PRAYERS FOR A
SAINT
Text ©2008 The Angst Guy
(theangstguy@yahoo.com)
Daria and associated
characters are ©2008 MTV Networks
Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me,
whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com
Synopsis: Amy Barksdale takes her favorite niece out to
celebrate the publication of a Melody Powers story. Another story follows.
Author’s Notes: This mini-technothriller was written in
response to Thea Zara’s PPMB contest for writing a fanfic story in which
someone discovers Daria Morgendorffer’s “Melody Powers” stories, producing
peculiar aftereffects. The tale grew in the telling until it was too big to
post on PPMB, however. Much of this story is based on research notes I had
generated for an unpublished technothriller novel unrelated to Daria.
Acknowledgements: My thanks go out to Thea Zara for her
contest, and to my beta-readers (in something like alphabetical order): Ace
Trax, Brother Grimace, Crusading Saint, Dennis, Deref, Galen “Lawndale Stalker”
Hardesty, RedlegRick, Robert Nowall, Ruthless Bunny, Steven Galloway, (again)
Thea Zara, THM727, and Wyvern337. Further acknowledgments are at the story’s
end.
*
Macbeth: How now, you secret, black,
and midnight hags! What is ’t you do?
Three Witches: A deed without a name.
—William
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I
Amy
Barksdale flipped through the digest-sized pulp magazine until she got to the
novelette that had brought her to Boston. She sighed as she looked at the
artwork of the determined-looking female astronaut, opposite the story’s title
page and the author’s byline: By Daria Morgendorffer.
“So, my
favorite niece finally got published,” she said, “and boy, did you ever! How in
the world did you come up with this story?”
Daria felt
a thrill run through her down to her toes. The favorite niece and her favorite
aunt had a private booth at the best seafood restaurant in Boston, a
fine-dining establishment far above Daria’s college-freshman budget. “It’s been
floating around in my head for a long time,” she said. “I wanted to do a
spy-in-space story, something better than that movie Moonraker, and it
sort of . . . um . . .”
“Blasted
off,” Amy finished. She laid the digest on the table before her. “You won’t
believe this, but I actually buy this magazine, Cold War & Hot Lead.
It has excellent espionage fiction. I read it at work when things are slow.
It’s great fun.” She shook her head slowly. “It’s just incredible to see your
name in here—and your story even got the cover art! An excellent painting, too,
professionally speaking.”
Daria’s
face radiated delight. “My friend Jane Lane, the one who goes to the fine arts
school here—she did the painting and all the interiors. My editor said authors
never get any say over the art, but the magazine’s art director saw Jane’s
sketches, and he—well, blasted off.”
Amy’s
eyes widened. “Jane did this? That’s wonderful! I definitely have to meet her
while I’m in town. It’s perfect for this great story you did. It has lots of
action, and the characters are excellent, too. It really made me think. I read
it the second I got it home from the bookstore. I was just in paradise and had
to fly out to tell you.”
Daria’s cheeks turned red. “Thank you.” She hesitated before adding, “That means a lot to me, Aunt Amy.”
“You’re
welcome.” Amy tapped the magazine with a forefinger, unable to keep from
smiling. “I notice that Melody Powers has a spy sister named Harmony, a spy
best friend who’s an artist, and a . . . spy aunt.” Amy gave Daria a
sidelong look, one eyebrow raised. “Annie Blackdale?”
Daria’s
blush deepened, but she couldn’t help a smile, either. “It’s just a name.”
“I
see—and Godiva is just a chocolate. Any particular reason you gave Melody a spy
aunt?”
“I, um,
sort of wanted to share the glory.”
Amy
snorted. “You spread glory around like manure on a farm. Well, at least you
didn’t call her aunt Helen or Rita. I should be grateful.”
“I was
thinking about giving Annie her own spin-off series, if Melody Powers catches
on.”
Amy
rolled her eyes. “Some people’s kids,” she murmured. “Okay, I have to know all
the dirty details. Pretend I’m really, really smart and not just a dull boring
art appraiser. How did you come up with the plot and all of these . . .
spaceships? Did you make them all up?”
“Well, the
Mjolnir is kind of made up. It’s based on an old space-glider project the Air
Force had, called Dyna-Soar. It’s not spelled like ‘dinosaur,’ it’s spelled . .
