She broke from them and sprinted toward the causeway. But in the dark, the mud and gravel defeated her. She lost her footing trying to climb up to the road, slipped, and slid back to the bottom.

As she was getting to her feet—and Harley and Sasha approached, furious with her—a new light fell on the trio. “Hey, you people—freeze!”

Rachel thought she was going to pass out. Then five men walked forward, and one of them turned out to be Shane Weldon.

“We followed you,” Bynum told Harley. Weldon, Bynum, and their passengers all helped lift Harley up to the causeway.

“Not very closely.”

“We had to stop to pick up some instruments,” Weldon said. He pointed to one of his team, a young man with a boxlike object slung over his shoulder.

“Is that an actual Geiger counter?” Sasha Blaine said.

“Yeah. The best we could do on short notice,” Weldon said. “We got that, a camera”—he raised a Nikon still camera like those astronauts used on missions—“and a spectrometer.” Another of the party was struggling with a box twice the size of the Geiger counter. “That baby was built for lunar surface ops about ten years ago. I’m not sure it even works.”

“Gotta love NASA planning.”

“Don’t worry,” Weldon said. “I’ve got a real team putting together a set of instruments that will be able to tell what this thing had for breakfast this morning.” He nodded toward the Object, which now loomed over them like a dome-shaped building.

“Speaking of breakfast,” Sasha Blaine said. “What was the latest on the material this thing seemed to be ingesting? It appears to be sucking up water, mud, and even some vegetation.”

“There might be some small absorption, right, Brent?” Weldon said, looking at the sodden, sullen White House man. “But nothing major. We don’t feel as though Earth is about to be sucked into some kind of mini–black hole—”

“—At least, not this particular moment,” Bynum said.

“Can we just go?” Rachel said. The entire party was now on the causeway, but they had not moved forward. Rachel was happy not to have been arrested, and grateful for the helping hands . . . but she felt she had to get to the Object as soon as possible. Or she’d lose her nerve.

Harley took Rachel’s hand. “Okay, we’re going—”

“No.” Brent Bynum stepped in front of them, a pistol in his hand. “This is a hostile entity. None of us should be this close. I authorized it so we could gather data.”

“Brent—” Weldon stepped forward.

“Stop right there!” Bynum screamed. To Harley the White House man looked unhinged. He could hardly blame him. “I’m . . . responsible!”

“No,” Harley said. “I’m responsible. You and Shane told me. You had me sign the documents. I’m the official in charge of alien encounters. And I say we go.” Bynum was wavering, unsure.

“Look,” Harley said, “as far as the White House is concerned, I’m still in charge—and I’ll be blamed.” He held out his hand. “And take a step back, Brent. We’ve been reacting, not acting.” Harley pointed to the Object looming in the near-distance. “Would that thing be here if we hadn’t set off a goddamn bomb on Keanu? Give me the weapon. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Bynum seemed happy to be rid of it.

As Harley dropped the piece into his lap and placed his hands on his wheels, he couldn’t help noting that he was shaking.

And that everyone was immediately trying to forget what just happened.

Within moments, the party had carefully advanced across the bridge, with Sasha Blaine looking over the railing for signs of Object-related sucking. “So far, so good.”

“Look,” Harley said. Off to their right, on the other side of the lagoon, still well north of the Object, half a dozen lights bobbed in the darkness. “I hope they’re on our side.”

“This might just be the most dangerous fucking thing I’ve ever done,” Weldon said.

“I certainly hope so,” Harley said, to general laughter.

Let’s review the bidding. There might be intelligent life on Keanu, which is no longer a NEO but likely a starship . . . at least one astronaut is dead, two others are missing . . . and both JSC and Bangalore have lost contact with the landing craft. And now two “objects” have slammed into the Earth’s surface.

Am I missing anything? Has the entire universe gone insane?

POSTER JERMAINE AT NEOMISSION.COM

You’re actually missing quite a lot. Stand by.

POSTER JSC GUY, SAME SITE

“Two minutes, we’re go for pop-up. Enabling RCS two and four. Go for main at plus two ten.”

Tea Nowinski was strapped into the left-hand couch of the Destiny, with Taj to her right. Behind them—and, once Destiny translated to a nose-up, tail-down orientation, below them—Natalia and Lucas were simply stretched out on a “bed” of netting that held the discarded EVA suits. It was not the most comfortable situation, but the g-forces associated with a launch from Keanu’s gravity field would be minimal. “About like a fast elevator,” Jasmine Trieu told her. Tea didn’t even need the straps at her seat. But she wanted them; they were a physical reminder that her vehicle was about to change locations.

“We show six-eighty on cabin pressure,” Tea reported, knowing Houston could see the same figure, but just to remind the team of that looming problem. She could not get a handle on the leak. Pressure wasn’t dropping in some straight line, suggesting some blockage somewhere. Destiny’s environmental system was pumping air into the cabin to compensate. That couldn’t go on forever, of course. They had to get off Keanu, and back to Earth.

“RCS is go, main engine is go,” Houston radioed, after the lag, which Tea now judged to be the most irritating thing she had ever experienced in her life. The reaction control system was a series of four small quads of rockets positioned equidistantly around Destiny’s service module. They were usually fired when Destiny needed to reorient itself.

Today, in this most unusual operation, they would actually lift the spacecraft off the increasingly unstable surface of Keanu. “We’d like to have clearance from the ground before we light the main,” Josh Kennedy had told her.

“If you like it, we like it,” Tea had responded. She saw the logic; even though the thrust of Destiny’s main engine would quickly lift the vehicle off the surface, there was no real way of predicting just how soon . . . it might scrape the ground for fifty or two hundred meters before getting airborne, certainly causing more damage.

“One minute.”

“I hope we don’t get any more movements,” Taj said.

“No negative thoughts, okay?” Tea told him.

There had been concern about whether the RCS quads had come through the snowplow intact, or through that shocking movement caused by either melting snow or some other external factor. Quad number one faced downward at the moment, buried in Keanu snow. JSC’s data showed that it was still intact—no fuel leaking, at any rate—but no one could know whether the small nozzles had been bent, and if so, how they would perform.

Fortunately, the pop-up burn didn’t require quad number one, but rather numbers two and four.

“It will be nice to see home again,” Natalia said, trying to correct for Taj’s gloom.

“For some of us,” Lucas said.

“Thirty seconds,” Tea said, knowing she sounded snappish, not to mention a couple of seconds ahead of the actual count. She couldn’t help it. Ever since buttoning Destiny’s hatch, all she could think about was the horrifying truth that she was abandoning Zack. A colleague. A good man. A man she loved.

It didn’t matter that he’d ordered her to do it. Who cared that she really had no choice? He was going to die, and for the rest of her life she would know it was her fault.