The Reply a5-2

by Robert Doherty

  “I count three foo fighters,” the operator said.

  Craig could clearly see them. One glowing dot heading due east toward the coast of South America. One heading west across the Pacific, and a third heading northeast toward Central America.

  “Damn, those suckers are booking,” one of the men in the center muttered.

  Craig looked down at his own computer and cleared it, then put the tracking data the other man had on his screen. He chewed absently on the nail of his right forefinger as he considered the data, then did what he knew he had to do.

  He entered a code and transmitted the data to the UNAOC operations center in New York and on Easter Island along with the Pentagon, NSA, and CIA in his own government. Then, glancing around and making sure no one was watching, he entered another code consisting of the five letters STAAR, and transmitted the data to that destination. He breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the message was sent and his screen was clear again.

  He looked up and watched. One of the foo fighters hit the shore of South America over Chile, then cut hard left and followed the coast north. It followed the entire coastline up to Central America and then looped back.

  Meanwhile, the second one had crossed Central America and was over the mid-Atlantic while the third was passing New Guinea. The first dot returned to the spot it had originated from and disappeared.

  The second foo fighter passed straight through the Strait of Gibraltar and flashed across the Mediterranean. The third had passed Taiwan and was doing a loop over mainland China.

  The second reached the far end of the Mediterranean and curved right over Egypt before heading back. The third had done a large figure eight over the entire length of China and was now also heading back. At speeds in excess of thirty thousand miles an hour, the blips on the screen ate up large chunks of distance quickly and shortly all were back down underwater at the point where they had come up.

  “What the hell was that all about?” someone asked.

  Craig was tapping his forefinger against his lips in thought.

  “Reconnaissance,” he said.

  “Looking for what?”

  “Damned if I know,” Sinclair answered.

  CHAPTER 6

  The pebble hit the bricks, then slid down to the turf at the base of the Wall. Che Lu bent to pick up another one, then paused, her back aching with pain. She straightened, as much as a wizened seventy-eight-year-old woman could, to her full height of four inches over five feet.

  “Never works for me,” she muttered as she turned from the crumbling remains of the Great Wall.

  “What doesn’t work, Mother-Professor?” her assistant, Ki, asked. He was young, just out of the university, and it was her opinion that he had taken the job more out of desire not to be arrested in Beijing than interest in her work. He used the term her students had used for her for many years. It was a sign of respect for both her age and her status as chief archaeologist at Beijing University.

  “The tradition.” She peered at him, her eyes a bright blue and, despite her years, not needing glasses of any sort. “You need to know traditions. They are very important in archaeology. They can guide you to what you look for.”

  She waved her hand at the serpentine mound of rubble that extended left and right as far as the eye could see. This portion of the Great Wall was not what was shown on documentaries to the outside world. The fools in Beijing would want the world to believe that the entire fifteen-hundred-mile length was in pristine condition, but this pile of rubble and decaying brick was more the norm, left to the ravages of nature and the needs of generations of peasants who had used the bricks to build their hovels.

  “The tradition is that a traveler going through the Great Wall should throw a pebble against the brick. If it bounces back, then the journey will be a good one. If it simply falls to the ground, then it will be not so good.”

  “So we will have a not-so-good expedition?” Ki said with a worried smile.

  “It has been not so good from the very beginning,” she said. “I don’t see why things should get any better.” She turned from the wall and headed toward the battered American Jeep that she had been using for so many years. A Russian truck, also Korean War vintage, was puffing large clouds of diesel into the air directly behind the Jeep. It held the other five students in her group and their equipment.

  Her great expedition, Che Lu thought to herself as she allowed Ki to help her into the passenger seat. He scurried around and got behind the wheel, throwing the ancient transmission into gear. They continued on their way, now paralleling the Wall, heading toward their work site many miles distant in the vastness of the western provinces of China.

  Despite the pebble and paucity of people and equipment allotted her, Che Lu was as excited as she had been in many years. She had finally received permission to dig into Qian-Ling, the mountain tomb of the third emperor of the T’ang dynasty. Inside the massive hill that made up the tomb were buried the Emperor Gao-zong and his empress, the only empress ever to rule in China.

  She knew it was the confusion of the current turmoil in China, of course, that had gotten her the permission. Some fool in the Antiquities Division of the government had made a mistake and stamped APPROVED on her request after twenty-two years of her resubmitting it every six months. She’d changed the wording on each submission, obscuring in scholastic language the fact that she wanted permission to actually enter the tomb.

  She’d known they had to get to Qian-Ling quickly and get to work before someone else at the division discovered the error. There were two things working against her, and both were significant. One was tradition. The Chinese people revered their ancestors and thus their dead. Grave robbing was unknown in the country, and archaeological digging was considered practically the same: defiling the burial place of someone’s ancestors. The second reason was that the present Communist government was walking a very tight rope in how the past was treated. There was fear, foolish fear in Che Lu’s opinion, that there might be desire among the peasants for a return to the old imperial days.

