Like the others in the crew, led by Zhao, Sanjay had been strapped flat on a squishy mat at the base of the vesicle, a sensation that reminded him of the golden fluid packing his reawakening cell in the Beehive. He had instantly experienced pressure, like a giant sitting on his chest, and suffered narrowing of his vision, a sign he was graying out and likely to black out.
Fortunately, the chest-crushing event had lasted less than five minutes. Now, twelve hours later, he was feeling good . . . just angry at having fallen asleep for six of them.
“When do we land?” He pushed off from the nose of the vesicle and slowly descended to its base.
Seeing him, Zhao looked up, a typically sardonic smile on his face. “You mean hit, don’t you?”
“Stop torturing him,” Makali Pillay said. She had been hidden inside the piles of Substance K containers and processing equipment that filled the vesicle interior. “Not very long ago he was dead.”
“Whatever term you prefer,” Sanjay said to Zhao.
“We land in ten hours,” Zhao said. And floated off, leaving Sanjay with Makali.
“He’s really consistent in being shitty to people,” Makali said. Sanjay had never grown to know her well, since she preferred to spend her time outside the Temple laboratory, working on agro projects (she was the HB’s “flower girl,” assembling and then planting beautiful nonfood items), or taking her own walkabouts. Makali was the closest thing the community had to a Keanu expert and explorer—Dale Scott without the weirdness.
“A mission like this is not going to soften a man,” Sanjay said.
“Still,” Makali said, “it would be helpful if he remembered that the enemy is on Earth, not here. Hungry?”
“Always.”
Food was prepackaged, to the extent anything on Keanu was packaged: dried fruit, nuts, bars.
Basic though it might have been, Sanjay found the food glorious. And engaging in such a mundane activity allowed him to think back on his life prior to Adventure and the frantic moments since.
He was glad he had kept Maren from coming along. She had screamed at him to stay; when that failed, she had turned on Sasha, Harley, and Jaidev, begging them to send her, too.
Sanjay had sided with Jaidev, Harley, and Sasha in refusing. It was bad enough adding a seventh human “passenger” to a vehicle that had been designed to support six. There was some flexibility in the consumables, allowing for a seventh, but not enough to accommodate an eighth human who would be breathing oxygen, drinking water, and requiring food. Maren would just have been baggage.
There was also the Revenant factor. Sanjay hoped that he would live through the completion of the mission.
But what if he didn’t? Poor Maren would be experiencing the death of her lover for a second time. And even in success, he was still dead, and Maren was Zhao’s responsibility.
No.
He asked Makali, “Why did you volunteer for this? Surely you haven’t solved all of Keanu’s mysteries.”
She hooted. “I haven’t solved a single one of them, if you want to be factual. But I sort of fancied seeing Earth again—”
“Even though this is essentially a bombing mission.”
“Well, no other travel options, right? We didn’t build a tourist vesicle. I also figure, this works and Keanu survives. If not . . . I won’t be doing much more exoscience because I’ll be dead.” She seemed embarrassed by the comment. “Sorry.”
“It’s not a problem,” Sanjay said. “Being dead hasn’t made me more sensitive.” But it had changed him in ways he still didn’t understand. Even as he uttered those words to Makali, additional data formed in his head, a process that gave him a brief, quiet, shuddering spasm that was almost sexual.
Momentary pleasure aside, becoming a link between Keanu and humans was proving to be stressful. (Another reason the Revenants didn’t last?) There was no clarity. Trying to interpret the words, sounds, and images in his head—the implanted memories—was like being an English speaker trying to translate a passage in Chinese to a dolphin.
Last night’s data, and this new material . . . it all seemed to deal with the Reiver facility and a vision of a vesicle sitting on a desert landscape not far from it.
“The mission is still dangerous,” he heard himself telling Makali. “Unless you were talking in secret after we took off in Adventure, no one has really dealt with getting back to Keanu.” Even for Adventure’s crew, return was always a desirable option, not a concrete plan.
“No matter how dangerous, and whether or not we get back, it’s still worth it.” Makali snagged the nuts, chomping them in midair. She smiled. “Frankly, I’m tired of the same old faces.”
It seemed like a trivial motivation until Sanjay remembered that within the HB community, Makali was famous for tempestuous love affairs and sexual adventurism, at least to the extent that could be practiced in the limited pool of candidates.
So she was risking her life in order to find new partners, which had the virtue of being a basic biological drive.
Which left Sanjay wondering about the other four in the crew, three Bangalores and one Houston. The Bangalores, like Sanjay, were all forty or slightly older—engineers or other Brahma control center functionaries who had been scooped up by the Object.
The Houston team member was a woman slightly older, Bobbi by name. A sales clerk at the Bayport Mall, Bobbi had been the victim of geography (her apartment was near the impact site of the Houston Object) and natural curiosity (she had gone out to see what had happened). Surely her motivation was less primal than Makali’s—probably just the urge to go home.
They were all busy monitoring a suite of 3-D printers that were still creating the fast- and self-replicating chemical-biological-cyber weapons that could be (a) dispersed in Earth’s atmosphere or (b) dumped in Earth’s oceans or (c) quickly spread through soil and groundwater if the vesicle blew up in orbit, crashed in the ocean, or smacked into land.
Thinking about the weapons allowed the new Keanu information to grow clearer in Sanjay’s mind—and more urgent. He needed to have this out with Zhao.
He pushed himself toward the vesicle captain. “How much control do we have over our trajectory?”
“Very little,” Zhao said.
“As far as you’re concerned, we’re just a guided meteoroid.”
“Meteor at the moment,” Zhao said. “A meteoroid when we enter the atmosphere.” He smiled, but not happily. “And a meteorite if all that’s left is a smoking hole in the ground.”
“Becoming a kinetic energy weapon—a giant cannonball—is one of the options, correct?” Sanjay said.
“Yes. Worst-case scenario, we simply crash into this Reiver facility at high speed. That ought to wreck it.”
“And us.”
“I did call it a worst case.”
In the event the vesicle survived its landing—or crash—and if Zhao and team were able to operate undetected, other substances could be delivered via data networks. “That covers everything, I think,” Zhao said.
“What’s the primary landing site?”
“Aquatic, coast of California. The vesicle will do its thing”—which meant rotate, absorbing terrestrial material while dispersing water- and aerosol-borne weapons—“and we will signal Rachel and the others and hope they can rendezvous.
“Then, bam!” Zhao clapped his hands. “Weapons launched, Adventure crew rescued, off we go, home to Keanu.” Now he regarded Sanjay. “You knew all this.”
“We have to change it.” So said the voices in his head, quite insistently now.