Maker Messiah

by Ed Miracle

  Nick broke his own judicious rule and poured a second whiskey.

  “No,” Yvonne had said, “Coalinga could only be the work of terrorists, Islamist thugs or their ilk, still intent on destroying America.” She wanted Nick to catch them and punish them. Bring them to justice. Ambitious though he was, Philip Machen would never shoot off his own foot with exploding technology. Her eyes had shone brightly when she said this, as they now did from the silver frame on his desk.

  He could save the whole country yet lose the only voter who mattered to him. Coalinga might not be enough. It might succeed in all the obvious ways, but he could still lose Yvonne and the other Yvonnes to simple, insidious doubt. To Philip goddamn Machen, traitorous Sower of Doubts.

  We must link that bastard to another blast, so there will be no doubt. There must be a way to do that. But first we need to find the sonofabitch.

  There was no other choice. He picked up his encrypted STU-5 and punched a number he was loathe to call, the Oakland office of the FBI. He would have to swallow his pride, reverse his earlier decision, and hope a useful idiot would once more prove himself useful.

  FORTY-ONE

  Western Nevada. Tuesday, June 9

  Day Fifty-two

  Goddamn Brayley.

  Parker seldom thought of anyone that way, not even his errant boss, Derek Majers. He squinted through the scratched, dollhouse window as it channeled daylight onto his arm. The steady rush from the 737’s engines relaxed to a sigh as the jetliner descended into California. There were no attendants, no other passengers, just him and his prisoner, installed on first class thrones. Across the aisle, Karen Lavery lay restless and pale in her recliner. Her auburn locks spilled lustrous and incongruous across her faded orange prison coveralls.

  Goddamn Brayley.

  Overnight, the AG’s office had summoned him to an audience with Brayley, who apparently had changed his mind about Philip Machen. Who abruptly thought Parker’s plan to ensnare the Great Fugitive would work, after all. Who wouldn’t stop talking about it. Who asked no questions but pronounced a litany of orders. Pick her up. Take her home. Collect the daughter. Make them call Machen. Get him to come for them. Tell us where and when, but do not approach him. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Even sober, the AG was a caricature of himself.

  Parker, on the other hand, had liberated four Scotch miniatures from a convenient locker up forward. Poor substitutes for a creamy Guinness, especially without ice, but subtlety was not on the bill of fare today. The choice before him was a hard-liquor decision if ever there was one. So he ripped off the caps, slugged the firewater, and shook himself like a wet dog.

  Goddamn Brayley, ensconced in his stodgy old office, redolent of power, reeking with anxiety. Parker could smell the man’s fear, sour as a flophouse mattress. But if Coalinga is Machen’s Waterloo, what more does Brayley want?

  Not Machen in court, defending himself before citizens who could see and hear and judge for themselves. This lawless fugitive, this social nightmare who should answer for what he’s done. Was there ever a crime so vast as destroying whole nations? Brayley must think Machen’s gifts-to-the-world exceed mere criminality, that his offenses transcend a court’s power to contain them or to mitigate them. Despite Coalinga, Nick Brayley was flat-out afraid. He’d even said as much.

  “He’s not just some criminal, Parker. He’s destroying Western civilization. He’s out there destroying us, and we have to stop him. So find him, then call me.”

  Maybe.

  Ms. Lavery wasn’t the only one on the plane who chafed at doing another’s bidding. This was no longer about his job or reputation. His career, it seemed, was whatever Brayley demanded. His fate, as much as Ms. Lavery’s, had been usurped. Now he could do anything—anything at all—and the result would be channeled, interpreted, and defined by a sixty-year-old lard-ass, desperately trying to steer Western Civilization from the helm of a quarter-ton of polished walnut.

  Parker could do the company thing, what Brayley expected, or he could do what he would have done in any case. By ordaining a particular outcome, Brayley had unwittingly given him license. And clarity. No more distractions. Whatever hopes or threats were converging on him and his prisoner, Special Agent Leslie D. Parker was abundantly free to follow his conscience.

  “Wake up.” He touched her arm. “We’re almost there.”

