Nowinski is expected to return to Houston this evening.
The landing ended a ten-day mission filled with anomalies, including unplanned events aboard the Near-Earth Object Keanu that resulted in the deaths of Destiny-7 astronauts Patrick Downey and Yvonne Hall as well as Brahma cosmonaut Dennis Chertok and the apparent loss of mission commander Zack Stewart. The Coalition spacecraft Brahma was also destroyed, resulting in a combined return crew.
NASA mission control continues its attempts to contact Stewart. Meanwhile, Keanu has departed Earth orbit at a speed of over 40,000 kilometers an hour.
Those seeking information regarding the impacts near Houston and Bangalore are referred to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
NASA PRESS RELEASE
Just came out of the presser—amazing in its uselessness. Dear God, “anomalies”? Destiny-7 made it back, yeah, but no one is talking about the two UFOs and 200 MISSING PEOPLE!!!!
POSTER ALMAZ AT NEOMISSION.COM
Part One
No one’s going to read this, I guess. Not even me. But it has to be done.
Slate battery power is better than it used to be. If I’m careful, I might have two days with it. (It’ll last longer because I’m not using the Net, ever again.)
Anyway, here’s what I know: I’m Pav Radhakrishnan, and I’m 16.
Last week two spacecraft, one from NASA commanded by Zack Stewart, and the other from the Coalition of India-Brazil-Russia commanded by my father, Taj, landed on the Near-Earth Object named Keanu…and everything went to shit. First, it turned out that there were aliens living on Keanu as well as human beings. And these human beings were people who were killed on Earth—including Stewart’s wife, Megan, and a girl named Camilla. Pretty fucking weird.
Then two of the NASA astronauts got killed and one of the Brahmans. No one’s quite sure how or why, but they’re gone.
Brahma got blown up.
Eventually four of the survivors, including my father, managed to get aboard the Destiny spacecraft and head back to Earth.
Two days ago me and about a hundred other people from Bangalore got abducted from Earth by a big white balloon thing, some kind of spaceship sent by the Near-Earth Object Keanu. Wrong place, wrong time, story of my young life. About eighty other people got collected from Houston, Texas, too.
We’re all here now, trying to figure out what the hell we do now—how do we eat, sleep, live? Oh, yeah: Who grabbed us and why?
And how do we get away from them?
It’s weird to think I’m never going to see my father again, and that we were really just passing each other in space.
I’m going to call this the Keanu-pedia.
Correction: No one HUMAN is ever going to read this.
KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, ENTRY #1
THE PRISONER
The days no longer had meaning. Even in the space beyond the barrier between the Prisoner and its former habitat, the cycle of light/lesser light/lesser dark/full dark/light had been irregular. The Keepers had almost certainly been manipulating it.
But now even that false rhythm was missing. Here one could rely only on the subtle gradations of the barrier’s temperatures. Touch warm: light. Touch cold: dark.
A poor method of keeping time, especially when keeping time was the only activity available.
There was food—barely enough to sustain life, nowhere near sufficient to give one energy for action. Waste simply drained away.
It was almost certainly another stratagem by the Keepers: to keep a being alive indefinitely, but useless, able only to measure the dimensions of the living space, to create fantastical scenarios of revenge, then to sleep and dream.
Then, somewhere in the next cycle, to repeat.
Even the revenge fantasies had long grown old and too familiar. Lately, in the past six cycles, they had given way to reconciliation dreams!
To consider reconciliation with the Keepers—that was a sure sign of madness, and a cause for terror…. What came after that? Complete mental collapse?
Fortunately, there had been an interruption…sharp vibrations through the floor and walls that allowed the Prisoner to reconnect with the physical universe, no matter how limited.
Revenge scenarios were once again dominant. There was much touching of the walls, in search of temperature data and now more vibrations.
Something was happening beyond the chamber. Whether bad or good, it was welcome…if only because it meant change.
ZACK
Where was it?
The question played in Zack Stewart’s mind like an annoying ad jingle. And those three words had been present all through the past seventy-odd hours…hours that were very odd indeed, if, in fact, they even numbered seventy…
Formerly a typical middle-aged American male of less than average height and weight, often dressed in khakis and polo shirts, he had become a haggard-looking man in stained and soiled long johns. Designed to be worn under a NASA EVA suit, said long johns were actually a garment filled with small plastic tubes through which water circulated. The outfit was now the only tangible reminder of Zack’s former life as an astronaut. Or as an inhabitant of planet Earth.
His life before Keanu.
Lacking a mirror and able to feel the ragged stubble on his face, he suspected that he now looked like a cartoon castaway, which, come to think of it, was exactly his state. Stranded on the interplanetary equivalent of a desert island—
Steady, he told himself. You’ve been running on fumes for a week. You’re stranded on a runaway planetoid. Your choices are…find the exit from this habitat while still breathing.
Or lie down and die.
Even that decision wasn’t simple: Death on Keanu, anywhere around Keanu, didn’t seem to be permanent, or not immediately permanent.
Maybe that whole life-death-what-have-you business was why he kept looking for the way out.
Because of Megan. The last he’d seen of his wife, she had been swallowed up by a rogue Sentry and carried off to certain death. An hour later, Zack had had to fight a Sentry…The same one? He’d thought so at the time.
Now…he wasn’t so sure.
Of course now, he was five days more exhausted, five days less fed. Five days more distracted.
Because two days after losing Megan, after killing that Sentry, 187 people had arrived on Keanu. According to them, they had been literally scooped from the surface of the Earth and carried across almost half a million kilometers in a pair of giant objects that resembled soap bubbles—
“Great number,” Harley Drake had said. “One eighty-seven is the section of the California Penal Code for murder.” Harley was Zack’s best friend, a fellow astronaut who had been crippled in the auto accident that killed Megan Stewart (for the first time, he had to remind himself, two years before the Destiny mission), only to somehow wind up on Keanu, too.
It was clear from the moment the 187 arrived that, beyond what they wore or carried, they had no clothing, few tools, no shelter, not even a common language. There was food on Keanu—the habitat had obviously been designed for creatures from Earth, but which era? There were edible plants, but few that Zack recognized. And how long would those supplies last? What nasty parasites or Keanu-specific bacteria were waiting to strike humans living on the Keanu diet of fruits and vegetables?
There was also a lack of organization and leadership. Plenty of candidates, but to what end? Questions like “Can we go home?” or “Are we stuck here forever?” couldn’t be answered.