  Che Lu understood respect for ancestors. But she thought it was carried a bit too far in China, denying the world, and most particularly the Chinese people, a look into the splendor that had once been the Middle Kingdom. If China was ever going to take its rightful place in the present world order, Che Lu felt it had to acknowledge its power in ancient times and understand how that power had been eroded and destroyed by the ignorant and small-minded people who had ruled.

  Che Lu had given much to China, and she wanted to see her country regain some of the stature it had held in ancient times. She had participated in much of the history of modern China, often at the cutting edge. Just twenty-six women had started the Long March with Mao sixty-four years ago. Only six had made it to the end alive, Che Lu being one of them as a young fourteen-year-old girl. Over one hundred thousand men had also been there at the start, less than ten thousand remaining alive when they arrived at Yan’an in Shaanxi Province in December 1935 after walking over six thousand miles.

  Such a feat should have assured Che Lu a revered place in Communist China, but such were the shifting vagaries of power and influence that she had long ago fallen out of favor with newer regimes. At least she had been able to get schooling and earn her degree in archaeology before she was put on the blacklist.

  The Jeep hit a pothole in the dirt road and she felt pain shoot up her spine, a fiery red explosion in the back of her head. Ki turned to make an apology and she waved him to remain silent. Young fools. They knew nothing of suffering. The two-vehicle convoy was heading west from Xi’an, the city that had been the first imperial capital in China and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road that had stretched from western China across Central Asia to the Middle East and on to Rome. Che Lu and her associates had arrived there three days earlier and checked in with the local authorities. Things were not much calmer here, a thousand miles away from the turmoil that was brewing in Beijing. The students were growing rest
less and now the workers were also. The UN disclosure of aliens visiting Earth had seeped its way even into tightly controlled China. Change was in the air all over the globe, and Che Lu feared and hoped that it was coming in China.

  She reached into the old straw bag between her legs and pulled out a leather sack. She emptied the contents into the cloth of her skirt that was stretched wide between her legs and looked at the four pieces of bone that lay there. She picked one up and turned it, staring at the marks etched into the white material. The bone was from the hip of some animal, perhaps a deer, triangular in shape, with two long flat sides.

  “What are those?” Ki asked.

  What did they teach young people at the university? Che Lu wondered. Of course, Ki was a geology major, not archaeology. Most of the students she usually worked with had preferred to remain in Beijing, prepared to participate in whatever happened in the upcoming weeks. That there would be another event like the Tiananmen Square massacre Che Lu had no doubt. She had lived through too many purges and bloodlettings in seventy-eight years to be optimistic that this turmoil would end peacefully. The key issue was would everyone behave like sheep and go back to the status quo after the blood had flowed, like they had in 1989? Che Lu, from listening to her students who politely but firmly declined to come with her, felt this time it would be different.

  “They are oracle bones,” she answered.

  Ki raised an eyebrow, inviting more information. At least he was curious, she would give him that. “They were used in ancient times by diviners to communicate with ancestors.” She felt the smooth bone under her wrinkled fingers. “In the beginning was not the city, but the word,” she murmured.

  “Excuse me?” Ki politely asked.

  Che Lu looked up. “Every other developing civilization on Earth was based on the growth of the city. In China, our civilization is based on the written word. In fact, our word for civilization, wenha, means ‘the transforming influence of writing.’” She held one of the bones closer so he could see the marks on it. “The interesting thing about these bones is that no one can read the writing. Most curious. After all, we had writing long before the rest of the world. But this writing, it predates even our own language.”

  “Perhaps it is just some form of drawing, Mother-Professor,” Ki ventured. “No, it is writing,” Che Lu said.

  “Where did you get those?” Ki asked.

  “From an old friend.”

  “And are they important?”

  Che Lu nodded but didn’t say anything. She didn’t trust anyone else yet, although she knew that there was a call she was going to have to make. She wanted to be clear of the monitored phones in Xi’an, though, before doing that.

  “Do they relate to Qian-Ling?” Ki asked.

  “They were found near the tomb,” Che Lu acknowledged. She saw a small town approaching. Tracking the single telephone line to a small store, she indicated for Ki to stop there.

  She walked inside and greeted the proprietor. She held out a wad of cash, and asked to use the phone to make a most important call. The cash was more than the proprietor saw in a month, and the old man was most happy to oblige this strange woman.

  Che Lu dialed on the old rotary device, getting the local operator. Slowly she worked her way through until she had an international operator in Hong Kong who could make the final connection.

  Che Lu stood still in the dilapidated store, watching her young charges buy food for the journey, as she listened to the faint echo of a phone ring on the other side of the world. Finally there was a click, and a distant voice spoke in English.

  “This is Peter Nabinger. I’m away from my office, but I do check my machine daily. Please leave your name, number, and a short message and I’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.”

