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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

Panicked, Tel’Chon knelt by the scholar’s side, but it was already too late. His eyes stared sightless, pupils dilated, and the blood that spread from the gash in his scalp flowed from gravity, no sign of a pulse.

  With the knowledge that Ganesh was dead, Tel’Chon rose. There would be no gain in reporting what had happened. Calmly, he went to the shelves and found the book he required, listing the Navigators’ voyages from the White Island to the near outposts, across the Storm Sea.

  He would take this to his colleagues in Nikenk. It was the evidence they would need to finalize their plans.

  Tel’Chon paused in the open doors, looking back at the body he had left where it had fallen. He wondered what their fate would be, the ones who denied the known facts of change and who would not prepare for it. There were some scholars, he decided, who would rather curl up and die with their old books than undertake the challenge of writing new ones.

  He left the Hall of the Navigators, never to return. Never to know that in the ages to come, he would be proven right.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The noise was relentless. The vast cargo hold of the C-17 Globemaster cargo transport was a drum the size of a basketball court, constantly pounded by four roaring engines ramming through the Antarctic sky.

  Less than an hour out, David had wadded up squares of toilet paper from the head and stuffed them into his ears. It helped, but not enough.

  He’d tried leaning back, shutting his eyes, aiming for unconsciousness, and had almost succeeded. But the drop-down canvas seat on the outer wall seemed to magnify the engine roar, and the startling bang from the in-flight refueling maneuver wrenched him from a shallow sleep with a rush of adrenaline that left him wide-awake and haggard.

  Air Commandos, however, apparently could sleep anywhere, even on top of the plastic-shrouded supply pallet at the far end of the hold. Some of them were snoring. Jess wasn’t, but she was on the other side in another drop seat, eyes closed, asleep. David envied her.

  Six hours into the flight from Christchurch International Airport in New Zealand, Jack Lyle pulled down a seat beside him. Like the others on this flight—including David, the twelve commandos, Ironwood, Jess, and Lyle’s partner, Agent Marano—the AFOSI agent wore a white insulated parka with matching padded trousers. When the time came to deploy, there’d be about fifteen other articles of clothing and equipment to put on, but for now, the parka and trousers were enough to keep them warm in the cargo hold. Even too warm. Lyle’s parka, like his, was open.

  “How’re you holding up?”

  “Doing fine.” David wished he had his iPod. It was a good conversation killer—and he could use one, especially with this man who’d threatened and lied to him. Ambient recordings of the rain forest. Just imagining that wash of natural sound made him relax. A bit.

  “Look, kid, if you’re pissed about the way things played out, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I had a job to do. And it turned out okay for you, at least, right?”

  “Peachy,” David said. He didn’t like or trust Jack Lyle. He knew the only reason he wasn’t facing charges for misuse of government resources, and wouldn’t be in federal prison for the rest of his life—all five more months of it, if he was lucky—was that Ironwood had insisted that the original pardons he’d negotiated remain in force. His programmers—no surprise there—were already under contract to the National Reconnaissance Office to further develop the search algorithm they’d created. Now only Ironwood was left to carry the can.

  David didn’t understand why he was of any further interest to the air force. “You’re only doing all this so Ironwood will give himself up. If he’d asked you to dress up like Mickey Mouse and sing opera in Times Square, you’d have done that, too.”

  “That would have been easier,” Lyle said. “Anyway, just wanted to say I heard from your old boss a while ago. Colonel Kowinski. She was part of the investigation, you know.”

  Big surprise, David thought. “How’s she doing?”

  “I’m sure she’d say, ‘Outstanding.’ ”

  “Yeah, she would.”

  “She was very curious about that nonhuman DNA sample you tried to pass off as Neanderthal.”

  David tightened. This wasn’t Lyle’s business.

  “Turns out it’s yours. Care to comment?”

