AH4 1.0
THE GATE TO the HAARP facility was little more than a sliding fence. There was no guard or guardhouse, only a curbside intercom box like one you’d speak into at a fast food drive-thru.
Help you? the box squawked.
“Yeah. I’m here to see Dr. Yankovich. This is Ranger Kuliak from the park. I don’t have an appointment.”
Stand by.
Jace could think of no better scientist for the task than the HAARP facility chief scientist, Dr. George Yankovich. Dr. Y was a lifelong Alaskan. He’d been a professor at the university in Fairbanks for over twenty-five years. He kept photos of his grandkids on his desk. He dipnetted for salmon in the Copper River every summer and he hunted moose on the Tanana River every fall. His students built sounding rockets to launch at the Poker Flats rocket range north of Fairbanks. He had Obama ’08 and ’12 stickers on his Volvo. He was respected by geophysicists around the world. And best of all, he seemed like a thoroughly decent guy.
The gate began to roll open.
Go through to the Operations Building. Dr. Yankovich is expecting you.
The Operations Building was located a short distance from the gate. It was a modest, lego-block-like building with metal siding and no windows. A flag pole out front flew the Stars and Stripes. About a dozen cars and vans were parked in the lot, most of them rentals, only one with government plates. The IRI antenna array that he had already visited lay another half mile inside the campus.
As Jace approached the canopied door, he could sense the rumble of the diesel generators inside. The door opened before he could ring the bell. There stood Dr. Yankovich.
“Ranger Kuliak,” said the spry sixty-year-old. Dr. Y wore Carhartt trousers, a plaid flannel shirt, and Nike athletic shoes, which was considered acceptable professional attire at the university. “Come on in. You’re letting the heat out.”
Jace followed Dr. Y down a short corridor to a cramped control room where six data stations were spread out along an L-shaped counter. Each station was equipped with a consumer-grade keyboard and monitor. A dozen men and women huddled around the stations in animated discussion. All were as casually dressed as Dr. Y, but in big-city and even European fashion. No military uniforms in sight.
Dr. Y pulled an extra chair to his own station opposite the others. On his monitor was a sort of foreshortened 3-D bullseye diagram. From the center rose a reddish-colored shape, like a flame, slightly tilted from vertical. That, no doubt, represented the current shape of the high frequency radio beam they were controlling.
“Sit, ranger. I have to keep an eye on this one as we talk.” They sat next to each other, but true to his word, Dr. Y watched the display more than he did Jace. “What can I do for the park?”
Jace wasn’t sure how far back to begin.
“It’s not park business, professor. More like NASA business, I guess, and you’re the closest thing to a NASA scientist I know. You’ll know who to contact, I’m sure. Also, you strike me as someone who won’t stop listening to me because something might sound crazy at first.”
Dr. Y glanced at him. “Well, you don’t appear drunk or high, and I’ve heard some crazy shit in my day, so lay it on me. Just keep in mind that we’re in the middle of an experiment and falling behind schedule.”
Jace showed him his wallet, and Dr. Y joked, “On the other hand, if there’s a bribe involved . . .”
“Sorry, no bribe. Tell me, what’s the most this wallet and everything in it could possibly weigh?”
“I dunno. A pound or two?”
Jace handed him the wallet and watched his amazed expression as he almost dropped it.
“My god, what’s in it?”
“I’ll show it to you, but first let me tell you the crazy shit part.”
“Hang on.” Dr. Y called to someone across the room. “Hey, Gunter, could you please monitor the A/J telemetry feed for a bit? Thanks.” He turned back to Jace. “I’m all ears.”
Jace started with the strange light descending on the river flats in December. He described the glass tulip and how it nearly sucked all the life from his body. Told him about confronting the loony fundy family while trying to retrieve the tulip from them. Dr. Y had heard about the Prophecy family, but he had never met them himself. During Jace’s account, Dr. Y’s eyebrows rose in surprise or alarm several times, but he didn’t interrupt him. He did set Jace’s heavy wallet down on the counter next to a keyboard while he listened.
