“Yeah.” For once in her life, she had no smart reply. Well, she didn’t know Shane Weldon; he was just one of her father’s space friends.
For another…nothing seemed funny right now. Whatever compulsion she had felt to go to the Object, then stay put as it expanded to absorb them all…that was long gone.
She had insisted on being taken to the Object because she believed that she would be seeing her resurrected mother. She had even been silly enough to think Megan Stewart might be aboard the Object when it landed. Why else would it have set down where it did, within walking distance of the Johnson Space Center?
Why else would her mother have told her—not in exact words, but still—to go to it?
These past two days, the worst in her life aside from the day her mother was killed, had forced Rachel to question everything.
It was probably natural, once you spent forty-eight hours in a space bubble, being hungry when you weren’t throwing up, feeling filthy (she’d had to simply find a relatively private area of the Object and pee, which was unbelievably gross even if all the other women were doing it!), and basically keeping close to Harley and Sasha.
Now…Rachel had reached another planet. She felt as happy about that as she had on the family trip to Mexico, which was not very much.
At least Keanu was quieter than Mexico, though it seemed, right here, just as crowded.
And maybe, just maybe, she would find her mother again.
Or her father. The last she’d heard, and what she believed, was that he was here, alive.
Sasha took her hand. “Come on, everyone’s going out.”
They were all headed toward an opening a lot like something you’d find in a sports arena…a big passage twenty meters wide and almost as tall. For the first time, Rachel examined the walls of the passage, which didn’t look like any tunnel she’d ever known from trips or movies or pictures. Mine shafts were dug out of rock and earth, then braced with timbers. There was this cool archive in Pennsylvania where the walls had been carved out of rock by some kind of machine…those walls looked ground down, like a tooth before the placement of a crown.
These walls looked poured and smoothed, like the cement of a new sidewalk…but with no grain at all. In fact, visually, they appeared to have been painted, they were so even. The “floor” did look a bit machined…it was certainly more metallic than stone—
“Whoa, check out the stash.”
Harley had interrupted her examination of the passage. The procession had reached the final opening. Just outside it sat a pile of electronic gear: PDAs, BlackBerrys, Tik-Talks, Slates—there must have been two dozen different devices—being examined by several Indian men.
“What the hell?” she said.
“I guess everyone got tired of carrying dead weight,” Harley said. “Hey, though, check this out.”
The creep from the White House, Brent Bynum, was pawing through them like a hobo in a restaurant Dumpster.
“Brent,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”
“One of these things has to work.”
Harley glanced sideways at Sasha and Rachel, as if to say, Stupid son of a bitch. “I’m sure they all work. Even if everyone left their little machines running during the trip, they’re still good for days yet. But, Brent, think this through: where’s the fucking network?”
“I know, I know,” the White House man said. “But we’re not that far away! If we could get to the surface, we could see Houston and Washington!” Harley was pretty sure you couldn’t—you could barely make out the shape of North and South America. “How far does line of sight work?”
“Not that far,” Shane Weldon said. Rachel had thought so, too, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Who knew what kind of magical, state-of-the-art PDA a White House staffer carried or knew about? Everyone was talking about the Tik-Talk, which had a walkie-talkie capability, but that item had been too expensive for Rachel; she had no idea what it could do. Maybe a Tik-Talk was capable of picking up signals at this distance—especially if some unit of the U.S. government kept an antenna pointed at Keanu.
For that matter, maybe they’d kept it pointed at the object as it shrank in the sky.
Gabriel Jones returned. “We’ve all had the same experience…scooped up and brought here. Their bubble thing dissolved, too. They know nothing that we don’t…. Pillay says we should just keep going, and I agree.”
The combined group surged forward, reminding Rachel of refugees fleeing a natural disaster like a volcano or maybe a tsunami. Which, of course, they were. Jones and Pillay took the lead, with Bynum at their heels.
Harley seemed tired and overwhelmed; Rachel couldn’t believe he would pass up the chance to take a verbal shot at Bynum, who, to Rachel, was moving exactly like a golden retriever.
Then she realized that Harley wasn’t exhausted…he was taking in the breathtaking vista.
They had entered a space that reminded Rachel of the time her parents had taken her to the old Astrodome…multiplied by a hundred. It was a roofed enclosure, longer than it was wide. “This is big enough to hold a city,” Sasha said.
“Big enough to hold a war,” Weldon added. He was growing increasingly pessimistic.
Rachel hoped that Shane Weldon would cheer up. Certainly she was feeling a little better, now that she realized she was entering a parklike landscape. There was soil, there were rocks, there were greenish growing things not far off. Smallish trees…or given the odd perspective, maybe not so smallish.
The roof was hundreds of meters high, likely higher, and covered with the same squiggly tubes that had given light in the tunnel, but many more of them.
Harley squeezed Sasha’s hand, then Rachel’s. “In spite of our differences, I think we all have one thing in common,” he said. “Look!”
Every one of the humans, Houston and Bangalore, was staring up, openmouthed, in exactly the same way.
As they marched over a low rise, they gained improved perspective. Not only did the habitat stretch at least ten kilometers in front of them…so far that Rachel could not see the other side…but one structure was in clear view, looking like an Aztec temple rising above a jungle.
Rachel’s appreciation of the alien building was short-lived, however. She heard a growing clamor off to the right, where most of the Bangalores were bunched up and breaking like a wave around a rock.
Two humans were approaching…one was a young girl Rachel had never seen before. “How the hell did those people get ahead of us?” Sasha said.
“They don’t look Indian,” Weldon said.
“They’re not,” Harley said.
No, they were not. Rachel recognized that walk, that oh-so-typical posture! It was her father.
She screamed and pushed through the crowd, heading for him.
ARRIVAL DAY: JAIDEV
The fighting had stopped.
At least, for now, and for Jaidev Mahabala, good. One side of his face was swollen and sore; he had a split lip; his left eye was half-closed. He looked awful, and for a man who took pride in his appearance—said pride already hit hard by the awful stench and misery of the flight from Earth to Keanu—it was emotionally as well as physically painful.
Not that there was ever likely to be a reason to restore his prior appearance: slim, dark-eyed, the carefully cultivated stubble, the close-fitting shirt and tailored trousers. Jaidev’s life had effectively ended when he was enclosed in the Bangalore Object.
But he had hoped that getting into a scuffle over food would have paid off with something. A Power Bar or even a drink of warm American beer.
Nothing…except bruises.
His participation in what began as a mad scramble for rations—one of dozens Jaidev had witnessed—had ended with a nasty punch delivered by Daksha Saikumar, a fellow Brahma enviro systems engineer. Daksha was a decade older than Jaidev’s twenty-nine, so hairy and slow that unfriendly colleagues dubbed him “the Gorilla.” Jaidev had never considered Daksha a friend, but he had never expected him to shove him aside, then complete the maneuver by striking him in the face.