. well, forget it. Anyway, I assumed that there was an actual, completely built
Dyna-Soar spacecraft left over from the 1960s, in storage somewhere, and
Melody’s aunt, Annie, used it when she attacked the Soviet battle station at
the start of the tale.”
“Uh-huh.
Where’d you get the name ‘Mjolnir’?”
“That’s
the hammer of Thor, from Norse mythology. It was the weapon Thor used to kill
the Midgard serpent during the final battle between the good gods and evil
gods.”
“Ragnarok.”
“Yeah,”
said Daria, then she stopped and stared at her aunt, her mouth open.
Amy
managed to look offended. “I read, too, you know,” she said.
“Oh.
Right.”
“You say
that in such a sincere way. Keep talking, my dear favorite
niece.”
Daria
smirked. “Anyway, the project that Mjolnir was part of, SAINT, actually existed
once. SAINT was an acronym for ‘satellite interceptor.’ There was another Air
Force project about forty years ago with that name, at the same time as
Dyna-Soar was around. The Air Force wanted to build a spacecraft that could
shoot down or destroy hostile satellites in earth orbit. Russian satellites, of
course.”
“That’s
amazing.”
Daria
hesitated. “The rest might be a little boring. It’s mostly technical and
historical stuff.”
“Try
me.”
“Okay.
Um—the SAINT project got cancelled when some international space treaties came
along that banned the use of weaponry in outer space, but SAINT kept appearing
and disappearing in different forms over the years. It’s what we now think of
as an ASAT program, ASAT for antisatellite. We shot down one of our own
satellites in earth orbit in the 1980s, as a test.”
“I think
I heard about that. We used a missile launched from a fighter jet, right?”
Daria
gave her aunt another curious look. “Yeah,” she said at last. “A missile from
an F-15.” She recovered and went on. “Anyway, the robotic Soviet battle station
I wrote about in ‘A Prayer for SAINT X’ actually existed, too.”
“You
have to tell me about that one.”
“Sure.
It was pretty weird. A lot of stuff’s come out about that satellite, the
Polyus. It was a sort of nightmare project, the Soviets’ last-ditch response to
President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.”
“The
‘Star Wars’ thing.”
“Yeah.
What happened was, in the early 1980s a bunch of Soviet premiers came and went
really fast, old guys who kept dying off right after they gained power. One or
two of them were sort of nuts, I think. One of the nutty ones got really upset
at Reagan’s SDI program, and the premier decided to create a way around it,
an—” Daria raised her hands and made quote marks with her fingers
“—‘asymmetrical response.’ If the Americans could shoot down regular ICBMs, the
only solution was to build a battle station that could launch its missiles
directly down over the U.S. from orbit. There would be no warning time, and
once the station was overhead, the nuclear missiles would hit us in just six
minutes instead of a half hour or so for slowpoke ICBMs. SDI would be useless,
but we wouldn’t know that. The Soviets would have the upper hand after all.”
“Couldn’t
SDI have shot the battle station down once it was in orbit, though?”
“Not if
we didn’t know it was a battle station. The Polyus was pretty big, but the
Soviets claimed it was an engineering satellite full of test equipment, which
was sort of true. The Soviets launched it on the first flight of their largest
successful rocket, the Energia, which was as powerful as a Saturn V. This was
in May 1987, like in the story.”
“Huh.
Where’d you find out about this?”
“I read
about the Polyus and the Energia in a science magazine a few years ago. I was
really stunned, so I looked up more information about them on the Internet and
in some other magazines, because I kept thinking I could do something with the
concept in a story. Someone else beat me to it, though. That movie with Clint
Eastwood, Space Cowboys, I think was based in part on the Polyus story.”
“You’re
saying that the Soviets put a real nuclear battle station into orbit in the
late 1980s?”
“It
didn’t have any nukes on it. It really was a test vehicle, but it was supposed
to try out all the weapons systems and defenses the actual Polyus would have:
nuclear missile launcher, ASAT defense cannon, laser reflector, barium-cloud
dispenser for use against particle beams, and other stuff. The Russians later
said that some of the project’s technicians screwed up, however. They
accidentally fixed the maneuvering rockets on the station to fire incorrectly,
so just as soon as the Polyus got to the point where it was ready to go into
orbit, its rockets fired in the wrong direction and made the whole satellite
fall out of orbit. It reentered and crashed somewhere in the Pacific.”
