That sounded more like a designation than a name, but it would do.
“Listen to me, Missing One. It’s wrong to harm a human. What you did to Uzzie was wrong. It was murder. What you did to Masterson was murder. It’s bad. Bad Missing One. You understand? Bad.”
Bad.
“Yes, bad. Do you understand?”
This one remember bad.
“Good. Remember it. Now tell me, what did you actually do to them? Did you kill them? Make them dead?”
No.
“But you changed them somehow, didn’t you? They have superhuman strength now. They can breathe poisonous air.”
Breathe.
“That’s what I’m talking about. On the volcano — understand volcano? — Uzzie and Masterson were able to go into the vent, but it nearly killed me.”
Volcano.
This was going nowhere. Jace backtracked and tried again.
“Uzzie and Masterson, did Missing One kill them question.”
No.
“Good. That’s good, but you did something to them question. You changed them question.”
Changed them.
“Does that mean yes?”
Yes.
“What did Missing One do to them that changed them question?”
This one they strive. But Bad. Striver bad. This one no make striver more.
Uzzie had used the same word, striver, on the volcano after he’d dragged him and Deut to safety.
“Good, no make striver more. Who else did Missing One make striver? Agent Bertolli? Is Bertolli a striver too?”
Too.
“Does that mean yes?”
Yes.
“Who else? That other agent, Nabor?”
Yes.
“Who else?”
Birds.
So the alien was illegally harvesting wildlife. Not something a park ranger wanted to hear, but probably no worse than harvesting people.
“What about . . .” He was afraid to ask. “What about Deut? Is Deut striver question.”
No.
Jace let out his breath. “Good. What about her family question.”
Ooo-Zee.
He already knew about Uzzie. “Any other people?”
No.
“Good. Keep it that way. No more strivers. Do you understand?”
Yes.
“Do you understand promise?”
Yes.
“Then promise me no more strivers.”
Missing One promise no more strivers.
“No more changing humans . . including me. Promise.”
Missing One promise no more changing humans including Jaaace.
Good. Progress. The alien didn’t seem combative or threatening, duplicitous or culpable. As tragic as the loss of four lives was (five if you counted poor Ned Nellis), you could hardly charge the little space freak with murder. After all, the Prophecys had kidnapped it from the river flats, stolen its tulip (whatever it was), and locked it up inside a mine. There they demonized it (literally) and injured it, maybe even tortured it. That must have been an extremely traumatizing experience. And who knew what additional heavy-handed shit the federal agents added to that. The castaway was only trying to save itself in a totally hostile environment, only trying to, as it said, phone home. Didn’t it have a right to self-preservation? The lives it took was a rookie mistake. But Jace had set it straight on that account. Now it knew better and nothing of the sort would happen again. It promised.
“No more strivers. Missing One make no more strivers promise.”
This one make no more strivers promise.
“Excellent. Now tell me about Crissy Lou. Who is Crissy Lou question.”
Crissy Lou friend.
“Yes, Crissy Lou is a dog, and dogs are people’s friends. But dogs can’t talk to people. Dogs can’t log onto Facebook.”
Crissy Lou talk inside head. Missing One listen inside Crissy Lou head.
It was exactly as Jace had imagined! The alien was able to talk to animals and translate their thoughts to humans. That wasn’t much of a stretch, was it? Dogs and people could practically read each other’s minds as it was, without alien intercession.
“Is Crissy Lou striver?”
No.
“Good. Keep it that way.”
Amen.
“Does amen mean yes?”
Yes.
“So when Deut came home tonight, did her father punish her? Hurt her?”
No.
“Why not? What happened?”
Doot say demons take Oo-zee. Demons bad. Doot good.
It sounded like she had talked her way out of it. He wondered what she had said about his role in the whole mess.
“What about you? What about Missing One? Is Missing One in danger question?” The only time he had encountered the alien in person, it seemed healthy and uninjured, but he was no expert in xenobiology. He remembered how, as it withdrew down the mine shaft, it bumped its turd head on a rock and seemed to react with pain. It seemed to be fragile enough and vulnerable to injury.
