With the weight limits of the cherry picker, it took half a dozen trips down, then up, to get all the containers out of Adventure and into the trucks. Xavier realized that by supervising from above—obviously necessary—he had allowed Singh and especially Pandya free rein with the materials on the ground. Either one of them could have been hiding inside a truck, unseen, prying open a container.

Well, nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t too worried that they would find anything useful. . . . Adventure’s cargo was literally just packages of goo. Even the vital proteus gear was secreted inside goo.

Once everything was loaded up and the crane lowered, Xavier and the team headed for the holding area, a corner of a munitions storage bunker about two hundred meters from the ops area, across the runway. It was more exposed than Xavier liked—his particular bunker and its kin were rounded mounds, wisely separated by several meters of open space, with the whole complex bordered by several dozen yards of mud and grass inside a wicked-looking security fence. There were fences beyond that, marking the boundary of Yelahanka Air Base.

He would have preferred an actual warehouse, a building among other buildings, of course. So that, should the impulse strike him over the next day or two, he could make unscheduled or unescorted visits. True, he would face the usual challenges of evading security—locks, cameras, and whatever new toys had been developed over twenty years.

But he had always found that even layered systems are vulnerable at one point . . . with their human operators.

For example, as the enlisteds were helping him stack and arrange the containers near the entrance to the bunker (which proved to be empty; so much for the alert status of the Indian Air Force at Yelahanka), one of them, the most junior aircraftsman, dropped a container on its corner.

The box ruptured, not only exposing the inner sheathing but tearing it, allowing a puddle of goo to escape.

The young man’s eyes—the only expressive part of his face visible over his mask—went wide with fear, either that Xavier would have him arrested or that he might die from exposure.

The sudden silence was apparent to Pandya, who said from outside, “Everything all right in there, Mr. Toutant?” He gave Xavier’s name a beautiful French pronunciation.

“Just some final rearranging!”

Then he pulled down his mask and put on his most engaging face. “It’s not really dangerous. What’s your name?”

He slowly lowered his mask. “Aircraftsman Roi,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I’ll get a shovel or a—”

Xavier was already bending to the box, righting it and prying off the lid. “Take a look,” he said. “You’re the first on Earth.”

He did, slowly bending toward the container with its wrapped greenish material, like foaming gelatin. “What is it?”

“It’s just raw material,” Xavier said, an honest if incomplete answer. “It’s what we found on Keanu when we arrived twenty years ago. It’s very . . . adaptable. You can make almost anything out of it.”

Now Roi’s eyes went wide in an entirely different manner. This was curiosity, possibly cunning. (It occurred to Xavier that he had been wrong in identifying Pandya as the likely intelligence agent on Singh’s squad, that it might well be Aircraftsman Roi. It was also possible that everyone on Singh’s squad was a spy—that was how he would have done it. But he was now committed to this gambit.)

“You can touch it,” Xavier said, demonstrating. It was harmless; had to be, since on Keanu the HBs made food out of it.

Roi dabbed a finger in it, smiled. “How does it work?”

“You need to have the right machine—a 3-D printer, what we call a proteus. You tell the proteus what you need, and, basically, it turns this goo into it. Food, equipment—”

“Money?”

Had him. “Anything,” Xavier said. “Especially if you’re just thinking of selling some of this to, say, a Chinese entrepreneur—” That was risky, because his sense of this world was twenty years out of date: China might not have entrepreneurs anymore, or if they did, they might be considered evil.

“Mr. Toutant?” Pandya was in the entrance, though the stack of containers kept him from seeing what the group inside were up to.

“One moment,” Xavier yelled. “Just a final adjustment!”

He turned away, and Xavier leaned close to Roi. “I would be happy to make you a little gift,” he said. He took off one of his gloves. “I could scoop the spilled material into this, and no one would ever know.

“But my colleagues might ask—” Xavier let the last word linger just long enough to earn a knowing smile from Aircraftsman Roi, who then said: “I have two hundred new rupees in my pocket.”

“You know, that would be a welcome gift. If I’m asked, I can say I exchanged the material for some money. We don’t have any!”

And with that, a deal was closed—and a new friend was made.

It was actually reassuring to Xavier, in a way, to know that some things never change.

And that it was possible he could break out of Yelahanka with minimal effort.

Reaction to the presser: not bad as far as it went, but it didn’t go very far.

Confirm that crew includes Rachel Stewart and Pav Radhakrishnan as well as their daughter, Yahvi. Another U.S.-born individual, Mr. Toutant.

But sources say six and that leaves two missing. Wounded? Imprisoned?

Same sources suggest one of the missing two is not human. Can anyone help? It’s important!

COLIN EDGELY TO THE KETTERING GROUP,

APRIL 14, 2040

CARBON-143

STATUS: Following a general Aggregate Carbon maneuver, in which each formation relocated from its workplace to the greater staging area, then, following precise circumnavigation, Carbon-143 found herself resuming her modeling with greater vigor.

It should have been anomalous. One of the least questioned verities of Aggregate existence was that their superiority to more organic life forms was due to their high and steady levels of production. Somatic disturbances such as fatigue or lassitude or general unhappiness were not attributes of the Aggregates.

Nevertheless, it had become clear to the formations that, especially in a new planetary environment like Earth’s, certain affirming measures helped maintain productivity and contributed to the general sense of purpose. Carbon-143 certainly felt more aligned with her immediate partner, 143/A71, as well as the rest of the A formation.

The march past the rows of vehicles being prepared for action served as a reminder of the scale of the work being performed and impressed upon individual units their relative unimportance and disposability.

Carbon-143 noted the day’s lesson.

INPUT: Although no actual data reached her, Carbon-143 detected a tremendous amount of signal noise on her military operational channels. Some action was about to take place. It was too soon to be directly related to the work at Site A—the countdown timer available to all formations and units still stood at minus twenty-five days.

But somewhere on Earth the Aggregates were going into action.

ACTION: None at this time.

HUMANS RETURN FROM KEANU

BANGALORE, APRIL 14—The Indian Space Research Organization confirmed what the rest of the world already suspected: Five humans from the Near-Earth Object Keanu returned to Earth yesterday, landing at a still-undisclosed air base in India. The humans—four of them originally born on Earth and transferred to Keanu by the mysterious Objects in August 2019—are in excellent condition and are expected to make a public statement within the next two days. They are currently being debriefed by government officials and ISRO scientists.