“The
Americans didn’t really shoot it down, then, like in your story.”
“No. We
had no idea the Russians were even doing this. We screwed up, too—never had a
single clue as to what was up. Military intelligence is such an oxymoron.”
Amy winced. “You do like to stick
it in and twist it, don’t you?”
Daria
grinned. “What do you care? You’re too smart to be in military intelligence!”
Amy’s
gaze drifted down to the magazine again. She was quiet for a few moments. “I’m
very proud of you, Daria,” she finally said. “You can’t imagine how proud I
am.”
When Amy
looked over at her niece, Daria’s eyes were unusually bright. Daria looked
away, embarrassed. She picked up her cotton napkin and wiped off her glasses
with it, dabbing her eyes as well. She sniffed and put her glasses back on.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice a little rough.
“I’m
sorry your folks couldn’t be here to celebrate with us. I’m afraid I didn’t
give much notice, though, flying in on a whim like this.”
“I’m . .
. I’m happy with just the two of us.”
“Know
what? Me, too. This Melody Powers character of yours is a dynamite chick. Is
this your first story about her?”
“Oh, no.
I’ve been writing these for years, since junior high.”
“I was
wondering about that. I had the impression you’d worked a lot with her. It
shows in the story.”
Daria
just smiled. “Enough about me. How’s the art appraisal business?”
Amy took
a deep breath and let it out. She stared down at the little plate in front of
her, covered with crumbs from her appetizer. “Sort of boring, actually. Not as
much fun as it used to be, even with all the traveling.” She was silent for a
moment. “I wonder sometimes how life would be different if I’d taken up another
line of work.”
“Like
what?”
Amy was
quiet again for a few seconds. When she did speak, her voice was very low. “I
wonder what life would have been like . . . if I had done something odd, like .
. . oh, join the CIA or something like it. You know, pretend to be an art
appraiser, to keep certain annoying family members out of my life, but in
reality be an intelligence analyst.”
Daria
grinned. “Like cousin Erin’s husband, before he got canned?”
Amy
looked pained. “Thank you for bringing back that special memory. I’d
almost pushed the wedding entirely out of my mind.”
“Don’t
be offended, okay? But I can’t imagine you as a real spy.”
Amy
suppressed a little smile and looked away, across the dining room. Her eyes
narrowed in thought. “I imagine there would be all sorts of people in
intelligence work. Some, a small few, do the legwork in other countries, but
most of the rest stay home in boring places like the Pentagon or Arlington,
looking over satellite photos and recorded messages and news programs, trying
to make sense of it all. Everyone’s looking for the common threads we need to
know, to keep us safe. I’ve heard it’s challenging work, but it can get to be a
routine, and you don’t often hit it big. It can be frightening, too, if you
learn certain things. Or so I’ve heard.”
“Yeah.”
Daria looked around their table. “Looks like we still have some time before the
lobster gets here. Those people in that booth across the room were here before
us, and they’ve not been served yet.”
“Hmmm.
So few people are in here, I thought . . . oh, well.” Amy looked down and
picked up the magazine again. “This was great.”
Daria
just smiled.
“I’m not
a writer like you,” said Amy softly, “but I wonder how I would do a story like
this if I were. A writer, I mean.”
“How
would you do it?”
Amy
stared at the magazine’s cover, at the winged black spacecraft firing missiles
and bullets far above the blue Earth. The silence drew out.
“If it
were up to me,” said Amy slowly, “and I were writing the story, I would have
used an old Mercury spacecraft, not a Dyna-Soar.”
The
smile on Daria’s face flickered. Surprise and puzzlement crept in. “A Mercury
capsule? Like what John Glenn used? Why?”
“Because
there aren’t any Dyna-Soars around,” said Amy. “Boeing didn’t build any. That’s
D-Y-N-A-S-O-A-R, right? For ‘dynamic soaring’?”
Daria’s
face went blank. “Uh, yeah, that’s—”
“Boeing
made a full-scale plywood model of a Dyna-Soar, for show, but that was all.
