“He’ll just have to take his happiness on the road.”
Blaine stopped and looked down at him. “What about you, Harley?”
“You know, there were two things I liked to do before my accident and only one of them was flying. I haven’t been able to do either since, and it doesn’t look as though I’ll start any time in the future. So I’ll take my chances here.”
“That’s brave of you,” Blaine said. “What about Zack’s daughter?”
Oh God, Harley thought. Yes, what about Rachel Stewart?
That conversation had consumed much of the intervening hour. It started in the visitors’ gallery; progressed to the hallway, where Sasha Blaine left them to return to the Home Team; then ended back in mission control.
The bottom line: Rachel Stewart wasn’t going anywhere. “This is the only place in the world where I can be in touch with my father,” she said.
“There won’t be much contact if it turns into a giant smoking hole in the ground.”
“If that’s what the Keanu-ites are doing, my father won’t have a chance, either.”
Harley Drake was a big believer in the right of any human being to make his or her own giant fucking mistakes, and the younger said human being learned that, the better. Some vestige of adult responsibility made him question the convenience of that either-or judgment. After all, the important lesson might well be that your decision got you killed. But no matter how he examined it, he still came back to the same conclusion: If Rachel wanted to stay, she should stay.
Besides . . . if the Keanu Plasma Thing was what it appeared to be, Rachel and Harley would be no safer sitting in a traffic jam on the 8 Beltway.
And here . . . the main screen displayed a computer-generated image of Destiny, flying tail first, sharing space with several ground-based images, one showing a small white dot . . . Destiny as seen from Hawaii. Two others showed what it now called the Objects, now completely diverged. One was being imaged from Hawaii; the other, if the bug in the screen corner told the truth, from a facility in Russia.
“Getting word from Maui,” one of the trajectory flight controllers said. “They can put a definitive upper limit on the diameter of the Keanu Objects, which appear to be the same size. Well under two hundred meters.”
Hearing that figure, Harley felt sick. In his years as an astronaut, and especially the past two years as an accelerated student of events astronomical, he had spent a good deal of time examining the Arizona meteor crater, primarily because he’d visited it for training, and just because it was so cool.
Which was why he knew that the big hole in the ground outside Flagstaff was something like 150 meters deep and close to a kilometer across . . . and that the impact—which vaporized vegetation and living things for tens of kilometers around—was triggered by a hunk of space rock around fifty meters in diameter.
One quarter that of either of the Keanu Objects. The damage if one of them struck wouldn’t just be four times greater, but some geometric multiple of that, comparable to a good-sized nuclear weapon.
Meaning that JSC and Building 30 stood no chance.
If an Object struck nearby, that is. There was still time for the both of them to change course . . . or to be much smaller than this two-hundred-meter figure, or to turn out to be less dense than iron.
The activity at the consoles never changed, though the pace of door openings and closings increased, with Brent Bynum the most frequent visitor, usually trailed by one of his deputies and several of Jones’s, all of them either talking into cell phones or touching Slates.
Harley wouldn’t have believed it possible, given Bynum’s expression when Keanu launched its Objects, but the White House man was even grimmer. “DOD is screaming. They want to shoot them down.”
“—Because putting a nuke on Venture was such a brilliant move,” Weldon said. Harley couldn’t tell if the flight director really thought it was stupid—or futile. Or just didn’t want to be distracted from the upcoming Destiny landing.
“Don’t worry, Shane,” he said. “Even if it was the best idea since the shitless dog, even if the president authorized them to shoot, they can’t.”
Bynum wasn’t so sure. “They’ve taken out satellites. And we have all these missiles—”
“Our missiles are offensive weapons that can’t be retargeted for exoatmospheric intercepts, at least not in the next couple of hours. We do have some anti-ballistic missiles, about a dozen of them in Alaska and California. They were put there a decade ago when we were nervous about North Korean or Chinese birds. But even if the Objects came across the northern Pacific, where our ABMs might see and hit them, they don’t carry nukes. And I don’t think they’re capable of locking onto a target that’s plasma.”
“I guess that’s a relief,” Bynum said, though his expression remained grim and pale. His phone buzzed again, and he left.
“I knew there was a reason I wanted you in here,” Weldon told Harley, “rather than back with the freaks and geeks.”
“I thought it was just because you didn’t want to die alone.”
Harley was impressed by the way Weldon and Kennedy and their teams never wavered from the immediate task before them: configuring Destiny for a crash landing on Keanu.
It helped that they had reestablished contact with Tea Nowinski, and with Taj, Lucas, and Natalia. All four were now on the surface, in suits; they had been forced to leave the rover on the ramp. Zack Stewart’s situation was still unknown. There had been a brief burst of communication, but nothing since.
Just then Shane Weldon turned to Harley. “Mr. Drake, I think your kids need you.”
“What’s going on?”
Weldon tapped his headset. “Blaine says there’s a problem. Get those people straightened out and out of here, then hurry back. I want you around when Bangalore gets it.”
Leaving Rachel in mission control, Harley powered for the door. What now?
I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.
MARK TWAIN, FROM HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Zack Stewart felt the double shock moments after he reached the clearing surrounding the Temple. He almost missed the events; the interior environment inside Keanu had gone insane. He had the gusting roar of wind in his ears and the sight of Keanu plant life literally melting, dissolving, then re-forming all around him. It was like being in a carnival house of horrors.
And the air—it smelled like rotting vegetation mixed with burning plastic.
Combine that with the freakish “sky,” which had darkened and was rent with odd flashes that reminded Zack of lightning, but minus the thunder.
The Temple loomed larger with each flash, however. It looked like a haunted house from a black-and-white horror movie, if you allowed for the fact that it was several stories tall and resembled no structure ever seen on Earth.
But that was his goal. That was where the Sentry trail led.
That was where Megan was. Camilla, too, though Zack wondered if he would have been as eager to abandon his crew and slim chance of a flight home just for the strange little girl.
Well, yes. But the issue was irrelevant, anyway. He was here, now, chasing both.
As he stumbled into the clearing, he remembered Taj and Tea’s warnings about some kind of magnetic field . . . perhaps he was hypersensitive because of the alert, or possibly the field’s intensity had increased with the wacky activities in the general environment, but Zack had gone only ten steps toward the Temple when he felt the hair on his neck tingling, lost feeling in his fingers, and generally slowed down. He stood in place as long as he could, feeling like a Van de Graaff generator in some junior high school science experiment.
One further step brought blinding pain. The Architects had erected an electronic fence around the Temple, and they were not going to allow Zack to use this route.