  There was a beep and Che Lu spoke in hushed English. “My name is Professor Che Lu. I am the head archaeologist with the Imperial Museum in Beijing. I understand you can read the high rune language. I have oracle bones in my possession that I believe are inscribed in that language. They were found near the Imperial Tomb of Gao-zang at Qian-Ling. I am going into that tomb. I believe the tomb may be connected with the Airlia somehow. If you wish to find me, I will be there.”

  She put the phone down and turned to her students. “Let us continue on our way.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It had analyzed the data, received a little over three days ago, quickly, in less than four seconds. The various courses of action, though, were more difficult to determine. More data had been needed. Power had been allocated to sensors, and the wealth of transmitted electronic material that flowed out of Earth’s atmosphere had been the target. That took time, and when it was done, there was no clear-cut answer, only probabilities.

  The probabilities were weighed and the machine made a decision. A message had been sent to Earth in reply, then the master program was activated. It would take time for the program to run its course.

  Waiting didn’t bother it. First, because it wasn’t alive and second because it had spent millennia waiting to activate the master program. A few more days would not matter.

  CHAPTER 8

  Lisa Duncan handed a file folder with a red top-secret cover to Mike Turcotte, then took the seat across from him. They had the entire forward section of the specially modified Air Force 707 to themselves. Behind them the bulk of the aircraft was filled with communications equipment and the military personnel who manned it.

  Turcotte picked up the folder and thumbed through. He glanced up as he read the first sheet. “When did you find out there was a transmission to the guardian?”

  “Just now,” Duncan said. “I’ve been so busy reporting our find to UNAOC and getting us this flight back to Easter Island that it was my first chance to catch up on things.”

  The plane was currently somewhere over the Indian Ocean and flying east. They’d left UN Forces securely holding the Terra-Lei compound and UNAOC scientists cautiously puzzling over the strange ruby sphere.

  “It just got released worldwide,” Duncan added.

  “Great,” Turcotte said. “Sometimes I think we’d get better intelligence if we just watched CNN.”

  Turcotte looked at the second page and read the block letters of the message from Mars.

  GREETINGS

  WE ARE OF PEACE

  ASPASIA

  END

  “What the hell does this mean?” Turcotte asked.

  “That’s the part of the message that was in binary and obviously meant for us,” Duncan said.

  “Aspasia?” Turcotte read out loud. “He’s long gone.”

  “Maybe the computer on Mars doesn’t know that. Maybe it’s just reacting to the message the guardian sent out and playing back a recording. The important thing, though, is that we now have communication with the computers.”

  Turcotte turned the page and looked at the photo of the Face on Mars. The next page had a summary of information about the Cydonia region.

  “This is some weird stuff,” he said.

  “Certainly not what anyone expected,” Duncan said. “Another guardian computer on Mars?”

  “Besides the one we know about under Easter Island,” Turcotte said, “there was one from Temiltepec that got destroyed in Dulce. Who knows how many of these things there are? Why did we have to wait to get this?” Turcotte asked.

  “Why didn’t we get informed before UNAOC made it public?”

  “UNAOC didn’t want any leaks.”

  “So they don’t trust us.”

  “You keep talking as if you weren’t part of UNAOC,” Duncan said, leaning back in the swivel chair bolted to the thinly carpeted cabin floor.

  “I’m a soldier in the United States Army and I’ve been ordered by my chain of command to do this. I’m not happy about it, but there wasn’t a happiness clause in my enlistment contract.” He looked at her. “You had a seat on Majestic-12. Were you a part of that?”

  “You know I wasn’t,” she answered, a dark line appearin
g across her forehead.

  Turcotte held up his hand. “Hey, don’t get upset. I’m just a dumb soldier and that was a rhetorical question. I know you weren’t part of what Majestic was doing. But in the same manner I’m not part of what UNAOC is doing.” He pointed at the top-secret cover sheet. “This tells me UNAOC is starting to do the same thing Majestic did; thinking it knows better and keeping the truth a hostage to their own aims, even if those aims are public relations.”

  “You don’t trust UNAOC?” Duncan asked.

  Turcotte stared at her hard. “Do you, Lisa?” It was the first time he had ever used her first name. If she noticed, there was no indication.

  “No, I don’t. They didn’t bother to brief me on the crashed craft the Russians gave up to UNAOC. Now, that simply might have been a bureaucratic oversight, but then again it might not have. Our experiences the last two weeks have made me a bit more paranoid than I was.”

  Turcotte laughed. “You were pretty paranoid when I first met you.”

  “I was doing my job.” She pointed at the folder. “I’ll tell you one thing about that message, though. It will give the progressives a shot in the arm, and UNAOC is solidly in their camp.”

  “Why?” Turcotte asked.

  “The UN has to be. It’s an organization that’s trying to bring the world closer together and foster peace. This whole Airlia thing could be the catalyst for that.”

  Turcotte snorted. “What, a computer says ‘We are of peace’ and we’re supposed to believe it?”

  “We’ll be at Easter Island soon,” Duncan said. “Let’s see what’s going on when we get there. I don’t know if it’s going to matter much whether the computer says it’s of peace or not, since there’s not much it can do on Mars.”