticon]
POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM
Tea’s run to rendezvous, even though she was barefoot and wearing nothing more than panties and a tank top, was quick and exhilarating. Maybe part of that was due to her near-naked state. She felt primal. Eve in Eden, maybe.