Rachel understood Harley’s reason for asking the question—it was likely the one thing everyone with him wanted to know, beyond the simple fact of the crew’s safety. But she didn’t want to have this discussion right now. She felt terrible, and she felt exposed . . . as if the wrong word could ruin everything. “We haven’t been outside much,” she said. “Confined to a hospital since landing.”
For a moment, the pain went away. Then it was back, as Harley said, “Losing the link. Glad to know you made it. Looking forward to more updates when you have them. Everyone here says, ‘Good work!’”
Then, mercifully, it was over.
Rachel blinked, then ran her hand through her hair, rubbing the right side of her head. It felt as though she had a fever.
She wondered if Pav and Xavier had had a link, and if they had been similarly affected.
God, what if this happened to Sanjay? What if the transmitter in his head had been discovered or removed by the Indian doctors?
The technology wasn’t new—one of the space communications specialists among the HBs knew about similar implants from 2019, and Zhao, to the extent that he shared anything, seemed to know a lot about their design and uses. And surely the Indian welcoming committee would expect Adventure’s travelers to have some means of staying in touch with Keanu.
This was not a setback—yet. But it reminded Rachel of the risks she and her family had accepted, and the stakes.
It was Melani Remilla who showed Rachel the living quarters. “We set aside four rooms in this wing,” the ISRO director said. “All on the same floor, all relatively private.”
They were hospital rooms, of course, with medical monitoring equipment removed and an extra chair and rollaway garment rack added.
As if we were packing several changes of clothes, Rachel thought. They each carried half a dozen versions of the same basic outfit; fashion was not a big deal among the HBs. No one had tried to use the proteus to make a sport coat or a little black cocktail dress.
The whole suite looked more appropriate to the prison ward of some white-collar American jail. The feeling was enhanced by the presence of two armed guards at the nurses’ station.
“There are bathrooms in two of the rooms,” Remilla said. “They have safety railings, of course. We weren’t able to remove them without rebuilding the facilities.”
“That we can deal with,” Rachel said. “Anything will be better than the accommodations aboard Adventure.” The onboard “bathroom” had been a curtained-off set of covered buckets on the cargo deck.
She wondered about Melani Remilla—was she married, did she have children? Was she a real engineer or scientist, or a policy wonk or political appointee? She looked like the former—a bit dowdy and distracted—but acted and sounded like the latter.
And did any of that matter? With luck, Rachel and team would be on their way elsewhere within a day or two, even if Sanjay had to remain behind. There would be other political operatives, flacks, and wheeler-dealers to confront—
“There are so many questions I want to ask you.”
Remilla had been silent for so long that the sound of her voice, echoing in this empty hallway, startled Rachel. “I feel the same.”
“Which is why we scheduled the group briefings and various conferences . . .” Remilla’s voice trailed off.
“You want to ask me something in private, and it feels as though you’re cheating the rest of the committee.” Rachel was aware that she had the bad habit of finishing other people’s thoughts. The high degree of accuracy had failed to make it one of her more popular habits.
But Remilla seemed relieved. “What do you really want to do here?” she said. “You aren’t equipped to explore—”
“We will be doing some sightseeing.”
Remilla made a skeptical face. All right, Rachel thought. Tell her. “We want to visit Texas, the U.S.”
“That’s what I feared.”
“It can’t be a surprise.”
“I understand perfectly—if I’d been taken from my home twenty years in the past, I’d want to visit. But you heard your father-in-law. Texas and the U.S., they are not what you remember. You won’t be welcome.”
They were about to leave the suite and go back to more public areas. Rachel took Remilla’s arm. “And now, a private question from me to you,” Rachel said.
“That’s only fair,” Remilla said, visibly bracing herself.
“The entities that control the Free Nations . . . how have you been able to stop their spread?”
“You heard Taj: a combination of embargo, fences, and other barriers, occasional conflicts. But, truly? I’m not at all certain that we have. I think they remain ‘contained’ because they choose to.”
“Which leads to, why?”
“That is the single question that obsesses us all, every government, every scientific body. The Aggregates are working on something big, and likely very nasty.”
“What does that mean?”
“The best current theory is that they are building a giant energy weapon that they can use to strike anywhere on the globe, essentially destroying cities and defenses from thousands of kilometers distant—”
“Then moving in?”
Remilla shrugged. “That would be the idea. It’s what seems to be obsessing and paralyzing our military, because they have no way of counteracting it.”
“What about destroying this energy weapon? It’s one giant installation, right?”
“Yes, located deep in the heart of Free Nation U.S.”
“India had nuclear missiles twenty years ago.”
“And still possesses a handful, but they are all twenty years old . . . and likely to be easy pickings for Aggregate countermeasures.”
“So taking a few shots at them would do nothing except get them angry.”
“‘Stirring the hornets’ nest’ is the phrase that keeps coming up.”
“What do you think?”
Remilla thought for a moment. “I’m not sure it is an energy weapon. There is also a great deal of other data about huge buildups of conventional weapons . . . especially land vehicles.”
Rachel found that image troubling, and also strange. “So they’re planning to invade Mexico?”
“Mexico is already a Free Nation, though there are pockets where even the Aggregates don’t go,” Remilla said. “But they could use ships to transport these vehicles to Asia.”
“It sounds as though you really don’t know.”
“The matter is above my pay grade, as they say.”
“Then how about this matter, at our level,” Rachel said. “How well do you know Commander Kaushal?”
Rachel’s experience with politicians was limited to the HB Council, but even that relatively limited pool had trained her to recognized wariness and hesitation. She could tell that Melani Remilla’s eyes narrowed some fraction of a centimeter—about the same distance her eyebrows rose—even as she said, in a voice that betrayed no change of attitude, “Why do you ask?”
“He seems cautious and controlling.”
“He’s a military man.” Now the ISRO official’s expression changed from wariness to something like bemusement.
“My father-in-law is a general, too,” Rachel said. “This isn’t a case of military-versus-civilian. One of our crew is in dire medical condition and we aren’t being given timely information, we aren’t being allowed to see him. We are being treated like prisoners.
“I understand his concern for the . . . safety of Earth,” Rachel said, feeling as though Melani Remilla could do with a reminder. “But we are six people, one of them a teenager. You’ve already performed medical examinations; we aren’t carrying a plague from space. In fact, given where we’ve lived for the past two decades, we are more likely to catch some terrestrial bug.