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answer is no . . . and yes —”
    “Fucking A!” Yvonne blurted, clearly annoyed. Zack wanted to smile. Pogo Downey had the classic military mind—get ’er done, give me an answer. Yvonne, an engineer by training, had even less appetite for nuance.
    But even Tea Nowinski, usually the mediator, the finder of middle ground in any group, joined the chorus. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Okay, everyone!” Zack used the command voice. “Hey, Harley . . . interesting news.” He wondered if the sarcasm traveled across the 440,000-kilometer distance. “Care to elaborate?”
    “We can tell you this much, my man. There has been a second eruption on Keanu, but it took place approximately half an hour after Brahma’ s burn. There was no apparent commonality. In fact, there has been a third event since then.”
    Zack found that news fascinating—and soothing. “So it’s possible the first venting was a coincidence? That we’re just looking at some kind of volcanism.” Keanu had been venting ever since it was first observed—indeed, Venture and Brahma were both targeted to the same spot on Keanu’s surface, a circular crater nicknamed Vesuvius that had been the source of several plumes of steam over the past two years.
    Harley confirmed Zack’s thinking. “So far that’s the most logical theory.”
    “Yeah, well,” Yvonne said, “the other theories are freaky . . .”
    “Good to know,” Zack radioed. “We’ll keep our eyes open.” He set aside the question of what—if anything—was strange about Keanu to wonder instead what Brahma would do when it arrived. What was that missile-like thing it carried? It didn’t appear in the Brahma schematics available on the Web.
    “Venture , we show one minute to PDI,” Weldon said from Houston. “Everything’s looking good from here.”
    “Is it okay if I say that I can’t fucking believe we’re still going to land?” Tea said.
    In spite of the apparent anger, the whole exchange was pro forma, its very familiarity allowing the crew to feel as though they were back in their Houston simulator and not attempting the first piloted landing on a Near-Earth Object.
    It was ten times the challenge faced by Armstrong and Aldrin on the first lunar landing—yes, Venture had far better guidance systems, but the Apollo crew had been aiming for a world that had always been in the human mind . . . had been studied for centuries, and in the years prior to their launch, been probed a dozen times.
    Keanu had been unknown until three years ago. It had since been the subject of exactly two distant flyby space probes. (There wasn’t a government or corporation on Earth capable of conceiving, funding, building, and launching a probe to Keanu in less than five years, by which time the NEO would be long past its closest encounter and heading back into the interstellar darkness from which it came.)
    Zack Stewart’s Destiny-7 and Venture crew would indeed make the first human contact with this world.
    “Thirty seconds,” Pogo said.
    It didn’t seem to take that long for the numbers to reach zero. With a rumble that Zack found startling—he had never experienced a burn from the Venture cabin—the twin RL-10s ignited, ramping up from twenty percent of thrust to a full one hundred.
    Zack was technically the commander of the Destiny-7 mission, something he found especially absurd at the moment. Hot pilot Pogo Downey was flying this landing.
    Of course, Pogo wasn’t actually flying it yet. True, hundreds of hours of simulations had prepared him to manually steer Venture to a flat spot on the surface of the Moon . . . and several dozen hasty, postdecision sims had concentrated on the challenges of accomplishing the same thing in Keanu’s lesser gravity.
    But Venture’ s incredibly sophisticated and rugged guidance system was really making the decisions, its radar pinging the surface of Keanu, recording range and rate of descent, then making the delicate adjustments in the