Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  His eyes still adjusting to the light, he stepped into a space of dark wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, like the cabin of a spacious yacht.

  “Joe Retticker, I presume?” asked a small Asian man in a very neat suit, coming forward to shake his hand. The man looked to be in his seventies, perhaps, but very spry.

  “Doctor Vang! Nice airship you’ve got here.”

  “Thank you,” the dapper old man said, steering him toward an elliptically shaped wet bar in the center of the room. “I’m quite proud of it. The only one of its kind with these particular amenities.”

  “Wonderfully stealthy,” said a voice, “but not stealthy enough to avoid coming up on Congress’s radar. I tried to save it for you, Doc, but…”

  “Cuts to the black budget killed it before it could go into production,” Vang said. “I exercised the option of purchasing the two extant prototypes. You know George Otis, I presume?”

  Retticker nodded, shaking hands with Otis and Vang before taking a seat near them, facing the wet bar.

  The mirror-backed pedestal supporting the bar encased a saltwater aquarium. Amid a living coral reef, dotted with anemones and sea fans, he saw crabs and shrimp moving. Slow-jawed eels poked their heads from hollows in the rock matrix, while fish of piercing blues and yellows and greens and reds darted about—all going on about their lives, oblivious to the fact that their “ocean” was floating in the sky.

  “This craft was based on the same technologies as those developed for stratellites,” Vang said, when they were all seated. Retticker nodded. He was familiar with stratospheric satellite airships, hovering antennas for wireless communications.

  “We went quite a bit beyond those in developing the military version, though. For aerodynamic flight and aerostatic float, we improved many of the features of the legendary deltoid Aereon. Inside this craft, I can still imagine a world where solar-powered airships stand at duty stations in the stratosphere, patiently waiting for the call to come in low and slow and linger over targets of interest.”

  “In ways true satellites, orbiting fast and high, never could,” Retticker said, nodding.

  Above the bar, surveillance monitors cycled slowly through views fore and aft, port and starboard, dorsal and ventral.

  “Maybe in the same parallel universe where Howard Hughes built dozens of Hercules airlifters,” Otis said with a wry smile, “and not just one Spruce Goose! Not in our world, I’m afraid, Doc. That bird has flown.”

  Vang smiled politely, even indulgently. They made polite small talk for a few moments more, but eventually could no longer avoid the real reason for the meeting.

  “Doctor Vang, I’m concerned that we’ve been working at cross-purposes,” Retticker began. “Darla Pittman accused me of the assault on her lab. I was able to deflect her suspicions, but the damage was done. I’ve lost one of my most valuable researchers. It’s miracle enough that she survived the attack, but now she seems also to have vanished. We’re having a hell of a time finding her.”

  “We have been working at cross-purposes, General,” Otis acknowledged. “It was my people who launched that assault, but it was you who necessitated it. I have reason to believe you have not been entirely forthcoming with the results of the good doctor’s experiments.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I was under any obligation to share that information, given that it was ‘my people,’ as you say, who obtained that stuff in the first place,” Retticker said, trying to keep his voice from betraying the anger he felt. “And your impatience—was it worth almost killing the chief investigator for that?”

  “An unexpected complication,” Otis said with a shrug.

  “And what about my troops that yours wounded and killed, at Larkin’s Lake Tahoe compound? And Larkin himself dead, too?”

  “Not my intent. Larkin offed himself before my people could reach him. I thought what turned out to be your troops were sent by James Brescoll at NSA. We were on alert for that possibility—especially after Brescoll’s CSS people got to the rest of that tepui rock before we could.”

  “That was an oversight indeed,” Vang said, quietly, yet with all the weight breaking his silence gave to the few words he did speak. “Even worse than losing Larkin.”

  “Now Jeremy Michelson’s disappeared from Fort Mead,” Retticker said, “along with much of his telemorphy gear—”

  “Of his own free will,” Otis countered. “Doctor Michelson is with us, and safe. As those children also need to be. They need to be gotten out of the country, for safekeeping, before your friend Brescoll or one of his comrades gets hold of them.”