  David’s silence didn’t deter the agent. “Me, I’m curious about how you and your ‘anomalies’ are at the heart of everything that’s unexplained: Ironwood and his hunt for aliens. A young woman shot at in public by employees of her family. Argentines bent on blasting to oblivion whatever it is we’re heading for. All of it’s got something to do with you. You might as well tell me. I’m going to find out sometime.”

  Agent Marano joined them, swamped by her military cold-weather gear. Combat wear obviously didn’t come in a size small enough for her.

  She had a Thermos of coffee and some paper cups. “Caffeine?” she asked. Both David and Lyle said yes, so there was a momentary truce. Predators at the watering hole, David thought.

  “Join you guys?” she asked.

  David made no objection, neither did Lyle, so she poured coffee for herself, pulled a seat down, and sat beside her partner.

  “So,” she said, leaning forward to be in David’s line of sight, “what do you think we’re going to find?”

  “No idea. Your turn.”

  “World War II Nazi sub base.” Marano raised her coffee cup to Lyle. “The boss thinks it’s a secret British research station. We’ve got ten bucks riding on it.”

  David couldn’t tell if she was being serious. “What happens if it’s a Nazi sub base that the British have turned into a secret research station?”

  Her sudden grin looked genuine. “Good one. I guess that would be a draw.” She took a sip of coffee. “Seriously, what do you think?”

  “Not my area of expertise. Therefore, no opinion.”

  Marano wrinkled her nose at him. “C’mon, what do you want it to be?”

  What David wanted it to be—not that he’d tell two AFOSI agents who were riding him for no reason he could deduce—was an answer. Something that no one had thought of, no one had considered, yet would somehow reconcile everything Ironwood believed, everything Jess believed, and everything that was locked in his own DNA.

  That, he suspected, was not only improbable. It was impossible.

  “Whatever it is,” he said truthfully, “it’s just going to raise more questions. Finding one of anything is never enough to change a scientist’s mind. If you think about it, the experts say early humans couldn’t have made the voyage to Antarctica, let alone build anything there. So if we do find an outpost—temple, whatever—like the one in Cornwall, Ironwood gets to say, ‘I told you so,’ but in the end, it’ll be like finding those Viking settlements in Canada. People still say Columbus was the first European to reach North America because his voyage is what started the modern age of exploration and colonization. All the other Europeans who came earlier, they were all blind alleys, so who remembers them?”

  “If it’s not important what we find,” Marano asked, “then why are you doing this?”

  David caught the approving nod Lyle gave his junior agent. In case there’s the slightest chance there really is an answer there for me, he thought. Something that might make dying easier. “Just seeing it through,” he said. He sat back, holding his hands around the paper coffee cup, warming them.

  Heavy bootsteps clanked on the metal floor of the cargo hold.

  “Heard there was coffee,” Ironwood said. He’d lost color; he wore a small scopolamine patch behind each ear and an acupressure band on each wrist, both measures failing to deal with his air sickness.

  “More like tinted water,” Lyle’s partner warned him. She stood to pour from the Thermos as if Ironwood were one of her superiors.

  The big man sipped the hot liquid, his expression signaling agreement with her. “What’s the word?”

  Marano led him through the competing theories of what was waiting to be di
scovered on the peninsula: sub base, secret station, a combination of both, a solitary outpost, or a temple.

  “But I guess you know what’s there,” she concluded.

  Ironwood stood in front of the three of them. Cold-weather combat gear did come in extra large, and, even weakened by motion sickness, he looked formidable, a walking glacier.

  “Don’t go putting words in my mouth, darlin’. I know what I expect to find, but I’m more like my friend Dave here than you think. I won’t know what’s there until I see it.”

  “Still,” Lyle said, “you’re thinking aliens.” David was surprised at how reasonable Lyle made that question sound. As if he wasn’t looking for an argument. Devious.

  “I’m always thinking aliens, son. Ever hear of Occam’s Razor?”

  Marano’s delighted smile transformed her face, making her even younger. “The simplest solution is the best.”