McDonnell Aircraft made twenty Mercuries, though, and four were unused after
the program ended. I’d have picked one of those, one that wasn’t in the public
eye, like capsule number twelve-B out in the Silver Springs warehouses in
Maryland. Mercuries each had their own resin heat shields, for reentry after
the mission, and they were flight-tested. You could scrounge a few parts from
other museum spacecraft, like number seventeen at Wright-Pat and number fifteen
in California, but that could be done without a lot of trouble, since the
government owns them all. You’d have to clean it up and add new parts, of
course, rewire the electrical system and put in new flight controls, a web
couch, a real computer, and a stick control for the pilot, like on the shuttle.
The spacecraft would weigh over a ton and a half, but you could do it.”
The look
of complete shock on Daria’s face deepened. “Aunt Amy?” she gasped.
Amy
chewed her lower lip. “True, it would help a lot if the project had actually
been started in the 1970s, something the Air Force had cooked up with NASA as
an emergency rescue vehicle for the shuttle, before they realized it wouldn’t
work. You’d have the crewed part, then, something halfway prepared with new
wiring and circuitry, stuck away in a hangar at Wright-Pat where people could
keep tinkering with it, improving it, giving it better systems against the day
we really needed it.
“If it
were up to me,” Amy went on, not looking at Daria, “I’d also get a leftover
Agena D upper-stage booster with restart capability and add extra fuel tanks,
widening it at the top to cover the Mercury’s heat shield. The Air Force museum
at Wright-Pat might have an Agena stuck in storage that the government could
quietly requisition. Around the tanks, you could put maybe four heat-seeking
Sidewinders with their fins stripped off, with just the rocket nozzles for
maneuvering. They’d need high-energy booster motors, saving the regular motors
for closing with the target, but that’s not a problem. The warheads would use
radar-proximity fuses, because in space a cloud of flying debris is better than
one warhead for causing damage. I’d also love to have armored the Mercury, but
then it would weigh too much, and debris in space moves too fast to be stopped
by anything. A loose bolt would punch through any armor you had. I’d keep the
astronaut in his suit from launch onward, and . . . just wish him luck.”
Daria
stared at Amy, hypnotized.
“That’s
just me, though,” said Amy. “And I wouldn’t have used a straight-eight Delta to
send up the Dyna-Soar from the Cape, like in your story. I’d have stuck to the
regular flight schedule from Vandenberg and found a regular old spysat launch
that coincided with the predicted Energia liftoff. If I’d checked the schedule,
I could have preempted a White Cloud ocean surveillance launch by the Navy,
maybe PARCAE 9, and used their own Atlas H. Screw ‘em if they cried about it.
That way, the launch would have full security, and the Soviets photographing
Vandenberg from space would see only what they’d expected to see, not something
unexpected. The payload shroud for an Atlas H was big enough to hide a Mercury
and Agena combination, if you stretched the shroud slightly. I might strap a
bunch of solid-fuel boosters to the Atlas so it could get the altitude the
Mercury would need, but I wouldn’t change much else. The payload would be
loaded onto the booster under the shroud, so the Russkies would never know until
it was too late.”
“Oh,
God,” whispered Daria. She fell back in her seat. “Oh, God, no.”
“Couldn’t
use a secret agent for the pilot, though,” Amy said. “Tempting, but you
couldn’t do it, even if you had a whole year to train after the NRO found out what
was being assembled at the Krunichev Factory for shipment to Baikonur that next
year. When I—I mean, when the NRO saw the photos of the mockup moving out on
its flatcar, everyone knew there wasn’t time to train a newbie.”
Daria’s
face was pasty white. She had to swallow twice before she could speak. “Who—”
She dropped her voice “—who would you use? A shuttle astronaut?”
Amy
shook her head. “They were too much in the public eye after Challenger
was lost in ‘86. Reporters were all over them. You’d need someone with a very
low public profile, a hot pilot but not well known. I’d go for a test pilot
from Edwards. I’d have picked up three, so you’d have backups in case one or
two washed out. I imagine if it had been done, we might have wound up with one
guy who washed out because he couldn’t handle his liquor, one who got cancer
and had to be hospitalized, and one guy from Pittsburgh, a quiet guy with deep
brown eyes and a warm smile, about five-foot-nine so he’s perfect for the
cramped Mercury cockpit, a guy whose uncle was a Tuskegee bomber pilot in World
War Two, and this guy would end up being your pilot. He . . . his name would be
. . . Major Michael Graves. ‘Graveyard’ to his buddies, but ‘Mikey’ to his
closest friends. He would do it.”
