Xavier and Tea were behind them, not easily seen. Rachel would describe Tea’s response as stoic, though with some tears in her eyes.
Xavier looked as though he’d been hit with a hammer. And, in many ways, he had, because without Sanjay, Adventure’s success now depended on him.
The plane rolled to a stop. Edgely was first out of his seat as Steve, the male pilot, emerged from the cockpit with the manner of a man in a hurry. “Welcome to Darwin, everyone. And please accept my condolences. Very sad news.”
The hatchway opened and Edgely and Steve exited. Chang, Tea, and Xavier started to follow. Tea gestured for Yahvi to join them. The girl sniffed, whether from her lingering cold or sadness it was impossible to tell, and got out.
Rachel lingered, not out of love for the aircraft, but just to give herself some emotional space.
Pav waited, too. Then he took her arm and led her down the stairs.
It was only once they were on the ground that he said, “We have a long list of practical matters to discuss—so long I don’t even know where to start.”
“Sanjay,” she said. “There’s a body . . . what do we do?”
“Well, several possibilities: have it frozen and stored; have it shipped to us; have it buried in Bangalore, or cremated there. I think that covers it.”
Rachel pondered this unhappy decision as she took in her surroundings. The plane had pulled up to a hangar, one of several in what was obviously the cargo terminal of a large airport.
The sky was moonless, dark—cloudy, night, the smell of rain in the air. She knew it was late, middle of the night, likely three or four A.M.
Yet there were armed guards within sight.
“Are they for us?”
Edgar Chang happened to pass close enough to hear. “Sadly, no. This is the world we live in.”
“So, machine guns against the Aggregates?” Pav said.
Chang shrugged. “Useless, of course. It just makes nervous people feel safer.”
He smiled and shuffled off. Rachel was amazed at how tired and elderly the man seemed.
“What will it be?” Pav said. “Sanjay?”
“I suppose I have to decide now.”
Pav gestured with his phone. “I can reach my father now. Don’t know that I’ll be able to do that for another ten hours.”
“What would you do?”
Pav closed his eyes. Even thinking about this was obviously painful for him, too. “He’s Hindu . . .”
“Then have him cremated,” Rachel said, surprised that her voice even functioned.
Pav nodded and was about to step away, but she caught his arm. “The rest of it,” she said. “What is the plan? Or what was it?”
“Refuel, reload.”
“Then?”
“Onward.”
“Where? Can this thing fly as far as North America?”
“No.”
“Then . . .”
“We stop at Guam, then Hawaii.”
Rachel felt sick at the thought, though she wasn’t sure if it was the number of stops or just the sheer danger and complexity of the job facing her.
“And this is all arranged and paid for?”
“So far.” Pav could see the fear and fatigue. He wrapped his arms around her. “We’ve got to trust these people. And look, they got us this far.”
“How do we know there aren’t Reiver soldiers waiting right outside?” She nodded toward the guards at the perimeter. “They seem to think so. . . .”
Pav smiled. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
Darwin was a full-sized city, which meant that its airport was fairly large, with a glittering tower and main terminal . . . and a distant, bustling cargo terminal where the Adventure crew’s plane had pulled in. Fortunately, it was the middle of the night. Nevertheless, there were still aircraft pulling into the terminal and crews preparing to load or unload them.
Seeing the activity, Rachel said to Pav, “We can’t let Zeds out.”
“He knows.”
“Does he need anything—?”
Pav was smiling. “You forget who you’re dealing with, lady. I assigned Yahvi to get water and whatever else he needs for the moment. Right now he’s operating on his suit, and we got it tanked up before we left Yelahanka.”
“Poor thing. It’s like he’s a prisoner.”
“Are we that much better off?”
Rachel laughed. They weren’t. Edgely had asked them to remain within one hangar in Darwin’s cargo terminal. “There are bathrooms,” he said, “and a bit of a buffet upstairs.”
Sanitary facilities and food—that was what Rachel’s life was reduced to. It reminded her of the things her father had told her about the realities of spaceflight. “Boredom and repetitious tasks,” he said. “And an hour of exercise every day, whether you think you need it or not. What you wind up thinking about is what’s next on your meal schedule, and how long is it going to take you to operate the zero-g toilet.”
Well, in a way, this trip to Earth was a form of space exploration.
“Speaking of which,” Rachel said. She didn’t need a bathroom as much as she needed a moment of privacy.
“Go,” Pav said.
“What about you?”
He tapped the side of his head. “Going to try to raise Keanu. They need to know about Sanjay.”
“From here?” One of the reasons Rachel had resisted leaving Adventure was the likely loss of communications with Keanu. Not that they’d been great or even good.
“You never know. It’s worth a try.”
She emerged from the bathroom to find Edgar Chang and Tea waiting for her. “Edgely has something important to show us.”
The high-school-teacher-slash-astronomer had commandeered an office on the second floor of the hangar building. From the pictures on the walls—cargo aircraft going back to the last century—and models of same on the desk, the place belonged to a veteran pilot. Edgely gently removed the models to clear the desk for his datapad.
Pav, Tea, and Xavier joined them. “Where’s Yahvi?” Rachel said.
“Ferrying some interesting food-type thing to Zeds,” Tea said.
“Here we go then.” Edgely had an image on the notepad. “You will recall,” he said, sounding and acting every centimeter the secondary school lecturer, “Mr. Chang told you that there were satellites that the Aggregates mistakenly thought to be dead.
“Actually, there were quite a few of them. When your Reivers began showing themselves twenty years back, some operators turned their birds off—or, rather, pretended to. So the human race does have a few overhead assets, if you know whom to ask.
“The trick is, no one has built or launched any new ones in almost twenty years. Maneuvering fuel runs out and solar panels degrade. Satellites don’t last forever. And the low-altitude birds, which are the most useful for taking pictures, are subject to atmospheric drag.”
“How do you know all this?” Rachel said. Her suspicions, never totally put to rest, were now up and demanding attention.
“Oh, Kettering tracks them,” Edgely said. “That’s really how the group started . . . English schoolboys were tracking secret Soviet rocket launches back in the 1960s. Some of them grew up and kept up with their hobby.
“The teacher I mentioned, Mr. Hall? He was a junior member, and he later emigrated to Australia and became a teacher in Alice Springs, which is where I grew up.” He laughed a little too loudly. “It was so perfectly appropriate!”
“Why?” Pav said.
“Alice Springs was home to a big American satellite downlink station. Just outside town there was a big base, all fenced off, with these giant golf-ball-shaped domes. I mean, even if you had no interest in space and astronomy, you would still be curious!
“I think, in fact, that Mr. Hall had originally come to Alice Springs to work at the facility—lost his job, I guess, and wound up teaching me and a few others at Centralian about satellites and telescopes and . . .” He suddenly stopped. “This is boring and off the subject.”