Heaven's War by David S. Goyer, Michael Cassutt Page A

landing site for both Zack Stewart’s crew and the
Brahma
team.
     
    Trying to think ahead, Harley latched on to his wheelchair. (The only truly nice thing about the trip inside the object had been the lack of gravity…Harley had been able to float just like everyone else.) He wanted support if gravity built up, as he expected it to.
     
    With Sasha’s help, he got positioned in the chair. “First time I’ve felt like I needed to be
strapped
down,” he said.
     
    Harley had begun hearing a few “Oh my Gods” and other alarmed whimpers. Before he could say anything, however, Gabriel Jones had spoken up. “People, please! Remember what I said about the voyage itself! Somebody
wants
us on Keanu! They’ll land us safely!”
     
    Harley hoped that Jones was right, and not just enthusiastic. He had lost perspective, lost any thoughts of the second object; the only thing he could do was watch the crater grow until it literally filled the field of view.
     
    Whoosh!
     
    The dark walls of the crater enclosed them with very little clearance, for a moment shaking Harley’s confidence that this would all end with a soft landing.
     
    Then, with no more g-forces than you’d experience in the ground-floor stoppage of an elevator, they were down…somewhere inside Keanu,all seventy-nine of them. Since they were now subject to gravity, they slid toward the lower fifth of the object, collecting around the bent RV.
     
    “Now what do we do?” Bynum said. The man from the White House staff—the most unlikely refugee in the whole unlikely group—looked more alive than at any time in the past two days.
     
    “Look for the door marked
EXIT
,” Sasha said.
     
    “How do we know we can go outside?” someone asked. That was another one of Harley’s associates, Wade Williams, the famous—though not as famous as he thought—sci-fi writer. For all his farseeing intellect, Williams was a cranky, half-deaf geezer wearing an Astros cap he had managed to find somewhere in the cloud of flotsam.
     
    “For the same reason we knew we would live through this,” Jones shouted. “Because someone
wants
us here!”
     
    Still nothing happened for at least a minute, maybe two.
     
    Then the entire object rotated and turned slightly. It was just enough to unsettle everyone and nearly throw Harley from his chair.
     
    Something wasn’t right. “Sasha,” he said, “do you feel anything really unusual?”
     
    She started to say no, but stopped in midsyllable. “Shit, what’s happening?”
     
    The curved surface of the object was beginning to soften. It retained its by-now-familiar milky translucency…but it also appeared to be melting. Harley sensed the wheels of his chair sinking in. The sensation was not pleasant.
     
    “It’s getting gooey,” Sasha said.
     
    The voices of those sharing the space with them began to rise, too. There were a couple of moans; someone started weeping.
     
    “Look at the life support gear!” Weldon said.
     
    At their backs, at the very base of the object, the machines that had provided air, water, and food as well as cleanup service were beginning to melt, too. Harley could smell a nasty odor, like burning plastic. “I hope that’s not toxic.”
     
    The process seemed to accelerate…the machines were now just puddles of goo and the surface of the bubble actually writhed and wrinkled, as if losing tensile strength.
     
    “Oh my God, Harley—” Sasha was literally sunk to her knees. She reached for Harley’s chair, but it, too, was sinking…
     
    At that moment the bubblelike skin of the object simply collapsed, covering them all in a substance that felt like fabric, but also like liquid.
     
    Which dissolved, leaving only a thin film of powder that quickly, gently wafted away, like ashes from an old campfire.
     
    The entire group, along with every piece of equipment including the RV (lying on its side), was sitting on the floor of a chamber at least five or six stories tall, and