Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  “Good to be up from under the ground,” the major said, sitting down on a rock facing her, shedding and setting aside the belt with its two knives, and the assault rifle too, all of which Marc had taken from the fallen troops at the helicopter crash site. “Good to be out under the stars again.”

  Darla nodded.

  “I’m happy to have another day of that subterranean travel behind me, too.”

  “It’s a strange method of transport, I’ll grant you that,” Vasques said. “Not without its appeal, though, if you feel the need for speed.”

  Darla smiled into the falling darkness.

  “Even the exhilaration of acceleration begins to fade eventually. Have to get off the roller coaster sometime.”

  “Maybe this is the last day, if the kids are right. They were right enough about that blood-sharing thing, weird as it seemed at the time.”

  Darla nodded.

  “Yes,” she said, walking over and sitting down beside him, touching his face in a way that was both clinical and very friendly, at the same time. “I have noticed that you don’t look so much like a walking section of cobblestone street anymore.”

  As she drew her hand away, Marc laughed.

  “Not unless I want to. That’s the strange part. Here. Shine your headlamp on my hand.”

  She did so. As she watched, the skin on the back of Marc’s hand visibly swelled, hardened, and took on that brecciated, stony cast again. Just as quickly the swollen and hardened condition smoothed and faded away.

  “You made it do that?” Darla asked.

  “Yep,” he said, then laughed again. “Weird, huh? For years I wore and tested smart armor. Now I’ve become smart armor.”

  “That’s a weird superpower to have,” she said with a chuckle.

  “You’re telling me?” he said, but then grew more serious. “Maybe the ‘super’ part is right, though. Darla, I don’t pretend to know from ‘gravitational anomalies’ or ‘metaphage mosaics’ or ‘metadiamonds’ or ‘silica nanoparticles,’ but I do know those kids have turned into something a helluva lot different from what even we are.”

  Darla nodded.

  “Yet when they took me away from the crash site, they said that you and I were the most like them in all the world.”

  “Which just shows you how different from everyone they really are,” he said. “I was part of the raid that killed off most of their tribe. They know that. They could have left me for dead when they found me in the desert. They could have killed me in revenge for what I did to their people. They could have done it anytime. Maybe they still will, but somehow I doubt it.”

  “I know,” Darla said, glancing toward where Aubrey and Ebu sat. “I used to think they might be bent on revenge, because of their history, and because what I’d heard and seen of them made them seem cold and superficial. Miskulin said they resembled children with autism or Asperger’s, that they were superfocused. That’s really it.”

  “Superheroes seem superficial,” Marc said, “because they’re superfocused. Only we don’t know what it is they’re focusing on.”

  “Exactly. I think now that, if these kids are bent on revenge, it’s not any kind of revenge I can understand by that name.”

  Marc looked away, into his own memories.

  “They’re different not only from us, but even from what their own people were. These kids…they can reach far deeper inside our heads than their people could. Especially when they try to show us how the threads or spawn or strings, whatever they are, are weaving together. The whole mindtime thing.”

  Darla nodded. The girls had taught them both their “Cave of Night, Seed of Light” nursery rhyme cosmogony. She understood now that the apparent verb tense simplicity of that poem—and of the entire Mawari language—had everything to do with mindtime. That vast system of branching universes in some sense spatialized time, rendering past, present, and future one in a higher dimension. Everything is present in mindtime, because everything is present in mindtime.

  She had to agreed too with Susan Yamada’s suggestion that that rhyme had deeper allusions to spores and spawn, and threads or strings. She understood what “A day is a mushroom on the spawn bed of time” might mean. And yes, all of that was (as Susan had also suggested) quite appropriate to a people who’d had a sacral relationship with a metaphage-inflected fungus, so far as that went. Yet that didn’t go far enough.

  “Their connection with the other two, with Ka-dalun and Alii, doesn’t seem to be limited by space and time,” she said, still watching the girls. “I think they can probably reach into anybody’s head who will give them an opening, now.”

