Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “I don’t deny that. Your survival is an almost miraculous example of self-healing.”

  “And self-healing is a capability that supersoldiers could certainly use, wouldn’t you say, General?”

  Retticker looked away.

  “Yes. Like flatworms, I suppose.”

  “What do you mean? You wanted to cut me in half to see if I’d grow a new head? Or a new body?”

  “I ‘wanted’ nothing of the sort. Just an old joke among those of us in the warfighter enhancement business—that such regeneration would be a neat trait to splice into the soldier genome. But no one’s ever managed to make a higher organism self-heal or instantly regenerate that way, not even by manipulating injected stem cells. A fatally wounded soldier—or chief scientist—is not a cut flatworm or a lizard that’s lost its tail. Why would I want to risk killing you, when past experience would predict so little chance of a positive outcome to such a ‘test’?”

  He could see Pittman pondering his question. Good. She seemed to be getting past her anger, at least a bit.

  “Darla, I realize you must find it hard to be dispassionate and coolly logical about this when you nearly lost your life. Still, the more clearly you can think about what happened, the more likely we are to get to the bottom of this.”

  Darla flashed him a cynical smile.

  “Like your intelligence types have gotten to the bottom of Fox getting blown away by Hijazi?”

  Retticker gazed down at the pattern in the blanket on Pittman’s hospital bed.

  “I’m sure that will be found out, too, with time.”

  “Oh? Personally, I don’t want to have to wait around until the records are unsealed, since by that time all the principal actors will already be dead. I want some questions answered first.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I want to hear you admit that tepui stone is from the same place Miskulin and Yamada found all those people massacred.”

  “Yes, that’s where it’s from,” Retticker said. He decided not to mention the young survivors he’d learned of. “Things weren’t supposed to turn out the way they did. They put up more resistance than expected.”

  “And your supersoldiers were involved?”

  “You know I can neither confirm nor deny that. I’d guess you already have the answer you want, though.”

  “Those people who penetrated our lab and shot me…I’d be willing to bet they were supertroopers, too.”

  “Maybe so, Darla. But they were not mine. And they didn’t do it under orders from me.”

  “If not yours then whose? If you didn’t betray me, then who did?”

  Retticker sat back in his chair.

  “I suspect that whoever betrayed you also betrayed me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Because you were right: I should have been the only one to know of the current status of your work.

  The intruders in your lab apparently knew what they were looking for. My guess is that our communication channels have been compromised. I don’t think they expected to find you in the lab at such a late hour, however.”

  “Collateral damage to their raid?” Pittman asked, eyeing him narrowly. “Or a victim of friendly fire?”

  “The former, I think. Whoever ordered this is no friend to either of us.”

  “Any candidates?”

  “Too many,” he replied, pondering it. He lapsed into silence, as did Darla.

  Fremdkunst? he wondered. No, he didn’t have this kind of reach.

  Brescoll? He did have the long arm of Central Security Services. NSA’s military wing was essentially a small covert army, navy, and air force—and at Brescoll’s disposal.

  If this had been NSA work, though, Retticker was sure he would have heard something about it. He had many connections in Crypto City—sources from whom, in fact, he’d heard the rumor that Brescoll had himself been MIA for weeks now, inside the MAXX in the mountains of central California.

  Brescoll could have set such a raid in motion before his disappearance. Or maybe his disappearance was more apparent than real. The way the raiders had come stumbling upon Pittman and shooting things up, though—CSS even at its worst would have been more subtle and shown more due diligence than that.

  No, probably not Brescoll.

  Vang, maybe? He was after some superenhancer of his own out of all this—remnant Tetragrammaton or Instrumentality scheming, Retticker was sure. Vang had the money and connections to suborn personnel, compromise systems, and send in mercenaries, too, but he was shrewd. He wasn’t the type to resort to force-scenarios until all other options had been exhausted.