  “Brescoll is no friend of mine, and you know it.”

  “No, General? Then why haven’t you taken Susan Yamada and Michael Miskulin out of the picture? And why have you not dealt with Major Vasques, that traitor in your midst? In spilling the beans to NSA and Brescoll, he’s betrayed us all.”

  “He’ll be dealt with.”

  “Soon, let’s hope. I beg your forgiveness, General Retticker, if I have acted in ways that seemed impatient or overhasty, but God’s Plan delayed is God’s Plan denied. You see, I pay Fremdkunst for his meteorite obsession. I’m not all that interested in the things, beyond their role as holy objects to be stolen or destroyed so that the Plan’s final holy war may begin. But those children—those young survivors—are part of the divine plan, I’m sure of it.”

  “Not all of us have as much insight into God’s plans as you do, Mister Otis,” Vang said pleasantly, “but I’m sure we all agree on the need for dealing with Vasques and safeguarding those children. You have indicated that Michelson is safely relocated to the Wabar digs in the Saudi Empty Quarter. Might the children be kept there, too, perhaps? Under Mister Fremdkunst’s watchful eyes, and away from the prying eyes of others?”

  Otis nodded slowly, but both he and Retticker looked to Vang, waiting for him to continue.

  “I also gather that Doctor Michelson wishes to involve those children in his research, as well,” Vang said slowly. “The survivors from Caracamuni tepui are currently in General Retticker’s custody and protection.

  I will place this airship and its crew at General Retticker’s disposal. I believe it might be to his advantage, and all of ours, that those children be moved to the desert. This craft has already been modified for desert conditions. It is only lightly armed—a few air-to-air, air-to-ground, and antiradar missiles—but that should prove sufficient so long as he doesn’t try taking on anyone’s air armada.”

  Retticker smiled, and nodded in cautious agreement.

  “Airship and crew should be more than adequate for delivering those children and seeing to it that they are looked after. With the additional protection of guards—of course also appointed by General Retticker.”

  In response to a questioning glance from Vang, Retticker nodded for him to go on.

  “I think it wise those guards not be informed of their destination,” Vang continued, “and that they be thoroughly bodyscanned before departure. Perhaps one of those guards should be Major Vasques.

  Perhaps he should go missing in the desert.”

  No one debated those points. With some reluctance, Retticker and Otis agreed, Otis’s plans and Retticker’s own taking on the shapes suggested by Vang. By the time they had hammered out the logistics, the stealth airship was hovering over the dropoff point for Otis—above Fremdkunst’s boat Skyminer, Retticker saw, from the forward and ventral cameras.

  Bidding them farewell and wishing Joe luck in the Saudi desert, the political power-broker disappeared from Vang’s ghostly airship, headed for the meteorite hunter’s waiting boat. After commenting that he needed to confer with his crew, Vang himself disappeared, leaving Retticker behind to contemplate all that had transpired.

  Retticker guessed they were about halfway back to his farm in the Pennsylvania hill country when Vang came back, to find him staring absently at the ice-cube dregs of the drink in his hand.

  “You seem pensive, Joseph,” Vang said, taking a
seat. “What’s on your mind?”

  Retticker looked up at him.

  “Doctor Vang, I thought the Instrumentality and Tetragrammaton were always about the long-term survival of the human species.”

  “True,” Vang said with a barely perceptible nod. “Despite some of the wrong turns—the obsession with the posthuman, with creating a man-machine information density singularity, faster-than-light travel, all that. All we’ve ever tried to do, really, is make people pay attention. Not only to the danger evolution programmed us to see in the hungry polar bear, but also to the subtler danger in the glacier slowly melting behind that bear. To cure our shortsightedness, and so prevent our unintended suicide.”

