Perhaps it was that layoff that contributed to his wife’s loss of operational discipline—the urge that allowed her to race for Taj’s Jeep as it and several similar vehicles started heading for the landing site.

“I want to see them!” she said.

“Get in.” She had a right, after all. Taj had wanted Tea with him from the beginning but had run into a bureaucratic barrier: If the welcoming committee had no room for a long list of local politicians, ISRO certainly didn’t want Taj making room for Tea Nowinski Radhakrishnan, even if she was stepmother to one of the Adventure crew . . . and former quasi-stepmom to a second.

The driver gunned the Jeep with purpose, violently flinging Taj, Tea, and the fourth party, Wing Commander Kaushal, side to side. “Careful!” Kaushal snapped. He was a round little man—short and so fat that Taj wondered how he passed the annual fitness exams. But then, Kaushal was known to be politically savvy if not especially skilled as a pilot. He was, in Taj’s view, a navigator, in all senses of the word.

And, as the commandant of Yelahanka, a necessary addition to the welcoming committee.

The convoy consisted of two Jeeps, an ambulance and rescue unit, and a cherry picker. They rolled toward the spacecraft without waiting for an order.

As the convoy turned onto the runway, Tea looked stricken, so he said, before she could ask, “Rachel and Pav are fine. There is one serious injury, a man we don’t know.”

“Oh, God. Taj, it crashed!”

“It could have been worse.”

“Tell me how!” This was an argument they had repeated all through their two decades of married life. Taj was a glass-half-full sort, she often said. Whereas Tea’s type was I didn’t order your stupid glass.

“They could have left a smoking crater,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Jesus Christ,” she snapped. Then she turned on the driver. “Can’t we go faster?”

Taj had fought to keep the Adventure receiving party small, and he had succeeded—if one neglected to count Tea and the hundreds of Indian Air Force officers and enlisted men and their families and friends crowding the base, lurking, it seemed to Taj, behind every window or outside every fence.

In the official dozen were five from the staff of ISRO Bangalore, including the center’s director, Mrs. Melani Remilla; the deputy mayor of the city, Suresh Kateel, representing the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagra Palike; also a member of the staff of the governor of Kanatka State and two agents from the Research and Analysis Wing in addition to the commandant of Yelahanka and his director of operations.

Taj was the twelfth.

But no reporters so far. The Signals Intelligence Directorate had frozen or silenced all networks and was transmitting blocking material on broadcast frequencies that originated from or were received at Yelahanka.

Or so they believed. Taj was skeptical.

Nevertheless, as much as it was possible in the mid-twenty-first century, the landing of this alien vessel carrying refugees from Earth was a private affair.

They cleared the buildings lining the runway, passing a plaque commemorating Taj’s ill-fated Brahma mission to Keanu. He had been stationed at Yelahanka when selected for space training in 2005, so the base had more or less claimed him. He had driven past the plaque half a dozen times in the last week, each time feeling a pang of regret and shame.

This time, however, he barely glanced at it, as if finally leaving it, and the Brahma experience, in the rearview mirror.

Looking ahead, their view still blocked by buildings, Taj wondered what he and Tea and the others would find at the landing site. They had heard the disturbing final exchanges . . . with no knowledge of the type of vehicle Adventure was, Taj was no judge of its terminal phase, though it did seem to be falling rather fast, not perfectly controlled. In the last few seconds, when Adventure more or less hovered over the runway, he could see that one of its four tail fins was clearly damaged. There was a hole in it big enough to see through.

It was early morning; the runway at Yelahanka ran almost directly east–west. Taj and team had instructed Adventure to aim for any of three helicopter pads to the north and west of the runway. Thanks to its problems, Adventure hit on the grass apron at the extreme eastern edge of the runway.

Which meant that, as they drove toward Adventure, Taj and team were looking directly into the morning sun. The big fat shape of Adventure—it reminded Taj of the famous London Pickle—was nothing but a two-dimensional shadow until the convoy managed to come up on its southern side.

Then he got a clear view of the patchwork quilt of thermal tiles, much like the old space shuttle, many of them scarred from the heat of reentry. “Oh my God, Taj! Look at that piece of crap,” Tea said. “How could they fly that from Keanu?”

Even though it was uttered by his wife, whom he loved, Taj bristled at the comment; any vehicle capable of crossing half a million kilometers was not a piece of crap.

Yet, with its tilt and damaged fin, it did look “hobo,” to use a phrase Taj had picked up from space station Americans. Nevertheless, even half-crumpled the fin was still strong enough to keep the vehicle from toppling.

Up close Adventure proved to be as tall as a five-story building . . . almost as tall as Taj’s long-lost Brahma. The medical unit and the cherry picker were at its base. One of the med techs waved and signaled that there were no toxics. All Taj and Tea could do now was wait, and wonder what the crew’s medical need was.

Before the basket of the cherry picker reached it, the hatch opened, flopping downward to provide an egress platform. Stepping out onto it was a figure from years of Taj’s nightmares . . . a Sentry! Taller than a human, multi-armed, deadly.

“Oh my God, Taj—!” Tea grabbed his arm. She had not seen any Sentries face-to-face, but she had seen their work.

“General,” Kaushal said, using a rank Taj had long since relinquished, “is that what we expected?” He sounded as nervous as any military man would, when surprised.

But this Sentry was carrying a wounded man. From where Taj stood, nothing more could be seen, certainly not the extent of the man’s injuries or even his identity—Taj prayed that it was not Pav even as he wondered if he would recognize his son.

With two techs aboard, the cherry picker basket reached the hatch level. The techs took the wounded man from the alien, then began to descend.

Taj’s Jeep stopped fifty meters from the base of the craft. “Wait here,” Taj told Tea. To his surprise, she did as ordered.

He and Kaushal hurried toward Adventure now. What they saw was devastating—a young barefoot Hindi in what would have been normal street attire (white shirt and slacks) a generation back, with a severe head wound, as if the left half of his face had been bashed in. “Get him to the infirmary,” Kaushal ordered.

Taj shaded his eyes and looked up at the Sentry, a figure from his past, shouting, “Are there other injuries?”

To his surprise, the creature shook its head and waved its upper arms in a very humanlike set of gestures. “No!” Its voice was muffled by its suit, of course, but could easily have been any of the welcoming party.

Then the Sentry was joined on the platform by four others, all in street clothes. (Taj had expected flight suits of some kind.) A heavyset black man—likely the partner named Toutant. A teenaged girl in shorts and a loose yellow blouse—Yahvi.

A tall man who looked much as Taj once had. “Papa!” He waved. Pav! Lord, he was grown up! Handsome in spite of the day’s ordeal.

And with him, a dark-haired woman in her thirties. “It’s Rachel, hi!” For a moment, Taj felt confused . . . it was as if he were looking at Megan Stewart, Rachel’s mother . . . the same woman he had last seen, alive, on Keanu twenty years ago.