  Ironwood gave her a paper-cup salute. “So what’s the simplest solution to the real historical conundrum? How is it that agriculture, written language, astronomy, and architectural engineering—in the form of pyramids—turn up around the world in unconnected human populations, all at the same time? Do we say it’s a remarkable and highly unlikely chain of coincidences? Or did somebody with advanced capabilities simply drop off the instruction books?”

  “Okay, but why aliens?” Lyle asked. “Why not an earlier civilization that figured those things out, spread them around the world, then disappeared?”

  “Very good question,” Ironwood said. “With an even better answer. No evidence. You’d think people like that would’ve left something behind. I mean, we’ve got scads of artifacts left over from the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Babylonians—all the real, true early civilizations left their footprints in the sands of time. So, Occam’s Razor again, what’s the simplest solution? A mysterious civilization even more mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth and took all the evidence with them? Or the spacecraft landed, handed out the knowledge we’d need to move from being hunter-gatherers to farmers—the beginnings of technological civilization—and then took off again?”

  David couldn’t resist offering a third possibility. ”What if that early civilization told its followers, its students, to hide all the evidence of its existence? What if the evidence was selectively removed from the historical record, specifically to hide the fact that that civilization existed at all?”

  “Conspiracy,” Marano said. “I like it.”

  Lyle was no believer. “A conspiracy that holds together over thousands of years? How could anything remain a secret that long?”

  “Yucca Mountain,” David said.

  “The nuclear waste facility that got mothballed?” Marano asked, intrigued.

  David explained. “At the time it was being built, the authorities figured the waste they planned to bury in it would stay lethal for at least ten thousand years. So the government pulled together a group of scientists, historians, even science fiction writers, to come up with a way to mark the area as dangerous, to keep people from digging there for a hundred centuries. Because they expected entire civilizations to rise and fall, there’d be different languages and cultures. So their question for their experts was: How do we preserve and transmit a message through all those years?” David paused. “Any guesses what one of the solutions was?”

  “Start a religion,” Marano said promptly.

  “The MacCleirigh Foundation.” Ironwood snorted. “Wouldn’t that be a hoot.” Then he added, thoughtful, “I’d be more interested in why it’s important to hide evidence of an early civilization.”

  David unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. “While you three figure that out, I’m going to check on Jess.”

  “One last thing, kid.” Lyle reached into his parka’s map pocket. “Just because this case is over. Almost over.” He drew out a wallet-sized photograph that David recognized at once, and also knew had to be a copy. The original was in his fake passport with his belongings, in Christchurch.

  “Back when this started, I was trying to get a line on you. This was the only personal item in your lab cubicle.”

  “Besides a Wolverine mug,” Marano said.

  Lyle conceded the point. “Photograph and mug.”

  “You thought they’d tell you something significant about me.” David was incredulous.

  “It’s called profiling. Standard professional tool.”

  “The mug belonged to the guy who had my job before me. He left it in the staff kitchen. I inherited it.”

  “But the photograph,” Lyle said. “That is yours. Taken on a family trip, at two twenty-four in the afternoon of July second, twenty-one years ago at Big Bear Lake.”

  David rolled his eyes. The air force had gone to a lot of trouble finding that out. For nothing. “January ’94. California. Ring any bells?”

  “The Northridge quake.” Marano shot a glance at Lyle, who shrugged. “One of the biggest to hit L.A. at the time.”

  “My mother had all our stuff in storage there. The place was under a freeway overpass. The overpass collapsed. We couldn’t get there till two days later. Whole place was roped off, and the bulldozers were already scooping everything up. It was all gone. Walking back to the bus stop, I saw that photo blowing around on the ground. It’s the only thing we had that survived. Other than that, it doesn’t mean a thing. Just random chance.”

  He left them to their unsubstantiated theories.

  Nine hours out of Christchurch, the loadmaster dropped the cargo bay ramp, and Antarctica howled into the flying cavern, instantly devouring the last trace of warmth.

  David gasped at the sudden change in temperature. The underlying snarl of wind and engines stayed muffled because of his balaclava, his combat helmet, and the white parka hood he’d pulled tightly over it.