  “So how can you work with Otis? You don’t really believe his ‘apocalypse delayed is apocalypse denied’ crap, do you?”

  Vang looked away, seeming to find something of particular interest on the parquet floor of the invisible dirigible’s mezzanine.

  “No, I don’t. We may, however, have some overlap in our goals. You see, in focusing only on the survival of the human species, we might all have been thinking too narrowly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  As the surveillance monitors chronicled the rest of their journey back toward Retticker’s farm, Vang explained. He had been tipped to the idea by Yuri Semenov, the agent he had keeping an eye on Fremdkunst.

  Vang told Retticker of Semenov’s theories about bolides and nuclear blasts. About heat-shock proteins, Tunguska, and evolutionary capacitors. About the great mass extinctions caused by the impact of celestial bodies upon the earth, and of earth itself as a palimpsest planet. About the enormity of the calamity required to make the lightning “jump the gap” from evolution’s capacitors. About the hubris of the human race, taking the prerogative of falling stars to itself. And about humanity’s shortcomings in that starring role, in which the Great Actor, Man, had forced so many other species off life’s stage.

  “This death of a thousand small cuts,” Vang said, “this slow frog-boil of global climate change—a few extinctions here, a few extinctions there, every day—it’s a short-circuiting of what’s meant to happen.”

  Retticker put his empty glass aside and stared at the busy silent life of the wet bar’s aquarium. The extravagance of such an ostentatious display tank, aboard a stealth airship, struck him again for a moment, then was gone.

  “Not much to be done about that,” Retticker said. “My experts tell me that, when it comes to impactors from space, the rule is ‘the bigger they are, the less often they fall.’”

  “That’s right. We can’t look to the skies alone to salvage our situation. Things cannot go on as they have, however. Humanity in the early decades of the twenty-first century has steadily failed to come to grips with our four horsemen.”

  “‘Four Horsemen’? That sounds too much like George Otis talking.”

  “Different horsemen: oil, population, economics, and climate. Global petroleum production is past peak and spiraling ever more rapidly downward. Simultaneously, global human population, global economic scale, and global climate change are all still ramping up. Not a good synergy. George Otis’s more traditional horsemen—War, Pestilence, Famine, Death—are more likely to come riding onto the scene than ever before.”

  “I thought human population growth was slowing.”

  Vang nodded, but not happily or enthusiastically.

  “Our rate of increase is slowly decreasing. But the number of people on this planet is still growing in absolute terms.”

  Vang paused, struck by a thought.

  “Hmm. What an odd idea!”

  “What’s that?”

  “George Otis, thinking he’s doing heaven’s will, might inadvertently be helping evolution to proceed in the manner to which it has long been accustomed.”

  “How so?”

  “Armageddon, apocalypse, rapture. Did you ever consider that that whole belief system, for all its obvious selfishness, is, perhaps unconsciously, an unselfish call for us to liberate the planet—by destroying ourselves?”

  An extreme idea, Retticker thought. And yet Vang entertained it so serenely.

  “No, I hadn’t considered it, actually. I suppose a total spasm nuclear war would be a pretty good substitute for a five-mile-wide mountain falling from the sky, though.”

  “Yes. Such a full-bore Armageddon is, I should think, quite capable of sparking the lightning from evolution’s capacitors.”

  Retticker looked fixedly at Vang as the implications of what the well-dressed elderly man had been saying fully dawned on him.

  “We have to destroy the world in order to save it?”

  “Yes,” Vang said with a shy nod. “Politics, biblical prophecy, and the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution all seem to converge on that.”

  Retticker shook his head.

  “That’s crazy. No one really wants that to happen, aside from people like Otis.”

  Vang gave him an enigmatic smile.

  “It well might happen, whether you or I want it to, or not. That’s why I want you to keep a very close eye on those Mawari children for me, Joseph. Where are you keeping them, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “They’re under guard at the farmhouse.”

  Vang looked up at the cycling screens.