Few danger. This one in hole. Peoples think this one go bye-bye.
“What about food? Do you have enough to eat question?”
This one eat volcano.
Again he had nailed it. “So you’re able to — uh — draw energy from the volcano for your energy?”
Energy.
“Yes, energy. Missing One is able to use the energy from the volcano to live?”
Yes. Soon Ooo-Zee energy phone home.
Ah, the volcanic energy wasn’t only for sustenance but meant to fuel its transmission home as well.
Jaaace help Missing One phone home question.
They were back to this.
“Yes, I’ll help if you keep your word to not hurt Jace or Deut or any other humans.”
Missing One not hurt Jace or Deut or any other humans promise.”
“In that case, yes, I’ll help Missing One phone home.”
JACE HAULED THE toolkit back to the shed. He wasn’t going to pluck a tulip tonight after all. Instead, he pulled his gear together for a trip out of the park. Missing One needed him to take an early flight. Where exactly he was headed, the little turdboy was unable to say in words that Jace could understand. Something to do with an angel’s harp and roadside assistance.
AH3 1.0
JACE SLEPT IN the following morning and barely had enough time for breakfast before dashing to the public airstrip. He stayed clear of the Sulzer house so as to avoid any nosy questions about his trip. No doubt Ed and Ginny were already in their easel bays smoking Kools and Camels, painting Alaskana goldpans. Jace was expecting Bertolli to pick him up in the Astar 350 helicopter, but the engine he heard approaching from the west was that of a fixed-wing aircraft, not a chopper. When it touched down, he saw it was from Running Fox Air Service out of Denny Lake, not Nellis Air.
“You Ranger Kuliak?” the pilot said, taking Jace’s sole piece of luggage. The middle-aged man seemed like a normal human.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Jace said and climbed into the copilot seat.
The flight over the Wrangells was awesome, as usual — the jagged peaks, the dazzling glaciers — but Jace was too preoccupied to notice much. He did think he spotted the flash of a familiar lavender tint on a field of snow, but when he looked again he couldn’t see it. Probably a trick of the morning light.
They landed at the small plane airport in Gulkana, outside Glennallen. After letting Jace out, the pilot taxied to the end of the strip and took off again. Jace wasn’t sure what to do next. His instructions hadn’t extended beyond getting there. The airport was quite a bit larger than the public airstrip in McHardy, with two runways, a couple of aircraft hangars, a fuel depot, and a plywood shack that served as a terminal. Jace was heading toward the terminal when his phone chimed an incoming text message:
Key ignition nav
A photo was attached that showed a white Ford pickup with the familiar park service arrowhead logo on the door panel. He saw the
same truck parked outside one of the hangars. It was their park service pickup, the very one Masterson had taken the day he borrowed Jace’s snowmobile.
The pickup door was unlocked, and the key was in the ignition as promised. A dozen bright yellow HEET bottles littered the passenger-side floor. HEET was a gasoline additive that prevented the buildup of ice crystals in carburetors when the weather turned sub-zero. Everyone in Alaska had used it back in the day before fuel injection. Today, not so much, and this Ford engine had little need of it. Yet here was a case of HEET bottles — empty. The power drink of energy thieves?
Besides the trash, the other thing that caught Jace’s eye was a metal detector lying on the passenger seat. It was the one from the gear locker, the same one he’d used on the river flats to find the alien.
Jace looked around the sleepy airport. There was no one outdoors except for a couple of mechanics servicing a Piper Cub. Though it was cold out, the pickup engine started with ease, which meant it hadn’t been parked there long. While the truck warmed up, he checked the navigation system. His destination appeared to be just up the highway past Gakona.
