Spears of God Read online

  “Very good,” General Retticker said, extending his hand for her to shake. “Make the stones talk—that’s exactly what we need you to do. We’ll leave you to it, for now. I’ll also leave my card and contact information with your department secretary. Keep in touch, and keep me in the loop. Good luck.”

  She rather regretted seeing him go. Kind of her type, if she were in the market for a little romance. Which she wasn’t just at the moment. Too busy, especially now. As she gloved up and set to work, Professor Pittman soon found herself captivated with the stone they’d brought her.

  HEAD TO HEAD

  Animals in our shadows.

  Those were the images Joe Retticker had in his head when he woke from a snooze on the flight back to California from Colorado. As the helicopter to which he’d transferred carried him through sunset light over the rumpled grassland and chaparral landscape of Camp Pendleton, he pondered what might have made such a thing pop up in his dreams.

  Sounded vaguely enviro, now that he thought about it. Maybe it had something to do with the name he’d selected for this mission: Operation Star Thrower. In a biology class he took when he was at West Point, he’d read an essay called “The Star Thrower.”

  The professor who’d taught the course had been something of an environmentalist. These days he’d probably be branded as a fanatic, since successive administrations in Washington had succeeded in making environmentalism virtually synonymous with terrorism in the public’s mind. There’d been nothing covert about that teacher, though. He’d been more than forthcoming with his beliefs. The essay, by Loren Eiseley, had been a good read, too—whatever its politics.

  The thud of the helo touching down ended his reverie. Exiting the helicopter, he heard the sound of its rotors slowing over his head as he made his way across a grassy ridgetop. He was saluted by a jut-jawed, thickly muscled Army Ranger he recognized as Major Marc Vasques. He returned the salute and shook Vasques’s hand.

  “Good to see you, Major. How are the training exercises going?”

  “If you’ll follow me, sir, you’ll be able to see for yourself. You’re just in time.”

  In the deepening twilight, they walked toward a point overlooking a small box canyon. Vasques handed the general a pair of binoculars. Retticker saw that they were bimodals—for both day and night vision.

  Below their perch, a joint services training activity of the Enhanced Warfighter program, in cooperation with MERC, the Military Executive Resource Corporation, was about to get under way.

  “The green team you see there just came out of the surf,” Vasques said.

  “Enhanced?”

  “Yes sir. Power armor, full heads-up enhanced sensoria. They have to pass through this small canyon to reach their objective. Blue team plans to give them a bit of a surprise, though.”

  “Blue team enhanced, too?”

  “Yes sir. SEALs, Rangers, special operations people on both sides—all new and improved.”

  General Retticker watched as the troops of green team advanced. He had just started to wonder where the blue team might be when a flash went off in the center of the canyon. He saw green team members banging their helmets with their hands or gun butts, then quickly flipping the heads-up visors away from their eyes.

  “Focused mag-pulse bomb,” Vasques said. “Takes out the heads-up electronics. Not big enough to take out the power armor, though.”

  Retticker nodded. As he watched, he saw the green team’s advance go suddenly awry. Out of nowhere, fighters—the blue team—appeared, as if they had risen from the ground itself. Close-quarters battle followed, spectacular yet eerily quiet. “Kills,” he saw, caused the power armor to go rigid, then collapse—quite effectively simulating a mortal hit.

  Among those who hadn’t been hit, a fantastic battle of supermen ensued. High-flying leaps and kicks and strikes everywhere, almost too fast to follow.

  “Brilliant,” Retticker muttered under his breath. Then, more clearly, “How’d blue team conceal itself so well?”

  “The new chameleon camo, sir,” Vasques said. “The stuff matches patterns in background temperature, as well as optical patterns. The temperature ranges and shadows at this time of the evening don’t hurt either.”

  Retticker nodded, without taking his eyes off the tableau before them.

  “Yes, yes. If I recall right, that new camo muffles breathing, even the sound of the wearer’s heartbeat.