  “To which we have almost returned. Good.”

  “Those kids are somehow involved in all this doomsday stuff?”

  “I’m not certain they are—and it’s the uncertainty that bothers me. I have reason to believe those survivors possess the potential to become wild cards, human singularities. ‘Transcendant persons,’ for good orill. I’d very much like to reap the many benefits from their potential capabilities, so we will let Otis’s and Michelson’s plans go forward, for now.”

  “They are just children, after all,” Retticker said as he recognized his own land and farmhouse now appearing before and below them on the screens.

  “Yes. And every mass murderer was a child once, too.” Vang shook his head. “The Kwok-Cho affair considerably dampened my enthusiasm for singular and unpredictable people. I don’t mean to be alarmist, but should there come a time when those young people seem inclined to terminate all of us, it might be wise to terminate them first, Joseph. I’m trusting you to make that admittedly tragic decision, if it needs to be made. I leave that, and this ship, in your hands.”

  Part of the floor forward of them began to drop down as it transformed itself into a gangway. Retticker descended the gangway and at last stood once more on the night-damp ground. Above him, the gangway became part of the stealthy airship again.

  Retticker expected to see the distortion move slowly away through the sky—the invisible egg moving in subtle contraction through the belly of the blacksnake night—but it did not. He was surprised to see Vang standing on the ground beside him.

  The slight, older man gave a brief wave of his hand and walked off into the night. So much still left unsaid, he thought, but Vang was obviously not interested in further discussion. Turning, Joe headed toward the house, to gather up the children and their guards, and to notify other troops of their sudden duty, before all of them boarded a mobile piece of the night and headed to a desert far away.

  REMEMBERED UNIVERSES

  One good thing about holding meetings in the office here at NSA headquarters, Jim Brescoll thought: passing through all the security to get here always impressed his visitors, especially new ones like Yamada, Pittman, and Miskulin. Dan Amaral, however—walking slightly ahead of them—had a talent for quickly growing jaded about almost anything.

  Some of that security those visitors could not help but notice. Despite all the well-wishing from his wife and his all-too-grown kids, despite the good thoughts from his staff (including the hilarious self-penned “get well” poem from Amaral), despite even the ass-chewing DNI Watson had given him (especially when he’d insisted on traveling to California for Larkin’s memorial almost as soon as he was back on the job)—despite it all
, Jim was glad to be out of the hospital and back to work.

  So glad that he had noticed the security precautions again himself, as if for the first time: the restricted Fort Meade exit ramp, with its heavy earthen berms and graceful tangle of security hardscape—strategically placed landscape boulders, barbed-wire perimeter fences, and cement barriers beneath the canopy of old oak trees. The personally coded magnetic passkeys, the matching fingerprint and retina scans, the new DNA and facial recognition biometrics—all of that could not help but make an impact, too, even if his guests didn’t know about the strategically placed antitruck hydraulics, telephoto surveillance cameras, motion detectors, and eight hundred uniformed police of Crypto City’s own law enforcement authority.

  Jim thought that the sheer size of the secret city must still impress, if not intimidate, them. The supercomputer labs and living quarters, offices and anechoic chambers, factories and 10K-clean rooms.

  The more than three hundred acres of parking space for forty thousand employees. All those people, working in a restricted-access world with its own post office, fire department, encrypted television network, university, banks, libraries, drugstores, barbershops, fast-food joints, and waste disposal and recycling services. The mere fact of all that had to have an effect, even if not necessarily a conscious one.

  No wonder then that when Miskulin, Pittman, and Yamada first entered the confines of his office, with its heavy antique furnishings, they seemed a bit overawed by it all, culture-shocked to quiet, if not silence.

  That didn’t last, of course. It never did. Especially after he pushed the button that made the pseudoholo console rise out of his desktop, its volumetric display-dome looking like half a crystal ball. He handed each of his visitors a piece of cutting-edge networking gear that took the form of a very specialized ring.