JACE WOULD HAVE liked a cup of coffee and a slice of pie for the road, the guilty pleasure of any trip to civilization, but there were no diners, gas stations, convenience stores, shopping malls, or any such dreck along this stretch of highway. Only acres and acres of snow-covered moose browse, scattered stands of spindly black spruce, and miles and miles of world-class scenery.
As he drove, Jace listened to the news from the local NPR repeater station: Mayor Bloomberg is urging Joe Biden’s task force to reinstate the ban on assault rifles after the Sandy Hook massacre. The U.S. jobless rate is steady at 7.8%. University professors have the least stressful jobs in the country while enlisted men and women in the armed forces have the most stressful. FEMA advises every U.S. household to keep an emergency supply kit in the home. Ten large U.S. banks agree to pay the Fed $8.5 billion to get it off their backs for cheating millions of mortgage borrowers out of trillions of dollars. All in all, same old, same old.
Before the top-of-the-hour newscast had ended, Jace reached Gakona Junction, and the nav system instructed him to turn right onto the Tok-cutoff. The Canadian border lay to the east. The great Copper River also took a turn at this point on its way from its headwaters. The junction was near the northwestern-most corner of his vast national park.
Driving through Gakona (pop. 218) took less than a minute. There was an historic roadhouse cum gas station, an igloo-shaped B&B, and not much else. Then it was back to wilderness driving. With the new direction, the scenery to the south rearranged itself. Mount Drum stood on the right now and was the most compelling of the mountains to look at, like a majestic snow-covered fist in the morning light, while Mount Sanford was to its left looking more like a knobby knee, and Wrangell, lying between them, was a distant bump on the horizon. Yet even from this distance, Jace could make out the cinder cone, where Uzzie, the striver boy, had begun his descent into Hell.
Around mile ten, the nav system informed Jace to turn left. There were no crossroads or driveways here, only unbroken woods. It looked like he’d have to cover the final stretch on foot. He knew where he was, less than a mile from the HAARP facility. A plume of exhaust from its power plant marked its location in the distance. He pulled off the highway and idled the engine.
Things were beginning to make sense. The harp that Missing One wanted to strum was the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. And the highway flare it wanted to send up to summon roadside assistance was the aurora itself.
Jace laughed out loud; he could see the tabloid headlines now: Intergalactic Castaway Strums HAARP to Phone Home. It wouldn’t be the first time conspiracy theorists had latched onto HAARP. According to the internet, the facility was a top-secret weapon of mass destruction, a death ray capable of incinerating whole armies on the other side of the globe, and a means of weather and/or mind control. Reputedly, HAARP was once responsible for killing ten thousand fish along a twenty-mile (32 km) stretch of the Arkansas River. For causing whole flocks of birds around the globe to fall dead out of the sky. For drowning forty thousand crabs that subsequently washed up on British shores. Just last October, it was HAARP that caused Hurricane Sandy to zig inland when it should have zagged out to sea, as every other hurricane ever recorded had done.
But HAARP had never been a secret installation. It was a joint military/civilian project that published its findings in unclassified academic journals and regularly opened its doors for public tours. Jace himself had been on two HAARP tours, once as a civilian last spring during an open house, and again a month later when the park service sponsored a routine wildfire suppression workshop on the facility’s 5400-acre (2185-ha) campus. So he knew firsthand the kinds of work being done there.
Amazing work, when you thought about it. What the HAARP scientists were doing was converting twelve million watts of electricity into focused high-frequency radio waves and beaming them sixty to one hundred miles (97–161 km) into the atmosphere through an array of 180 antennas. In effect, they were heating up a tiny patch of the ionosphere to see what happened and creating small, brief auroras along the way.
Still, in this case, the tin-hat crowd might be more right than wrong, for Missing One did indeed intend to use HAARP to phone home. And here was the world’s leading auroral research facility literally across the road from one of the largest tracts of unpopulated territory on Earth that was also a stone’s throw away from a smoldering geothermal energy source. What were the odds that this was all a coincidence? Missing One must have chosen to touch down exactly where it did.