  “And that infosphere stuff they can pull straight out of the air!” Marc said. “I keep trying not to think of them with little dish antennas growing out of their heads. It’s like they’ve got the eavesdropping and code-crunching capabilities of the whole damn NSA inside each of their skulls.”

  “I don’t know what Director Brescoll would think of your analogy,” she said with a smirk, “but that could be a consequence of Michelson’s work with them. After Barry hit them with the rest of the metaphage material he’d extracted.”

  He leaned forward, closer to her.

  “I suppose these kids have to face the same problem any intelligence agency faces, in the end,” Marc said. “Too much information. Too many sources. Like trying to drink from a firehose.”

  “The more they know, the more they must realize they don’t know,” she said, looking long and sidewise at them. “They can’t know everything. They’re no longer children, but they aren’t yet gods.”

  Reflexively, she shivered, although the September night was still quite warm. Just as reflexively, Marc put his arm around her shoulder. Aware something had changed between them, they turned toward each other, looked in each other’s eyes, and kissed. She touched his face lightly again.

  “I know what superpower I gave you,” she said, her attempted Mae West flippancy faltering on the huskiness of her voice, “but what superpower do you have for me?”

  Glancing quickly toward Aubrey and Ebu and seeing the two of them still preoccupied in their usual superfocused fashion, Darla and Marc slipped down behind the rocks and out of sight. The superpower Marc had for her was a much more enjoyable way of mingling bloodlines than that involving knives and slashed palms.

  No sooner had they finished, however, than a deluge of thoughts not their own cascaded into their heads.

  The overwhelming complexity of mindtime, of thread and strings and spawn of universes weaving and being woven. Two men they knew—Vang and Otis—arguing about spears and grails, about heresies and faiths, about power and compassion, while being watched by Alii and Ka-dalun. Cargo planes with great cylindrical canisters aboard. Heavy-lift helicopters carrying similar devices. Radar imagery. Tracking data…

  Marc! Darla! It’s happening! Darla! Marc! The clock has ticked—over for the world—to celebrate—with a day of horror—the anniversary—of a day of horror—

  Darla wanted to tell them to slow down, to wait a minute, to explain, but at that instant both she and Marc heard the scrape of booted feet in sand, no matter how stealthily the wearers of those boots might be trying to move. Darla broke into a run in the direction of the children. Marc gathered up rifle and knife belt and covered her retreat.

  “Hello, Major Vasques, Doctor Pittman!” a voice from the darkness called to them. “Before you do anything rash, consider this: you have what amounts to a cliff at your backs. We have all your escape routes blocked and our numbers are significantly stronger than yours. Best for you and the children to come along with us as quietly as possible.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Marc shouted into the night. He handed the assault rifle to Darla.

  “The people wearing the night-vision goggles—bimodal binoculars, actually—and pointing their guns at you. Victor Fremdkunst here. Greetings!”

  “Barry Levitch here. Hi, Darla!”

  “Barry, you thieving sonuvabitch!” Darla
yelled at her erstwhile postdoc. “You stole my work—and betrayed its intent!”

  “We did nothing of the kind. We merely carried it to its logical conclusion.”

  “This from the man who talked about a world with no religious relics and monuments to worship or destroy, and look who you and Fremdkunst are working for!”

  “Give it up, Darla. Otis can chase his ‘Spear of Destiny’ to his heart’s content. I just followed the money.

  You and those kids can’t just slip off underground this time, so you come on, now. We can follow you gravimetrically if we have to. That’s how we found you. The children might get hurt, too. Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be.”

  Marc! Darla! Come with us!

  “Can’t risk it,” Darla said, both thinking the words and subvocalizing them. “No time. We have to stop them from tracking you.”

  “We’ll cover your escape,” Marc said. “Go. Do it!”

  Uncertainty, confusion, and distraction flooded Darla’s mind from a source outside herself.

  “Go! Now!”

  Reluctantly she felt as much as saw the children disappearing into the earth. Then she was too busy feeling and seeing many other things—as she started shooting.

