Sadness hit him like a hammer. Good-bye Earth and friends and NASA and Michigan and Mom and Dad and strawberries and clean sheets and sunrises and the stars and kisses and music and Rachel and Megan and—
Holding hands, he and Camilla walked into the holy light.
Epilogue
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
REVELATION 12:7–8
We’re still here.
KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, MUCH LATER ENTRY
RACHEL
Rachel was shocked at how much the gravesite had changed since her last visit. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of visiting. There was always too much to do. And the memory of her parents was still strong. She still thought of them every day.
Even after twenty-one years.
Besides, while the remains of her mother’s second body were buried here, there was only a stone to Zachary Stewart’s memory. He had never returned from the power core.
She had often relived her last conversation with Yvonne, who died less than a day after Zack entered the shaft that dropped him into Keanu’s power core. Yvonne had clearly wanted to comfort Rachel on her loss, even as she was dying.
“Why are the Reivers so bad?” she remembered asking Yvonne. “Couldn’t we find a way to work with them? Aren’t they just information arranged differently?”
“Exactly,” Yvonne said. “They are perfect machines for the collection of energy and its use. Their only purpose seems to be replication.”
“Isn’t that what we do?”
“No,” Yvonne said. “We have love and free will, and our information grows and changes…”
“The Reivers are where information goes to die.”
And if we don’t stop them, Rachel had concluded, that’s what the universe becomes. Dead.
Her deputy mayor got her attention. “Do you wish to remain in private?”
Sentries were always so deferential, a state that would have startled any of the Houston Bangalores in their early encounters with the aquatic race. Their motives, their incomprehensible savagery, all combined to make them unwelcome crewmates. But years of negotiation and, frankly, mutual evolution had not only resulted in a truce—they had created a kinder, gentler type of Sentry. If they were going to be useful in a war on Earth, they would have to step out of their comfort zone.
Sentries would have to be the warriors they once were. Because that was what they were facing.
When the Reivers launched the vesicle, they also commanded Keanu’s propulsion system to fire a long, sustained burst, not only accelerating the NEO to its greatest speed, but depleting its onboard fuel supply so thoroughly that it took years—decades—to replenish.
One of the side effects of this fuel starvation and system crash had been the elimination of the Revenant function. No human had been reborn since the day of the power core restart, though some HBs continued to try. No animals beyond the dozen that had been released. It was only after Beehive technology was imported to the Temple system that experiments in 3-D manufacturing and plasm manipulation created a permanent animal population, though not without much pain and loss.
All the while, Keanu was moving farther and farther from Earth.
It had been difficult…not just eradicating the Reivers. The Gabriel Jones–delivered information virus, aka the bug zapper, had done most of the work, causing the machinelike beings to evolve themselves into unstable and unsurvivable forms that then crashed, collapsed, and died. All of them, from tiny bugs to Long Legs and other forms.
But it had taken years before humans were certain that there were no Reiver colonies anywhere on the interior or surface of Keanu.
Rachel was in her early twenties when the HBs, then numbering more than three hundred and living in two habitats, were able to fire Keanu’s engines again, braking the trajectory (which took five years) and firing the vessel back toward Earth.
With limited fuel, however, Keanu was never able to reach the same velocity…the flight “home” took three times as long as the flight out. Until recently, there had been no communication with Earth. It had taken years of experimentation with Keanu’s systems to develop such a system—and more years until the vessel was within range.
Then there had been a long series of debates—what do we know about Earth? If the Reivers reached it, the entire planet might be infected, enemy territory.
So we wait, Rachel thought. Until today.
Pav Radhakrishnan, her longtime lover and confidant, approached, edging in front of the Sentry. “Madame Mayor,” Pav said, relishing the term because he knew it irritated Rachel, “what are your orders? Do we answer Earth, do we stay silent and fly on by, or—?”
She rose. As she did, she happened to glance back across the habitat to the original Temple, now surrounded by Keanu-grown apartments and fabrication facilities. There were fields, roads, passages that connected to other habitats. The HB population now stood at close to one thousand.
So different from those first days.
Rachel turned to face Pav, and DSA, connate of DSZ, her best friend among the Sentries and her functioning first mate. “We’re not going to fly on by,” she said.
“I know,” Pav said. “But you always like to hear all the options.”
“And we can’t remain silent much longer,” DSA said through its translator. “There is no evidence that we’ve been tracked, but we are detectable by telescopes that existed a human century ago.”
It was not going to be easy. In fact, if the Reivers had indeed reached Earth, Rachel and Pav and all the HBs were facing a continuation of the ugly little war her father had fought and won twenty-one years ago.
What would Zack Stewart say? Or Megan?
“Let’s go get ’em.”
BLIND TRANSMISSION RECEIVED ABOARD KEANU:
Greetings!
Colin Edgely here…discoverer of Keanu back in 2016, transmitting from an undisclosed location.
It’s twenty-one years to the day since the Venture and Brahma crews landed on Keanu, twenty-one years to the week that 187 humans were taken there by means unknown. Some of us have watched you fly away from Earth and the solar system.
Some fewer have watched you fly back.
We hope you can read this or understand it:
DON’T
[Message corrupted.]
Acknowledgments
An SF trilogy, especially an epic SF trilogy of which Heaven’s War is the middle chapter, takes time. We’ve been working on this since January 2007 and have a bit of road ahead of us.
So, first, thanks are due our wives, Marina Black and Cindy Cassutt, and the children, Milo, Sayle, Ryan, and Alexandra.
At Ace Books, Ginjer Buchanan, Kat Sherbo, and Rosanne Romanello. At Pan Macmillan, Julie Crisp and Bella Pagan.
Simon Lipskar at Writers House.
A special shout-out to those who supported Heaven’s Shadow: Rick Kleffel, Lou Anders, and Paul Cornell.
And double thanks to those who are continuing on Keanu’s journey.
D.S.G. & M.C.
Los Angeles, December 2011
Don’t miss the next book by David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt
HEAVEN’S FALL
Available in July 2013 from Ace Books!