“The next clue?”
“You will see,” Mualama said.
Lago checked the cuts on his arm from the jungle that had encroached over much of the trail, half listening to his uncle, waiting for him to answer the question as to the purpose of this expedition. His uncle was known not only in the family but at the university, for his trips all over the world, searching for something he never quite told anyone.
The journey had been more than worth it so far, though, simply to see the bizarre terrain they had passed through. Swamps and marshes had surrounded the trailhead, but as they went up, the vegetation changed to a strange world of giant plants among misshapen rocks. Lobelias grew twenty times their normal height, and many other plants that rarely topped a foot or two elsewhere towered over their heads. The almost constant moisture from the clinging clouds combined with the mineral-rich soil and high dosage of ultraviolet light, due to the altitude and latitude, to produce mutations unknown elsewhere on the planet.
Tall, writhing stems crowned with heads of spiky leaves swayed overhead, while the ground was covered with layers of pink blossoms. Tree heathers draped with beards of lichens formed with the rest to create a landscape that might have existed millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It was a land out of time with the rest of the world, and one of the most remote and inaccessible places on the planet.
Lago was startled out of his thoughts as his uncle grasped his arm. Lago was surprised by the intensity in his usually easygoing uncle’s face. “Men died so I could get the information that leads me here.”
That got Lago’s attention. “What men?”
“My guide and porters in Brazil.” Mualama quickly summarized his escape from beneath the stone altar in the Devil’s Throat; the walk to the nearest town; hitching a ride back to Santos; and then the flight to Dar es Salaam.
“This Bauru was a brave man,” Lago noted when his uncle finished. “Who killed your porters and trapped you there?”
“I believe it was a group that has tried to stop me several times over the years,” Mualama said. “They are known as The Mission.”
“Why are they trying to stop you?”
“They are afraid of what I might find.”
“Which is?”
“I’ll know when I find it.”
Lago controlled his frustration. “What are we looking for on Mount Speke? What kind of clue?”
Mualama pulled out the oilskin-wrapped package. “This is what I found in Brazil. Burton put it there over a hundred years ago.” He unwrapped the covering. A thin sheaf of papers was inside a leather case. “When Burton died in 1890, his wife, Isabel, burned a manuscript. No one knows exactly what was written in that manuscript.”
He tapped the papers. “I believe this is a copy of the introduction to that manuscript. The manuscript itself is the untold story of Burton’s life, of his secret expeditions. I have been following clues he left, going from one to the next, for over two decades now. Even this is just another stone in the path leading me here, to these mountains.” Mualama looked up from the papers toward the mist covering the mountains. “On the side of Mount Speke, something is hidden. Something important. I believe—I hope—it is the rest of the manuscript. That is where we go.”
“Why did Burton go to such extremes to hide this material?” Lago asked.
“I wondered that myself,” Mualama said. “These papers say that he made a promise never to tell anyone about something he had seen. Something incredible. However, he did not promise to not help others try to find what it was he saw. Of course, he knew he had to prevent those with bad motives from also following his clues, so he made it very difficult. Very difficult.” The old professor stood, putting the journal back into his pack. “It is time to continue.”
Smithon Harbor, Tasmania
“Are we ready?”
The voice was that of one used to speaking from the pulpit, strong and deep, easily reaching those assembled on the deck. Their solid mass, standing shoulder to shoulder in the space between the ship’s bridge and the forward hatch, showed their determination. There were sixty-two people on the deck. All were dressed alike, in dull-brown pants and parkas. Sewn onto the left chest of each parka was a patch that was becoming more and more familiar around the world: It was circular with a small Earth in the center; coming out of the Earth were lines to stars that surrounded the planet.
“We are ready!” they answered with one voice.
The mountains of northern Tasmania towered over the freighter on the landward side. Their rugged beauty contrasted with the rust-stained hull of the ship. Originally called the Island Breeze, the ship had been renamed Southern Star for the purpose of this journey.
Captain Halls watched the passengers from his bridge, and he couldn’t give a rat’s ass what they wanted to call his ship. He had his money.
The man who had asked the question turned and walked in from the small wing off the bridge. “Let us depart,” he said to Halls.
“We’ll be under way in a minute, Mr. Parker,” Halls said.
“Guide Parker,” the other man corrected him.
Halls gave the order, which was relayed to the engine room. The ship slowly parted ways with the quay and headed for the center channel of Smithon Harbor.
Besides the way they were dressed, the people on deck did not act like ordinary passengers. They didn’t line the railing and watch the land fade. Instead they looked out to sea.
“It’ll be a hard journey,” Halls said. “And I understand the American Navy has Easter Island under strict quarantine. I’m not breaking any blockade for you people.”
