He pictured the beautiful blue-and-white sphere of Earth, as he had seen it close up from the space station, and far away from Destiny. Now add a black spot of contagion in the middle of the USA. How quickly would it spread? How long before the entire North American continent was that horrible color, awash with Reiver templates?

The world?

And what would it mean? Would people die? Quite likely, just as swiftly and horribly as they would if a mutated Ebola virus struck.

Or would Earth and humanity be transformed into something mean, ugly, Reiver-like.

“The war isn’t on your planet,” Camilla said. “The battlefield is elsewhere.”

“I think the battlefield is everywhere,” he said. “The sooner you realize that, the sooner you’ll start to win.”

She was silent for several moments. Then: “We were unsuited to fighting the Reivers. Too old, too fragile, too large scale.”

“Too large scale?”

“Our reactions, our thought processes—they are simply too slow. We can’t compete against creatures who live in fractions of fractions of a moment. They can make a million decisions in the time it takes us to make one. And there are other flaws, too.”

Zack said, “So consider this: We’re a few hundred humans in a ten-thousand-year-old ship. We might be able to help you with one battle when Keanu gets wherever it’s going, but if I were you, I’d want seven billion weapons—I’d want the entire population of Earth working as a team.”

“You can’t promise that, and mobilizing your entire population is impossible. We had a difficult time collecting two hundred, and you are still not a fighting unit.”

“That may be our strength,” Zack said, afraid he was losing the most important argument in human history. “Think of us as bridging the gap between you and the Reivers. We’re smaller, faster, capable of operating in discrete units. But we are still individuals. We’ll never act as a bloc, the way they do.”

Then she said, “We are still suspicious. Consider your actions here.”

“Individuals make mistakes. Groups of individuals make bigger ones. It’s how we learn and change.”

A long silence. Finally she said, “If you accomplish the restart, we will consider turning the vessel around and returning to Earth.”

That would have to do. He hugged the girl, a bit of a trick with the rattling and shaking all around them. He wanted to laugh out loud. He thought of his friends and surviving family members—his poor parents and the hell they must have gone through this past two weeks—and all the workers in the space community, not to mention the astronomers who had discovered the NEO in the first place…the look on their faces when they realized that Keanu was heading back!

Assuming, of course, that he succeeded—

They stumbled into a vast brilliant cylinder tens of kilometers tall. Zack felt like a microbe at the focus of a telescope.

High above them, what appeared to be a brown dwarf star floated…fading even as Zack watched.

“We have little time,” Camilla said.

“What do I do with this unit?” Zack said. “Is there a switch or a trigger?”

“Oh,” she said, “you triggered it by carrying it through the last Membrane. Drop it there.”

Zack did as Camilla directed. Before the unit left his hand, it began to throb, grow warm, grow heavy.

The girl drifted forward, deeper into the cylinder. “Not that way,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Camilla stopped, spread her arms as if in benediction. Then turned to Zack with a smile.

Zack didn’t need to ask the next question. Camilla’s posture told him everything. “We aren’t getting out, are we?”

“If the device is used properly, we have no chance of survival.”

Oh God, he thought. He exhaled once, twice, three times. With the rocking and rolling motion of the NEO interior, he felt like a captain on a sinking ship.

There was the case, glowing with a white-hot brilliance, like a doorway opening to heaven—

Sadness hit him like a hammer. Good-bye Earth and friends and NASA and Michigan and Mom and Dad and strawberries and clean sheets and sunrises and the stars and kisses and music and Rachel and Megan and—

Holding hands, he and Camilla walked into the holy light.

Epilogue

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

REVELATION 12:7–8

We’re still here.

KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, MUCH LATER ENTRY

RACHEL

Rachel was shocked at how much the gravesite had changed since her last visit. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of visiting. There was always too much to do. And the memory of her parents was still strong. She still thought of them every day.

Even after twenty-one years.

Besides, while the remains of her mother’s second body were buried here, there was only a stone to Zachary Stewart’s memory. He had never returned from the power core.

She had often relived her last conversation with Yvonne, who died less than a day after Zack entered the shaft that dropped him into Keanu’s power core. Yvonne had clearly wanted to comfort Rachel on her loss, even as she was dying.

“Why are the Reivers so bad?” she remembered asking Yvonne. “Couldn’t we find a way to work with them? Aren’t they just information arranged differently?”

“Exactly,” Yvonne said. “They are perfect machines for the collection of energy and its use. Their only purpose seems to be replication.”

“Isn’t that what we do?”

“No,” Yvonne said. “We have love and free will, and our information grows and changes…”

“The Reivers are where information goes to die.”

And if we don’t stop them, Rachel had concluded, that’s what the universe becomes. Dead.

Her deputy mayor got her attention. “Do you wish to remain in private?”

Sentries were always so deferential, a state that would have startled any of the Houston Bangalores in their early encounters with the aquatic race. Their motives, their incomprehensible savagery, all combined to make them unwelcome crewmates. But years of negotiation and, frankly, mutual evolution had not only resulted in a truce—they had created a kinder, gentler type of Sentry. If they were going to be useful in a war on Earth, they would have to step out of their comfort zone.

Sentries would have to be the warriors they once were. Because that was what they were facing.

When the Reivers launched the vesicle, they also commanded Keanu’s propulsion system to fire a long, sustained burst, not only accelerating the NEO to its greatest speed, but depleting its onboard fuel supply so thoroughly that it took years—decades—to replenish.

One of the side effects of this fuel starvation and system crash had been the elimination of the Revenant function. No human had been reborn since the day of the power core restart, though some HBs continued to try. No animals beyond the dozen that had been released. It was only after Beehive technology was imported to the Temple system that experiments in 3-D manufacturing and plasm manipulation created a permanent animal population, though not without much pain and loss.

All the while, Keanu was moving farther and farther from Earth.

It had been difficult…not just eradicating the Reivers. The Gabriel Jones–delivered information virus, aka the bug zapper, had done most of the work, causing the machinelike beings to evolve themselves into unstable and unsurvivable forms that then crashed, collapsed, and died. All of them, from tiny bugs to Long Legs and other forms.

But it had taken years before humans were certain that there were no Reiver colonies anywhere on the interior or surface of Keanu.