Stolen skies, p.1
Stolen Skies, page 1
Table of Contents
SUNDAY CHAPTER ONE: Hands Like Steam Shovels
CHAPTER TWO: Foo Fighters
CHAPTER THREE: Como Siempre
CHAPTER FOUR: UFO, Not NLO
CHAPTER FIVE: Underpainting
CHAPTER SIX: Epitaphs Over Lazaruses
CHAPTER SEVEN: Spiritual Danger Pay
CHAPTER EIGHT: Free Will’s a Bitch
CHAPTER NINE: Some Kind of Brujos?
CHAPTER TEN: Little Frisbees
MONDAY CHAPTER ELEVEN: A Different Method Now
CHAPTER TWELVE: Parasitoid Wasps
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Lineas de Muerta
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Visiting Old Friends
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Couple of This Old Lady’s Fingerbones
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: What There Is to Do
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Confederacy of Bums
TUESDAY CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Yo, Samson
CHAPTER NINETEEN: They Go Off by Themselves Lately
CHAPTER TWENTY: They Know Me
EPILOGUE: I Have No Idea
Table of Contents
SUNDAY CHAPTER ONE: Hands Like Steam Shovels
CHAPTER TWO: Foo Fighters
CHAPTER THREE: Como Siempre
CHAPTER FOUR: UFO, Not NLO
CHAPTER FIVE: Underpainting
CHAPTER SIX: Epitaphs Over Lazaruses
CHAPTER SEVEN: Spiritual Danger Pay
CHAPTER EIGHT: Free Will’s a Bitch
CHAPTER NINE: Some Kind of Brujos?
CHAPTER TEN: Little Frisbees
MONDAY CHAPTER ELEVEN: A Different Method Now
CHAPTER TWELVE: Parasitoid Wasps
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Lineas de Muerta
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Visiting Old Friends
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: A Couple of This Old Lady’s Fingerbones
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: What There Is to Do
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A Confederacy of Bums
TUESDAY CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Yo, Samson
CHAPTER NINETEEN: They Go Off by Themselves Lately
CHAPTER TWENTY: They Know Me
EPILOGUE: I Have No Idea
STOLEN SKIES
TIM POWERS
Stolen Skies
Tim Powers
ROGUE AGENTS SWEPT UP IN THE SEARCH FOR AN ANCIENT RELIC IN A UFO NOVEL AS ONLY TIM POWERS COULD WRITE IT!
Sebastian Vickery has learned something about UFOs that he shouldn’t have—and Naval Intelligence, desperate to silence him, orders his old partner, Agent Ingrid Castine, to trap him.
But Castine risks career, liberty, and maybe even life, to warn Vickery—and now they’re both fugitives, on the run from both the U.S. government and agents of the Russian GRU Directorate, which has its own uses for the UFO intelligence.
With the unlikely aid of a renegade Russian agent, a homeless Hispanic boy, and an eccentric old Flat-Earther, Vickery and Castine must find an ancient relic that spells banishment to the alien species, and then summon the things and use it against them—in a Samson-like confrontation that looks likely to kill them as well.
Sweeping from the Giant Rock monolith in the Mojave Desert to a cultist temple in the Hollywood Hills, from a monstrous apparition in the Los Angeles River to a harrowing midnight visitation on a boat off Long Beach Harbor, Stolen Skies is an alien-encounter novel like no other.
Books by
TIM POWERS
The Skies Discrowned
An Epitaph in Rust
The Drawing of the Dark
The Anubis Gates
Dinner at Deviant’s Palace
On Stranger Tides
The Stress of Her Regard
Fault Lines Series
Last Call
Expiration Date
Earthquake Weather
Declare
Three Days to Never
Hide Me Among the Graves
Medusa’s Web
Vickery and Castine Series
Alternate Routes
Forced Perspectives
Stolen Skies
Short Story Collections
Night Moves and Other Stories • Strange Itineraries
The Bible Repairman and Other Stories
Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers
Stolen Skies
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Tim Powers
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2583-7
eISBN: 978-1-62579-850-3
Cover art by Eric Williams
First printing, January 2022
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Powers, Tim, 1952- author.
Title: Stolen skies / by Tim Powers.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021042635 | ISBN 9781982125837 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3566.O95 S76 2022 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042635
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
To Tom and Debbie Gilchrist
for years of friendship and advice
With thanks to:
David Brin, Tony Daniel, Preston Dennett, J.R. Dunn, Ken Estes,
Russell Galen, Tom Gilchrist, Brian McCaleb, Elizabeth O’Brien,
Elena Pagter, Serena Powers, Tina Princethal, Joe Stefko,
Toni Weisskopf, and Bill and Peggy Wu
SUNDAY
CHAPTER ONE:
Hands Like Steam Shovels
After making good time through Reston on Highway 267, the government Chevy Suburban slowed as brake lights flashed on in the dark highway lanes ahead of it.
