Ten minutes earlier, Pav had awakened her with a gentle touch on her shoulder. She had been reclining in an airline seat under a thin blanket, dreaming about the Architect’s home world. The giant alien she had encountered that first week on Keanu had been dead for twenty years, yet a day rarely passed without some thought of him . . . where his people had come from, what they wanted, where they had succeeded in their quests.
Where they had failed.
Jaidev and the other HBs had devoted considerable effort to walking back Keanu’s trajectory, but with the limited resources available to them—and too many unknowns, such as the actual amount of time that had passed since Keanu’s original launch—they had never been able to settle on a particular star, much less a planet.
Which had not stopped them all from speculating about the type of world that would be home to creatures like the Architect, a large, low-density planet on the scale of Jupiter, but with a breathable atmosphere and tolerable temperatures. Rachel had formed a clear vision of the place, naming it “Homestead” and imagining endless pink steppes, blue mountains, black forests, and white cities that literally floated in the thick atmosphere. Her Homestead was familiar enough that she had dreams about it.
But today’s had not been happy. She had felt incredible sadness and impotence as she watched a flying city literally fall out of the sky, slamming into a blue mountain range and being torn apart, Architect bodies scattered—
But it was just a dream, the side effect of an otherwise solid night’s sleep. And some kind of strange, dreamlike mirror of the sadness she felt about Sanjay, and the frustrations she experienced with Adventure’s ongoing mission.
Okay, she thought, I have to start turning this around. Be active, not passive. She almost launched herself out of the seat.
Stretched across the entire row behind Rachel, Yahvi was still asleep. Pav was moving to wake her, too, but Rachel stopped him. “How long has she been out?”
Pav smiled. “No idea. I was dead to the world for five hours.”
“Let her sleep as long as possible. It’s not as though there’s anything she can do until we get to Mexico.”
“If then.”
“Well, we didn’t bring her so we could get work out of her.”
“I just think she’d be happier all around if she had a job.”
Yahvi had talents that might be useful. Sanjay and her other teachers had frequently taken Rachel and Pav aside to praise their daughter’s potential, especially in math. So far, however, Yahvi’s greatest accomplishment was getting her own way. “We can turn to her when we need someone verbally beaten into submission.”
Then Rachel slipped into the lavatory for a moment, peeing and washing up, emerging to find Chang busy with his datapad, creating his fantasies about the adventures of the Adventure crew.
Colin Edgely was ready with coffee and his geographical update. “Two hundred kilometers northwest of Los Angeles,” he said. “We’re flying parallel to the coast and should be turning east within half an hour. With luck, we’re on the ground shortly afterward.”
“What happens to you two once we’re in Mexico?” Rachel said. “I assume this plane goes back to where it came from.”
“Yes, Chang will turn around and fly back to China by various means,” the Aussie astronomer said. “As for me—” Here his face grew rosy with embarrassment. “I’d like to come along.”
“Don’t you have students to go back to? Or your family?”
Edgely grinned. “Family knows I’m on my voyage of personal discovery. I met my wife through Kettering, you know.” Until this moment Rachel hadn’t known that Edgely had a wife.
“As for school, I took a leave. My boss isn’t a member of Kettering, but he’s sympathetic to the mania. Everyone in Alice Springs knows a bit about space tracking and such, anyway.”
“So you want to come along.”
“Nothing would give me more pleasure,” he said. “To see this through.”
To see this through. Rachel wondered what that meant. “I don’t think we’d have gotten this far without you,” she said, with total sincerity. “So stay as long as you want, as long as you know—”
“That it could be risky? I understand.” He gestured toward the left-side windows. “The riskiest maneuver is almost upon us, in fact.”
They faced so many unknowns. The first hour after taking off from Guam, she and Pav, Zeds, and Xavier had huddled in the rear of the plane, going over their options.
Pav told them that Chang had arranged for them to land in northern Mexico, near the city of Rosarito. “That country is filled with secret landing strips from the drug days, but few are equipped to handle a jet.” He had smiled. “Nevertheless, we have found one.”
They would then drive overland to the coast, where they would board a small sub. “This definitely sounds like a smuggling craft,” Xavier had said.
“No question. There’s barely room for all of us.”
“Do we have to smuggle drugs, too?” Zeds said.
For a moment none of them realized that the Sentry was joking. “No,” Rachel said, laughing, “only our own cargo.”
They would be put ashore somewhere on the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego, final destination to be decided en route. “The Free Nation Federales keep changing their countermeasures,” Chang said, “so our sub captain will be doing the same.”
“So this does still occur,” Rachel said. “Drug smuggling.”
“Oh my, yes,” Chang said. “No government in human history ever stopped it, and even with all their extraterrestrial powers, the Aggregates haven’t, either.” He smiled. “In many cases, however, the smuggling has gone the other way . . . it used to be people into the U.S. from Mexico. For the past two decades, it’s been the other way.”
“Speaking of cargo, Chang,” Xavier said, standing and indicating several containers. “Your little team of mice will be busy arranging the next leg of our journey. But before we make a move, I need four hours to produce our pharmaceutical package.”
“Our what?” Pav said.
“The poison pill,” Rachel said.
“Oh.” In spite of his claims of having slept well, Pav was still, to Rachel’s eyes, a bit slow and unfocused . . . or he would have remembered a key backup portion of their strategy versus the Aggregates, which was to replicate the only strategy that had actually worked against the machinelike aliens: infect them with a fast-evolving, self-replicating poison that destroyed their ability to communicate and reproduce.
It had worked to cleanse Keanu of the Reiver infection twenty years ago, driving the survivors off the NEO and toward Earth.
No one expected success from the same formula, but Jaidev, Sanjay, and other great HB minds had discovered a way to mask a deadly bioweapon as something entirely different—a Substance K–derived battery that stored vast amounts of energy in a very small package. It had been the end product of years of research, since the HBs could use such a device . . . and the subject of an increasingly tedious series of jokes, as the HB researchers pondered the eternal question, “What do Reivers want?”
The cleverest aspect of the backup plan was the presence of an actual poison pill weapon much like the original 2019 version. “It works two ways,” Sanjay had said. “Either the Reivers spot and grab it, missing the real weapon . . . or they don’t see it and it kills them.”
All this supposed that Rachel, Pav, and company were captives, or worse, dead. So it was not an option Rachel had spent much time pondering.
Nevertheless, Xavier needed time to complete “assembly” of both packages. “Obviously we won’t move until you’re ready,” Chang told him.
“Just as obviously,” Rachel said, “the sooner we are ready to move on this Reiver ray gun, the better.”