Popular history and entertainment mentioned “visitors” and “benefactors” known as the Aggregates, but with few useful details. Earth had changed in twenty years, obviously. The global environment had continued to evolve; Arctic ice was largely gone and sea levels had risen.

There had been the usual wars, all of them regional. Some nation- states and associations seemed to have disappeared; there was no mention of a United Nations, for example. They saw references, however, to the Free Nations and the Western Alliance. (Overall, they didn’t see nearly as much broadcast material as expected, though surely their position—far out of the solar system plane—their sheer distance, and their lack of a receiving network had a lot to do with it. There was also the reality that most of Earth’s communications were now short-range or through fiber-optic nets, not spewed into the galaxy at large.)

What was most intriguing was the rise of a religious-scientific movement called Transformational Human Evolution. The HBs had not been able to find out just what it was, only that a lot of people—in the tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions—were members.

If you look at it one way, Rachel thought, we’re arriving as emissaries . . . another way, as scouts.

Another way—as irresponsible parents. She and Pav had spent hours debating the wisdom of bringing their daughter on such a dangerous voyage. It wasn’t just to give her the kind of educational sightseeing trip Rachel’s parents had given her, though it seemed appropriate that Yahvi should visit her ancestral world.

The reason was this: While Adventure was capable of being refueled and could conceivably have launched in a high, looping Earth orbit that might have eventually taken the crew back to Keanu . . . Rachel and Pav fully expected this to be a one-way trip.

When they left Keanu, the six of them were saying good-bye to friends and their home.

And, given those circumstances, Pav and Rachel were simply unwilling to leave Yahvi behind.

As they dropped lower, the initial buffeting lessened and they found themselves in the rosy glow of plasma. “We’re leaving a bright streak across the Indian Ocean dawn,” Sanjay said.

“How is the temp?” Pav asked. Why, Rachel didn’t know. If it was too high, they were in deadly trouble. It wasn’t as though they could do anything about it.

“Shields are holding,” Zeds said, which almost made Rachel laugh, since it sounded like a line from a movie she remembered watching with her parents.

“How unlikely is this?” Xavier said. “A ship designed to return from Keanu to the Sentry world ten thousand years ago and God knows how many light-years from here . . . and now it’s landing on Earth!”

Rachel could see Pav shrug. Zeds just grunted, a peculiarly human reaction.

Things began to happen very quickly now. A guidance system was doing the actual piloting: Zeds and Pav were simply monitoring—or, in Pav’s case, worrying aloud.

They were low enough now, over the Laccadive Sea, that Bangalore had had to alert air traffic to their passage—but still high enough that they could see, off to the right, the northwestern coast of Sri Lanka.

But just like that they were over India proper, heading directly north up the tip of the subcontinent. “Was that Madurai?” Yahvi said. Rachel had asked her to keep quiet at this time, but at fourteen it was hard to remember parental orders—Rachel knew from experience. And besides, she was proud of the fact that her daughter had tried to learn terrestrial geography.

“Not yet,” Pav said. He had actually flown over Madurai as a boy.

“Coming up on the big swoop,” Zeds said. “Ready to rock it.”

The “big swoop” was a vital maneuver. . . . Adventure was currently flying nose forward like a reentering space shuttle. Unlike that vehicle, however, it could not lower landing gear from its belly and glide to a stop on a runway.

Adventure would have to fire its main engines, which had so far been used rather sparingly, first to lift the vehicle off the surface of Keanu four days back, then to change its trajectory, essentially slowing it down, putting it on a shallow “flight” toward Earth.

The stress on the vehicle would be immense. But, having shed much of its original thirty-eight-thousand-kilometers-an-hour speed diving into the atmosphere—turning velocity into heat—Adventure now began to ascend, gaining a bit of altitude (and reaching thinner air), going nose up, up, up, and up until the vehicle was standing on its tail . . . and the crew left feeling as if they were weightless and motionless.

They weren’t, of course. They were still flying toward Bangalore at a good clip.

Stress on the vehicle aside, there was also stress on the six of them—the only real g-forces they experienced during the flight. They now felt as though they were being pushed deeper into their couches, possibly with the addition of a fifty-kilogram weight on their chests.

But that lasted only for a minute or two. Zeds was especially silent and obviously struggling. Rachel had learned that the gravity of the original Sentry world was half that of Earth, and the Sentry habitat was stabilized close to that. (Sentries always seemed unhappy when they entered the human habitat; it was due to being twice as heavy as they liked.) Zeds wore a protective suit that offered support, but he still had to be feeling flung about.

Rachel and the other humans were in street clothes. They weren’t expecting multiple g-forces, or not for more than a few seconds, so suits weren’t needed.

Xavier did utter “Shit” a couple of times. And there was at least one audible whimper in the cockpit. That was me, Rachel realized.

“Good job,” Pav said, surely intending that for Adventure herself.

As things smoothed out, Rachel began to feel relief—she had not realized just how worried she had been about the big swoop.

Now she and the others felt as though they were falling backward, as Adventure rode its rocket down and to the north. A rearward-facing camera showed a large city passing beneath them . . . Bangalore. But they were going too fast and their field of view was too narrow to identify any landmarks, just the mass of the big city itself.

When the HB Council decided that landing in India was preferable to Houston or Florida in the United States (there were more of the mysterious THE folks in America than anywhere else), Bangalore became the choice.

The actual target was an Indian air base north of the city called Yelahanka, which had been chosen primarily because it was the closest controlled airport to the former Bangalore Control Center. The mission control building and surrounding territory had been destroyed by a Keanu vesicle in August 2019, but a larger space research campus survived.

“Two thousand meters,” Pav said. “Descent speed is good.”

“Feels a little sluggish to me,” Zeds said.

The moment he uttered those words, Adventure shuddered and a red light flashed on the control panel. (The designers had kept the earthly conventions wherever possible.)

Before Rachel could react—or even feel fear—Yahvi’s hand landed on her shoulder.

“Relax,” Zeds said. “We’re still good.”

“But losing some altitude,” Pav said. For a moment, they exchanged terse, operational chat, like all pilots Rachel had ever heard on every airplane flight she’d ever taken.

“I saw a flash from one of the screens,” Pav said.

Then Zeds added, “I think we lost part of the tail.”

Hearing that, Rachel almost choked. The tail was actually a set of four fins, each providing aerodynamic control and landing support. Losing one or part of one might not be fatal, but it was certainly not good news.