Jace described Ned Nellis’ mail plane crash. Dr. Y had known Ned; they’d been occasional drinking buddies at the Grizzly Bar, and he was still grieving over his death. He hadn’t heard anything about a circle of vaporized countryside, however.
Jace told him about crawling down the mine ventilation shaft to meet an honest-to-god space alien and hear its plea to help it “phone home.”
He even told him about Uzzie in the volcano and the undead federal agents and ranger, and he concluded with today’s events: “It wanted me to throw the BB over the fence into the antenna array. I think it wants to hijack your transmitter to send up some kind of signal to its mothership or invasion armada or whatever.”
Dr. Yankovich leaned back in his chair when Jace was finished. “Well, well,” he said. “Quite the crazy tale, to be sure, and all of it bullshit without proof. It’s time to see this golden BB of yours.”
“You bet.” Jace reached over and picked up his wallet. “Oh, no.”
“What’s wrong?”
The wallet was light, or rather, no heavier than it usually was. Jace opened it. No BB!
“It’s gone.”
“Of course it’s gone,” Dr Y said, “but a good party trick, son. Except for bringing poor Ned Nellis into it. He was my friend. How did you make the wallet seem so heavy? I still can’t figure it out or why you’d want to waste my time.”
“It wasn’t a trick. It was real. It is real.”
Dr. Y gestured to one of his colleagues. “Gerri, would you mind escorting Ranger Kuliak to the door.”
Gerri, a young woman about Jace’s age, but quite a bit beefier, came over and said, “This way, ranger.” She paused to sniff the air. “You got something burning over here, professor?”
All three of them sampled the air, and Dr. Y said, “Smells like melted plastic.” They zeroed in on the countertop, and when Dr. Y ran his hand over its surface, he jerked it away and blew on his fingers. He moved the keyboard aside. There were no scorch marks on the formica surface. “Examine your wallet. Any holes in it or burns?”
No holes or damage, not even to the dollar bills into which the BB had been sandwiched.
Dr. Y crouched and placed his ear against the counter. “Gerri, get me a flashlight. Hurry!”
Gerri dashed from the room, and the professor got down on the floor and lay on his back. He wriggled himself under the counter.
“See something?” Jace said, lying down next to him. The others in the room gathered around their feet.
Dr. Y said, “If you have a substance that’s able to break one law of physics, it’s probably capable of breaking others.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you should probably scoot over a bit. You’re directly beneath it.”
Jace quickly moved aside, and with Gerri’s flashlight they watched the composite board undersurface of the counter.
“Someone find me a bit of lead shielding or something very dense to catch this in.”
The scientists scurried about the control room looking for something to contain the BB.
“It’s coming through. What do we have?” The undersurface dimpled, and the BB emerged slowly, like moisture gathering into a drop. “Give me something, people,” Dr. Y said. “Anything.” Someone handed him a china coffee mug, complete with coffee dregs. The professor sighed but held it up against the composite board.
The BB, when it dropped into the mug, cracked it, and Dr. Y almost dropped it. “Someone take this outside as far from the building as you can.” He set the mug
on the floor and pushed it into the room, but no one volunteered to take it. “Someone, hurry.”
Finally, Gerri picked up the coffee mug, but it broke apart in her hands, and the BB crashed to the floor. It sank through the wooden flooring quickly. The floor was raised, with space underneath for ducts and cables, the circulatory system of the control room.
“Tools, people!” Dr. Y ordered as he got to his feet. “We need to pull up the floor.”
While he waited for the tools, the professor gave Jace a wry look and said, “That was a case of first-class thinking, ranger.”
“What was?”
“You say you’re afraid your alien artifact wants to hijack my facility. So what do you do? You bring it into the facility control room. Good work.”
Jace detected a note of sarcasm.
AH5 1.0
WHEN DR. YANKOVICH’S staff pulled up the floor panels, they could find no trace of the BB. Nor was there any detectable intrusion into their control systems. Taking no chances, Dr. Y ordered the entire facility to be immediately shut down, including the power plant. He called various experts on his cell for advice and asked Eielson AFB near Fairbanks to send a security detail. He sent most of the staff and researchers home, as well as Jace.
