Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Ah, you’ve read it! I gather that phrase is derived from lapis ex coelis or lapis de coelis, both of which mean ‘the stone from the heavens.’”

  “Da. Or might be contraction of lapis lapsus ex illis stellis, ‘the stone which came down from the stars.’”

  Avram gave a weak laugh.

  “No more. I know truths are hidden in myths and legends, but keep heading down that path and you end up looking for occult powers in Wagnerian operas. That way lies madness.”

  The energy-sapping heat and the potentially deadly tedium of traveling through desert terrain at last caused them both to lapse into silence. As their vehicle climbed updune, Avram saw over the Humvee’s hood that the sandstorm had died away, enough that he could begin to see the stars. Soon, however, they were heading downdune again.

  Before long he had fallen into a jouncing, sweaty sleep.

  What jolted him awake at last was the end of their jolting ride. The stop in their motion put his mind back in motion, though only slowly.

  “Ah, you wake. Good. Follow, please.”

  Still at least half asleep, Avram walked out into an otherworldly landscape of shelters that looked like a cross between a yurt and a dome—“yomes,” Yuri called them—and craters that had been filling with sand for a century and a half, beneath stars now fading fast with the coming of dawn.

  Following Yuri, he saw ahead of them in the clear early light a group of people dressed in white, working near the edge of the largest crater. As they got closer, he recognized their attire as environment suits—each rather like a cross between hazmat cleanup garb and a bargain-basement spacesuit—for working outdoors in the brutal climate.

  He gazed across the crater they were working beside. It looked to be nearly completely filled with sand, yet still something over a hundred meters wide, judging by the rim. Given that an impact in sand generates a crater ten to twelve times the size of the impact object, he estimated that the impactor was probably close to ten meters across.

  They were still short of the group in hazard white when he bent down to examine the stony edge of crater rim standing above the sand. From the uniform straticulations, he realized that the pale stony stuff must be impactite—sand transformed instantaneously into rock by the pressure of a meteoritic-impact shock wave. He also thought that the scattered stones along the crater rim—glassy black and shiny white—were probably tektites.

  When he stood up, he saw that the sun had breached the horizon and Yuri was well ahead of him. He hastened to catch up.

  By the time he reached the group, they had their headgear and flex-gauntlets off. A tall, square-jawed, sun-reddened man with piercing blue eyes beneath graying blond hair stepped forward. Beside him stood a dark-complected, dark-eyed woman with shoulder-length black hair.

  “Welcome to Wabar, Doctor Zaragosa,” said the man, thrusting out his hand for Avram to shake. “I hope Yuri ‘Mister Toad’ Semenov didn’t give you too wild a ride to our digs.”

  Yuri gave Avram a smiling, squint-eyed look.

  “No, not at all. We either slept or talked—me doing the former, and both of us the latter.”

  “Really? I’ll bet Yuri could drive some of it sleeping. He probably did! I’m Victor Fremdkunst, the money behind this madness. Just visiting, actually. This is Professor Vida Nasr, your co-director.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Avram said. “I’ve read your articles on Libyan desert glass, from the Sand Sea strewnfield in western Egypt. Good work.”

  When Vida Nasr flashed a smile at him, he realized just how beautiful a woman she actually was. Just as quickly he reminded himself of his daughter’s death, and of his own mission.

  From her name and career path, he doubted this Nasr woman was a devout Muslim—secular Arab or Persian, more likely. Nonetheless, she, too, have a hidden agenda—she might be putting up as thorough a facade as he was himself. Best to be careful of her.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” she said. “Thank you. I know your own fine work at Campo del Cielo.”

  Fremdkunst laughed.

  “Now that you two have finished with the official academic strutting and preening, grab yourself a cool suit, a personal locator beacon, and a magnetometer, Avram, and see if you can’t help us find some meteorite spall.”

  As he walked away to find his gear, Avram wondered at Fremdkunst’s suggestion. If he knew about Avram’s implant, he would have realized that a personal locator beacon was rather redundant. Was Victor trying to hide what he knew about him? Or were there aspects of Avram’s mission that exceeded even Victor’s need to know?