  Very effective.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Below and before them, the leaps and falls and throws—all of the superhuman grappling between the soldiers—continued apace. Watching from this height, however, it was clear that the blue team had gained the upper hand, and would be mopping up before long—kicking butt and taking names.

  “It’s like watching a Hong Kong martial arts movie,” Retticker said, turning now to face Vasques. “With the sound turned off.” He switched the binocs to close-up mode.

  “Yes sir. We’re regular ninja masters, all right. And we don’t need wires and harnesses for our tricks.”

  Retticker thought he heard something worth pursuing in Vasques’s voice. He removed the bimod binocs from his eyes and peered at the major, who was no longer watching what was going on below.

  “It sounds as if you’re not impressed by your supersoldiers, Major. How so? I thought our recent field test for MERC was a success.”

  “They are impressive, sir, but—” Vasques paused. “Permission to speak frankly, General?”

  “Granted—and welcome. As always.”

  “Sir, when we hit that tepui down there, we had every advantage. We had surprise on our side. We had night vision and the cave’s darkness. Power armor and lethal firepower, against bare skin and spears.

  And we still lost two men.”

  “You were taking them on their own turf, Major. They knew the ground. They were the home team, fighting for their homes.”

  “Yes sir, but home court advantage should have meant next to nothing. It should have been a cakewalk.”

  “Any ideas why it was more challenging than you expected?”

  “Nothing certain, sir. Just hunches.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, sir, it was like, from the moment we first stumbled onto one of them, they all instantly knew we were there. There was no way they could have spread the alarm—we made sure of that. Yet, for some reason, the silencers we started with didn’t seem to silence them.”

  “And?”

  “The cohesiveness with which those people responded…it made me realize something, sir. Individual supersoldiers in supersuits aren’t the same thing as a superhuman fighting unit. Heads-up displays and GPS can still only get you so far. That’s why we had to kill so many of those tepui people—maybe all of them. We had no choice. They just wouldn’t stop coming at us. They were of one mind, especially when it came to that rock of theirs. They were determined not to give it up, no matter what the cost. One of my men thought it might be some kind of meteorite.”

  “It is—at least according to the scientists who have it now.”

  “Sir, those plateau people seemed to think it was awfully important. Important enough to die for.”

  “Lots of people all over the world have thought certain objects were awfully important, at one time or another. Sometimes those objects have been meteorites. That’s what the experts say, anyway. We don’t know much about this particular rock yet. We’re still in the early stages of the analysis.”

  Vasques glanced at his feet. When he looked up again, his voice was tight.

  “It was almost as if they wanted to die. A bunch of soldier-assisted suicides,” Vasques said. “Sir, the bodies we brought back for the docs, did they…did they find anything strange or unusual about them?”

  Retticker smiled.

  “There were a few anomalies. They all shared a rather unusual fungal infection. Rather outsized pineal glands, in the adults. Nothing that would account for the sort of cohesion you mentioned, though.�
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  Major Vasques nodded, but he looked somewhat downcast.

  “General, if your science wizards could come up with something to give us that kind of head-to-head connection among our troops in the field, added to our technical superiority, it would make for an unstoppable combination.”

  “Already part of the program, Major. Mind-machine action-at-adistance—M2A3D. That’s the tech. As for head-to-head telepathy, it’s what the scientists call ‘conjoint consciousness.’ It’d certainly go a long way toward cutting through the fog of war, I’ll give you that.”

  He glanced at Vasques.

  “So far we’ve had more luck with M2A3D,” he added ruefully.

  “That about brain-machine links?” Vasques asked. “Joystick-trained monkeys, moving cursors and robot arms with nothing but a thought?”

  “We’re a good ways beyond that sort of thing,” Retticker said. “It’s not conjoint consciousness, though—that’s a different story—but we’re working on it. Anything else, Major? Any other ‘hunches’?”