“Go back to McHardy, ranger. You’ve helped enough for today,” he said. “We’ll call you if we have any questions. Homeland Security or someone is bound to pay you a followup visit to hear your crazy-shit story firsthand, but I think it best you don’t hang around here.”
Jace felt so stupid and so ashamed that all he could get out in reply was, “Sorry.” But Yankovich was too busy tearing the place apart to hear even that. Gerri offered Jace a ride to the Gulkana airport. She and some of the other out-of-state researchers were staying at a B&B in Glennallen during the campaign. As she drove her rental car out the gate, she said, “I spent two years of my grant putting together my experiment. It was scheduled to go tonight. Thanks a lot.”
What could he say? “Sorry.”
The white Ford park service pickup was still parked on the shoulder of the highway where he’d left it. Someone had retrieved the metal detector he left in the woods and put it on the hood. Jace looked all around for lurking strivers, and, finding none, asked Gerri to let him out there. She pulled alongside the pickup and stopped.
“We were trying to build an artificial ELF antenna in the ionosphere,” she said as he got out of the car.
“Sounds fascinating,” he replied.
“If successful, we could use it to map underground tunnels and cave systems.”
“Again, sorry. Maybe you’ll be able to do it tomorrow.”
“Doubtful. The schedule was too tight as it was. It’s a bust. Two years down the toilet.”
“I wish there was something I could do to help.”
She snorted. “Thanks and good fucking bye, ranger.”
He watched her tires kick up a spray of snow as she reentered the roadway. When he turned around, he was startled to find Masterson there, leaning against the pickup. The striver laughed at Jace’s expression.
Jace began fumbling with zippers and snaps, burrowing down through his layers for his Ruger. “I don’t have it,” he said. “The orb; I don’t have the orb. So you can go away and leave me alone.” He got the gun out at last and leveled it at the striver, who had not moved in that time.
Masterson laughed again. “Oh, I already know you don’t have it. My creator informed me. He’s pretty pleased with your performance, and surprised, too. He thought you didn’t want to cooperate, but you went and found the perfect place to deploy the orb by yourself, better than the transmitter array. Missing One says to tell you that you have more than earned a reward. So pick out which scientific wonder you want, and Missing One will send you the technical details you’ll need to make it happen. As soon as it remembers how.”
Jace kept the pistol trained on the striver.
“Oh, put that away and get in. I’ll drive you back to the airport. Your return flight should be arriving soon.”
Jace didn’t move.
“Then go ahead and shoot me already. Go on, it won’t hurt.” Masterson opened his parka to give him a clean shot of this chest. “You know you won’t rest until you find out whether or not it’s possible to kill one of us. I’ll be your willing guinea pig. Go ahead, shoot.”
BLAM!
Jace did fire. He put a .357 Magnum slug into the striver’s heart, or where his heart should have been if he still had one. The force of the blast made the striver stumble backward a few paces, but he didn’t fall down. There was a neat, round hole in his chest, but no blood came out. A few moments later the hole closed up, including the hole in his shirt, and the powder stains melted away.
“Yum, lead,” Masterson said. “My diet was lacking in lead.” He scooted the metal detector across the hood of the truck toward Jace. “Speaking of metals, return this to the gear locker when you get a chance. We’re done with it. Now hop in; I won’t harm you.”
Jace took the detector and got into the passenger seat, reassured not by the striver’s promise as much as by his lingering respect for park service equipment. It demonstrated that there was still enough of the man in the monster for him to trust.
During the short ride to the airport, Jace tried to pump Masterson for information:
What is a striver?
Are you still Masterson?
Would you have really left Deut and him on Mount Wrangell?
What are Missing One’s plans for Earth?
Does Missing One keep promises it makes?
What’s all this “remembering” stuff?
What’s going to happen at HAARP?
But Masterson deflected his questions with questions of his own:
So how is Deut in the sack?