  INTERLUDE: A LATE-NIGHT HIKE IN DESOLATION

  Under the moonless, starlit December night, Paul Larkin and the four Mawari children tramped away from Grass Lake in their snowshoes. This was supposed to be a short little nothing of a walk, he thought.

  Just a little snowcamping in the pristine white stuff from a recent storm. That was not how it was turning out, though.

  He watched the kids moving ahead of him in the trail they had broken through the snow the previous afternoon. They were not just “the four Mawari children” anymore, he reminded himself. The kids had picked up English and other languages with astonishing speed. Not bad, coming from a people whose language apparently had no verb tense other than the present. They had already given themselves names extracted from what they’d learned on the Internet, too.

  Paul was having less and less trouble distinguishing among them with each day that passed. He knew the youngest girl called herself “Ka-dalun” now, while “Aubrey Menehune” was the oldest, and the middle girl called herself “Ebu Gogo.” The lone boy, more sullen and hard to reach than the others, called himself “Alii De Danaan.”

  Each had taken a name associated with disappeared fairy folk or little people from around the world.

  Strange names, for strange kids. Too grown up and focused, and too young and clumsy, all at the same time. It was to get them away from the Web and the computers, from their endless soap bubble–blowing and marbles-playing, too, that he’d taken them walking in the woods—on day hikes down to Emerald Bay and along the Tahoe shore, as well as overnighters on the Rim Trail and up to the Echo Lakes.

  Trekking into the southeastern edge of Desolation Wilderness for snowcamping had taken them just a couple miles inland from the south edge of Fallen Leaf Lake, with its lodge and lakefront cabins.

  It should have been no problem.

  No problem as they tramped that afternoon through the sparkling powdery snow, snow-limned pines, and crisp blue air. No problem as they set up a pair of tents—Paul and Alii in one, the girls in another—in an open spot under ponderosa and lodgepole pines west of Grass Lake. No problem as they fixed and ate dinner, before turning in for the night.

  No problem, until the children’s sense of disquiet and unease in the middle of the night led them to rouse him—and then, moments later, the sound of a branch snapping and displaced snow softly falling from trees.

  As they moved through and over the snow, Paul wondered if their uneasiness had been some kind of sixth sense, something preternatural, or just kids afraid of the dark. The children had learned languages and tech so fast it was almost like four minds concentrating together on each problem or obstacle. Was this now something even more than that? Or was their hyperalertness just an overreaction bred of fear and suspicion?

  He supposed such alertness wasn’t too surprising in some ways, given that they’d seen their entire tribe killed off, and then been transported into a world that was (technologically at least) thousands of years into their future. A world populated by people who probably looked a great deal like the people who had massacred everyone they had ever known.

  That would be enough to make anybody grow up fast and strange. Not to mention probably making them feel more than a little conflicted about their destroyer/benefactors.

  They traveled on, under innumerable stars sparkling and cold as the snow about them, but far more distant and tranquil. Paul be
gan to think that the children’s uneasiness and the night sounds they’d all heard might be nothing after all. He felt sheepish that such late-night fears had led them to break camp at two in the morning and start back toward Fallen Leaf. He felt more than a little foolish, too, for having called in to rouse his security team with their concerns, and urging the team to proceed to his GPS coordinates.

  A bright shooting star fell overhead, surprisingly slowly.

  “Look!” Ka-dalun whispered, pointing—for Paul’s benefit. The children all seemed to have seen it at the same instant.

  “Geminid meteor showers are now,” Alii said bluntly.

  Paul nodded with enthusiasm, but said nothing. As a child he’d been fascinated by the sheer numbers of falling stars in meteor showers, the myriad quick sparks struck from the night sky. As he grew older, however, he’d looked for something slower, rarer, and more graceful: the long bright spear tipped with its diamond lotus of fire, blooming, flying, burning, dying.

  Like this one.