JACE FED THE target coordinates from the dashboard system into his Garmin GPS. He debated whether or not he was supposed to take the metal detector and decided it was better to take it than have to return for it. He crossed the highway and started hiking through the woods. The snow came up to his thighs in places and the going was exhausting. Before long he came to an easement clearing with a string of utility poles. There were fresh tracks in the snow here going in the same direction as his target. Too big for fox or wolves, too snowplow-like for moose. Apparently he wasn’t the first person, or striver, to pass this way recently. And since whoever it was had kindly broken trail, the going got a lot easier.
Jace followed the tracks to a spot where they left the easement and headed back into the woods. Here the tracks changed from individual footprints to a rough groove, as though something heavy had been dragged through the snow. According to his GPS, he and whoever had made the groove were still going in the right direction.
Jace followed the groove into the woods. It came to an end only a few dozen yards in. A large area of snow was disturbed and trees knocked over. Something had happened in this spot, but he couldn’t make out what, except that it apparently wasn’t his destination; the GPS beckoned him further in. He broke fresh trail another couple dozen yards. When he did reach the coordinates on his Garmin, he looked all around for whatever it was he was supposed to find. But all he found were runty trees and snow-smothered brush.
His phone chimed.
Detect
Jace switched on the metal detector. Designating the spot where he stood as ground zero, he lay out an impromptu search grid. Sweeping, sweeping the coil as he went, he fell into the familiar rhythm of metal detecting.
It didn’t take long to find something. Feedback squealed loudly in his headphones indicating that something massive like an engine block or treasure chest full of gold coins lay just beneath the snow. He knelt down and began to dig with his mittened hands and was startled to uncover a dead animal. It was a bird, a raven; its lifeless black eye was staring at him. Missing One had told him that it used birds as strivers. This was probably one of them. Did that mean that strivers could die? If so, that would be a very important bit of intel.
Jace passed the detector coil over the bird. No doubt about it, the bird was his target. He dug out his phone and texted, Found it. Now what? and
the reply came at once.
Strike with fist
“Okay,” he said out loud. “Striking with fist.” He crouched next to the dead bird and punched it. He pulled his punch, expecting the bird to be frozen stiff, but it was actually soft and squishy. Nothing seemed to happen, so he hit it again, this time raising his fist over his head and bringing it down like a hammer. Phooosh! Air escaped from the bird, and its black tongue protruded from its beak. Kinda gross. Jace raised his arm to strike again, but the bird started moving, and he jumped back in surprise. No, the bird wasn’t moving but its glossy feathers were. Each delicate vane seemed to detach from the feather spine and wriggle like a tiny worm. Thousands of them. The entire outer surface of the bird’s body was squirming, and it gave off so much heat it started melting the surrounding snow. Jace could only stand back and watch in wonder.
After a couple of minutes, all that was left of the raven was a melted patch of ground, scorched moss, and in the center a golden BB. A golden BB exactly like the one Uzzie had shown him, except that it was slightly larger.
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
Jace’s phone chimed with new instructions:
62.392481, –145.152202
GPS coordinates. He put them into his Garmin and confirmed what he had been thinking, that Missing One wanted him to take the BB closer to the HAARP facility than the raven had managed to fly. At least it wasn’t asking him to carry it down a fumarole.
Jace removed his mitten to pick up the tiny prize and was surprised by how heavy it was. Not surprised — more like shocked — that such a tiny thing could weigh so much, maybe twenty pounds (9 kg). It was impossible to carry in his bare hands. It packed so much mass into such a small volume it actually felt sharp, like someone jabbing his palm with a ballpoint pen. Even with the padding of his mitten it was uncomfortable. If he put it in a pocket, it would tear a hole in the lining and fall out.
Jace searched himself for something to carry the BB in and came up with nothing better than his wallet. So he dropped it in with his paper currency and began trekking to the next target destination. He tucked the metal detector under an arm and carried his wallet with both hands. It was slow going.
Glassing the Orgachine Page 10