  Ms. Lavery blinked and swept a lock of hair from her eyes. She scowled and looked away. The cabin shuddered, prompting an exchange of glances. Parker leaned across her to check their progress beyond the window. From a base of smooth, yellow slopes grew a prominence, its ridges coursing off sharply to the north and the west, hollowing toward the south. In that valley sprawled Livermore, California, which gave him the name of the peak, Mt. Diablo, the Devil’s Mountain.

  They were five minutes from Oakland, which reminded him. He sat back and keyed his Cambiar. He’d tried to call her over Colorado but got a busy circuit announcement, which had never happened before. He tried again now.

  “Mrs. Petzold? It’s Les Parker.”

  “Oh, thank God, Leslie. Are you home?”

  “I’ll be there shortly. What’s going on?”

  “Well, it’s bedlam.” Her voice quavered. “Tory vigilantes killed six people on the first floor this morning. Shot them dead. Security and a few residents drove them off, but the bodies are still lying there, and the police haven’t come. I think they’ve been told to let the vigilantes do whatever they like. Some of our residents have skedaddled. The ones who stayed are copying guns and setting up barricades. They’ve abandoned the first floor because of all the windows, but I think that’s a mistake. Vigilantes could block our exits and lay siege until we surrender. Please help us, Leslie.”

  “Are they still shooting?”

  Across the aisle, Ms. Lavery turned, alert and attentive.

  “No, not now. But you should take the garage entrance anyway, not the front.”

  His mind raced. “Lucille, listen to me.”

  “I don’t want to shoot anyone, Leslie.” There were tears in her voice.

  “Draw your curtains and stay away from the windows. I’ll be there in twenty—” The connection dropped.

  Ms. Lavery shifted in her seat. “What’s happened?”

  He pocketed his phone.

  “The curse of interesting times,” he said.

  FORTY-TWO

  Victorville, California. Wednesday, June 10

  Day Fifty-three

  Philip adjusted his headset and requested clearance for takeoff. A voice as dry as an heirloom bagel granted permission. Philip guided the lumbering MD-11 tri-jet to the center of the runway, steering with his feet, and advanced the throttles. Beneath each wing, a fan-jet the size of a concrete truck spooled to a crescendo, in a roar that used to excite him. As they accelerated down the tarmac, Tanner called out airspeed from the co-pilot’s chair. At 200 knots, Philip drew back his control wheel and lifted off from the sleepy desert strip a hundred miles north of Los Angeles.

  “Gear up,” he ordered.

  Tanner flipped the lever, and they each gave Victorville a parting look. Whenever the airlines could no longer fill enough seats, they parked their idle assets in safe, dry deserts to await better times. Rows of plastic-shrouded Boeings and Airbuses crowded the field below, making Victorville a perfect base of operations for a large commercial aircraft flying irregular missions. But since Coalinga, the intrigue of hiding among these bulging white husks had morphed into restless dreams, pregnant silences, and an unresolved conundrum: What are we going to do?

  “Gear is up,” Tanner confirmed.

  For most of a month, they had departed twice weekly in their chubby MD-11, with its faded Federal Express markings, taking off at dawn and returning a day or two later, to land after dark. No one noticed that while every MD-11 has three engines, this one used only the two beneath its wings and never the one in its tail.

  Fifty-two-year-old Chuck Zarbaugh, their bald perpetual instruct
or, sat in the jump seat behind them.

  “Flaps,” he scolded. Chuck owned this MD-11 and two others he’d converted to wildfire bombers, but only through Philip’s generosity.

  Philip nudged a lever, noted the indicators, and twisted to check the wing. How many more flights does the old girl have in her? They’d been working her pretty hard.

  “Flaps are up,” he confirmed.

  He banked eastward and continued climbing into a wispy sunrise. Both he and Tanner squinted ahead, though they expected no traffic. In minutes, they crossed the southern tip of Nevada and passed over Arizona, headed for an even more sparsely populated region, near New Mexico, where few groundlings would notice thunder booms or bright lights, high in the summer sky.