“Aunt
Amy,” whispered Daria, “I’m really scared.”
“No need
to be scared, Daria.” Amy took a sip of her ice water. “Everything’s okay.
We’re just talking about writing stories.”
“Did I
do something wrong?”
“Not at
all, dear. You did something right. You got a story published, and it was
wonderful.”
“But . .
. but you flew out to see me right after the story came out. You came out right
after you read it. Did I do something wrong that—”
“No,
Daria, you did fine. Everyone at work loved your story.” She stared into space.
“It took us all back. I bought copies of the magazine for everyone. You’re
quite famous in lots of . . . strange places.”
There
was a fragile silence.
“You’re
not in any trouble ‘cause of me?”
Amy
hesitated before speaking. “Some people were a little surprised, but they
checked into things, and everyone’s satisfied now. We’re all proud of you.
Surprised, but very proud.” Amy gave Daria a smile. “Trust me on that, okay?”
Daria
struggled to find her voice. “What happened?” she whispered.
“Back
then, you mean? In my story?”
Daria
nodded.
Amy
looked around to make sure no one was near them. She then looked down at her
hands in her lap and played with her fingers.
“What
happened? What happened. We did a bad thing, I think, not that it matters
anymore. We had no authorization from the White House to proceed until the day
of the flight, and I suspect the go-ahead didn’t really come from the
President. He hadn't a clue, I believe. Not his fault. We played it fast and
loose.” She looked Daria right in the eyes, then. “This is still a story, and
just a story, right? Just a little story?”
Daria
nodded stiffly. She looked like she was about to faint.
Amy
nodded, too, and looked away again. “Everything came down on the morning of May
fifteenth. I’d been up since the day before. Couldn’t sleep, too much caffeine,
too wired. We got word about three a.m. that the Energia was being fueled, and
we got Mikey into his blue suit and into Peregrine Seven at five a.m.,
then loaded it on the Atlas as fast as we could.” She smiled. “He named his
spacecraft Peregrine because it’s the smallest of the hunting falcons,
and all Mercury missions had the number seven in their name. It was tradition.
You gotta have tradition.” The smile faded.
“Mikey
trained with Peregrine in the shuttle’s Vertical Assembly Building at
Vandenberg—after Challenger, no one was using it for anything much, and
we had full security and free run of it. I was handling flight communications
with Mikey, me just a novice ASAT analyst with a voice that Mikey liked, so
they made me CAPCOM. Mikey was the calmest of us all, just sitting there in Peregrine
inside the shroud, waiting for it to happen. He was solid. Then we got the go,
and we lit the Atlas that morning and kicked him off the planet. I thought I
would die, my nerves were so bad, but I kept it together. He’d complete half an
orbit, catch the Polyus, and come down in the southern Indian Ocean later, west
of Australia.”
“But,”
said Daria, “I don’t understand. The Polyus was unarmed. It was just a test spacecraft
. . . a testbed with no . . .” Her voice failed her as her eyes grew impossibly
large. “Oh, no.”
Amy
looked grim. “Gorbachev wasn’t in control of everything. There was a group of
Soviet generals in the air force and strategic rocket forces who’d worked
closely with Andropov and Chernenko, and they wanted to do the Strangelove
thing and hit us first without warning. Gorby didn’t believe us until almost
too late. The surprise attack would have forced Gorby to order a full
preemptive strike right after and get rid of us before we killed them all. The
generals had turned Polyus into an operational weapons platform with four
thermonuclear mines, maybe half a megaton each. We never did learn what targets
they had in mind, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?” She shrugged.
Daria
stared, her mouth open in horror.