  “Everything’s normal,” Sergeant Dodd shouted into his ear. Dodd was the Air Commando David was strapped to for the jump. They stood together, well back from the pallet about to be deployed. Two other airmen wore tandem chutes to jump with the two AFOSI agents. Ironwood, to everyone’s surprise, had extensive parachuting experience and had managed to convince the commandos’ leader, Captain Lomas, of his expertise. The big man was jumping solo, as was Jess. She’d taken even less time than Ironwood to convince Lomas of her training.

  A green light flashed, and the loadmaster pulled a lever on the side wall. Instantly, the pallet slid down the ramp and vanished from sight. The tandem jumpers walked forward slowly as the first nine solo jumpers ran for the ramp—Ironwood a head taller than the others—and then were swept away, into the blue void.

  The tandem jumpers walked backward down the ramp, two pair to each side, holding on to guide ropes until they reached the edge.

  David concentrated on breathing the freezing air. The wind tore at his gear. Every sensation was overpowering. He stared up at the wires and conduits of the cargo bay ceiling, saw the fabric insulation ripple in the swirling wind.

  “Lean back!” Dodd shouted.

  David felt himself falling. Catching sight of the enormous gray tail of the Globemaster. Seeing a quick flash of Agent Marano spinning beside him joined to Sergeant Childress, and faintly hearing her whoop of joy. Then he felt himself roll, and he was looking straight down at black rocks and white snow, icy wind tearing at his face. It was impossible to catch his breath.

  Faintly, he heard Dodd shouting, “Look ahead!”

  He tried. Saw the huge red umbrellas of the pallet’s cargo chutes far below, but growing larger, larger . . .

  David had just enough time to think they were about to collide with those chutes when the ground suddenly swung away and he was looking straight out to the horizon. Boundless snow, a frozen sea lapping against a jagged black shore, and a blue sky so pure it hurt his eyes to look at it, even through his tinted goggles.

  Then the horizon rotated around him, and he dimly realized his chute must have opened. He looked up, and there it was, perfect. So silent, he only heard
the vestigial hiss of the explosions in Cornwall. The air felt supremely still, and he knew it was because he was moving with the wind.

  More shouted commands from Dodd. “Knees together! Bend your legs!”

  The ground was suddenly hurtling toward him. David saw the pallet already down, a half mile away. Between it and the ground below, the other jumpers quickly gathered their chutes. There was a slight upward bounce and—

  It was like stepping off a fast-moving escalator. He and his tandem partner took a few quick steps together, and then were still.

  “Outstanding!” Dodd exclaimed. A few quick clicks and David was released. He stepped away as his partner shrugged off his chute and began rolling it up.

  David looked around, shaking not from cold but from the experience. He closed his eyes for a moment, and was back stuck in traffic on the George Washington Parkway the night this had really begun, when he had gone to the Hay-Adams in D.C. and met Ironwood for the first time. Then he opened his eyes and he was still on the ice of Antarctica, and it felt as if everything that had happened in the past few weeks had happened in that same amount of time—a single blink of an eye.

  Then everything changed again as Dodd ran to him and quickly disconnected his reserve chute and harness, pointing urgently to the sky. It was already darkening with the approaching sunset.

  David looked up, hearing engines different from the Globemaster’s, to see a black silhouette against blue and the dark specks tumbling from it, spreading apart as they fell, abruptly blossoming into pure white canopies.

  They’d won their race by minutes, only to face a war.

  FIFTY-TWO

  “This training you had,” Captain Lomas asked, “was it in the military?”

  “Private security,” Jess said. Side by side, they bundled their chutes, both moving quickly, economically. He was reassessing anything he might have been told about her, and she knew why. She’d leapt from the cargo plane like a soldier charging into battle because she knew that was what she was and what she faced. Dropping swiftly, she’d pulled her ripcord with defiance, daring the parachute not to open, then guided it expertly to land six feet from the supply pallet, only two feet farther from it than Lomas.