  APPROVED SIGNS

  The balloon has gone up, Joe Retticker thought. That much was obvious from the frenetic, if not frantic, activity around him as he was escorted under CSS guard into the National Security Operations Center, Room 3E099. Aswarm with technicians in augmented reality glasses or seated before computer monitors and various three-dimensional display tech—volumetric domes, pseudoholo flashbar eyetrackers, airbending holographic projectors—the situation-room maze of workstations and cubicles was clearly processing one hell of a lot of telepresent information.

  Retticker had been to Strategic Air Command’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex and NASA’s Mission Control facilities in Houston during the heydays of both. With its large flat-panel video display screens covering the walls, NSOC 3E099 was much like those, only faster. The imagery on its various display tech flash-cut from scene to scene almost more quickly than he could follow.

  What he saw flashing across the hanging flat-panels, however, gave him pause even as the imagery itself moved and shifted without pause. He saw map and time graphics, mainly focused on the Middle East.

  On several screens he saw air-traffic-control radar information, triangular red icons moving through Israeli airspace. Another screen showed the Great Mosque in Mecca from above, roughly key-shaped, with the ihram-clad Hajj pilgrims walking the rounds of their seven-circuit labyrinth, spiraling in toward the black monolith of the Kaaba and back out again.

  Before he was ushered into the considerably greater privacy of the Executive Command Suite, just beyond the buzzing hive of Room 3E099, he thought he also saw sky-eye satellite visuals of the Arabian peninsula. Real-time optical feeds from several other locations too, including the force-field blisterdomes of the American and Chinese MAXX facilities and the smaller Labyrinth Key sites, mainly in the South American Tri-Border.

  The gravity of the situation was fully brought home to him, however, by the fact that, seated next to Director Brescoll, was the director of national intelligence himself, Ethan Watson, running his hand nervously through his sandy hair and looking very uncomfortable.

  “General Retticker, sit down please,” Brescoll said peremptorily, preoccupied with something on his ARGUS blinks. “We seem to have located Avram Zaragosa. Traveling under the name of ‘Ibrahim Fayez,’ photographed and interviewed in a local paper in Taif, not far from Mecca, a day and a half ago.”

  He turned back to the long-distance phone call he’d been on. “This ‘Mister Fayez’ is at the top of our watch list, and very dangerous. Take him into custody at your earliest opportunity.”

  Inundated by this flood of information, Retticker sat down slowly. He watched as Brescoll began rapidly blinking up on the ECS’s main flat panels a burst of American satellite and AWACS data, split-screened, beside Israel Defense Force air-traffic-control radar tracking.

  “It now seems your fuel-air bombing scenario may be under way, as well, Joe,” Brescoll continued. “As a result of your debriefing, we flagged the Israelis to intensify security around their MAD FAE munitions and keep an eye out for an attack by elements from within their own ranks. That attack has happened within the last hour.”

  Through Retticker’s mind shot images of missiles or bomb canisters, bursting open precisely, instantaneously spreading mushroom-cap or umbrella-shaped clouds of fuel—then those clouds just as instantly being set ablaze by secondary detonations, flashing from white to black-orange in an eyeblink.

  “Any idea who’s behind it?”

  “Early reports indicate radical Kahanist nationalists, some of them within IDF, attempted to take over MAD FAE support and delivery systems at three bases. Heightened security stopped them at one. From two other bases, however, we now have confirmation that a total of four aircraft with fuel-air munitions aboard have just left the ground—two fixed-wing cargo aircraft and two helicopters. We have fighters waiting on the deck of the Lincoln in the eastern Med. The Israelis have just put fighters in the air and are awaiting anything else we can give them. You said you thought the targets would be in Gaza, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why Gaza?” DNI Watson asked.

  “That’s where George Otis believed such an attack would be most effective.”

  “I’ve known George Otis for years,” Watson said dismissively. “I can’t believe he’s behind this.”

  “You’d best tell Mister Watson what you know about this, General,” Brescoll said.