Slouched in the passenger seat, Ingrid Castine watched the black silhouettes of the trees alongside the highway bending in the wind against the the paler night sky. She was glad to stretch her legs several inches farther than she’d been able to during the last eight hours, in the coach seat of the American Airlines flight from London’s Heathrow Airport to Dulles International.
Even with the heavier traffic, the drive would probably be less than an hour. It was a familiar ride, down past the Beltway Loop through Falls Church toward the Potomac, but she wouldn’t be going to the Office of Naval Research building, as she usually did—tonight she was summoned to an office in the Pentagon.
Probably she was to be transferred again. She had been recruited into the Transportation Utility Agency right out of college eight years ago, and five years later the TUA had been terminated, and she’d been shuffled to the Office of Naval Intelligence; and then last year she had been transferred to what was—as of yesterday, at least—her present job, as a field investigator with the Office of Naval Research.
The jobs had all proved to be disquietingly weird. What could be next? she wondered sourly. Was there a Sub-Department of Tactical Astrology? An Auxiliary Office of Dowsing?
She shifted in her seat and glanced at the driver. Short haircut, dark suit—apparently in his early thirties like herself. He had been professionally cheerful when he had met her at the disembarking gate and opened his wallet to show her an Office of Naval Intelligence identification card, and had obligingly wheeled her suitcase to the waiting Suburban and stashed it in the back, but when she had asked why it was ONI that was picking her up, and why she was being taken to the Pentagon, he had simply shaken his head in evident distaste. She had got the impresssion that his answer would have been, Some damn fool thing.
As usual, she thought now, and she shivered. And with my peculiar ability, or handicap, I seem to make things worse.
Castine had never told her employers that ever since a traumatic crisis in May of 2017 she had not been securely fixed in sequential time, as just about everyone else was; if she deliberately caused her vision to blur, and then made herself focus past the shapes she saw, she was generally able to see her surroundings as they had been in the recent past—from a couple of minutes earlier to a bit more than an hour. The retro-views seldom lasted longer than a minute, but during them she was blind and deaf to whatever might be going on in real time, so she only sought them deliberately when she was alone, and she had found that drinking lots of coffee could reliably keep them from happening spontaneously.
A man in California had been with her in the crisis three years ago, and shared her peculiar ability, but she hadn’t spoken to him in more than a year. At that time the echo-vision, as he had called the phenomenon, had for a period of about a month shown them only sequential views of an old house where terrible things had happened fifty years earlier; but those views had been projected into the psychic ether by a man who died in 2018, and the echo-vision had worked reliably since then, in the few instances when she had ventured to use it.
Worked reliably, she amended, until last night. The Office of Naval Research travel order had come just after her supervisor in Wiltshire m ade his report on that night’s operation.
To her right, the full moon was intermittently visible through the waving black tree limbs. Somewhere beyond them lay Fort Myers and Arlington Cemetery. There had been trees bending in a night wind in Wiltshire too, twenty-some hours ago, with this same full moon above them; and she was too tired now to push back the memory of what she had seen, or hallucinated, in that English field off the A360, just south of Tilshead.
She quickly turned away, toward the driver. “How do I get in?” she asked, just to hear her own voice here.
He rolled his wrist on the steering wheel to glance at his watch. “You’ve got your phone on you?”
Castine tapped the front of her coat. “Of course.”
He nodded. “When you scan your ONR badge at the entrance security checkpoint, you’ll get a text code to enter on a keypad there.”
She hadn’t run into that on her several previous visits to the Pentagon. “Okay,” she said, and added, “Sorry to wreck your evening.”
He just shrugged and went on squinting at the cars ahead. Evidently he didn’t want to talk. She sighed and looked back out the window at the trees.
That field in Wiltshire was nearly four thousand miles behind her, but over the new-upholstery smell of the car’s interior she could almost catch the remembered reek of crushed and scorched English wheat stalks.
For the last four months she had been assigned to a Naval Research field office in Southampton. One of her main duties had been to drive out into the country in the middle of the night with a team of four other special agents, and make convincing crop circles in one or another of the many fields of wheat and barley that were accessible from the main roads.
It hadn’t been easy. Plant stalks in genuine crop circles showed expulsion cavities and elongated nodes, so Castine’s ONR team had had to bring along a generator to power a couple of portable microwave guns that they’d jury-rigged from disassembled microwave ovens, and sweep their beams across the bases of as many of the plants as time permitted; one night they had accidentally radiated a cell phone one of the team had dropped, and the phone had exploded. And, again to match the characteristics of the real thing, they had had to heat a lot of magnetized iron pellets and toss them around. The final part of the task had been to simply drag boards on ropes across the fields to flatten the grain, using Leica laser surveying meters to make their patterns symmetrical.
