The cockpit seemed dark, deserted, and cramped. Of course, the lower deck doubled as a habitation area, a fat doughnut surrounding the ascent stage. This was where the four Brahma travelers rode through launch, maneuvers, and touchdown on Earth.

Had they finally gotten home? The three surviving Brahma astronauts had joined Venture crew member Tea Nowinski aboard the Destiny orbiter, which, if Makali remembered correctly, had been crash-landed onto the surface here…and safely launched toward Earth.

She knew the crew members, some better than others. The Indian commander, Taj. How horrifying to have him survive the mishaps on Keanu, to return home and find that his son had been snatched away. Lucas Munaretto, so handsome and charming—and so unsuited to the rigors of spaceflight.

Makali barely knew Natalia Yorkina. But she had been good friends with Dennis Chertok, the oldest and most experienced member of the Brahma team—and its only fatality. Poor Dennis! So focused, so driven, so knowledgeable. He had spent almost two years in space on half a dozen different missions going back almost thirty years, every one of them marked by some equipment failure that he had been able to solve.

She wished he were here now.

“Looking for anything in particular?” Dale Scott was two steps behind her.

“Well, your food and water would be a good start.”

“Most of that would be below.” He edged into the cockpit with her, wrenching himself around to reach the access hatch. “It’s open, but—”

Makali could see past him. “Damaged.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I can even fit in there.”

“Forget it,” she said. “It would be great to have extra goodies, but they’d be gone in an hour.”

They both straightened up. Then, gingerly placing their feet on the sides of the couches, they moved away from the hatch and toward the control panel. “So, who did open that hatch?” Makali said.

“No fucking idea.”

“There must be something we can take, something that will be useful.”

“It’s a spacecraft, lady. Especially this module. It’s all instruments, controls, computers, comm, none of which is useful in our present situation.” He pointed to a panel mounted above them. “Since it’s technically a wreck, I suppose we could take the cockpit recorder….”

“There’s a black box?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s not as though anyone expected Brahma to crash, or if it crashed, to be found. It was just a data storage device, all the uplinks, maneuvers, imagery.”

“I want it.”

Scott looked at her as if she were raving. “Why?”

“When we get back to the habitat, it will give me something to do.” That wasn’t the answer, of course. The black box held data, and data was her life. Especially data on exo-environments, possibly on the postblast environment. She had been nursing dark thoughts about the radiation levels here—

Scott braced himself in order to reach above his head and detach the recorder unit. “Whoa,” he said.

“What?”

He gestured at several cabinets directly in front of him. Because of her need to brace in midcockpit, Makali had not been able to see them before this.

Two cabinets had been ripped open, their covers literally torn from the hinges. One contained clothing that, she could now see, was dumped below her in the dark bottom of the cockpit. The other cabinet had been cleaned out.

“What do you suppose happened?” Makali said. “Is that damage from the crash?”

“Could be, but look lower.”

Below the vandalized cabinets was another damaged area…a third door that looked as though it had been punched in. It was jagged and some pieces were missing…and there was a film of frozen red or orange fluid on it.

“I think,” Dale said, “that someone opened the hatch and did some damage in here.”

“And to himself,” Makali said, deciding without any justification that the red fluid was blood.

Scott handed her the recorder unit. It was just too big to fit comfortably in Makali’s hand. Scott could see that as well. He must have learned something from his abortive ISS mission, because without being asked, he tore some netting from a corner of the cockpit. “You’ll need this,” he said, adding a tool kit and several pieces of cable and clips from another cabinet. “I don’t know how helpful it will be—

Just then Zack’s rounded, skinsuited head rose above the open hatch. “Come out here. We found something.”

“So did we.” He told Zack about the cabinets and the possible blood.

“Yeah. I think you need to exit, now.”

Head bowed, Wade Williams was carefully searching an area directly in front of the Brahma nose, moving deliberately. He reminded Makali of a beachcomber using a metal detector to search for coins.

“So, what do you have?” Scott said.

“Tracks,” Williams said. Zack had told the others about the possible “incursion” into the Brahma cockpit. Zack’s description made her think of a black bear attack on a campsite.

In the glare, with the diminished acuity of the skinsuit “eyes,” the tracks weren’t easy to see, but they were unmistakably present: a series of long scrapes on the thin layer of ice and snow. Each one was half a meter long. “Bipedal, I judge,” Williams said. As a sci-fi writer, he was in heaven. “And a big fella.”

He was following them away from Brahma, to where the ice and snow-covered regolith gave away, again, to the white plates. “They’re hard to see on the white stuff,” he said, “but still present.”

Scott was still examining the most visible tracks. “I’m not sure it’s just one creature,” he said. “There’s a scattering of other markings, too.”

“Two sets?” Valya said. She sounded alarmed.

Zack walked over for a second look. “Well, we know that at least two nonhuman life forms exist on Keanu—the Architects and the Sentries. Who’s to say there couldn’t be others?”

“Who’s to say this is two different creatures?” Williams said. “Maybe it’s just your Architect.”

“I hope so,” Zack said. “I’ve got unfinished business with that guy.”

“So let’s find him,” Makali said. “Follow him.”

She pointed straight ahead.

“Where?” Valya said.

“Mt. St. Helens,” she told her. “The next vent.”

“How far is it?” Williams said.

“Check me on this, Zack, but ten, maybe fifteen kilometers.”

Zack had frozen into apparent immobility. He knew what Makali was proposing. “At least.”

“A bit of a hike,” Williams said. “Of course, we still don’t have any way back into our habitat, and don’t know how long these suits are good for—”

“This is officially fucking crazy!” Scott said. Perhaps he was being protective of Valya, or maybe he was just using common sense. “I agree that going back through the Beehive seems not too promising, but I have a hard time believing that the next best option is to hike overland to some other vent. Suppose it gives us access to another habitat—suppose that habitat is filled with the creatures that ransacked Brahma! How is that good?”

“There are no good options,” Zack said. “So we make the best of what we’ve got.”

“Which is?”

He pointed at the plates on the surface leading in the general direction of Mt. St. Helens Vent. “Follow the blinding white road.”

GABRIEL

“It’s kidney failure,” he said.

It was the first time he had uttered those words to anyone. Not to his chief of staff at JSC, not to his girlfriend or his mother.

Certainly not his daughter.

No one.

The diagnosis was recent, of course. The definitive word had been delivered to him at Baylor only, what, less than a month ago?

“How advanced?” Harley Drake said. The HB mayor had found him slumped against a rock a kilometer from the Temple, in the direction of the opposite wall, beyond Lake Ganges.