“Are we flying to China? Are we catching a boat to Japan? What’s the deal?”

“Just wait,” Pav said.

Out on the runway, a small jet broke through the low clouds, swiftly touching down and rolling out. Xavier would not have been able to identify aircraft types in 2019 beyond big and not-so-big, so he was useless with this one.

But it was not big . . . a corporate or executive jet.

“Is this our ride?” Yahvi said.

Pav put his arm around her. Xavier noticed that he exchanged a look with Chang before answering: “Yes.”

“Who are they?” Rachel said.

“Friends,” Edgar Chang said.

“I asked my husband,” Rachel said, more gently than Xavier expected.

Pav smiled, trying desperately—Xavier thought—to return a bit of humor to this tense situation. “It might be better to call them ‘old friends never met,’” he said.

The jet was taxiing right up to the front of the hangar; the noise of its twin engines effectively eliminated further exchanges.

Zeds looked intrigued. Tea was grim, her arms across her chest. Yahvi blinked and seemed miserable. Pav had his arm around Rachel.

Now Xavier got a good look at the plane . . . sleek, white, clearly twenty meters from tip to tail. Two pilots were visible in the cockpit. Rows of windows confirmed that it was some kind of passenger craft.

On the tail . . . a baby kangaroo? The word surfaced from his deep memory: a wallaby.

“Is this from Australia?” Xavier shouted. The engines wound down just as he opened his mouth, making him sound so much louder than necessary that the others—even Chang and Singh—laughed.

Singh’s lighter moment didn’t last long. As the engines fell silent, Xavier and the others could hear latches on the cabin door being opened. As the door swung down, becoming a ladder, Singh raised his pistol, covering the hatchway.

A thin, middle-aged white male with a crest of blond hair stuck his head out. “Don’t shoot!” he said, hands up. “We come in peace!”

Xavier saw Singh glance at Chang, who nodded. The weapon was lowered.

Pav stepped forward, hand extended. “Mr. Radhakrishnan, I presume,” the man said. His Aussie accent was so strong that Radhakrishnan sounded like “Redda kishen.”

“My wife, Rachel,” Pav said. He quickly introduced all of them, ending with Zeds . . . which caused the Aussie fellow to step back and look up.

When this happened, Yahvi grabbed her mother and said, “Who is this man?”

The man heard her and turned. “Oh, sorry, got your names, forgot to offer mine.” He smiled. “Colin Edgely, young lady. Among my other notable accomplishments, I am the man who discovered Keanu.”

Rachel said, “I thought that name was familiar. Lovely to meet you, and why are you here?”

Edgely looked at Pav, who cleared his throat and said, “He’s come to rescue us.”

Mr. Kalyan Bhat of Hebbal, Bengaluru, Karnatka, admits he was shocked by the news that humans had returned from the Near-Earth Object Keanu. “I lived near the control center,” he said. “I saw the object rising into the sky.” He had a special interest in the event, though Kalyan—who was only thirteen—didn’t know it at the time.

“My older brother, Sanjay, was in that thing. I didn’t find out for a week.”

That shocking news contributed to the death of the boys’ mother, Sima. “She was fighting cancer and doing well, but losing Sanjay like that . . . she gave up.” Sima Bhat died two years later.

Kalyan and Sanjay’s father, Mahavir, a clerk with the State Bank of India in Hebbal, lived until 2037. “I know that losing Sanjay affected him, too. Every year, on the anniversary of the object’s takeoff, he would lock himself in his room.

“But when I tried to get him to talk about Sanjay, he wouldn’t. There was only one picture of my brother in our house, in my father’s bedroom.”

As for Kalyan himself, he served in the Indian army during the conflicts of 2029–2031, and became an engineer with DMC Electronics.

“I was thirteen when Sanjay was taken,” he said. “I can’t wait to see him.” He added, “It’s like something from an old story—a castaway returning, or someone coming back from the dead.”

As for the rumors that Sanjay was injured in Adventure’s crash landing, he said, “I hope they’re wrong. And if he was injured, I hope he’s recovering.” Has ISRO or another agency been in touch with him?

“No.”

TIMES OF INDIA FEATURE,

APRIL 15, 2040

TAJ

“You said they were going to China!”

Taj was heading for his car when Melani Remilla caught up with him.

They were in the same garage where the Adventure convoy had departed earlier that day; Taj had spent the hours since then essentially locked in the conference room, working his phone and calling up news reports on the screens.

The accident on the road to Bengaluru International had shocked him—which in turn surprised him. He had not only agreed to the idea of a second, clandestine convoy . . . it had been his idea! He was the one who always feared that the Adventure crew would be targets of violence, and not just from the Aggregates.

Tea often teased him that no matter how cynical he sounded, he was still a romantic. “Poor Taj! Loves flowers and pretty girls and the Moon . . . has to pretend about guns and treachery.”

No matter. Knowing Rachel and Pav and the others had lifted off from Bengaluru meant he could go home for a few hours, before returning to the Sanjay vigil—and trying to decide his next move.

Once he got rid of Remilla. “Didn’t we all believe they were going to China?”

“That doesn’t answer my question, sir!” If Taj had any doubts that Remilla was upset, they vanished.

“Until an hour ago,” he told her, and he wasn’t lying, “the only information I had was that the crew would be going to China. Edgar Chang was arranging it.”

“Then who took them to Australia?”

Here Taj was on trickier ground, since he had suspicions, though no data. “That I cannot tell you.” Strictly true, if not especially illuminating.

He had known Remilla for more than twenty years, since the Brahma days, first as a young female spacecraft engineer specializing in environmental systems, which could not have been an easy job, given the male-dominated ISRO world.

Then, after the arrival of the Aggregates and the subsequent wars and plagues, when India had no money for space exploration aside from spy satellites, Remilla had moved into program management, becoming the last woman standing.

Their interactions over the past year, all of them involving the Keanu return, had been completely professional. He knew nothing of her personal life, though he had some memory of a husband somewhere, and a grown son. During those contacts, Taj had found Remilla to be smart and open—possibly too open when it came to dealing with sharks like Kaushal—but too prey to emotion when things didn’t go her way.

Like now. “But you have had more information than the rest of us!”

“Why are you surprised? My son is one of them!”

“So he was telling you secrets!”

“I was spending more time with him than anyone else,” Taj said, losing patience with this woman. “So, yes, I undoubtedly heard more than you or Kaushal did.”

“You should have told us!”

“I told you everything that was important.”

Remilla frowned. Clearly she had no goal other than to express frustration at losing control of a situation that was never in control. “What are they going to do now?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said, though he was convinced that, ultimately, the Aggregates were their target. Pav had told him a bit about the Houston-Bangalores and their successful eradication of the Reivers on Keanu twenty years ago. Of course, sanitizing a Near-Earth Object was one thing . . . cleansing half a planet, quite another.