And then after a few days, during which their elaborate crop circles would have been noticed and have drawn the excited attention of the public, Castine and her team would revisit the sites in their official Office of Naval Research capacity, and prove that they had been hoaxes. The exploded cell phone had proved to be so effective as a debunking detail that they had used the trick again a couple of times.
And the ONR field office maintained a fleet of drones, equipped with directional microphones and infrared scopes, that flew low over the Wiltshire fields at night to spot new, genuine crop circles—and the remote pilots were careful not to fly a drone directly over one because the little aircraft always lost power then, and sometimes blew up. When a genuine circle was located, Castine and her team raced to the spot and trampled conspicuous pathways from the nearest road to the new pattern of mysteriously flattened grain, and dropped cigarette butts and empty beer cans and crumpled petrol station receipts among the whorls of horizontal stalks. They generally hadn’t even needed to revisit those—the curious public was quick to find the deposited litter and dismiss the sites as hoaxes without any help.
Last night—which was further in the past for her than for most people, since she had flown from east to west at 500 miles an hour for eight hours—Castine and her ONR team had got a positive signal from one of the drones, and piled into their van and sped along the A360 to the indicated wheat field a mile south of Tilshead.
There were ONR-mandated precautions to be observed when entering a genuine crop circle. Bursts of alpha and beta radiation had been detected at a couple of sites, and the research agents carried hand-held radiation meters; and lately among the cultists and cranks who flocked to every newly reported site there were wild and unsubstantiated stories of people being lifted from their feet and thrown impossible distances, and patches of cold so intense that monitoring cameras spontaneously shattered and couldn’t be touched for hours. That was all obvious nonsense, but in the last month the ONR team had found that the sites became very cold shortly after the phenomena had occurred.
The ONR agents approached each site carefully, and they maintained continuous, if sometimes inexplicably sporadic, radio contact with the field office in Southampton. Castine always dutifully followed the procedures, but until last night in the field beside the A360 she had never encountered anything but the silent, mystifying symbols imprinted in the landscapes of grain.
And until last night Castine had not experienced any of the physical ill-effects that had sometimes afflicted her fellow agents and the tourists who visited the spots later—tingling of the skin, dizziness, spontaneous weeping, even hallucinations—but that had changed when she tried to question a woman they found in that field.
The flattened pattern in the wheat had been wide in the moonlight, stretching a hundred yards in a set of variously sized spirals and a couple of torn-up areas closer to hand. Even from ground-level, by moonlight, Castine could see that it was one of the more complex patterns that had been showing up just in the last couple of weeks, with, in ONR terms, “extensions and double-dumbbells and curling entourages of diminishing grapeshot prints.” And, as often lately, she could dimly make out a whirlwind-like column of dust standing above the center of the pattern.
Castine had found the woman, cowering and unable to speak, crouched in a sort of nest she had made for herself off one of the smaller curls of the pattern.
The woman was about twenty years old, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, and Castine had had to pull her hand out of her mouth to stop her chewing her already bloody fingers; and Castine had spun around in alarm when the woman suddenly gasped and pointed past her; but there was nothing to be seen besides the rows of standing wheat that bordered the flattened and interwoven stalks.
Whatever had happened there, it was over—the pattern was finished and the characteristic intense chill was beginning to set in. But this woman had seen something that had frightened her out of her senses. Castine and her team had arrived within ten minutes of the drone’s signal, though, so the event had been recent.
While the other agents lifted the still-speechless woman to her feet and half-carried her back toward the van, Castine looked out across the field in the direction the woman had pointed, and—quickly before she could change her mind—let her eyes unfocus.
The field and the sky were now abstract variously gray shapes in her vision, and she made herself look past their now-meaningless streaks, past the insignificantly immediate moment.
Her view of the field brightened slightly, though the light was a color comparable to copper, and she recalled that the man in California who shared the echo-vision ability had speculated that it might be infrared light, received directly in the primary visual cortex and not through the narrow-band retinas.
Tiny spots of brightness, invisible to normal sight, would be the characteristic hot iron pellets, but Castine’s attention wasn’t on them.
Thirty feet ahead of her in the round clearing was—had recently been, rather—what appeared to be three naked and malformed figures, hunched close together and facing away. Castine shuddered, for though the expanses of bare striated flesh were shifting and flexing, they were as dark as the standing wheat behind them, and in the echo-visions living flesh glowed.