  To Retticker’s surprise, Vasques looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “There is something else, sir. I don’t know, but it seemed that, at points during the fight, those people were projecting their pain back at us, right into our heads. It was all we could do to keep going. None of us like to talk about it, but I think all of us felt it at some point in the mission.”

  “Intriguing, Major. And certainly worth investigating further. Thank you for your input.”

  “Yes sir. I hope it helps, sir.”

  Darkness was falling, so they switched their bimodal binoculars to night vision and watched as, on the shadowed plain below them, small armies still clashed by night. As Retticker had anticipated, the blue team’s members had overwhelmed their opponents at last.

  Who knows what we might learn from what’s out there in the twilight? Retticker thought, pondering what Vasques had said. From the crazy stuff, the wild stuff. From the animals in our shadows.

  THE ARGUS SPIDER

  Jim Brescoll sat quietly in his new office, so quietly, in fact, that to the uninformed bystander he might have appeared to be napping, his eyes safely hidden behind dark glasses.

  Admiral Janis Rollwagen’s office decor had been spartan—so austerely Scandinavian that the office hadn’t looked all that much emptier when her furnishings were at last hauled away. Brescoll had replaced those with the old dark wood of his antiques. He fully believed that more than just the furniture had been changed, however. He hoped he was already accomplishing the business of national security in a new way, as well.

  The recently concluded Kwok-Cho affair had lived up to both sides of the ancient Chinese understanding of the word crisis: danger, and opportunity. That series of events had been dangerous enough in its unfolding, especially for Rollwagen, who had been revealed as a creature of the secret societies and shadow security apparatuses that had riddled the intelligence community for years.

  For Brescoll, though, the precarious episode had proved to be a tremendous opportunity. At its most dangerous point, Jim Brescoll himself had been put under arrest by his agency’s own internal security forces, the Emergency Response Team’s Special Operations Unit. In an instant, however, the situation had flipped and he had gone from being a prisoner to being the first African-American—and first civilian—director of NSA.

  History had left his agency with blots enough on its escutcheon, no doubt about that, but he’d willingly taken over the helm in hopes of steering it by a better star. His transformation and the transformation of his agency paled, however, in comparison with the change experienced by the secret architect of the revolution. Ben Cho had undergone a metamorphosis that seemed barely describable in human terms—Metaquantum Apotheosis, or Transcendence, or Singularity. Then he’d vanished utterly from the world stage. Perhaps human affairs were beneath his notice now.

  Indeed, Brescoll supposed the Apotheosized One was busy enough with his own concerns, out there at the end of time, looking back like a distant guardian angel or bodhisattva over the vast ensemble of branching universes. To tell the truth, Brescoll found himself hoping that the Transcendent One was out of the picture for good. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the intervention of superhumans in human history.

  Life was so much simpler when it stayed within the smaller compass of the known and the familiar in a post–Peak Oil world. Once they’d learned the petroleum supply had most likely dropped past the half-empty mark, greedy nations seemed all the more eager to wage wars, greedy individuals seemed all the more bent on enhancing their personal power bases, and the president and the cabinet seemed more willing than ever to play musical deck chairs on Planet Titanic.

  With a sigh, Brescoll peered into his AR glasses and pivoted down the mike, thus allowing him the luxury of voice commands. At least these new ARGUS blinks were more user-friendly than previous Augmented Reality glasses had been. Blinking into them and calling for selections, Jim pulled his messages and links out from peripheral vision and into the center of his visual field. He blinked on the first one.

  Dear Director Brescoll:

  Whether from minds under the influence of stars, or stars under the influence of minds, new constellations are coming into being. Just thought you’d like to know.

  Best,

  Karuna Benson

  Cherise LeMoyne

  Don Markham

  Jim wouldn’t have given the message much thought had it not intruded over his quantum crypto hardline.

  That was supposed to be impossible. His two chief scientific advisers from the Kwok-Cho days, Steve Wang of Princeton’s Institute for Defense Analysis and Bree Lingenfelter from NSA’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the University of Maryland, both assured him as much. Yet there it was.

