Rachel was turning toward Xavier, to thank him for the use of the communicator, when Edgely arrived.
“The second plane is on approach.”
Greetings! Emerging from radio and other silence to say . . . all is well.
I’ve been traveling, seeing the sights, working on fulfilling a lifetime dream. (For those of you who have been following me for twenty years, you know what I mean.)
Which is all I can say here. “But soft, we are observed!”
Hoping for some news I can talk about soon!
COLIN EDGELY TO THE KETTERING GROUP,
APRIL 18, 2040
DALE
“What exactly do you know?”
Once he had penetrated the vesicle factory and been confronted by Zhao, Dale knew he could no longer escape. Zhao had closed and locked the exit from the habitat, even though Dale was fairly sure he could still find a way out.
But he didn’t particularly want to. Something in his head—not the map, but some part of the connection with Keanu’s controlling intelligence—told him that this was where he needed to be, and possibly that Zhao was the one human to meet.
The former spy had shed his Skyphoi environment suit and was busy checking on the odd-looking, lumpish proteus-created controls that operated a set of spray guns and other devices that were slowly but steadily building the vesicle. He was talking to Dale, but not concentrating on him.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you?” Dale said.
Now Zhao turned away from his work to face him. “I realize you can’t help being an ass, but please try. Surely you know that Harley told me you had resurfaced with some vague warnings.”
“I wouldn’t call them vague.”
“And you still have the incredibly annoying habit of picking on a modifier and arguing about that instead of the substance of an entire sentence. Fine, to repeat while also expanding: What exactly do you know about the dangers to the Adventure crew?”
“That their approach had been detected and tracked, that some hostile force fired on them . . .” Dale trailed off, since Zhao kept nodding as if he already knew that much. Well, if he had talked to Harley, he did.
“Anything specific?”
Dale weighed his answer. During his trek from the human habitat, he had felt a growing certainty that Rachel and her team were in danger again. But in order to fully access the Keanu data banks, Dale needed to engage in his naked interface . . . and there had been no opportunity.
Nevertheless, earlier memories seemed to have grown clearer. “The Reivers have a big project that is about to go live. When they pull the trigger, a lot of humans are going to die.”
“Did you tell Harley this?”
“No. It wasn’t—”
“I should take you back to the habitat and lock you up so everyone can hear your big secrets. You did escape, correct?”
“Ask Harley. He kept insisting I wasn’t a prisoner, or that if I was, it wasn’t his decision.”
“Oh, you were. And in a sense, are.” Zhao smiled, never a happy look. “But then, so are we all.”
Zhao nodded beyond Dale. He turned and saw half a dozen HBs approaching, two women among them, and one of them, amazingly, appeared to be Makali Pillay, the Aussie exobiologist who had shared Dale and Zack Stewart’s long, weird trek across the surface of Keanu. They did not seem hostile; they didn’t even seem to notice Dale, but rather fanned out to work on the vesicle. Zhao said. “To be honest, there’s no point in locking you up. Things are moving too fast. We actually need some help.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting this ready for launch.”
“To Earth?”
“Well, it’s not going to the fucking Moon!”
“But you already sent Adventure there!”
“And look how that’s going! They’re in everyone’s crosshairs. I know it seems like we sent six people up against an entire planet, but come on, Dale. We’re going after the Reivers, but not with Adventure.”
He pointed to the giant, almost-complete vesicle. “With this.”
Like all of the HBs, Dale Scott had arrived at Keanu in one of two vesicles . . . giant sample return craft launched by Keanu toward Earth.
There had been a third Object, which the Reivers had used twenty years ago to make their escape. Dale had never discovered how to fabricate another one; in the many areas of the Keanu library he had accessed, he had never even found a reference to the vesicles.
Which meant nothing more than that there was a vast amount of information about Keanu he had yet to learn.
It did bother him that somehow Zhao or Jaidev had managed the trick. It made him feel a bit less special.
But his momentary pique was tiny compared to the wonder of seeing a vesicle being not just fabricated but, in a way, grown. Simply learning how took hours, time in which Dale found himself tolerated if not actually welcomed.
“I can sort of see how you’d replicate the shell of this thing,” Dale said to Zhao, joining the former spy at his workstation. “But how do you equip it for war against the Reivers?”
“The basic systems were already in the library,” Zhao said, confirming that he had indeed accessed the system—which was news to Dale. “We’ve spent the last two years weaponizing it.”
“What do you use against a whole planet?” A chilling thought occurred to him. “It’s not a bomb, is it?” Dale didn’t think Zhao would launch a planet-killing weapon, even making the giant assumption that he possessed such a device, since it would kill millions or billions of humans along with the target Reivers, but power did strange things to men, so . . .
“Nothing like that,” Zhao said. “Even before we left Earth, bombs were no longer the weapon of choice, unless you were a terrorist. It’s all chemical-biological or cyber.”
“Like what we did to the Reivers before.” The alien Aggregates had been exterminated in Keanu by a designer virus fabricated by Jaidev in the Temple laboratory.
“Exactly,” Zhao said. “We assume the Reivers have evolved their defenses.” He smiled. “But we’ve evolved, too. We have the option of going after not just their populations, but against their networks and ability to communicate.” He pointed to the vesicle. “We’ve got half a dozen ways of attacking them.
“And, of course, we have stealth and surprise.”
“While the Reivers are panting after Rachel’s crew, you’re going to hit them from behind.”
“Assuming we ever get this fucking thing launched.”
“What can I do?” The words were out of his mouth before he truly thought about them. So much for your enlightened communion with Keanu, he thought. Well, before becoming an astronaut, Dale Scott spent years as a military fighter pilot.
Maybe he just wanted to kill something again. Especially Reivers.
Or maybe this was all about working with people once more, even people who despised him.
More hours and another day passed, an intoxicating time for Dale in which he almost forgot to eat. His job was to monitor the extrusion of the shell material from three different hoses. Looking like foaming white goo, the smart-shape material quickly hardened and soon enclosed the entire vesicle.
The others on the team—none of them familiar to Dale from years past—largely dealt with the interior equipment, which they were assembling and collecting on the platform that encircled the vesicle. Which caused Dale to approach Makali and ask, “How do you get this stuff inside? Does the shell eventually develop hatches?”
She stared at him for a long moment, as if she didn’t recognize him. She was certainly recognizable—clearly in her late forties now, with lines around her eyes and hair cropped like most of the HB women. But she had retained her athletic figure; in fact, she looked leaner and in better shape than Dale remembered. “You know, when I came in here, I said to myself, ‘That looks like Dale Scott, but it can’t be. Dale went walkabout a long time ago. . . .’”