And if politics didn’t interfere.

“Shutdown!” Pogo called. “Right on time, three minutes, sixteen seconds!”

It was Zack’s job to make the call. “Houston, commander through Channel B,” Zack said. “Burn complete, on time.”

It took five seconds to hear, “We copy that, Destiny,” from Weldon in mission control. “You are good to go. We’ll be sending you updated figures ASAP.”

Laughing nervously, the crew began to unstrap.

Then Tea said, “Oh my gosh, look at that.”

Even hardened Pogo Downey gasped. Outside Destiny’s three forward windows, Keanu’s daylight side rose, its snowy, rocky surface flowing past below them. Zack thought, It’s like hang gliding over Iceland—

“Zack,” Pogo said, refocused on the controls. “Houston’s giving us an update on Brahma.”

Zack felt a surge of alarm. “Did they make a burn, too?”

“No. Pretty pictures.”

Zack looked at the image on the control panel.

It showed the cylindrical Brahma—the height of a six-story building—half in shadow.

And sporting what looked like a missile attached to one side. “What the fuck is that?” Yvonne said.

“More to the point,” Tea said, “how come we didn’t see it before now?”

“They might not have deployed it before leaving Earth orbit,” Zack said.

“And God forbid we should actually be looking at them when they were close,” Pogo snapped. He was convinced that America routinely underestimated its rivals.

As Zack tried to comprehend the startling but real possibility that he could be in a space war, he heard Weldon’s voice in his earphones. “Shane for Zack, Channel B. Did you notice anything funny about your burn?”

The phrasing was highly unusual, especially for Weldon, who was the most precise communicator in space history. Funny was not a word he would normally use. Tea and Patrick exchanged worried glances.

“What you do mean by funny, Houston?” Zack said, looking at Yvonne for support.

She gestured to the displays, nodding vigorously. “It was on time, proper orientation. If we had champagne, we’d pop the cork.”

There was a moment of relative silence . . . the carrier wave hissing. Finally, Weldon said, “DSN noted an anomaly.”

Anomaly? What the hell would the big dishes in Goldstone or Australia see that Destiny herself wouldn’t see?

“Don’t keep us guessing, Houston.”

“There was a major eruption on Keanu.”

Hearing this, knowing his crew was listening, too, Zack said, “Keanu’s been venting periodically since we started watching.” He was proud of himself for not adding, That’s why we wanted to land here, assholes.

“This was substantially larger. Note the time hack.”

“What the fuck is he talking about, the time hack?” Pogo snapped, clearly rattled. Not that it took much to set him off.

Zack looked at the figure uploaded from Houston. “Keanu started venting at 74:15.28 MET.” Feeling a bit like a doctor delivering bad news to a patient’s loved ones, he waited for the reaction.

“That was our burn time,” Tea said, her eyes as wide as a six-year-old’s.

“So some volcano on Keanu farted at the same moment, so what?” Pogo said. “The universe is full of coincidences.”

“The same second?” Yvonne said.

The burly Air Force pilot loomed over her. “What are you saying?”

“Something on Keanu reacted to our burn.”

Pogo’s face went red. “Like what? Some alien anti-aircraft system? What are you going to hit with steam?” He pushed himself as far away from Yvonne as he could get without actually leaving Destiny.

Yvonne turned to Zack and Tea. “This is significant, isn’t it? I’m not crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” Zack said. If she was, then he was, too. He was resisting a connection between their burn and the venting on Keanu, but only in the sense that a cancer patient is reluctant to accept a fatal diagnosis: He had experienced a sickening chill the moment he heard the time of the event, as if his body and his unconscious mind were simply better informed than his intellect.

Now his cool, rational, scientific, astronomically astute intellect had had time to do the math:

Destiny was hours away from beating Brahma to the first landing on a Near-Earth Object.

And they had no idea what they were going to find there.

The prospect was as terrifying as it was exciting.

Far below the solar plane, at a distance of 1.4 million kilometers—closer than the orbit of the planet Saturn—Keanu now becomes visible to even the most low-powered Earth-based telescopes, first as a point of light, then, at higher power, as a resolvable disk. Which is to say, a definable body.

One year after its discovery, Keanu’s nature is still the subject of a violent debate in the astronomical community . . . Is it a comet? A planetesimal? A visitor from the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt? Most astronomers agree that Keanu originated far beyond our solar system....

NEOMISSION.COM, JUNE 20, 2017

TWO YEARS AGO

God, it’s hot.

It wasn’t even ten A.M. on this June morning, and already the temperature on the Space Coast was ninety and climbing. Megan Stewart’s hair—normally straight—was frizzed into a Bride of Frankenstein do. Under her arms, behind her knees, everywhere she could be damp, she was. Even the backs of her bare thighs had somehow stuck to the fabric of the car seat.

It’s like being in a broiler. The metaphor was tired—she needed something punchier if she was going to use it for her documentary.

She adjusted her Sennheiser webset. Five years old, the digital camera and mikes were already obsolete yet retained ease of use while still producing webcast-quality images. She looked directly at her twelve-year-old daughter in the backseat. “Rachel, how would you describe the weather here today?”

The girl blinked her brown eyes, making the now-familiar adjustment back to real time from her own Slate-based reverie. “Better than Houston.”

“Really? How?”

“Florida’s just as hot as Texas, but it doesn’t smell as bad.” Rachel’s whole lifetime had been blogged by Megan for one site or another, from New Baby to Terrible2s to TweenLife and now for Megan’s half-hour documentary for GoogleSpace. She had grown skilled at uttering answers that were just good enough.

Behind the wheel, Harley Drake laughed. “Why don’t you just call it ‘The Sixth Circle of Hell’?”

“I presume that’s the one with fire.”

“Yes, as opposed to blood or mud or being pummeled with heavy objects.” He smiled. “It’s for heretics.”

“For a guy who calls himself a space cowboy, that’s a lot of literary reference.” Megan made sure to apply an exaggerated version of the Houston accent she had been absorbing over the past nine years. It was also a joke: Drake was an astronaut, but he had a master’s in literature to go with four engineering and science degrees. Unlike Megan, he had likely read Dante’s Inferno. Probably in the original Latin.

“‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’”

“Which is a quote from Whitman. Thank you, astronaut Drake. God, this is uncomfortable.” Megan killed the feed and removed the webset so she could swipe a tissue across her face.

Rachel said, “Why are all these people here so early? The launch isn’t until next week.”

Megan looked out the passenger side window of the Tesla. The southbound traffic on Highway 95 from the house in Nova Villas through the grimmer stretches of Titusville toward the 407 interchange—never easy—was truly terrible today, thanks to the addition of several thousand cars, pickups, and RVs heading the same direction, or parked on the shoulders.

“They want a good view,” Harley said. “And a launch is an excuse for a party. It beats tailgating at a football game.”