  His money and influence had, for instance, easily overcome the medical confidentiality protections that were supposed to govern the doctors and technicians who had seen Paul Larkin’s four young houseguests. Those techs and docs had all claimed they’d passed on privileged information about the children only out of concern for the poor, fungal-infected kids, never out of a concern for money. Of course.

  Yet even with that information in hand, Vang and his people had not gone off cowboying on their own.

  They had instead passed the word along to Retticker, for him to take action on it or no. So probably it wasn’t Vang behind the lab raid, either.

  That left George Otis. With all the public-private and defense intelligence cooperation surrounding the supersoldier program, his people had at least as many opportunities to suborn personnel and compromise systems as Vang ever had. Probably more.

  Given that Military Executive Resource Corporation was paying a lot of bills for warfighter enhancement research—and that even more money was flowing from MERC’s corporate parent, Otis Diversified Industries—the strong possibility of compromised communication channels might actually be the least of Retticker’s worries. The shoot-‘em-up raid at Rocky Mountain felt very much like something the MERC cowboys might have been in charge of.

  Otis and his people had opportunities, all right, but what about motives? When he was in politics, Otis had been noted for his ruthless, take-no-prisoners style.

  Then again, the same thing could be said about the way the raid on the tepui had turned out, under his own watch.

  Retticker took no particular pleasure in what had happened there. It was duty, and it had been discharged. Yet he remembered Otis’s almost fanatic joy at the mess swirling about Temple Mount.

  And the day they were all aboard Fremdkunst’s boat, hadn’t Otis and Fremdkunst both taken a call from somebody named Fox? How deeply might Otis and Fremdkunst have been involved with Avigdor Fox’s final days, or even his assassination by Hijazi?

  Otis was a hard-core Christian Zionist, true, but was he so hell-bent on bringing the Rapture that he would betray even his allies in the name of fulfilling some obscure end-time prophecy?

  Retticker suddenly saw Darla Pittman and the quizzical look she was giving him. He shook his head.

  “Sorry. I was just going through the list of suspects in my head.”

  “And?”

  “Plenty of leads,” he said, standing, “but no smoking gun yet. I’ll keep at it, and I’ll be back in touch. I promise. Anything else I can do to help?”

  “Get me released so I can get back to work. I’m in perfectly good health, now.”

  “For someone shot six times, I suppose you are. The doctors are intrigued enough by your case to want to keep you here longer than you might need to be, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  He shook her hand, much more warmly than he had in the past, genuinely relieved she was still alive and apparently healthy. Her own handshake, however, was more reserved than he’d expected, as if some unspoken and unspecified connection between the two of them had weakened.

  “I’m off to talk to the directors at Rocky Mountain,” he said. “Any messages?”

  “Tell them I’m ready for work, and I expect the cabinet lab to be ready, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Retticker said, giving Pittman a mock salute that managed to make even the frustrat
ed scientist smile.

  A knock sounded on the partially open door. Retticker turned to see a man and woman in the doorway as the door swung wide, both of whom looked to be in their thirties. The man was carrying flowers, and the woman a card.

  “Michael! Susan! What a nice surprise!” Darla said. “General Retticker, this is Michael Miskulin and Susan Yamada. They’re consulting on the project.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Joe Retticker said, feeling awkward but glossing over everything with his friendliest, folksiest, don’t-mind-me smile.

  “I hope we aren’t interrupting…?” the woman said.

  “Not at all. I was just bidding farewell to Darla, here.”

  Retticker left the room and headed down the hallway of the small local hospital. Glad to have slipped out as smoothly as he had, he exhaled slowly and pondered his options. So was Darla chumming up with Miskulin and Yamada, now? Or was she just milking them for information? More variables to put into the equations.

  Brescoll’s apparent disappearance had allowed Retticker to learn, through his connections at NSA, that one of his own supersoldiers had leaked information to that agency. That would have to be dealt with…and soon. Best to strike before the director showed up again, or his replacement got a firm grip on the reins.