Parker turned. Halls stepped back from the sheen in the man’s eyes. He’d seen that look before, from missionaries he’d run into in the South Pacific, where his ship had spent many a year plowing the normal island trading routes.
“We have our faith in a power greater than the American Navy,” Parker said. “We will get ashore, one way or the other. Our destiny lies on Easter Island.”
CHAPTER 5
Area 51
Duncan handed out sheets of paper, one each to Turcotte, Yakov, Major Quinn, and Larry Kincaid. “This was the last article Kelly posted before she went underneath Rano Rau Volcano on Easter Island and became entrapped by the guardian computer. I want you to read it and compare it to the one that was just transmitted.”
The five were seated inside the conference room just off the Cube—the complex deep under Hangar One from which Majestic-12 had ruled Area 51 for decades. There was the quiet hum of machinery in the room, along with the slight hiss of filtered air being pushed down by large fans in the hangar above.
Major Quinn had been the operations officer at Area 51 for many years, but he had survived the purge of MJ-12 personnel because he had not been on the inner circle taken over by the guardian, and when Duncan had finally shut Majestic down, he had assisted her. He was the one man in the room who knew all the inner workings of the Area 51 facility and the Cube, the nickname for C3, (Command and Control Central).
Just outside the conference room was the main operations center, housing the Cube center. It measured eighty by a hundred feet and could be reached only from the massive bouncer hangar cut into the side of Groom Mountain via a large freight elevator. The entire complex was self-enclosed and rested on massive springs designed to allow it to survive a direct nuclear strike on the mountain above. Like the old NORAD headquarter in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, the Cube had been built during the Cold War, the costs hidden in the sixty-billion-dollar-a-year black budget.
At the height of Majestic-12’s operations, the bouncers were being test-flown, and part of the security force—which Duncan had had Turcotte infiltrate—codenamed Nightscape, had kidnapped subjects to be sent to the sister biotech facility outside of Dulce, New Mexico.
The Dulce facility was now crushed rubble, blasted by foo fighters, and Nightscape disbanded. Major Quinn had a different job now, aiding Duncan in her attempt to find out the
truth about the aliens and their influence on mankind, which even Majestic-12 had been relatively clueless about.
Quinn was of medium height and build. He had thinning blond hair and wore tortoiseshell glasses with oversized lenses to accommodate the split glass he needed for both distance and close-up viewing.
The other person waiting in the room, Larry Kincaid, had worked for JPL—Jet Propulsion Laboratory—and NASA for over three decades. He was an outsider to Area 51 and had been as shocked as the rest of the world to learn what had been hidden there for decades. He was short and overweight, and his face bore the stress of his having sat through numerous space launches. He was the one who had spotted the Airlia base at Cydonia on Mars, right next to the enigma known as the Mars Face. Kincaid looked more dour than ever, with the recent word of the loss of Atlantis.
They all quickly scanned the clipping of Kelly Reynolds’s article:
The discovery of the alien computer known as the guardian, hidden here on Easter Island at least five thousand years ago, has been the most significant and most disappointing discovery in recorded human history. Significant because it conclusively tells us we are, or at least were, not alone in the universe. Disappointing because we can no longer access the wealth of information the computer contains. Like a hacker breaking into a top-of-the-line computer, we can read the file names but we don’t have the code words needed to open those files and read the advanced secrets they contain. The guardian shut down less than forty-eight hours after transmitting a message up into the skies, toward whom or where we do not know.
The secret to the bouncers drive system lay just a few inches away. The details of the mothership’s interstellar engine lay just as distant. The technology of the guardian computer is just as jealously guarded by the machine. Control of the foo fighters also rests inside the guardian. The mystery of where the Airlia, as the alien race called itself, came from and exactly why they were here on our planet also lies within.
We know some basics, the barest sketch of what happened thousands of years ago when the alien commander Aspasia decided to get rid of all trace of his people’s, the Airlia’s, presence here on Earth to save the planet from their mortal enemies, who we now know are called the Kortad. Upon making that decision, Aspasia had to fight rebels among his own people who did not wish to go quietly into the night and in doing so destroyed the land that in Earth legend we have called Atlantis, where the Airlia colony was homebased. By doing this he protected the natural development of the human race, and for that we owe him a large debt of gratitude.
But beyond those few facts there are so many unanswered questions: What happened to Aspasia and the other Airlia?
Why was an Airlia atomic weapon left hidden in the depths of the Great Pyramid of Giza? Indeed, as we now suspect, were the pyramids built as a space beacon by the Airlia?
What really happened to Atlantis, site of the Airlia colony? What terrible weapon did Aspasia use to destroy it?
And, perhaps most important, to whom was the transmission the guardian made four days ago when it was uncovered, directed to? And what did it say?
