“Let’s find the son of a bitch before he does something else to us.”
He headed for the hatch and jumped into the dark tunnel.
Rachel Stewart started to follow her father out of the railcar, but Makali got in her way. “You stay.” She turned to Pav. “Keep her here.”
Pav grabbed for Rachel’s arm.
Now Zhao was up. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill that thing,” Dale said, “even if I have to use bare hands.”
“Unlikely,” Zhao said.
“First we’re going to catch him and make him talk,” Makali said. “Yvonne, if you think your link with the Architect will work at a distance, you should come with us.”
The astronaut headed for the open hatch. The Architect didn’t move.
Zack was already fifteen meters ahead of them, running after Dash. But the Destiny commander’s feet were obviously hindering him; Makali saw him slow, hop in pain, then try to get going again.
She and Dale quickly caught up with him. Yvonne was close behind. “Hey, Dash!” Dale shouted.
The Sentry ignored him. But the alien couldn’t ignore Cowboy. The dog was the fastest being in the tunnel—with a snarling yelp, he caught the Sentry and began tugging at its garments.
The Sentry actually stopped. As it struggled with the dog, it faced the approaching humans. Now what? Makali wondered. She well remembered the story of Pogo Downey’s ill-fated encounter with a hostile Sentry.
But she didn’t need a plan of action after all; Dale simply rushed the Sentry like a football linebacker, slamming the alien between knees and waist.
The Sentry was staggered, but not felled—until Zack Stewart hit him, too. Dash hit the wall, then stumbled sideways.
With the dog barking and looking for an opening, Dale and Zack, working together for the first time, tried to pin the Sentry.
It’s come to this, Makali realized. Two weeks ago she could only fantasize about discovering hard evidence of alien life in the universe. Now she was tackling a genuine alien being. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be hilarious.
“We saved you,” Zack yelled at Dash.
“I…expressed gratitude.” It was strange hearing a calm, monotonic voice emerge from the translation unit when the Sentry was clearly struggling.
“Didn’t last long.”
“I had my mission.”
“I don’t understand your mission. Or anything you’ve done.”
“We are bred to fight, even our own kind. It’s in our water—”
Before Yvonne or Makali could add their weight, Dash flung them aside as if they were angry cats. Dale landed on Cowboy, who squealed in pain.
With impressive speed and determination, Dash was off again, soon with four humans and a dog in ragged pursuit.
Within moments Dash had passed through a T-junction in the tunnel. As Makali, Zack, Dale, and Yvonne huffed and puffed in the Sentry’s wake, Zack said, “We’re never going to catch him again.”
“Maybe we should let him go,” Makali said, mindful of Zhao’s urging about their mission to the power core.
“No. He’s killed humans and he’s involved with the Reivers. We need what he knows.”
“No we don’t,” Yvonne said. “We need to…”
She turned back and looked at the railcar a hundred meters away.
It was moving toward them.
“We need to get out of the way,” she said. “This way!” She pushed or dragged the other three into the side tunnel. Cowboy was faster than all of them.
They had barely exited the main passage before the railcar flashed past them like a whisper. Makali felt the explosion of displaced air and a disturbing rippling sensation, as if her entire body had been stretched wide, then allowed to snap back to its original state.
“What the hell was that?” Dale said.
“Cat’s-eye passing,” Yvonne said, as if that explained anything.
The railcar had stopped a few meters away. Zhao, Pav, and Rachel were emerging slowly, like accident victims. “Who did that?” Zhao said.
“Keanu did it,” Yvonne said simply.
Dash lay on the floor of the tunnel in front of the railcar. The impact had been horrific; flattened on one side, oozing internal fluid, the Sentry looked as though it had been dropped from a ten-story building. The dog sniffed at the remains and didn’t much like what it smelled.
Zack knelt to examine the body. After a moment, he simply sat back. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting tired of finding these things dead.” He slowly rose. “That makes three.”
Only now did he realize that his fourteen-year-old daughter was standing two meters away, taking in the entire gruesome scene. “Rachel,” he said.
“Don’t worry, Daddy. After the things I’ve seen…”
Makali noted that Pav was holding her hand. And that the Architect had emerged from the railcar. The silent giant moved like an old man with arthritis.
Then the power died again. Unlike the previous momentary blackouts Makali had experienced, this was accompanied by a sound that might have been a distant explosion. The entire tunnel—indeed, all of Keanu—seemed to shudder.
“Tell me that was another cat’s-eye,” Makali said.
“Sorry,” Yvonne said, nodding to the Architect, who now appeared hunched over. “That was the vesicle being launched with Reivers on board.”
“We’re too late. It’s going to Earth.”
“The son of a bitch suckered us,” Dale said.
“What are you talking about?” Zack said. The power returned but immediately went off again. The whole system seemed to be sputtering.
“He stalled us just long enough!” Dale laughed. “He literally threw himself under the bus so these Reivers could get to the vesicle first!”
“Does that mean we’re screwed?” Pav said. “We can’t go home?”
“I’m more worried about whether Keanu will survive,” Zhao said. “The power’s not steady.”
Zack turned to Yvonne. “This is the Architect’s world,” he said. “What can we do?”
“Go to the Skyphoi,” Yvonne said. “They’re our only hope now.”
HARLEY
“It’s a form of the disease that afflicts Dr. Jones,” Jaidev said. “His attacks the organs from within. This attacks the brain and central nervous system.” He was holding a crude-looking injector filled with a milky fluid.
“But it kills the host,” Harley Drake said.
“Yes.” The serious-minded Indian engineer looked at Harley as if he were an idiot. And not for the first time. “How else would it do the job?”
Shane Weldon sat down next to Harley. They were at the worktable in the second-floor “kitchen” of the Temple. The light was so low it was like camping out. The sounds of the habitat—a distant drone, the whisper of a faint breeze, and what Harley now realized was a creaking sound he associated with spacecraft expanding and contracting—had all died away as the power dropped to a minimum.
The only sounds were footsteps of HBs running up and down the ramps, as Harley and Nayar gathered their “war council.”
That, and Gabriel Jones’s broken voice. A few steps away, he was using the Tik-Talk to converse with his daughter, Yvonne, who had been killed in the horrific and misguided detonation of the baby nuke during the first exploration of Keanu.
Had been killed. Alive again. Harley Drake kept thinking about that idea.
Well, he was just grateful that the Tik-Talk still worked, and that they’d been able to locate Zack Stewart and the others. They knew that the Reivers had launched the vesicle toward Earth and essentially shut down Keanu’s power core.
Not that any of this was especially comforting. If the power core didn’t get rebooted, they were likely all dead, and with Keanu dead, not likely to become Revenants.
But the information had allowed them to come up with plans: Zack and his team would attempt to deal with the core while the Temple would stage a counterattack against these Reivers, the cause of all the problems. Jaidev and his magicians had seized on a suggestion by Zhao and had managed to produce one dosage of this brain-attacking horror before every system shut down. Their bioweapon was based on samples from Gabriel Jones. Harley wasn’t quite sure how or why, but biochemistry had never been his field. Or close to it.