  Alii had just started to tell them that the Geminids were not, like most meteor showers, the debris trails of active comets but were instead the debris trail of 3200 Phaeton, which might be either a rocky asteroid or a very ancient extinct comet—when, in the starlight, little comet-tails began sprouting from the snow, moving closer to them.

  Paul only had a moment to realize those were bullets impacting in the snowfield. He shouted “Run! Head for the rocks and trees!” before he was struck high on the right shoulder and spun around by the impact.

  A second impact, this one a blow to his left leg, knocked him and his snowshoes out of the snow and laid him down hard in a heap, poles all akimbo and snowshoes toes-up to the sky.

  As he lay there, more stars fell overhead. He told himself to try to stay calm, to stay focused, to think about the children, but an all-too-comforting lassitude began to spread over him. Another meteor speared by overhead, a lit fuse dropping from the tall tapestry of the steadier stars. Fireworks, he thought dreamily. He waited for the boom, the starshell flash, the “Ahhh!” of the crowd. They never came.

  Instead, sounds of something whizzing rapidly over his head caught his attention. His last thoughts, before he passed out, were of bottle-rockets, and whistling shells, and Ka-dalun and Alii and Aubrey and Ebu chorusing in his head “No! Don’t let it happen again—”

  At the chaotic borders of consciousness, Paul saw his grandmother shaking her finger and saying in his sister’s voice, “It was people what turned Paradise into Hell!”

  As he came more fully awake, however, the voice and words resolved themselves into the beeping of biomedical monitors and hissing of life-support equipment. He was surrounded by a rubber jungle of hospital bed equipment. He found himself catheterized and tanked on oxygen and God only knew what all else.

  With a groan he removed the oxygen line clipped to the septum of his nose. A short blond woman dressed in nurse’s scrubs entered the room, followed by a tall, thickset man dressed in uniform, removing his hat as he came in. It took Paul a minute to place him. Jarrod Takimoto, the chief of his security team.

  “Glad to see you’ve rejoined us, Mister Larkin,” Takimoto said, as the nurse checked his vital signs.

  “Jarrod,” he said. It was difficult to talk over the dry scratchiness of his throat. “Where am I?”

  “Private clinic in Truckee. Caters mostly to those who’ve broken themselves skiing. We have the entire wing.”

  “Sounds expensive. The kids?”

  “They’re fine. Sleeping in shifts, waiting for you. They’re in the lounge down the hall.”

  “That’s a relief. How long have I been out?”

  “Including surgery? About a day and a half. You’d lost a fair amount of blood by the time we got to you.

  One of the bullets was about this close to your femoral artery.” Takimoto made a gap with thumb and forefinger that looked uncomfortably less than an inch wide.

  The nurse finished up and left the room.

  “Who came after us?” Paul asked quietly.

  “Don’t know for sure yet. They came in sterile—no ID. Five of them. Night vision, full body armor, silencers. We would have had a heck of a time stopping them. Luckily, someone else stopped them for us.”

  “Who?”

  “I have no idea. But somebody killed all of the attackers.”

  “How? I thought you said they were in body armor.”

  “They were, but it didn’t help them much. Blunt trauma took them out. The bulletproof gear wasn’t pierced, but the forces of impact cratered everything down to four inches below the armor. Impact was right above the heart in most cases, unfortunately for them. Clean kills. Like somebody fired a heavy caliber slug into each of their chests.”

  “‘Like’?”

  “Yeah, like,” Takimoto said, staring at the hat in his hands, fiddling with its brim. “I had my people scour the area yesterday, but they found nothing worthwhile. No spent rounds, no shells, no slugs. No footprints, even. Found a few oddly shaped rocks, but you’d better ask a geologist about those. Nothing germane to the investigation.”

  Paul remembered the high, whizzing sound he’d heard, but tried to put it out of his mind.

  “Somebody must have heard something?”

  Takimoto shook his head.

  “The assailants had silencers, like I said. Whoever helped you out must have had the same. If those kids know, they’re not talking. Nobody heard anything. That’s made it easier to keep all this out of the public eye, at least.”

  “What’s the cover story?”

