The Aggregates were all being loaded into a van instead of a helicopter. “Do you suppose they don’t like to fly?” Tea said, pointing to them.
“I think they are too numerous,” Zeds said.
“Truer words,” Rachel said. Tea laughed.
Before they could take off, Counselor Nigel returned and spoke to Rachel. “I’m sorry to say I have very bad news for you. General Radhakrishnan has passed away.”
Rachel took the news calmly, while thinking, Poor Pav! She had just said, “What happened?” when Tea groaned and reached out.
Oh, God, Rachel thought. Counselor Nigel didn’t know that Tea was Taj’s wife.
Then the door was locked and the helicopter rattled into the predawn sky.
Rachel had managed to trade places with Zeds—quite a trick in the cramped helicopter cabin—in order to sit next to Tea, who shook with sobs during most of the trip to the Ring. “God, I’m a mess.”
“You just got terrible news.”
“Poor Taj,” she said. She shouted across the cabin at Counselor Nigel. “Did they say anything? What happened to him?”
“Only that he died yesterday in Bangalore.”
Hearing this made Tea even sadder. “There’s no one to take care of him! I’m not going to be at his funeral!”
“Let’s ask de la Vega,” Rachel said, including her THE companions in the proposal. “Maybe they’ll let you go, compassionate leave?”
“Oh, honey,” Tea said. “First you have to have compassion.”
Counselors Nigel and Ivetta only exchanged glances, but their silence confirmed Tea’s statement. There would be no expression of compassion from the human leader and his Aggregate allies.
The helicopter turned then, giving Rachel a restricted but fascinating view of a reddening eastern sky, desert mesas casting insanely long shadows . . . and a portion of a glittering circular structure: the Ring.
The helicopter landed moments later. As the engines fluttered to a stop, Rachel said to Counselor Nigel, “Does my husband know?”
“No,” he said. “My orders were to inform you.”
Tea took Rachel’s arm again. “I’ll tell him,” she said, trying to smile through tears. “I’m his stepmother, after all.”
Rachel witnessed the dread delivery from several meters away. Tea had forced her way to Pav, but Rachel was held back; the helipad was crowded with two vehicles and disembarking passengers, all being herded toward stairways. Even Zeds, who could easily bulldoze a path, was stuck behind Rachel, and she behind Edgely.
By the time they were inside the building, Pav had already absorbed the blow. He accepted a hug from Rachel. “It’s so fucking unfair,” he said. “I just got him back!”
He remained stoic. Yahvi, however, wept openly. Xavier and Tea both comforted her. Zeds and Edgely looked on, each ineffectual in his own way.
De la Vega regarded them all with confusion; obviously he didn’t know what they were reacting to, and Rachel was damn sure she wouldn’t be the one to tell him. “Your equipment will arrive within the hour,” he said. “Right now you are going to the operations center to meet the project leaders. They will identify the devices we need and you can communicate that to Keanu.”
He turned to other business, leaving Xavier to ask Rachel, “How are we going to do that?”
“With whatever system they have.” She had seen several radomes at the perimeter of this facility.
“Fine. What are we looking for? Some specific tool we can use, some information?”
“Really?” Rachel said. “All we’re looking for is time.”
She glanced out the window at the desert morning, wondering . . . where was the vesicle?
Veteran NewSky TV reporter and on-air personality Edgar Chang died Friday, family and friends have revealed. No details were given, though family members claim he died outside China.
The 65-year-old Chang, well known to NewSky viewers for a generation, had been working with the six returnees from Keanu. They have not been seen in public for a week, since disappearing from an air base near Bangalore, India.
There has been no comment from NewSky.
XINHUA NEWS, APRIL 22, 2040
Does anyone have more information? Chang was with Colin!
KETTERING GROUP, SAME DAY
SANJAY
Sanjay awoke and was angry with himself.
He had so little time remaining! There was no value in wasting it with sleep, even if Keanu used that time to upload information to him. (He had had a series of strange dreams involving falling, being naked or lost in the passages of Keanu, or a mixture of the three.)
Like every member of the HB community, Sanjay knew about the Revenants . . . tortured Pogo Downey, brave Yvonne Hall, tragic Camilla . . . and, of course, the amazing Megan Doyle Stewart.
Their second lives had all been short, with Camilla lasting the longest . . . a little over a week.
Sanjay wanted to become the new Revenant life span record holder. At the moment—less than a week after being born again in the Beehive—he felt terrific, alert, pain free, manic, and productive in a way that was quite familiar from his work at Bangalore and Keanu.
Not only that, but he was eager to see Earth. He felt he had been cheated by the accident. Now he had cheated death—How do you like it?
He wanted to confront the Reivers, too. He had no memory of their earlier presence on Keanu—Zack Stewart and his daughter, Rachel, and Dale Scott were the major players in their expulsion.
But Sanjay had always loathed the whole idea of the creatures, part organic life form, part machine, all-consuming, and totally against everything he valued in life.
He had learned that there was some kind of galactic war between the Reivers and the Architects of Keanu as well as their allies, the Skyphoi and the Sentries. Humans had sided with the Architects; Sanjay had seen no reason to remain neutral. If eradicating the Reivers on Earth would help that effort, he was all for it.
Or so he had believed, right up to the moment of his death. Now, though . . .
“Where are we?”
Sanjay was floating near the rounded nose of the vesicle, a milk-colored egg thirty meters long and twenty wide at its broadest.
Zhao Buoming floated several meters below him, his head inside a silver dispenser that would shortly be spewing deadly material all over Earth. Without turning, a bit of a trick in microgravity, the former spy said, “We are over halfway, and falling fast.”
Then Zhao rotated, showing his bare feet to Sanjay, and pushed himself away, toward the base of the vehicle, which was stuffed with life support and guidance equipment. Sanjay knew there had to be some propulsion gear, too, though not much; the vesicle had been blasted out of Keanu like a shell from a cannon. In addition to basic equipment, it also carried several tons of Substance K in a variety of containers. Some of that was being converted into weapons (most had been assembled on Keanu, but certain substances were so dangerous to humans that Jaidev and Drake and Rachel had deferred their final preparation to postlaunch).
Sanjay had found the launch punishing, which shouldn’t have surprised him; he knew that the vesicle would be fired toward Earth at a high velocity, much like the original Objects that had struck Bangalore and Houston in 2019. A free-fall trip between Earth and Keanu took four days; those had covered the distance in less than one.
But since one of the marvels of Keanu tech was the ability to control gravity, Sanjay had expected the vesicle to be equipped with a field that would mitigate the effects of being blasted off the NEO. No chance; when the countdown (Harley Drake had insisted) reached zero, the vesicle had shot forward with a speed that belied its mass (an egg the size of a small building, weighing as much as a semitruck, should not be capable of such acceleration!), flashing through one of Keanu’s passages before emerging into open space.