Read Heaven's Shadow Online

Authors: David S. Goyer,Michael Cassutt

Heaven's Shadow

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

Part One - “TO FIND THE SEA”

KEANU APPROACH

TWO YEARS AGO

KEANU APPROACH: TERMINAL PHASE

 

Part Two - “LONG, GENTLE THUNDER”

TWO YEARS AGO

KEANU STAY

SEVENTY-THREE DAYS EARLIER

KEANU STAY

 

Part Three - “SOME FRAGRANT NIGHT”

 

Part Four - “IN THE WIDE STARLIGHT”

 

Part Five - “FOR THE DEAD ARE FREE”

 

Acknowledgements

HEAVEN’S WAR

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Phantom Four Films and St. Croix Productions, Inc.

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Goyer, David S.

Heaven’s shadow / David S. Goyer & Michael Cassutt. p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-51654-6

1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Space flight—Fiction. I. Cassutt, Michael. II. Title.

PS3607.O925H43 2011

813’.6—dc22

2010054263

 

 

http://us.penguingroup.com

To Michael Engelberg

Dramatis Personae

ZACK STEWART
, astronomer and astronaut, commander of
Destiny-7

MEGAN DOYLE STEWART
, journalist

RACHEL STEWART
, their daughter

AMY MEYER
, Rachel’s friend

SCOTT SHAWLER
, NASA public affairs officer, the “voice” of the
Destiny
missions

TEA NOWINSKI
,
Destiny-7
astronaut

PATRICK “POGO” DOWNEY
,
Destiny-7
astronaut

YVONNE HALL
,
Destiny-7
astronaut

TAJ RADHAKRISHNAN
, vyomanaut, commander of
Brahma

NATALIA YORKINA
, exobiologist and
Brahma
cosmonaut

LUCAS MUNARETTO
, engineer and
Brahma
cosmonaut

DENNIS CHERTOK
, aerospace physician and
Brahma
cosmonaut

HARLEY DRAKE
, former astronaut, head of the Home Team

GABRIEL JONES
, director of the NASA Johnson Space Center

SHANE WELDON
, former chief astronaut, now
Destiny-7
mission director

BRENT BYNUM
, deputy national security adviser, White House staff

JOSH KENNEDY
,
Destiny-7
flight director

LINDA DOWNEY
, Patrick Downey’s wife

JILLIANNE DWIGHT
, crew secretary, Johnson Space Center

KONSTANTIN ALEXANDROVICH FEDOSEYEV
, Russian, now a Revenant

CAMILLA
, a Brazilian child, now a Revenant

VIKRAM NAYAR
, lead flight director at Bangalore

THE HOME TEAM

SASHA BLAINE
, Yale astronomer

WADE WILLIAMS
, popular science and sci-fi author

GLENN CREEL
, creator of Cartoon Network’s
Escape Velocity

LILY VALDEZ
, professor at University of California, Irvine

STEVEN MATULKA
, president of the Planetary Society

JASMINE TRIEU
, astronaut, capcom

TRAVIS BUELL
, astronaut,
Destiny-5
commander, capcom

JAMES
and
DIANE DOYLE
, Megan Doyle Stewart’s parents

TOBY BURNETT
, Wackenhut security officer at JSC

LEE SHIMORA
,
Destiny-7
Stay-3 flight director

Part One

“TO FIND THE SEA”

Near-Earth Objects are comets or asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.

NASA JET PROPULSION LAB, NEAR-EARTH OBJECT PROGRAM FAQ

 

What if it comes from farther away?

POSTER ALMAZ, JULY 7, 2016

KEANU
APPROACH

Blue planet Earth and its seven billion human beings lay 440,000 kilometers below—or, given the arbitrary terminology of orientation in space, off to one side. If the sheer magnitude of the distance failed to provide a mind-boggling thrill, Zack Stewart could, by looking out the window, cover his home planet with his thumb.

That small gesture got the point across: He and his three fellow astronauts were farther away from Earth than any human beings in history.

Farther than the Moon.

Yet . . . they were still dealing with its politics, dragged down as completely as if trailing a 440,000-kilometer-long chain with anchor.

It irritated him. Of course, the fact that he had now been without sleep for thirty hours meant that
everything
irritated him. He was forty-three, a compact, muscular man with considerable experience in spaceflight, including two tours aboard the International Space Station. And now he was commander of
Destiny-7
, responsible for four lives and a multibillion-dollar spacecraft on a mission unlike any ever attempted.

He knew he should be pacing himself. But the stress of preparing for today’s unprecedented maneuvers—440,000 kilometers from Earth!—had robbed him of sleep. Mission control in Houston had been uploading scripts for burns that would adjust
Destiny’
s flight path, but the computer code was too fresh from some Honeywell cubicle and kept crashing. NASA called these commands
e-procedures
. To Zack, the
e
stood for
error
.

The process reminded him of the time he had tried to load Windows onto a laptop in Antarctica . . . with dial-up. Then as now, the only choice was to grind slowly through it.

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