Free Heaven's War by David S. Goyer, Michael Cassutt

hold a city,” Sasha said.
     
    “Big enough to hold a war,” Weldon added. He was growing increasingly pessimistic.
     
    Rachel hoped that Shane Weldon would cheer up. Certainly she was feeling a little better, now that she realized she was entering a parklike landscape. There was soil, there were rocks, there were greenish growingthings not far off. Smallish trees…or given the odd perspective, maybe not so smallish.
     
    The roof was hundreds of meters high, likely higher, and covered with the same squiggly tubes that had given light in the tunnel, but many more of them.
     
    Harley squeezed Sasha’s hand, then Rachel’s. “In spite of our differences, I think we all have one thing in common,” he said. “Look!”
     
    Every one of the humans, Houston and Bangalore, was staring up, openmouthed, in exactly the same way.
     
    As they marched over a low rise, they gained improved perspective. Not only did the habitat stretch at least ten kilometers in front of them…so far that Rachel could not see the other side…but one structure was in clear view, looking like an Aztec temple rising above a jungle.
     
    Rachel’s appreciation of the alien building was short-lived, however. She heard a growing clamor off to the right, where most of the Bangalores were bunched up and breaking like a wave around a rock.
     
    Two humans were approaching…one was a young girl Rachel had never seen before. “How the hell did those people get ahead of us?” Sasha said.
     
    “They don’t look Indian,” Weldon said.
     
    “They’re not,” Harley said.
     
    No, they were not. Rachel recognized that walk, that oh-so-typical posture! It was her father.
     
    She screamed and pushed through the crowd, heading for him.
     

ARRIVAL DAY: JAIDEV
     
    The fighting had stopped.
    At least, for now, and for Jaidev Mahabala, good. One side of his face was swollen and sore; he had a split lip; his left eye was half-closed. He looked awful, and for a man who took pride in his appearance—said pride already hit hard by the awful stench and misery of the flight from Earth to Keanu—it was emotionally as well as physically painful.
     
    Not that there was ever likely to be a reason to restore his prior appearance: slim, dark-eyed, the carefully cultivated stubble, the close-fitting shirt and tailored trousers. Jaidev’s life had effectively ended when he was enclosed in the Bangalore Object.
     
    But he had hoped that getting into a scuffle over food would have paid off with
something
. A Power Bar or even a drink of warm American beer.
     
    Nothing…except bruises.
     
    His participation in what began as a mad scramble for rations—one of dozens Jaidev had witnessed—had ended with a nasty punch delivered by Daksha Saikumar, a fellow
Brahma
enviro systems engineer. Daksha was a decade older than Jaidev’s twenty-nine, so hairy and slow that unfriendly colleagues dubbed him “the Gorilla.” Jaidev had never considered Daksha a friend, but he had never expected him to shove him aside, then complete the maneuver by striking him in the face.
     
    Jaidev had been left to wander the fringe of the refugee crowd in search of something potentially edible.
     
    All he—and several other members of the Bangalore group—had found was a large, shallow pool of muddy (looking) water, which everyone drank from even as Daksha sniffed in disdain, naming it “Lake Ganges.”
     
    It was the latest in a series of humiliations. Jaidev couldn’t even blame the worst of them on the Bangalore Object.
     
    He was from an IT family; everyone, his father, mother, an older brother, and two older sisters all worked in the Corridor in Chennai, though on a lower level. (One brother ran a call center.)
    Jaidev had built on the family experience and earned a position at nearby Sathyamba University, a lucky move, since it allowed him to get out of his father’s house and into the hostel.
     
    (The school had a fleet of buses available to students, too. Odd how