Read Heaven's Fall for Free Online Page B

as Taj’s long-lost Brahma . The medical unit and the cherry picker were at its base. One of the med techs waved and signaled that there were no toxics. All Taj and Tea could do now was wait, and wonder what the crew’s medical need was.
    Before the basket of the cherry picker reached it, the hatch opened, flopping downward to provide an egress platform. Stepping out onto it was a figure from years of Taj’s nightmares . . . a Sentry! Taller than a human, multi-armed, deadly.
    “Oh my God, Taj—!” Tea grabbed his arm. She had not seen any Sentries face-to-face, but she had seen their work.
    “General,” Kaushal said, using a rank Taj had long since relinquished, “is that what we expected?” He sounded as nervous as any military man would, when surprised.
    But this Sentry was carrying a wounded man. From where Taj stood, nothing more could be seen, certainly not the extent of the man’s injuries or even his identity—Taj prayed that it was not Pav even as he wondered if he would recognize his son.
    With two techs aboard, the cherry picker basket reached the hatch level. The techs took the wounded man from the alien, then began to descend.
    Taj’s Jeep stopped fifty meters from the base of the craft. “Wait here,” Taj told Tea. To his surprise, she did as ordered.
    He and Kaushal hurried toward Adventure now. What they saw was devastating—a young barefoot Hindi in what would have been normal street attire (white shirt and slacks) a generation back, with a severe head wound, as if the left half of his face had been bashed in. “Get him to the infirmary,” Kaushal ordered.
    Taj shaded his eyes and looked up at the Sentry, a figure from his past, shouting, “Are there other injuries?”
    To his surprise, the creature shook its head and waved its upper arms in a very humanlike set of gestures. “No!” Its voice was muffled by its suit, of course, but could easily have been any of the welcoming party.
    Then the Sentry was joined on the platform by four others, all in street clothes. (Taj had expected flight suits of some kind.) A heavyset black man—likely the partner named Toutant. A teenaged girl in shorts and a loose yellow blouse—Yahvi.
    A tall man who looked much as Taj once had. “Papa!” He waved. Pav! Lord, he was grown up! Handsome in spite of the day’s ordeal.
    And with him, a dark-haired woman in her thirties. “It’s Rachel, hi!” For a moment, Taj felt confused . . . it was as if he were looking at Megan Stewart, Rachel’s mother . . . the same woman he had last seen, alive, on Keanu twenty years ago.
    Before this thought could bedevil him further, there was a shriek from behind him—Tea. Waving her hand, moving as she had not moved in a decade, she ran toward the base of Adventure .
    Rachel was hopping up and down like an excited teenager, which was what she had been during her last meeting with Tea. It was clear that she wanted to scream, and just as clear that, given the wounded man’s condition, she could not.
    And so Taj Radhakrishnan was reunited with his son and introduced to his now-extended family.

    There were hugs and tears all around as the Adventure crew descended. Tea and Rachel were linked so completely and for so long that an objective observer might have judged them to be a single organism. There was a special bond between the two, of course. Rachel’s mother, Megan, had been killed in 2016 in an accident that cost Zack Stewart command of the Destiny-5 lunar mission . . . which had then gone to Tea!
    A year or so later, Zack Stewart began dating Tea . . . who then became a surrogate mother to fourteen-year-old Rachel. They had apparently gotten along well—it was Taj’s impression that at the time, Rachel might have had the edge in maturity.
    And if so, it appeared that his granddaughter, who had been standing silently and politely for several minutes, shared her mother’s prodigal serenity. Of course, Yahvi’s silence could also be caused by sullenness—or, to