  Retticker told him. About the trip to Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock. About Otis’s general elation that his “friends” in the Knesset, decrying the failure of the two-state solution, had called for the annihilation of the “House of Esau” and the “Amalekites.”

  “That’s the Palestinians, according to the Kahanists and Christian Zionists,” Brescoll said. Retticker nodded.

  “Otis knew—and apparently those Knesset members knew, too—how effective surgical fuel-air bombing strikes would be for such a close-quarters civilian genocide,” Retticker said.

  “But why do such a thing?” Watson asked.

  “Otis read such an event as the fulfillment of a scripture passage in the Book of Obadiah. He thought the outbreak of such calamities and catastrophes would be approved signs of the end-times—and would lead the unchurched to turn, in unprecedented numbers, to Jesus Christ for salvation.”

  Watson drummed his fingers nervously on the table as Retticker finished up. Odd, Retticker thought.

  Watson had a reputation for being a cool political operator. Perhaps he already suspected more of what George Otis had been up to than he was letting on.

  “What course of action would you recommend to the Israelis?” Watson asked at last.

  “Immediate shootdown of the aircraft carrying the MAD FAE devices.”

  Watson looked from him to Brescoll.

  “Do it,” he said. “Put out the word via DoD command chain. I’ll inform the president.”

  “And if the Israelis can’t or won’t take them out?” Retticker asked.

  “Then let’s pray it’s not too late to do it ourselves.”

  “Hell,” he heard Brescoll mutter, “we should be praying already anyway.”

  The next instant Watson was so busy on the phone it was as if Retticker and Brescoll had ceased to exist. Retticker, however, had little time to note that, for a moment later Doctor Jeremy Michelson, looking hollow-eyed with fatigue, was escorted into the ECS under guard, just as Retticker himself had been, not too many minutes earlier.

  SPIRITUAL TOKAMAK

  After perhaps half an hour resting, Avram and Mahmoud made their way through enough of the colonnaded immensity to stand, here and now, looking out onto the great courtyard and the long porticoes at its edges. All of this vast architecture framed and
surrounded—but somehow did not fully contain—the Kaaba at its center and the crowds around it, endlessly turning and being turned, beneath the pavilion of floodlights, beneath the greater canopy of the night sky.

  At long last, Avram was looking upon his goal with his own eyes. Before him stood the 160,000-square-yard parallelogram of the floodlit courtyard of Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary of the Great Mosque at Mecca. The edifice was capable of containing nearly one and a quarter million people on a crowded Hajj day. To Avram’s secret relief, not nearly that many were here on this night.

  Across a broad, roofless forum, he saw where the stone floor gave way to a marble ellipse as smooth and white as a skating rink. At the center of that lake of frozen whiteness, reflected in its surface, stood the Kaaba, still point of the turning world, a building turned four-story-tall black monolith by its own ihram attire, the drape of the kiswa.

  He had seen film and video of this scene, shots from above in which the pilgrims, shrunken by distance, were obliviously walking their seven-circuit labyrinth. To him, they had looked like the wheels-within-wheels or fields-within-fields of a toroidal machine—a crowd-rotor turning around a tall black bar-magnet stator in an enormous dynamo.

  From ground level, however, the effect was different—different even from what he and Mahmoud had seen from the Umm al-Qura Road at their arrival. The sense of spiraling toward a core or singularity, and then spiraling back out again—an attraction seemingly magnetic, electric, gravitic, and far more—was still there. What was rotor and what stator was less clear here, however. The crowds hid the Kaaba’s base with the density of their own bodies and, watching them, Avram had the odd relativistic sensation that it was not the crowds that were turning but the Kaaba, the black-draped edifice rotating and somehow levitating above the masses of pilgrims.

  The night breeze ruffling its cover made the building seem all the more tenuously held by gravity, ready to float off into the sky despite its undeniable massiveness. If the ritual energy of what he looked on now could make even the Kaaba seem so weightless, how much more insubstantial did it make Avram himself feel as he looked toward the eastern corner of that same kiswa-draped edifice!