“More to the immediate point, they know where Rachel and the others are. They will never allow them to visit the U.S. They tried to kill them once; they’ll try to do it again.”
Jaidev closed his eyes and drummed his fingers. That wasn’t the extent of his twitchiness—he also tapped a foot. “And how do you know these matters?”
With a great deal of pride—no other human had managed to reach such a lofty level of communion with Keanu—he told them.
Beginning almost two decades ago, four habitats had turned out to be off-limits to Dale. Human, Sentry, Skyphoi, and the blasted one.
Reachable, however was a fifth . . . the Factory habitat, a genuine cityscape that filled a volume larger than any two of the others.
It was here that Dale spent ten years wandering, exploring, probing, and in some cases, defacing . . . entirely alone. The Factory was a fascinating place if you craved solitude and the company of exotic ten-thousand-year-old machines doing God knows what for who knows what reason.
But he believed that he had learned some of the Factory’s secrets, and one of the most important was accessing its amazing data intercept and retrieval systems.
Dale knew that in their first years on Keanu, Jaidev and Sanjay and that bunch had made several trips to the surface to erect communications dishes that they’d fabricated with Keanu’s nanotech goo—Substance K. But, given the other priorities—food, habitation, immense numbers of other needed items—there had been little time for them to pursue what was seen as a hobby.
And Keanu’s trajectory away from Earth, and soon the Sun, made signal intercepts difficult; the NEO was literally flying at right angles “south” from the solar ecliptic plane. While many terrestrial signals propagated in an expanding sphere, others—usually the most interesting—had been confined to fiber-optic networks or transmitted in tightly directed beams. There were also signals that were too weak to be detected at any distance.
At least by the equipment humans would possess in 2019, and especially the equipment that could be knocked together by ill-equipped refugees of that era.
Keanu’s systems were a hundred times better. “You won’t believe what Keanu itself has been able to pick up.”
“Oh, try me,” Sasha Blaine said. “The Architects were able to pick up morphogenetic signals and human souls. I wouldn’t think that episodes of The Simpsons would be a real stretch for them.”
Dale turned to her. “I don’t claim to have mastered the search engine, but I have learned this: Anything that was transmitted anywhere near Earth in the past twenty-four years, ever since Keanu entered the solar system, is here somewhere, stored and theoretically retrievable. I’m not just talking television and radio, but ham radio signals and telephone calls. Billions of telephone calls. Internet posts that went wireless. Obviously, I could only access a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of any of it, and I can only read or understand a tiny bit of that.
“Another thing: Terrestrial encryption means nothing to the Architects and their software.
“It just boggled my mind when I realized what it was doing. It still does, because, FYI, Keanu is still recording.”
Jaidev spoke. “You still haven’t told us how and where you learned about Rachel’s landing and these threats.”
“Landing news is everywhere outside India, nonofficial but public transmissions. You could see and hear those if your old antenna were working.
“The threats? That’s more subterranean, various blogs and other links. But convincing. A source I trust.”
Harley looked at Sasha Blaine, who looked away, through the curtain.
Then Harley looked at Jaidev, who stood up. “Deal with this.”
And the Bangalore engineer-leader walked out.
“What does that mean?” Dale said. “That’s it?”
“Sorry, Dale,” Harley said. “You’re not going anywhere for a while.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re a . . . security risk.”
“Be serious.” Dale knew Harley well enough to know that Harley was serious, and felt stupid about it.
“You’ve stepped in something.”
“I’m guessing you’re not going to tell me what.”
“Nope.”
“You’re not even interested in what information I have?”
“Oh, we’re interested. We want you where you can be questioned.”
Dale wanted to laugh. “What are you going to do . . . clap me in irons?”
Harley said nothing but looked past Dale toward Sasha, and the curtain.
Which had parted, revealing three serious-looking young people, one woman and two men, who were there to take Dale Scott into custody.
THE LATEST:
Word from various places in India confirms arrival of the Keanu folks, including a Sentry! (Can’t wait to hear the explanation for that.)
One of the crew is badly injured and reportedly not likely to survive.
All are temporarily sequestered at an air base north of Bangalore, near the site of their landing.
Crowds are being kept at bay, but the whole operation leaks like an old boat—good for us, but potentially bad for the Keanu folks. Not only are they fat targets for the Aggs, but anyone on the Indian subcontinent who has a religious gripe with them, and this appears to be a good number.
Well, we warned them to stay away, right? Anyone remember that?
But, since they’re here . . .
COLIN EDGELY TO THE KETTERING GROUP,
APRIL 13, 2040
YAHVI
The first night was awful. Partly it was the weight of the hours, the isolation, the creepy interior of the hospital, the presence of guards . . . combined with Rachel’s motherly iciness.
Mostly, though, it was the food. Everything Yahvi had eaten in her life had been produced in the Keanu human habitat, either grown from existing stock the HBs had discovered—some of it not remotely terrestrial—or from prototypes engineered by the proteus after considerable trial and error. And while there were spices and curries suited to the tastes of the Bangalore majority, none of it prepared Yahvi for the variety of exotic dishes she was now supposed to consume.
Half of the food on the table appeared to have non-Indian origin, too. There was some kind of rice dish topped with sliced circular items that Yahvi suspected were meat of some kind. They must have been, because Xavier and even Rachel greedily dug into it. “Not bad for Bangalore jambalaya,” Xavier said.
There were even boxes of food from places with names like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. “Where on Earth did you get these?” Rachel said.
“Come on, baby,” Pav said, “there were franchises in Bangalore when I lived here.”
“I just wonder who the franchise money goes to these days,” Xavier said. “Those were American companies. Are we supporting the Reivers by eating this?” It was clear he wasn’t expecting an answer, as he happily tipped a flat, wedge-shaped object toward his mouth and bit into it. “God, pepperoni,” he said, his mouth full. “You know, I could never get this quite right in the habitat.”
“Or pastrami or steak or any red meat,” Rachel said.
“Not even chicken.”
The HBs had few animals, for one thing. For another, the idea of slaughtering any for food was repugnant to most of the imported population—and as far as Yahvi knew, everyone in her generation.
She wasn’t going near the hut pizza or large mack or whatever the supposed “American” food was. Dealing with the Indian cuisine was bad enough.
So she picked at her food and soon gave up the effort. As any mother would, Rachel noticed. “There’s nothing you like?”
“No.”
“Not even the naan?”