How did they get around Poppy & Co?
How is the eyepatch kid doing these days?
Masterson stopped the pickup next to the runway and idled the engine. “A striver is a creature of God who wants to become God himself. That’s all I got so far; I’m still new at this.”
“So you’re striving to be a god?”
“Eventually, I guess. But you gotta survive long enough to get to that point. The moment you’re no longer useful to your creator, he purges you. So, the first part of the journey is remaining useful. So you strive to fulfill the Master’s wishes, down to and including its most fleeting whims. By this path shall you endure and prosper.
“Does that make sense? I’m still trying to figure it out myself.”
Things had stopped making sense a while ago.
“So Missing One tells you what to do,” Jace said. “It’s your boss or commanding officer or something?”
“Not exactly. I am in such synch with the little guy that it doesn’t even need to tell me stuff. I just know what it wants at any given moment and whether I’m the one to do it.
“As far as whether I’m still Masterson, I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. I mean, Masterson’s personality, memories, emotions, drives, dreams — they all died when he did. I’m not him, but I have access to all of it. I can recall everything he ever said, did, thought — but without any emotional tie to it. It’s like facts I memorized for a history test. They happened to somebody else.”
A small airplane touched down and rolled to the end of the runway. It was the same Piper Cub from Running Fox Air he’d flown in that morning.
“Looks like your ride is here. Got any baggage?”
“Only this.” Jace reached into the back seat for the metal detector and opened his door.
“Listen, kid, you did good today. You impressed Missing One, like I said. Now the little space monkey wants to deputize you.”
“What?”
“You’ve exceeded all its expectations. All on your own you figured out that it can’t do everything it needs with strivers alone. It’s gonna need some real humans to help if its going to succeed. So there’s no reason to worry that it’s going to striver-ize you. You
’re safe. As long as you’re useful.”
“What makes it think I even want to help it when I don’t know what it’s up to?”
“I’m a little unclear on that too, but I’ve pieced together enough to know that Missing One is one of the good guys. In fact — you’ll appreciate this — in fact, Missing One is a ranger. Like you. Like I used to be.”
“A ranger?”
“Yeah, a space ranger! That’s not what they call themselves, but it amounts to the same thing. Just like our mission is to patrol this park and to preserve it for future generations, Missing One is out there with its team of rangers protecting the galaxy.
“Only, on this particular mission his team got bushwhacked. They came to deploy a shield to protect our solar system, but they got wiped out. Except for Missing One. It escaped but was forced to make an emergency landing here. Now it seriously needs to call in backup before the bad guys get here. Otherwise, Earth is toast.”
Jace pulled his door shut without getting out. “Bad guys? Toast? What the fuck you talking about?”
Masterson shook his head. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. Anyway, that’s what HAARP is all about. It’s why Missing One landed in the park in the first place, as you’ve probably sussed out. And don’t worry, none of the researchers at HAARP will get hurt if all goes as planned. The signal will probably fry the generators and blow out the transmitters, but it’s the best shot we have of calling in the cavalry. You better go now; I have some striving I need to do.”
As Jace got out of the pickup, Masterson had one last parting revelation: “Oh, and Bertolli and I would have totally left you on Wrangell if you hadn’t threatened to shoot up the chopper.”
The Skyburn
TS1 1.0
IN HER HOUSE on Lake Lola, Alaska Governor Vera Tetlin was holding a late-night brain trust meeting of her Strategic Planning Task Force around the dinner table. In attendance, besides Bradd, were Colonel D. “Beaver” Swayne of the Alaska Liberty Force; Vera’s chief advisor Kris Derry; the commissioners of Revenue, Public Safety, and Commerce; district judge Jeb Milliner; and U.S. Army Major Armando Hidalgo of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Vera had imposed upon them a deadline to finish a plan of action for boosting Alaska’s security — Sunday, January 20, 2013, the day before President Obama’s second inaugural. With the deadline fast approaching, they had been meeting every evening of the past week.
Glassing the Orgachine Page 12