Zack stared at the earthen floor of the habitat, unspeaking, his shoulders heaving with barely suppressed sobs, his eyes suddenly filling with tears. “I wish I knew what to tell you. She was…here,” he said. “For two days, Harls, I had her back. I heard her. I saw her. I…touched her. It was like…every damn song about loss. That one last look.” He raised his face and smiled bitterly. “You know what? That’s a pretty fucking overrated idea. Take it from one who knows. The second separation is worse than the first.”
Harley considered that thought, and realized he could not address it or even express it. “Did she die somehow, or…”
“A Sentry took her,” he said, a phrase that meant nothing to Harley. Then Zack added, “It was the same kind of beast that killed Pogo.”
Harley raised his head slightly and was startled and horrified to see that behind Zack, dozens of people had gathered. It was not only Sasha, who was at the front of the throng, her arm around Rachel…and Weldon, Jones, and even Bynum. It was Pillay, the Indian woman, and Vikram Nayar…and several Americans and Indians he had no way of knowing.
Their faces were alight, reminding Harley of a classic Bible movie…the Israelites waiting for Moses to give them the Ten Commandments.
“Okay, you saw the landing. We pulled some orbital shenanigans and got down ahead of Brahma. The moment we landed, Keanu pulled its own maneuver and put itself in orbit around Earth. So we knew we were into strangeness.
“Yvonne and I did the EVA, the vent blew, and she got hurt; Taj and his crew came to the rescue.
“We went down into the vent together, Pogo Downey and me, Lucas and Natalia. We found ramps and a Marker and the membrane, all these signs that we weren’t exploring a NEO, we were entering an alien starship…which we’d known from the time Keanu maneuvered.”
He closed his eyes. To Harley, Zack seemed to be reading another man’s after-action report rather than giving testimony.
“Right off the bat, we met…something. A big alien; it carried this…vest with tools and some kind of layer of fluid. Strong. Faster. Bam—Pogo got killed. And we retreated.”
“What was this creature?” Harley said.
“The Sentry; that’s what we called it, anyway.”
“What happened to it?”
“Oh, it died. I don’t know whether we did something to kill it, or it was in the wrong environment.” He thought again. “Then, those of us who were left, we began meeting others…Natalia, Lucas, me.
“That was where we found Megan. The machines or systems here had rebuilt her or had her reborn.” His voice grew thick and ragged. “So we had two days together…”
“Do you have any idea how it happened?” Shane Weldon said. “How this…resurrection worked?”
Zack was struggling, but he, too, had stepped back from the emotional precipice in order to deal with the mechanics. “They told us a few things—”
“‘They’?” Harley suddenly felt like the Grand Inquisitor but couldn’t help it. He was also aware that Sasha, Rachel, Weldon, and likely Bynum were listening.
“The Architect, the builder or operator of the NEO.”
“You talked to one?”
“Sort of.” Just to one side, Harley saw Sasha Blaine slipping an arm around Rachel, holding her closely. “I only communicated through Megan.”
“So she was, what, channeling this Architect?”
“A good way to put it. Anyway, it has to do with the properties of space…the way information, which would be everything from sound to images to the atoms in our blood and muscles to whatever tiny bit of electrical sparks make up a human personality, is never actually lost. It just takes different forms. And these guys are able to access it.”
“I think I said this once before,” Harley said. “But that’s one serious fucking search engine.”
Zack merely blinked. The concept would have been overwhelming at the best of times, and these were far from that.
Harley turned to Weldon. “Are you expecting me to shed some light on this?” the former mission manager asked.
“You’re a systems guy. Is this plausible?”
“Harley, I’m a also propulsion guy and a communications guy and a life support guy, too, and I have no idea how these Architects managed to make those things work…and I interfaced with them. So when you start talking about—what were you guys on the Home Team calling it? ‘Morphogenetic fields’ and stuff like that—I’m as dumb as the next person.”
Harley didn’t know what to say and didn’t have to respond, because Gabriel Jones showed up looking agitated.
“Zack, I hate to do this to you,” Jones said. “But the, uh, rest of the natives are restless. Can you talk to them?”
Zack stood, stretched. He forced a smile and aimed it at Rachel. “I don’t think I have any choice.”
ARRIVAL DAY: ZACK
With Jones and Weldon flanking him, and Harley, Sasha, and Rachel trailing, Zack walked to the front of the Temple and up the wide ramp that led to its entrance. With no special call to attention, the nearly two hundred refugees grew quiet even before Jones could ask for quiet.
“Friends from Houston—Dr. Pillay, Vikram Nayar, and friends from Bangalore—we’ve been through a lot. To help us know more about where we’ve wound up, and how we might go forward…Zachary Stewart, commander of Destiny-7.”
He had no outline in mind. All he could say was, “Thank you, hello, everyone.”
Then he had begun to speak, as clearly as he could, though nowhere near as forcefully as he would have liked, about the basic facts of their situation. Jones acted as moderator, making sure to elicit questions from Pillay and Nayar in particular.
It seemed that Zack’s ordeal was about to end, with the groups breaking off to start their basic tasks, when a voice shouted:
“You haven’t explained why you did this to us!”
In the last few minutes, Zack had sensed a steady rise in the general grumbling. The shared elation—We lived through the trip!—was fast wearing off, driven away by thirst, hunger, and exhaustion.
Nevertheless, that question—based on the accent, shouted by one of the Bangalore group—was shocking, for both its vehemence and content.
“My wife,” he said. His voice was weak; he doubted he’d be heard by half the crowd. He took a breath. “My wife learned from the Architects that they needed us, that we had a purpose—”
“We weren’t asked!”
“Neither was I,” he said. He noticed a young man—Chinese, likely—stepping out of the mass of people and edging his way toward the front.
“But you were here!” a different voice said, overlapping with the first speaker. “You and your crew started a war!”
Jones leaned over to him, trying not to be obvious. “One of the Bangalore flight controllers.” That was helpful information; who else would have known about the nuke?
Zack tried to say something: “No one really knows what happened—” Well, he knew about the Sentry attacking Pogo Downey. Had it been unprovoked? Hard to tell. This was humans encountering aliens, for Christ’s sake! It had gone badly, no question. The attack had led to the detonation of a nuke, no doubt about that. (A nuke Zack had not known about and, if asked, would not have accepted.)
But the crowd was getting out of control, with lots of yelling and finger-pointing. Most of the Houston people who knew what had happened were up here with Zack. But Zack could see advocates, of a sort, Texans arguing with Bangalores.
“Oh, shit,” Harley said. Zack suddenly thought of Rachel and turned; she was a few meters behind him, standing with Sasha, both looking alarmed, but both safe. “What is it, Harley?”
“I just saw Dale Scott.”
Dale Scott? He was a former NASA astronaut that Zack knew from his first International Space Station tour…where Zack, as a new arrival, had realized that Scott was not performing well and recommended his early return to Earth. “I heard he was working with Taj’s team.” Taj had been the commander of the Indian Brahma spacecraft—the other set of human explorers who had landed on Keanu.