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

Chardonnay .
    He worked hard and led by example. He’d get his hands dirty, and when he played Mr. Goodwrench (an increasingly vital role on space missions), he was good with tools.
    He liked science, but kept it in its place. And he had a glib way of making even the most idiotic experiments—the kinds astronauts usually described as “looking at stars, pissing in jars”—seem relevant.
    Which got to another point: Zack was savvy, too. He had built effective, long-term relationships with science and medical folks—though that was to be expected for an astronaut from what Pogo called the “pencil-necked geek” world.
    But to have made friends with the puppet masters in mission ops, the flight controllers? That took skills worthy of a K Street lobbyist, the kind Pogo had watched in horror during a tour at the Pentagon.
    Stewart even seemed to have administrative folks on his side—the secretaries and IT types. Of course, tragic widowerhood didn’t hurt with the gals.
    But, shit, he had to have had something going for him, for NASA to have given him command of the first lunar landing of the twenty-first century.
    And yet . . .
    Pogo had known quite a few special operators, Navy SEALs and Air Force pararescue guys, who had a cold-eyed ability to jump into icy water or fly a mountain pass on a moonless night, to cap an insurgent with a sniper rifle or slit one’s throat with a knife—and never question the order or worry about the consequences.
    With a few drinks in him, he would gladly include himself in that particular club.
    He wondered if Zack Stewart was ruthless enough to kill someone, or even more challenging, to order a man to his death.
    The EVA ops around Brahma were basic: opening up bays in the descent stage and pulling out boxes. After fifteen minutes, Pogo was bored.
    He was also distracted by the conversations between Zack and Taj, who had wisely decided to switch to a common frequency and dispense with relays through their respective mission controls. The first thing Pogo picked up was that Taj was dealing with a problem in its command-and-control system. It was all he could do to keep from telling Venture —“Hey, even the Indian guy has to call Bangalore for computer help!”—but he restrained himself.
    Especially since the next thing he learned was that the eruptions on Keanu were actually some kind of braking rockets . . . somehow making jokes at Taj’s expense seemed too trivial.
    As a kid Pogo Downey had always thought UFOs were alien spaceships, that the government was hiding something. He’d largely put those suspicions aside by the time he entered the Air Force Academy, where he’d learned new and better ways to distrust governments. But he still believed that humankind was not alone in the universe. So to be standing on an alien artifact . . . well, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.
    It was actually pretty cool.
    By the time Natalia Yorkina, the second Russian on the Brahma crew, joined her teammate Lucas on the surface, it was obvious that Pogo was a third wheel. “Heading back. Good luck,” he told the Coalition team.
    “We will all need luck,” Natalia said.
     
     
    When Pogo reached Venture , Zack was back on the surface, already preparing to deploy the rover. “Getting a Buzz” was what the training teams had called it.
    For years NASA had been in the stupid habit of bestowing individual names on pieces of equipment. The agency had even held a goddamn contest to name the rover that would be used on the third lunar landing, and “Buzz” had been the winner . . . after the second man to step on its surface.
    Well, wherever he was, Buzz Aldrin was laughing, because while rovers Neil and Gene had been relegated to traverses on the nasty, asbestoslike lunar soil, rover Buzz was the first on an entirely new world.
    Or starship. Let’s not forget that.
    The Venture lander stood eighteen meters high and, with the low sun angle, cast a shadow three times that long. In that shadow,