Zack was the human race’s expert on Keanu—a title he would gladly have relinquished, given the shallowness of his expertise.
Not that it stopped everyone, including Harley, from bombarding him with questions, questions, questions.
Maybe that was another reason to go walkabout: for the sweet moment of silence.
There was also shame and nagging responsibility; the castaways’ presence here was largely due to Zack’s actions as commander of Destiny-7. Zack had seen the anger in more than a few of their faces. How long before someone picked up a rock and clubbed him to death, just for the sheer catharsis?
So, yes, Zack had wanted to get away from them.
Even from his own daughter, one of the miraculously improbable new immigrants. Well, not so improbable: Harley Drake had been her guardian. If Harley got himself nabbed, Rachel couldn’t have been far away. And Zack had since learned that the reality was the opposite: it was actually Rachel’s fault that the pair had wound up in the not-so-magic 187.
But, much as he cherished the contact with his daughter, Zack feared the road ahead. Rachel’s life—just like the lives of all humans on Keanu—might turn out to be nasty, brutish, and short.
Wouldn’t it have been better to leave his daughter to a full life on Earth? She’d have been an orphan…but she’d have learned to deal with it.
Another reason to beat himself up.
He needed to think. He needed to take stock.
He needed to explore.
During the horrible end game of the First Contact on Keanu, in which his crewmates had been forced to leave him, in which Megan had been killed a second time…Zack had seen what he could only call Keanu’s “Factory.” He had walked the broad “streets” of this second habitat, marveled at its mysterious but somehow functional structures.
He knew that answers to their situation, and tools to improve it, were likely to be found there.
If only he could reach it.
So, as one of the vaguely defined Keanu days ended (the light in the habitat did not change much), Zack had simply slipped away and headed back toward the tunnel to the Factory…a distance surely less than a couple of kilometers.
And now here he was, as alone as any human being in history, and as vulnerable…painfully and slowly working his way along one wall of the habitat…its farthest reach almost misty in the distance, surely ten or more kilometers away, at the end of the chamber.
In best Boy Scout fashion, Zack had managed to find traces of his earlier passage, when carrying Camilla in that frantic escape. The ground surface was a nanotech-based regolith, but it acted like hard-packed dirt.
And, in places, not so hard-packed. Here were their tracks, unmistakable.
But as far as he could determine, the tunnel he had used to reach the Factory was simply gone! It was like a scene from some episode of the Arabian Nights—as if a giant stone door now blocked his escape.
Had there actually been a door, Zack might have been able to locate the spot where the passage used to be…some fine crack or edge.
One thing he had been able to do with his spare time was to create a three-dimensional image of Keanu in his head…the Near-Earth Object was a sphere more than a hundred kilometers in diameter. Zack’s crew and the competing Coalition Brahma team had landed near Vesuvius Vent, one of many craters on Keanu’s icy-rocky surface. Vesuvius had been located near Keanu’s equator; both teams had descended through the vent, then traversed subterranean tunnels that had given them access to this habitat.
Zack pictured a fat cylinder running from surface to core…but that could be wrong: The habitat might just as easily lie at angles to the core.
No matter. He and the others were inside it, until they figured some way out. They couldn’t go back the way they had come—Zack’s team had entered through a passage that was exposed to the vacuum of Keanu’s surface. And while the information from the 187 new arrivals was still jumbled, it appeared that they, too, had come to the habitat via a one-way system.
Well, Keanu’s environment had changed twice in the week Zack had been part of it. Plant growth, sky, temperatures, everything seemed variable, as if programmed by a machine somewhere (likely the case) or, a more horrible thought, entirely at random.
There was no reason to think Keanu’s environment would stay the same. A passage that had been open five days ago was now closed, as if the habitat were some kind of Rubik’s Cube. Bad news for Zack.
But who was to say it might not open again?
Besides, Zack was so unsure of his directional abilities and perceptions that he made a second, broader sweep of the area near the wall. With his back to it, he ranged a couple of hundred meters to his left, back toward the Temple and the other humans…and found no opening or, indeed, anything but more wall.
So he retraced his steps and marched forward, deeper into the habitat. It was as if his mood sank with every ten meters. It wasn’t distance from the other survivors that caused it…it was the realization that his moment of freedom, adventure, and exploration was about to end.
He was going to have to go back, to resume his unwanted post as titular “leader.”
And father.
And he felt completely unequipped for either role—
He stopped. The light inside the Keanu habitat was never as bright as noon on Earth; at its best, it was equivalent to a cloudy morning.
So Zack couldn’t be sure what he was seeing…some kind of object not far ahead, up against the wall, that was not a plant or tree, and not shaped like the rocks here, either.
He began to run, the tubes in his long johns making clicking and zipping sounds, like corduroy pants—
Then he stopped, because he suddenly knew what he was seeing less than five meters away.
It was the body of a human female so mangled it appeared to have almost been torn in two. It reminded Zack of some classic crime photo—California again, the Blue…or was it the Black Dahlia?
Only this wasn’t some stranger unlucky enough to be the victim of a crime.
This was Megan, his reborn wife…killed a second time by a Sentry. She had sacrificed herself so that Zack and Camilla could live.
He knelt, noting with some relief—the only relief he could summon—that her eyes were closed and her features seemed peaceful.
Zack had already gone through the horror of seeing Megan dead once before, after the auto accident in Florida. That time she—her body—had been intact. But her expression had been different; colder, deader somehow.
This face was more…resigned? Accepting? Knowing?
Stop it. He was projecting. He needed to be practical. He couldn’t leave her like this—
Not far from the wall he found a stand of trees with giant, fanlike leaves. There were similar trees near the Temple, and one of the survivors had already dubbed them “ginkgos.”
Zack stripped off several leaves and several lengths of vine.
He returned to Megan’s body and set about the heartbreaking task of rearranging the remains…then gently wrapping them for transport.
Zack might not have found the passage, but he’d found closure.
RACHEL
Shortly after dawn, the rain stopped.
At least, that was how Rachel Stewart would have described it: “Dawn” inside the Keanu human habitat meant that after nine or so hours of low light, the squiggly shaped glowtubes in the ceiling warmed up and grew somewhat brighter. A day? It was a lot like one of the few phrases Rachel remembered from the Bible—“the light followed the dark,” something like that. There was no sunrise or noon…only the glowtubes coming on, then fourteen hours later, fading out to twilight.
The rain wasn’t much like the precipitation Rachel had known growing up in Texas, either. It was more like a heavy mist that rolled out of hidden crevices in the habitat walls, filling in the lower areas first, then expanding to a dense wet cloud that coated vegetation, buildings, and people with enough moisture to cause discomfort and even leave puddles.