Now Houston had her checking environmental systems. She quickly learned why. “Houston, I’m seeing a pressure drop . . . barely over seven hundred millibars, and I think it’s gone down a point since I’ve looked.” She was too tired to do the math, or to wait for Trieu to confirm those figures. “How long before we’re sucking vac?”

“It’s still on the order of hours, possibly a day or two,” Trieu told her. “But it means we have to get you off the surface ASAP.”

Taj had heard this, and so had Lucas and Natalia. The vyomanaut was already climbing into the seat next to Tea. “How much time?”

Houston answered for Tea. “You will be going LOS in the next ninety minutes. We want you off the ground before then.”

“No more than we do,” she had told them.

Just then, strangely, the spacecraft rolled. It was worse than one simple motion . . . it actually seemed to yaw a bit, too, causing Tea’s already-sensitive stomach to protest. “Okay, anyone, what the hell was that?”

Natalia said, “I thought this was solid ground!”

The nearest window to Tea showed nothing but black sky overhead. “Taj, take a look—”

The vyomanaut already had his nose up to the square window in the hatch. “There’s a lot of vapor outside!”

Lucas pulled himself up to the couch next to Tea. “Are we venting?”

Tea didn’t think so—at least, no more than before the movement—and a quick glance at all the panels confirmed it. “No indicators. Haven’t heard anything.”

Taj was getting agitated. “I think Vesuvius is active again—”

That was all Tea needed to hear. She clicked her radio. “Houston, Destiny . . . Let’s get to that departure checklist!”

Big Smart Alien

TERM COINED BY NASA ASTRONAUT ZACHARY STEWART, AUGUST 2019

To Zack, it seemed as though the Architect considered his request to release Megan.

Then it moved again, its portside appendages swiftly lashing out, touching the interior walls to Zack’s right. A third of the way up, just above the height of Zack’s head, a panel opened up—

And a body slid out.

Zack moved reflexively . . . and a good thing, too: it was a writhing, scratching, loudly protesting human female.

Megan.

They both collapsed. Fortunately, Keanu’s gravity ensured that they wouldn’t be hurt.

It took a moment before Megan realized who had caught her. “Oh my God,” was all she said.

Zack had never heard anyone so relieved. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

They regarded each other. “I keep hoping I’m eventually going to figure this out,” Zack said.

“Me, too.”

Zack turned to the Architect, who, after releasing Megan from a hole in the wall, had resumed exploration of other cabinets higher up in the chamber, using two or three of its appendages at the same time. “Any ideas?” Zack shouted.

“I think he can hear you.”

“And you would know.”

“Yes.” She seemed to be regaining strength. “Both of us know.”

“Listen, darling . . . I’m just about out of time and energy. I haven’t slept in three days, I have barely eaten . . . I’ve seen stuff I wouldn’t have thought possible. And I’ve given up my ride home. So there’s a clock on me. I don’t know whether it will be days or hours, but if you and the Architect have anything to share, please do it now.”

Megan knelt and slipped her arms around him, cradling his head the way she’d held Rachel as a child. “Ssshh,” she said, almost cooing. “I know. I do know. You were . . . incredibly brave to come here.”

“You’re the brave one—”

“Hardly. I was in an accident, then these guys brought me back. I didn’t choose any of it. But I would have, to see all this.”

“Yeah. I wish I felt luckier.”

She hushed him, just like Megan of old. “How many people ever get the chance to . . . change the history of the world? Or a couple of hundred worlds?”

“Yeah, well, my team hasn’t done a very good job so far.” He glanced up at the busy Architect. “I’d like to tell our . . . host here that that bomb was a major mistake.”

Megan leaned her head close to his again. “I think you just did.”

“You think, or you know?”

Megan looked at the Architect herself. The giant being looked back. “I know. I mean, I figured my new body had some improvements.”

“You know things you shouldn’t.”

“Even more as time goes by. It’s like I’m being prompted. I can’t just offer things up. But hear the right question—bam! Here’s an answer.”

Zack turned her face back toward him. He put his hand on her cheek . . . their first truly intimate touch, so familiar. “Who are they? What do they want? Just building or outfitting a ship like this would take the resources of an entire civilization!”

She took a breath, then closed her eyes and said: “Okay, trying my best: life is hard to find in the universe. Intelligent life is . . . incredibly rare. We’ve found more dead civilizations than living ones, and we haven’t found many of those.”

“You said we.”

“Yes, we. I’m Megan. But I’m beginning to share some of their consciousness, too. This vessel . . . he’s really old, on the order of ten thousand years. And our solar system isn’t its first stop. There have been a dozen others.”

“Does it really have the ability to reengineer its environment to suit whatever creatures it encounters?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“For some of these other races, like the Sentries?”

“Other candidates, we call them.” She blinked, as if listening.

Zack was about to seize on the term candidates—for what? But he had a more vital question. “And this vessel can magically access specific ‘souls’ of the dead of . . . any race?”

“Yes. Don’t think of it as magic. It’s technology humans don’t possess. We know how consciousness and personality connect to bodies.”

“But you found a handful of souls out of millions!”

“It was accessing data stored in . . . the closest I can come is morphogenetic fields. The universe is filled with it . . . with bioelectric data, all kinds of data. Information.”

“Like the akashic records from the Vedas, the ‘library’ of all experiences and memories of human minds through their physical lifetimes.”

“They’re not using those terms.”

“Neither am I, really. They were Taj’s.”

“And I keep thinking of Jung. I guess we all reach for the words and concepts we already know.” She smiled. “This is like trying to explain the Internet to Benjamin Franklin. You know electricity, but you’re a long way from computers and networks.”

Zack looked up at the Architect, who seemed almost indifferent to his presence. “I feel like I’m standing outside the biggest library in the world, only it’s closed.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“Oh, God, honey, it’s not about you. It’s just . . . look at this!” He gestured at the Temple interior. “Okay, why did your friends send this vessel?”

“We’ve found a . . . presence, a challenge, another entity, and it’s been a threat to us. We came here looking for help. We think you might fill that role.”

“Against another race?”

“Another type of being, the Reivers.”

“The what? Sounds Irish.”

“I’m sure it’s Irish, Scots, Gaelic, whatever. It’s the word in my head, and it means bad guys. It’s not just that they’re enemies, they are enemies bent on exterminating us, and all memory of us. We can’t coexist.”

Zack took her by the shoulders. “But, still, it’s thousands of years in the past, hundreds of light-years from here, right? Does that threat still exist?”

“Yes. The Reivers don’t live on the same time scale humans do. They’ll be a threat for a million years.”

“In that case, I don’t know how much help we can offer. We could barely make the trip from Earth to here! When we did, it took us a day and a half to try to blow you up. We’re rude, crude, and pretty damn stupid!”