“So,
Mikey took Peregrine into a low polar orbit, heading up over the Arctic,
and then we got the bad news. The Energia was put on a launch-pad hold. If it
didn’t get upstairs A.S.A.P., the whole project would be a wash. Peregrine
was a one-shot only, no fallback. We’d have to bring Mikey down, and when the
Polyus really went up, we’d have to shoot it down with MHVs, ASAT missiles from
F-15s, assuming we could catch it before it launched its nukes. We had to take
it out as fast as we could, or we’d have to launch a full spread in
retaliation. SAC had the bombers up on a surprise drill, ready to go. We were
all just waiting for the world to end. Mikey said we should keep him up for a
couple of passes, just in case, so we did. Peregrine was optically black
and mostly radar absorptive, like the Polyus, so we thought the Soviets
wouldn’t notice him. We’d also stuck a fake payload in the shroud with him,
something that would imitate a standard White Cloud array, cables and all,
separate from Peregrine, so the Russkies wouldn’t know the launch was
really for something else.
“But it
didn’t work. The generals must have picked him up when he went over the western
Soviet Union on his first orbit. For reasons we didn’t understand then, they
ended the hold and went on with the countdown. The Energia would take off from
Baikonur after an hour’s delay. We gave Mikey a series of thruster firings to
change his orbit, and he got his attack window, an even better one than he
would have had on the first pass. He came over the North Pole on his second
orbit and was dead on to fire his Sidewinders while the Energia core was still
climbing, rolling over so it could drop off the weapons platform. Polyus would
then fire its engines to climb into its orbit and kill us.
“Then
everything hit the fan. Colorado Springs called and said they were seeing
movement in a Cosmos satellite, what the Soviets had claimed was a Molniya
weather satellite in a failed orbit. It had the profile of a sleeper ASAT, a
hunter/killer with a shotgun bomb. They were coming for Mikey. I told them to
look for other low-orbit satellites that would intercept Mikey’s new orbit, and
they found another one, a research Cosmos, that was also moving out of orbit to
get closer to him for a popup kill. They had crap all over the place. We had to
get Mikey down right away.
“Mikey
stayed with it. He never lost his cool. The generals went ahead with their
launch. We didn’t know then that Gorby had the KGB and three units of special
forces crashing their way into Baikonur, trying to stop Energia from going up.
They were a little late, though, and Energia went up before the MiGs arrived to
shoot it down. The generals knew it was their last shot at winning the Cold War,
do or die. They’d do, and we’d die.
“Mikey
waited until his attack window came up, then he let go of his Sidewinders in
opposing pairs. The Energia dropped off the Polyus at about that moment—and the
damn platform turned without starting its engines, just seconds after the
Energia let go of it, and it painted him with radar and opened fire. We must
have done a crappy job of making Peregrine radar invisible, damn
worthless stealth paint. The Polyus’s recoilless cannon was huge. Mikey took
evasive action, but Polyus blew the engine bell and one of the fuel tanks off
the Agena. It stopped firing then, so it could reorient itself and get into
orbit. Mikey dropped the Agena and used the Mercury’s thrusters to get
stabilized, slow down, and reenter. About then, one, maybe two of his
Sidewinders found the Polyus and blew the ever-loving daylights out of it while
it was thrusting to get away from the fight. That’s when it fell out of the
sky, too, and our big birds spotted a huge fireball coming down into the South
Pacific, where we picked up the pieces later by submarine. The fake Molniya
came up five minutes later and took out the rest of the Agena, but Mikey was
already coming home. Or so we hoped.”
Amy took
another sip of her ice water. “I wish I could write like you,” she said to
Daria. “I can’t write worth a darn. I would love to write a story like that.”
“Wha—wha—what
happened to Mikey?”
The
waiters arrived at that moment with the lobster. Amy waited until they left
before answering. She looked down at the lobster before her. “I’m not as hungry
as I thought I’d be,” she said.
Daria
found it hard to speak. “Is he dead, Aunt Amy?”
“We
don’t know,” Amy whispered. “Peregrine came down intact, but it fell in
the sea near Antarctica and we couldn’t find anything when we finally got
there. If it landed by parachute, like it was supposed to, Mikey could have
gotten out and used his raft to get to an island or an ice floe . . . but we
never found him. The spacecraft’s beacons didn’t turn on, I don’t know why. We
never found the capsule, either. We looked for a long time, praying for him
every day, but we never found him.”
Amy and
Daria sat without speaking for several long minutes. Amy took a deep breath.
