Heaven's War Read Online Free PDF

linguistic skills, her isolation from the other bubble victims was no surprise. Valya had gotten to know very few of the team at Bangalore. To this point, all her
Brahma
-related work had taken place in Moscow.
     
    As well it should have. She was a linguist, not a space person. Yes, she had grown up on the fringes of the space program—her father, Anton Makarov, worked in the Energiya factory, where spacecraft were built; he was essentially a plumber. Valya’s mother was a secretary in one of Energiya’s sister organizations.
     
    From both parents their daughter had learned about the overwhelming and unproductive role of the Communist Party—never dealing with ideology, but only with bonuses and perks—and the inside politics of any organization larger than a football team.
     
    Rather than follow her family, and her contemporaries, into aerospace engineering and a sure job at Energiya, Valya had chosen to study languages at Moscow University.
     
    Part of it was her desire to make money as a translator. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union threw itself open to European and American businessinterests in a desperate attempt to remain Communist. The effort had failed; by 1992 the Soviet Union had fallen apart.
     
    But the market for translators never slackened. Valya had made a better than decent living—in hard, non-Russian currency—by knowing not only English, but French, German…Spanish, and Portuguese. Over the years she had added some Arabic and Hindi and had a reading knowledge of Chinese (she spoke the Cantonese version).
     
    It was this broad-based knowledge that had brought her to work for the Indian Space Research Organization, to help translate strange signals. Her skill had likely made it easier for her to fall into a relationship with Dale Scott.
     
    On balance, then, she would have to conclude that language had ruined her life.
     
    After a few hours, however, with the bubble clearly in space, the bodies no longer flailing, the long wave of panic having receded, Valya was able to hear.
    Somewhere inside the bubble, machines were at work. There was a definite hum, and occasional insane series of mechanical clicks.
     
    Turning her head, she saw dark rectangular shapes at the nearest “pole” of the bubble. They seemed to be the source of the noises.
     
    No matter. By this point, perhaps two hours into the situation, Valya’s overriding thought became…
Now I need to urinate
.
     
    Before it became an emergency, however, she found herself joining a collection of humans—none of whom she recognized—at the south pole of the bubble, where it became apparent that the object was equipped with life support mechanisms. One unit displayed obvious nipplelike structures, and some desperately thirsty people were lapping away, happily wiping their mouths. “Water!” one of them proclaimed.
     
    Water. Good.
     
    Valya surmised that a similar unit next to it dispensed food of some kind. At the moment, a pair of Indian men in the standard white shirts and slacks were examining the device, fingers probing, hands tapping around the edges. A heavyset young Chinese man joined them for a few moments, too, before giving up.
     
    Thank God for engineers,
she thought.
     
    Then a different man joined them—American, in his fifties, a bit stocky, yet looking somehow less rumpled than the others. He conversed briefly with the two Indians, seemed to reassure himself of something important, then saw Valya…and smiled. “Hey, baby! Happy to see me?”
     
    When the Bangalore Object struck, Valya had just reached Dale’s car in the parking lot. Like most of the several thousand employees of Bangalore Control Center, Valya commuted by bus, a trip that often took an hour, one way, from the city center.
    But Dale Scott was American. His belief in private transportation bordered on the religious. He was proud of the fact that he had bullied ISRO into leasing a car for him. “Driving it is still a bitch,” he said. “What