  At thirty thousand feet, Philip throttled back and leveled off. Behind him, Chuck retrieved a lap panel and passed it forward. Philip slid the panel into clips on his armrests and switched on the screen that displayed instruments and controls for their third engine. Ten minutes later, each man donned thick gloves, which they sealed to their sleeves, then bulky white helmets, which they snugged to the neck rings of their government-surplus space suits. Once everyone was sealed and pressurized, Chuck switched on auxiliary heaters to protect vital systems from the deeper cold to come.

  Philip selected the prestart program on his panel and patted Tanner’s arm. “Go,” he said.

  Tanner drew back the throttles then pushed the nose down into a dive. Chuck and Philip braced while Tanner hauled the nose up sharply. The MD-11 shuddered in self-generated turbulence, struggling toward the vertical. Just as stall warnings squawked and a recorded female voice warned, “Attitude. Drop your nose,” Philip double-stroked the red icon on his screen.

  From the third engine nacelle at the base of the tail, a thin beam of intense, blue-white light winked into existence with a gunshot bang. Its brilliant rapier extended straight aft for three miles. Only at its furthest extent did the beam widen into a corkscrew of billowing steam.

  In the right seat, Tanner worked swiftly to shut off fuel to the fan-jets, then to silence a cacophony of engine alarms. Philip touched a control icon, moved it slightly, and the plane tilted southeast.

  The MD-11 rode its column of plasma and steam, accelerating steadily, less a thrill ride than a steady shove in the back. It did not exceed the speed of sound until they passed 150,000 feet, where the air was too thin to rip off the wings. Because Philip’s matter-energy converter—a modified Powerpod—produced a steady, hypersonic thrust, their ascension into orbit felt slow, downright casual. More important than a smooth ride, this modest push kept stresses on the MD-11’s aging airframe within design limits. Even so, thermal contraction in the vacuum of space made her hull creak and groan like an old wooden schooner.

  Twenty minutes later, Gloria, their makeshift space plane named for Chuck’s wife, pitched forward, and Earth’s brightness came into view over the nose. Their south-easterly trajectory was hurtling them past Mexico, over the Caribbean, away from North American radars. Philip switched his ground-oriented navigation screen to a new display showing position, speed, acceleration, and trajectory. He opened an orbital Nav window to guide them to their first rendezvous. Or rather, to the position a satellite should have occupied in that orbit. Cambiar 21 had disappeared yesterday, having met the same fate as the other Cambiar birds the authorities were destroying.

  Philip stirred a tiny joystick with his gloved hand, manually testing thrusters for pitch, yaw, and roll. Gloria wobbled as the autopilot corrected for the test. On his screen, he called up an estimated time of intersection when Gloria would match the speed and trajectory of the ghost satellite. His display indicated this would occur over the Indian Ocean, on the night-side of Earth, in thirty-eight minutes. Now in microgravity, the men loosened their seat belts and harnesses.

  Chuck unbuckled completely. “Cabin pressure is steady,” he said. “Taking off my beanie.” The rule was, one of them must remain fully suited at all times, in case of sudden depressurization. They had to caulk new leaks almost every flight. Chuck tethered his helmet to his seat.

  “After this is all over,” he said, “I’d sure like to bring the real Gloria out here, just to float around and see this.” He craned to the window over Tanner’s shoulder. “You bring your woman out here, and she’ll fall in love with you all over again.”

  Philip’s woman was down there and captive. He unclipped the lap board and passed it to his right. “Tanner has the aircraft,” he said. Then he removed his helmet.

  Gloria’s cargo hold was stuffed with six replacement satellites, so this would be a long trip to release each of them into separate orbits. Gloria’s flights were not keeping up with the losses.

  As he drifted aft, Philip’s Cambiar vibrated.

  “Tiffany,” he said. “What’s up?” He put her on speaker.

  “Philip, we need you.”

  He grabbed a hand-hold.

  “Mom called. She’s out of jail and she wants to meet with you right away.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “It’s a trap. She’s helping the FBI.”

  Philip glanced at Tanner. “Tiff, are you okay?”

  She groaned. “Philip, what are we going to do?”

