There was an ominous rumbling, as if Keanu were suffering death throes. Maybe that’s what a NEO’s death is like, Zack thought; it breaks up, scattering itself across space….
He had to act now. One last hug, one last kiss. “I’ll see you in a little while. Go with Makali.”
He turned to the others. He was almost shouting. “This isn’t a suicide mission. I’ll meet you guys right here once I’ve got this bad boy working again.”
He never let go of the unit. If he did, he’d never pick it up again.
He pointed to the Tik-Talk, which was now in Zhao’s hands. “Tell Harley that I expect a decent meal for the first time. Something in a steak should do it.”
Then, picking up the package, he stepped into the Membrane, and fell into darkness.
There was almost no gravity in the shaft. Zack was barely aware that he was falling.
The landing was soft, featherlike, so gentle that he was able to tuck his knees up—just like living in microgravity aboard the International Space Station—and land on both feet.
He wasn’t steady; the entire chamber continued to rock, like Los Angeles with aftershocks. It made every movement more difficult, more urgent—
He ended up in another ancient stone tile chamber with five shafts leading in different directions. Before he had to confront the decision of which to take, he saw that he wasn’t alone.
The Revenant girl Camilla waited for him. She had been sitting in the darkness. Now she rose.
Odd how this child seemed to haunt these moments.
Even odder that he kept having them.
“Everyone back at the Temple is wondering what happened to you,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t understand.
To his shock, she said, in English, “Regrettable. I became infected. I became an instrument of the enemy. It was like a fever—I could only sing this little song from my childhood about ‘ratos.’ I was warning you—”
“About the Reivers.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re no longer constrained.”
“Oh, no. I’m destroyed,” Camilla said. “But the infection is contained within me. When I die, it dies, too.”
For the first time since reconnecting with Rachel, Zack grew alarmed. This isn’t right. But the only comment he could offer was, “I’m sorry.” Then, feeling that to be inadequate, added, “Your communication skills have improved.”
“We are able to work more efficiently with young subjects,” she said. “I speak for the Architect.”
“I figured.” He looked around. “Do you know the way to the core?”
She immediately turned to the shaft across from them and pointed. “Okay,” he said. “Are you coming with me?”
“The effort is straining my body,” she said. “I have very little time.”
What did that mean? Was she going to sit down and die here? He held out his hand. “I’ll help.”
And, stumbling as another quake jolted them, she took Zack’s hand.
Steadying himself as best he could, he slung the kit over his shoulder.
It was like walking into the first few meters of the Beehive, though longer and straighter. Zack was grateful for the distance, since it allowed him to ask, “Do you take messages to the Architect, too? To Keanu itself?”
“That is the nature of communication. We hear you.”
“That’s good,” he said. They passed through another Membrane, the curtain shimmering in response to the quaking and shuddering. “Because this reboot and saving you, the ship, is only half the battle.”
“What else do you want?”
“To save Earth,” he said, surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth. “I want to keep that vesicle from reaching my home planet. Nothing else matters.” He imagined the Reiver vesicle splashing down in the ocean, or touching down in some remote forest or mountain range. How long would it take for the nasty little creatures, exposed to sunlight, awash in oxygen and soil and hydrogen, to start reproducing at some fantastic rate?
He pictured the beautiful blue-and-white sphere of Earth, as he had seen it close up from the space station, and far away from Destiny. Now add a black spot of contagion in the middle of the USA. How quickly would it spread? How long before the entire North American continent was that horrible color, awash with Reiver templates?
The world?
And what would it mean? Would people die? Quite likely, just as swiftly and horribly as they would if a mutated Ebola virus struck.
Or would Earth and humanity be transformed into something mean, ugly, Reiver-like.
“The war isn’t on your planet,” Camilla said. “The battlefield is elsewhere.”
“I think the battlefield is everywhere,” he said. “The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll start to win.”
She was silent for several moments. Then: “We were unsuited to fighting the Reivers. Too old, too fragile, too large scale.”
“Too large scale?”
“Our reactions, our thought processes—they are simply too slow. We can’t compete against creatures who live in fractions of fractions of a moment. They can make a million decisions in the time it takes us to make one. And there are other flaws, too.”
Zack said, “So consider this: We’re a few hundred humans in a ten-thousand-year-old ship. We might be able to help you with one battle when Keanu gets wherever it’s going, but if I were you, I’d want seven billion weapons—I’d want the entire population of Earth working as a team.”
“You can’t promise that, and mobilizing your entire population is impossible. We had a difficult time collecting two hundred, and you are still not a fighting unit.”
“That may be our strength,” Zack said, afraid he was losing the most important argument in human history. “Think of us as bridging the gap between you and the Reivers. We’re smaller, faster, capable of operating in discrete units. But we are still individuals. We’ll never act as a bloc, the way they do.”
Then she said, “We are still suspicious. Consider your actions here.”
“Individuals make mistakes. Groups of individuals make bigger ones. It’s how we learn and change.”
A long silence. Finally she said, “If you accomplish the restart, we will consider turning the vessel around and returning to Earth.”
That would have to do. He hugged the girl, a bit of a trick with the rattling and shaking all around them. He wanted to laugh out loud. He thought of his friends and surviving family members—his poor parents and the hell they must have gone through this past two weeks—and all the workers in the space community, not to mention the astronomers who had discovered the NEO in the first place…the look on their faces when they realized that Keanu was heading back!
Assuming, of course, that he succeeded—
They stumbled into a vast brilliant cylinder tens of kilometers tall. Zack felt like a microbe at the focus of a telescope.
High above them, what appeared to be a brown dwarf star floated…fading even as Zack watched.
“We have little time,” Camilla said.
“What do I do with this unit?” Zack said. “Is there a switch or a trigger?”
“Oh,” she said, “you triggered it by carrying it through the last Membrane. Drop it there.”
Zack did as Camilla directed. Before the unit left his hand, it began to throb, grow warm, grow heavy.
The girl drifted forward, deeper into the cylinder. “Not that way,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Camilla stopped, spread her arms as if in benediction. Then turned to Zack with a smile.
Zack didn’t need to ask the next question. Camilla’s posture told him everything. “We aren’t getting out, are we?”
“If the device is used properly, we have no chance of survival.”
Oh God, he thought. He exhaled once, twice, three times. With the rocking and rolling motion of the NEO interior, he felt like a captain on a sinking ship.
There was the case, glowing with a white-hot brilliance, like a doorway opening to heaven—