She seemed to have aged greatly since they’d entered the restaurant. “We didn’t
think about it at the time . . . but . . . it was strange that his first name
was Michael. In the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, verses seven through
nine, it tells of how the archangel Michael fights a war in heaven with Satan,
and he and his angels cast the Devil down to earth, and that was what Mikey
did. We were his little angels, his helpers, but he shot down the weapons
platform himself and saved us all. He saved millions of us, maybe billions,
maybe all of us, because he did what he did. He did his job real good.
“And
then,” Amy continued in a weary voice, “as the years passed, we realized he had
done more than that. The Soviets had sunk a huge amount of money into the
Energia and Polyus programs, too much money. They’d drained all their other
government projects, gave up butter for guns, hoping they could overcome our
on-again-off-again SDI program. When Polyus was destroyed, that was the domino
that knocked all the other dominoes down. The generals who had armed Polyus had
special interviews with the KGB, which did not like the idea of anyone usurping
the nuclear chain of command, and they all suffered fatal hunting accidents
right afterward. The Energia program was cancelled the year after. The Warsaw
Pact rose up in revolt the year after that, the Soviet economy collapsed, Gorby
got caught in the coup, Yeltsin bailed him out, and the Evil Empire broke up
and was gone, just like that. Totally gone. And—” Amy suddenly put her hands
over her face, trying to stop a sob “—and Mikey did it.”
Daria
swallowed, watching as Amy got control of herself.
“Some of
the people I work with think Mikey really was Michael,” Amy whispered, “that he
was the archangel come to save us. I know he wasn’t, but sometimes it’s hard
not to think about it. He and Peregrine both disappeared. He didn’t have
any living family. He was just there when we needed him, our guardian angel in
real life. Maybe he really was. He was such a wonderful man. He had such
beautiful brown eyes, and he radiated such warmth. You felt so good when . . .”
She
couldn’t speak. Daria reached over and took Amy’s nearest hand. They sat like
that for a minute more.
“I’m okay,” said Amy at last. She blew her nose in her napkin. “We should eat.”
“That
was a good story,” Daria whispered. “Maybe you should be a writer.”
Amy
flashed a weak smile at her. “Thanks, but no. I just like to make up stories
when work is slow, you see. I guess it runs in the family. I liked your story
better.”
They
managed to eat their lobster and even enjoyed it. They talked about college,
about Daria’s parents and her sister, about Jane, about little things.
They
were outside on the sidewalk, walking to Amy’s flame-red sports car, when Amy
said, “Would you and Jane like to visit me at work sometime?”
The question
fell on Daria like a ten-ton weight. “Uh . . . sure, if it’s okay.”
“I’d love to have you both out. Everyone at work is quite the fan of yours now. However, I’m afraid I’d have to ask that you not tell your mother about this, for certain reasons, if you wouldn’t mind. And don’t repeat the story, either, even if it’s just a story.”
“Sure,
no problem. I don’t talk to Mom about everything that goes on in my life,
anyway.”
“That’s
how nature intended things should be between mothers and daughters,” Amy said.
“Do you think we can visit Jane today? I’d love to see those paintings of hers.
For professional reasons, of course.”
“Of
course.”
Amy
unlocked her car, and they got in. “And,” Amy went on, “I was going to ask the
two of you about your career plans.”
Daria
turned in her seat to stare at Amy. “What?” she said faintly.
“Well,
you know, being a writer and an artist, those kinds of jobs are rewarding, but
they don’t pay much. It’s possible that there are other careers out there,
interesting things you could do with your time, and you could do a little
writing and painting on the side. It might be worth looking into.” Amy looked
at her favorite niece and grinned. “Think you’re smart enough for . . .
intelligence work?”
*
Acknowledgements II: Kara Wild was the first
person to suggest that Amy Barksdale was in the art appraisal business, in her
extensive fanfic series, the Driven Wild Universe. My shameless theft of this
idea is hereby noted. Also, the name of Melody Powers’ sister, Harmony, was
borrowed from Galen Hardesty’s own Daria/Melody Powers stories, which also
inspired a good bit of this one. Kara Wild’s “Abruptly Amy” material sparked
the note about Annie spin-offs, and Mike Xeno’s “Guardian” got me to thinking
about its, um, subject matter. Thanks!
Original: 02/19/03, 09/04/06, 09/18/06, 07/16/08
FINIS