  “About your mom?”

  “No, dammit, about Coalinga, the jihad against Powerpods.”

  “You’re upset,” he said.

  “Because nobody is stopping them. We need you to lead us. To make people understand.”

  “As long as enough Makers remain free, we can prevail.”

  “Philip, they’re killing us! We are dying for you. Don’t you get it? The country has turned against us. Vigilantes are going door-to-door, destroying Pods and Makers. People are ripping out their Pods, not converting them. Gangs and looters are running amok, and Congress is calling for martial law. If you don’t do something real soon, it’s going to be the end of everything. If you don’t help us, I hope they hang you, because you’ll deserve it.”

  Whoa. Fifty hornets in the face.

  “Where are you?” she pleaded.

  “I’m keeping Cambiars and the internet free and available so people can help each other. So they can see me on the video clips we’ve been posting.”

  “Words won’t stop bullets,” she said. “We need soldiers.”

  Philip shook his head. “Listen, Tiff. They can’t win. Makers will subvert them too. Makers will subvert everyone. We are all Freemakers now. Some of us just don’t know it yet.”

  “Have faith that heaven will provide?” She leaned on the sarcasm.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t join the insanity. Don’t fight. Don’t kill. Let the Tories think they’re winning. Keep a Maker or two in a safe place. Share them with your friends. Do you understand? Don’t wait for me. Don’t wait for heaven. The universe does not care. Only we care. Be your own messiah.”

  He cringed. She didn’t deserve that.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought they’d come after me, arrest a few people. I didn’t expect them to go berserk.”

  “You’re just like Mom,” she said. “Fussing over details while the Tories steamroll us.” A moment dangled between them. “When will I see you?”

  Philip held the Cambiar before his face, activated its camera, and winked. From its speaker came the fizz of a broken connection. Because the satellite which should be forwarding its signal was gone.

  Have I lost Tiffany as well? After Sao Paulo, Art Buddha reported dozens of new enclaves had formed, plus thousands of individual households had joined the Three Cone Club. Until, that is, Art’s site was hacked, and Coalinga blew out all the candles. For the first time, their Ryles numbers were declining. What could anyone do against a tsunami of fear? Stop pretending Cambiars are sufficient to keep Makers and their owners free? Make a stand someplace, beat my chest and dare the haters?

  “Back to work,” he said. He tucked the phone away and reached for his helmet. “I’ll do the first launch.”

  Tanner floated n
ear and made eye contact. Because he had built the cargo handlers and could fix any problems, he had always released the first birds.

  “You really believe what you told her?”

  “We need to do this,” Philip said. “I need to do this.” He put on his helmet and sealed it. “Whether she believes me or not.”

  Tanner stuffed his apprehensions into his voice. “Be careful out there,” he said.

  Philip entered the airlock and checked his suit. He shut the door and tested his radio.

  “Ready,” he said, and he cycled the chamber. By handholds, he drew himself to the dim bulk of the first satellite, then by straps and frames he reached the cargo door and its latching lever. He loved this stuff, floating around, doing astronaut things.

  He tethered himself to a pad eye and recited each step as he performed it: open the cargo bay door (Hal); extend the release rails; remove four restraining pins; then launch the bird by shoving its two-thousand pounds along the rails until it floated free. In the minute it took to drift clear of Gloria’s left wingtip, its majestic progression no longer inspired him. It was just slow.

  “While you’re at it,” Tanner said, “how about sweeping the porch?”

  Philip braced in the open door, contemplating their new Cambiar 21. Its dark limbs unfolded to receive a vast solitude. Twenty-one was a replacement bird, not a supplement or a counter-punch. But six satellites, twenty satellites, a thousand wouldn’t save the advent if people didn’t share more Makers. Tiffany was right. He was hiding in his work again, hoping the world would come to its senses.

  His father once said that any messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment. So what could a fake messiah expect ? Top billing for a few media cycles? One media cycle?

  A brilliant light shot across Gloria, reflecting off Twenty-one and streaking into the distance.

  “The hell was that?” he said. “An attention-getter?”