  Best to keep Vang satisfied and everyone else in the dark, as well. Get those tepui kids at Larkin’s place under better observation and control. Abduct them to a safe house, if necessary. Getting the rest of their holy stone helicoptered off Caracamuni tepui might be a good idea, too.

  If Brescoll reappeared then, playing Vang against him would be simple enough. Playing them both against Otis might be more of a challenge, if it came to that. How the tepui stone—and now these survivors, too?—might fit in with Otis’s doings in the Middle East, Retticker couldn’t yet say. He rather hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

  Fat chance of that. There was a lot more at stake, now, than even self-healing for supersoldiers, valuable as that might yet prove to be.

  OUT FROM UNDER THE UNBREAKABLE BUBBLE

  Jim Brescoll stepped back into a world bristling with weapons pointed at him, or at least toward him. The soldiers of Central Security Services stood poised and at the ready with a quite impressive array of armaments. He was so much reminded of a scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still he almost laughed.

  It took him a moment to recognize that the man approaching him was Dan Amaral, one arm and shoulder in a sling.

  “Jim! Thank God you’re all right! You are, aren’t you? All right, I mean?”

  Jim nodded slowly.

  “We’ve all been worried,” Amaral continued. “Especially your wife and kids. Despite my reassurances.

  Despite the messages from Benson and LeMoyne and Markham. What have you been doing in there all these weeks?”

  Funny, he felt as if no time at all had passed, but also that years had passed, too. He realized slowly that something was different. Ah, the snow was gone. As he turned toward where Dan was pointing, he couldn’t really remember much of anything, until he saw the MAXX in its bubble of force behind him.

  Bubble of force…

  The memories came back so powerfully he tottered on his feet, then collapsed to the ground.

  Inside the cavern, inside the powerhouse mountain. In the auditorium-size wonderland of the latest high tech, hidden beside the main generator room with its great enclosed sideways waterwheel of a turbine, forever turning. Computer monitors and projection screens hanging in front of the blasted and shotcreted walls. Bent-air holographic projection tables. Real-time holographic remotes, haptics on full-sensorium feedback virtuality units.

  Don Markham, Karuna Benson, and Cherise LeMoyne—quite something other, now. They didn’t so much “communicate” with him as share their dreamtime, the kaleidoscope of microcosmic universes, the panoply of parallel worldlines with which they interacted. Were they themselves glowing and winged and many-limbed? Or was that just some distortion of time in their kaleidoscopic realm?

  The three did not so much “show” him things as drop him into events. He got the sense they knew exactly which events he wanted to see, but they were going to make him experience others of their own choosing, first.

  The damaged mirrorball starship made of wild glowing angels, luminous butterfly octopi, all breaking up, slow-crashing stones through the solar system. Sky-scattered pieces orbiting, returning again and again, burning through the sky, plummeting to earth. Broken stones, rare and precious, scattered through time in cave and mountain, shattered forest and ocean floor, icefield and desert plain.

  Stones driving ancient artists to paint their worlds inside caves. Stones reverenced in the desert, raised by hands onto platforms and hidden in tents. Carried on the shoulders of nomads, the shatter cones and oriented skystones of the goddess’s breast, the god’s right hand, the holy object generating the holy place generating the holy city.

  Mushroom-worshipping, hunting-gathering, insect-eating, dark-haired and bright-eyed people of the tepui, dressed in purple-and-black loincloths or robes of the same intricate knot-weave, the same snaking double-helical pattern.

  Caracamuni tepui, but not the same. A Caracamuni where Paul Larkin’s sister Jacinta completed her mission. Where she did not commit suicide. Where the ghost people were not massacred.

  The forests far below the tepui tossing like waves in a storm. A vast song of human voices filling the air, and a great ring of dust forming halfway up Caracamuni’s height, the tepui itself growing taller—not growing but separating, top half from bottom half at the ring of thinning dust, until a space of clear sky stood between the sundered halves of the ancient mountain. Rising on song like a mushroom in the night, drifting away like a ship slipping from harbor toward open sea, open sky, the flat-topped mountain ascending in a bubble of force, a pale fire like inverted alpenglow beginning to shine from the sphered mountain itself, increasing in intensity until in a brilliant burst of white light the mountain disappears, silently and completely as a soap bubble bursting in a summer sky.

