Free Heaven's Fall by David S. Goyer, Michael Cassutt Page B

Radhakrishnan had splashed down in the Destiny-7 spacecraft four hundred kilometers west and north of Los Angeles, not far from the Channel Islands.
    In terrible shape—dehydrated, starved, filthy, and worst of all, incredibly traumatized by the utter, catastrophic failure of their mission—they were taken aboard a NASA recovery ship.
    There they were separated and put in separate rooms—not staterooms, but tiny crew cabins that had been slightly modified to serve as temporary quarters for NASA astronauts. Taj had hoped and expected that he would be met by an ISRO doctor. That had been his first question after alighting from the rescue helicopter, drinking a considerable amount of juice (which he immediately vomited) and taking the shortest and best hot shower of his life.
    It was aboard the ship that he learned that many of the Brahma control team were gone—some of them killed in the impact of a Keanu-launched object that destroyed the control center but eventually scooped up several dozen humans and took off with them.
    The same thing had happened at Houston . . . which explained the absence of Shane Weldon, the Destiny flight director. Veteran astronaut Travis Buell came to welcome them instead.
    Tea, Natalia, and Lucas crowded into the cabin at that point. They all looked better than they had upon exiting the Destiny spacecraft, without in any way looking good.
    “Good,” Buell said, “now that you’re all here. I’m telling you you’re in quarantine.”
    “We were always going to be in quarantine, Trav,” Tea snapped. She had flown to the Moon with Buell and, Taj knew, had not come away from the experience with a good relationship with the man.
    “For two weeks,” Buell said. “This, unfortunately, is indefinite.”
    “I’m a citizen of India,” Taj told him. “Natalia is Russian, Lucas Brazilian. You have no legal grounds to detain us.”
    “Actually, we do,” Buell said, smiling. “You three entered the United States illegally. None of you are even carrying passports.”
    Taj remembered wanting to laugh. The idea that a crew of space travelers might make an emergency landing had been considered for decades, especially after the first Russians to return on a space shuttle turned out to be without passports. His Brahma crew had carried appropriate papers—
    —which had been vaporized on Brahma.
    “But you brought us here!” Natalia said.
    Buell seemed to be aware of the ridiculousness of the situation. “I suspect that will be a factor in your favor, should this ever get to a hearing.”
    “What in God’s name do you hope to accomplish?” Tea said. “It’s not as though we’re planning to hide anything. You know the worst of it, anyway. Everybody does.” Indeed, four dead, two vehicles lost, human history changed.
    “If anything,” Lucas said, “we’re eager to talk.”
    “See, that’s the problem,” Buell said. “It isn’t the postflight debrief that worries everyone. We know you’re pros. You’ll tell us every detail.
    “It’s these other . . . events.” He was talking about the miraculous reincarnation of Megan Stewart and several other humans—including Pogo Downey, killed on Keanu, then revived. “It’s bad enough that there are all these rumors around.”
    “What kind of rumors?” Natalia snapped. As far as Taj knew, the Russian cosmonaut had never met Buell before. It was surprising how quickly she had developed a dislike for him. “We can’t possibly know what’s being said here.”
    Buell stared at all of them. “I’m just going to call them zombies, for the moment. Space zombies is the term.”
    “Travis,” Tea said, “you know what happened up there.”
    “Do I?” he said. “I don’t know jack, right now.” Buell was quite religious, even by American standards. The idea that alien entities had the ability to bring people back from the dead, even briefly, with no more effort than humans would expend in accessing a website . . . surely that had to