Read Online Heaven's War by David S. Goyer, Michael Cassutt - Free Book Online Page B

to Mexico, which was not very much.
     
    At least Keanu was quieter than Mexico, though it seemed, right here, just as crowded.
     
    And maybe, just maybe, she would find her mother again.
     
    Or her father. The last she’d heard, and what she believed, was that he was here, alive.
     
    Sasha took her hand. “Come on, everyone’s going out.”
     
    They were all headed toward an opening a lot like something you’d find in a sports arena…a big passage twenty meters wide and almost as tall. For the first time, Rachel examined the walls of the passage, which didn’t look like any tunnel she’d ever known from trips or movies or pictures. Mine shafts were dug out of rock and earth, then braced with timbers. There was this cool archive in Pennsylvania where the walls had been carved out of rock by some kind of machine…those walls looked ground down, like a tooth before the placement of a crown.
     
    These walls looked poured and smoothed, like the cement of a new sidewalk…but with no grain at all. In fact, visually, they appeared to have been painted, they were so even. The “floor” did look a bit machined…it was certainly more metallic than stone—
     
    “Whoa, check out the stash.”
     
    Harley had interrupted her examination of the passage. The procession had reached the final opening. Just outside it sat a pile of electronic gear: PDAs, BlackBerrys, Tik-Talks, Slates—there must have been two dozen different devices—being examined by several Indian men.
     
    “What the hell?” she said.
     
    “I guess everyone got tired of carrying dead weight,” Harley said. “Hey, though, check this out.”
     
    The creep from the White House, Brent Bynum, was pawing through them like a hobo in a restaurant Dumpster.
     
    “Brent,” Harley said. “What are you doing?”
     
    “One of these things has to work.”
     
    Harley glanced sideways at Sasha and Rachel, as if to say,
Stupid son of a bitch
. “I’m sure they all
work
. Even if everyone left their little machines running during the trip, they’re still good for days yet. But, Brent, think this through: where’s the fucking network?”
     
    “I know, I know,” the White House man said. “But we’re not that faraway! If we could get to the surface, we could see Houston and Washington!” Harley was pretty sure you couldn’t—you could barely make out the shape of North and South America. “How far does line of sight work?”
     
    “Not that far,” Shane Weldon said. Rachel had thought so, too, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Who knew what kind of magical, state-of-the-art PDA a White House staffer carried or knew about? Everyone was talking about the Tik-Talk, which had a walkie-talkie capability, but that item had been too expensive for Rachel; she had no idea what it could do. Maybe a Tik-Talk
was
capable of picking up signals at this distance—especially if some unit of the U.S. government kept an antenna pointed at Keanu.
     
    For that matter, maybe they’d kept it pointed at the object as it shrank in the sky.
     
    Gabriel Jones returned. “We’ve all had the same experience…scooped up and brought here. Their bubble thing dissolved, too. They know nothing that we don’t…. Pillay says we should just keep going, and I agree.”
     
    The combined group surged forward, reminding Rachel of refugees fleeing a natural disaster like a volcano or maybe a tsunami. Which, of course, they were. Jones and Pillay took the lead, with Bynum at their heels.
    Harley seemed tired and overwhelmed; Rachel couldn’t believe he would pass up the chance to take a verbal shot at Bynum, who, to Rachel, was moving
exactly
like a golden retriever.
     
    Then she realized that Harley wasn’t exhausted…he was taking in the breathtaking vista.
     
    They had entered a space that reminded Rachel of the time her parents had taken her to the old Astrodome…multiplied by a hundred. It was a roofed enclosure, longer than it was wide. “This is big enough to