  The three signers had been involved in the Ben Cho/Jaron Kwok affair. They were reportedly still dwelling inside an underground powerhouse in California’s Sierra Nevada—inside a mountain that was in turn protected beneath an impenetrable blister of exotic energy, a force-field dome. Several other impenetrable spots had appeared elsewhere across the globe—over what had been the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall in China and in the South American Tri-Border, most importantly.

  None of those domes were exactly your everyday street address, which also made the message harder to ignore, whatever the motivations of the three senders might be.

  Markham and Benson and LeMoyne had attached several site-linked files, which he now brought before his eyes. One was a brief newsnote announcing that billionaire investors George Otis and Dr. Ka Vang were sponsoring research into spontaneous human combustion. Their goal, on the face of it, seemed to be to debunk the phenomenon once and for all.

  Otis, an archconservative former cabinet member, and Vang, the computing mogul with connections to the discredited Tetragrammaton network, were a pair of odd bedfellows indeed. Jim wondered if there might be more to their “investments” than the curiosity of a couple of wealthy debunkers.

  Although Vang and Otis’s endeavor might just be a fluke or odd coincidence, he would keep an eye on it anyway, just to be safe. Tetragrammaton was down, but it was never wise to count someone like Vang out—at least not until you were absolutely sure.

  As creator and CEO of ParaLogics, Vang had at one time run the largest specialty supercomputer firm in the world, a company whose biggest clients were the NSA and the CIA. Not bad for a guy born to a Southeast Asian peasant family in a village with a shaman and neolithic-level culture, recruited to service in a CIA-sponsored guerrilla army when he was just barely into his teens, and then, after Vietnam, retrained in California via an Intelligence-sponsored scholarship, to become an All-American success story in the information sciences.

  No, Jim admitted grudgingly, it might not be smart to declare him a dead number just yet.

  The second attachment was another news article, this one more extensive, describing a deal under which Victor Fremdkunst, meteorite hunter and self-proclaimed “fine
art lapidary,” had consummated a transaction with the curator of the Vatican’s meteorite collection, handing over an undisclosed number of iron-nickel meteorites in exchange for what was thought to be a meteorite of lunar origin.

  Related links led to sites chronicling the outcry against Fremdkunst for turning meteorites into a crass commodity. It seemed he was shaving thin slices from the skystones and applying lapidary techniques to highlight their unique features. Fremdkunst claimed thus to have succeeded in transforming the fallen stars from “artifacts” into “art.” His creations had become modish conversation pieces fetching hefty prices among the wealthiest of the beau monde.

  According to the news sites and hobby blogs, Fremdkunst’s marketing success had driven up the worldwide price of meteorites to the point that it was becoming increasingly difficult for museums and research institutions to purchase new finds for their collections. With increased demand, there had come a spate of thefts as the black market sought to profit from the situation. Fremdkunst was blamed for the crime wave as well.

  Jim always found it hard to determine how reliable this rumor-mill stuff might be. Undoubtedly some of it was valuable material, but much blogging and online reporting was less journalism than journal jism—not so much works of genius as jerks of wienius.

  Through the various links, however, Jim was able to blink, in turn, to more solid news sites. There he found details concerning the disappearance and presumed theft of the antarctic Adelie Land meteorite from the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. He also read the happier story of how a security guard at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History had foiled an attempted burglary.

  There, too, the target was the museum’s meteorite collections.

  Other links Markham, Benson, and LeMoyne had sent him seemed less directly related to one another.

  The first was a brief news report on an apparently random suicide bombing that had led to the death in Israel of Enide Zaragosa, the daughter of Argentinian-Jewish meteoriticist Avram Zaragosa. Her father had been forced to leave a delegation that was accompanying the exhibition of Argentinian meteorites currently wending its way through a tour of museums and universities throughout the world. Israeli and Argentinian authorities, firmly maintained that Enide’s death was unrelated to the exhibition or her father’s work.