  “If anybody asks, you’ve been hospitalized due to a skiing-related accident. Bad fall—broken leg and dislocated shoulder. So far nobody’s asked.”

  “The staff here?”

  “They’re being paid enough to refer all questions to us, and to say nothing beyond that.”

  “Good.”

  “Mister Larkin? I’ve been waiting for word from you on whether I should inform the kids’, er, guardians—Doctor Miskulin and Doctor Yamada?—about what happened.”

  Paul Larkin shook his head, vehemently and negatively enough to make stars flicker in his vision.

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind. They’re off to Italy. Probably there by now. Our cover story is good enough for Aunt Susan and Uncle Michael, if they ask, when they return. They won’t have much time for it. Michael, at least, is going to some conference in Dubai, I think it is. Now, if you will, call the kids in so I can see them.”

  Takimoto left. Paul felt a pang at having to hide the truth from Michael and Susan this way. Cowardly and sneaky, but he had no choice. Who knew how they might respond, especially Susan, to news of his failure to take adequate security precautions for himself and the children? They might want to take the kids away, and he didn’t want that at all.

  Takimoto stepped back into the room and the children surged forward around him, each coming forward to give Paul a quick strong hug before stepping back from the bed.

  Tears welled up in his eyes. These children were the last remnant of the people his sister Jacinta had so loved. The people she would have given anything to help. The people she had died for, because Paul had refused to believe in their existence all those years ago. Now he wanted fiercely to hold on to them, and never let them go.

  THREE

  ROCKS AND THE CHURCH

  “Yo, Brother Doctor Guy!” Michael Miskulin called across the grounds of Castel Gandolfo. Aside from its hilltop position twenty-two miles southeast of Rome, the Castel did not look very fortified. Tall columnar Italian cypress trees were the only obvious sentinels standing beside the high square-cut hedges—the fortress’s sole ramparts. Maybe that was part of the problem, given what had happened.

  “Hello, Michael,” said the bearded and bespectacled man coming toward them. He wore the black attire and white clerical collar of a Jesuit brother and looked to be in his early sixties. “I trust your flight was a good one?”

  “Not bad, if you l
ike hurtling through the sky in a pressurized sardine can with wobbly wings. At least my jet lag is better today.”

  “And this is Dr. Yamada?”

  As Susan shook the Jesuit’s hand, Michael introduced him as Guy LeConte, director of the Specola Vaticana, the Vatican Observatory.

  “When I first met Brother Astronomer,” Michael said, “he was only the curator of the Vatican State Meteorite Collection, in the Observatory Museum here.”

  “And you were only a rather pesky medical student, crashing an astrobiology conference,” the Jesuit said with a broad wink. They walked together along one of the stone paths that radiated across the lawn like a sundial’s hour-angle lines.

  “I wasn’t crashing it. I had submitted a paper for presentation. On survivability parameters for microbes in meteorite pores. It was my first conference presentation.”

  “And of course he presented the paper like an old pro,” Brother Guy said to Susan. “Born to take the center stage. Ah, Michael, Michael. Indiana Miskulin and the Raiders of the Lost Aubrites. Always the high radar cross section—makes you easy to shoot down, my friend.”

  “You haven’t exactly stayed out of the limelight yourself.”

  “No, that’s true. But if you’d just followed a more traditional path in either medicine or impact geology, who knows where you’d be now?”

  “Overworked as an internist or stuck among dusty rocks in a dustier academic department. You know me, Brother, I’m not good at office politics. That’s why I never went to work for NASA.”

  The director of the Vatican Observatory gestured toward the telescope domes atop Castel Gandolfo’s roofs.

  “You were raised Catholic, as I recall. Too bad you never took Holy Orders. If you had, you could be funded by the Holy See, as we are here. No politics. Our only imperative is to do good science.”

  “I’ve never been good at following orders, holy or otherwise,” Michael said, smiling and waving his hands in mock dismissal. “I actually thought I was called to the priesthood when I was in the third grade, but in the fourth grade”—Michael shot Susan a sidelong glance—“I began to realize what the whole celibacy thing might really mean.”