  Jim realized, in some distant way, that he was being loaded on a gurney and trundled toward an ambulance. He heard nothing of the voices around him, however—saw only their silently shouting mouths. His ears were still filled with the memory of a tremendous blast like thunder sweeping over the world, as the tepui departed from a universe not his own.

  Disappeared. From a universe where the Mawari genocide never happened.

  The paramedics spun the gurney and he saw once again the bubble of force in his world, around this powerhouse mountain that had never taken flight, yet was also a world removed from his own. The medtechs bounced him into the womb of the ambulance, birth in reverse.

  That other universe shown him by his contacts within the mountain held darknesses of its own. In that far other world, into the world the flying mountain left behind, Paul Larkin had unknowingly carried a spore print back with him, from which was grown an obscure South American fungus, Cordyceps jacintae, from which the covert operators of that world’s Tetragrammaton cabal had in turn extracted KL 235, a supertryptamine intentionally misnamed ketamine lysergate or “gate.”

  In that universe, they had payrolled ob-gyns to pump their patients’ wombs with KL during the embryonic development of their unborn children. To encourage the development of paranormal talents useful to Medusa Blue, the psi-power enhancement project within Tetragrammaton. To facilitate computer-aided apotheosis, the translation of human consciousness into a machine matrix, the seamless mind-machine link Tetra had sought for decades.

  Instead, in that universe they succeeded only in turning out myriad Medusa Blue babies, children who possessed only “latent talent” at best, or were possessed by lifelong madness ending in suicide, at worst.

  As the siren began to sound and the ambulance to move, Jim realized he had returned enough to this world to hear its sounds once more. He realized, too, that crazy things not so very different had happened in
his own universe.

  Like doping up your own soldiers on BZ without their knowledge or consent. Like dropping LSD on your own unsuspecting citizenry. Like nuking your own citizens. Like looking for latent talent by other means.

  Latent talent…

  The question wasn’t what had been done to unknowing and unconsenting employees and citizens—by governments in the name of international insecurity, and corporations in the name of bottom-line profits—but what wouldn’t be done by such organizations in the name of such things. In his own worldline, too, there seemed no bottom to how low corporations would go to protect the bottom line, no government atrocity indefensible in the name of national defense.

  Of all the things the three inside the mountain had shown him, the strangest was the way those alternate universes seemed to parallel the possible pasts and converge upon the possible futures of his own world.

  This world, in which Jacinta Larkin had been prevented from helping the tepuians sing their mountain to the stars. In which the tepuians themselves had been massacred, despite their ability to travel in “mindtime.”

  This universe, where the spore print that Paul Larkin indeed possessed, and the mushrooms grown from it, had at least not had KL 235 extracted from them—at least not yet. Although there had been no KL here, there had been other covert projects for manipulating what went on inside the womb, also in the hope of activating “latent” paranormal talents in the kids.

  Those projects had involved long-term twin studies, and the inducing of dissociative identity disorders.

  He had learned of them from Janis Rollwagen herself, in this world, in which so many forces also conspired toward that next step of apocalypse, or transcendence, or apocalyptic transcendence. The world in which, if those forces could not bring humanity to the stars, then they would somehow have to bring the stars to humanity.

  The world in which Jaron Kwok—even more ethereal than Markham and Benson and Le Moyne, and more powerful—had decided to stay behind, he now knew, as Ben Cho’s vicegerent, his “governor of the change.” The world in which those four had given Jim—via the mindtime he’d experienced inside the mountain—what he had been after all along, without really knowing it. The most likely outcomes, the most plausible futures, on his own particular worldline amid the great ensemble of branching universes.