And how do we turn the guardian back on?
“Most of this is already out of date,” Turcotte noted.
“We damn well know where the message was sent,” Larry Kincaid confirmed. “And we know where Aspasia was, and we know he’s dead now, thanks to Mike.” He inclined his head toward Turcotte.
“Are we sure they’re all dead up there?” Turcotte asked. “After what happened here and at the Kennedy Space Center?”
“We think the talon is operating on an automatic program,” Kincaid said. “It’s shown no indication of being able to maneuver. It’s drifting in orbit.”
“An automatic program that sucked in Warfighter and used it to destroy the hangar that just happened to be holding the two bodies here?” Turcotte’s tone indicated his disbelief. “And took out Atlantis as it was prepping to go up?”
Kincaid shrugged. “I’m just telling you our best guess,”
“Back to this.” Duncan tapped the news release.
“We know Aspasia was the rebel, the bad guy, not the Kortad,” Major Quinn said. “And that the Kortad were some sort of Airlia police, led by Artad.”
“Are we certain of those so-called facts?” Yakov asked “We have only your dead Professor Nabinger’s word on that—what he learned from a Kortad guardian (…) Qian-Ling in China. Aspasia’s guardian under Easter Island told him the opposite thing, and did you not believe that first? It is to be expected that each side’s computers would make them out to be the—How would you say? Men, or in this case, aliens in white hats?”
Turcotte was tired, more mentally than physically. First stopping the flight of the mothership by Majestic-12, then intercepting Aspasia’s fleet from Mars, then stopping the new Black Plague—he saw no end in sight to this war with a foe that had yet to make themselves apparent. The fact that The Mission had escaped from Devil’s Island and was now somewhere in the world, preparing the next phase of battle, was something he had thought about ever since coming back to Area 51.
“Something bothers me.…” Quinn hesitated, as if uncertain whether to air his thoughts in front of the group.
“Go ahead,” Duncan prompted.
Quinn tapped the article. “One thing that has been lost in recent events is the factor that started all this—the danger of activating the mothership’s interstellar drive.”
Turcotte stirred. “I destroyed the power source for the drive—the ruby sphere we found in the Great Rift Valley. So that’s not a problem.”
“And the mothership was damaged badly when Aspasia’s fleet was destroyed,” Duncan added. She pointed to the ceiling. “And it’s also in orbit abandoned, so we got it out of everyone’s reach.”
“What actually concerns me,” Quinn said, “is if the Kortad were actually one side of the Airlia in the civil war they fought, who is the interstellar threat that the guardians referred to? That’s the one thing both guardians—Aspasia’s and Artad’s—agreed on, as far as Nabinger could determine: that if the mothership’s drive was activated, there was an enemy out there”—Quinn pointed up—“who would track back along the drive and destroy our planet.”
Larry Kincaid shrugged once more. “We now know for certain there’s at least one other life-form out there among the stars, so it’s not a stretch to accept there are others.”
“Are they still out there is what concerns me,” Quinn said.
“Aspasia and Artad went at it over ten thousand years ago,” Turcotte said. “Who knows what’s out there now.”
Yakov suddenly stirred. “There is an ancient Chinese saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Maybe this enemy of the Airlia could be an ally in our fight?”
Everyone turned as Lisa Duncan tapped the top of the conference table. “We have to concern ourselves with more immediate problems here. On Earth. We can’t count on anyone bailing us out.” Duncan pulled out another sheaf of papers, giving a copy to each man. “Here’s the update, supposedly, from Kelly. It was burst-transmitted on the Navy FLTSCOM network off Easter Island, into the Internet, with e-mail addresses to every media outlet. It will be hitting the papers tomorrow and is already on radio and TV and posted on the Internet.”
“We can’t stop it?” Turcotte asked.
“Freedom of the press,” Duncan said. “It’s an American right.”
Yakov’s snort of disgust indicated what he thought of that.
“We couldn’t stop it,” Quinn said, “unless we shut down every Internet provider and put an absolute blackout on all media. I can assure you that Majestic-12 looked into the possibilities of doing just that and determined it would be impossible from a technological standpoint, never mind a legal or moral one.”
Turcotte quickly read the short article:
The Airlia have meant no harm. They have only been protecting themselves. They have coexisted in peace with us for thousands of years. They have protected us from outs
ide forces that would destroy our world. It has only been the interference of Majestic-12 and people from Area 51 who have caused the recent troubles.
I have talked with the Airlia still surviving on Mars, and I know all this to be true. They are trapped now, but even so, they hold no ill feelings toward us.
The recent events in South America were the results of a NATO secret experiment in biological warfare.
The Airlia can help us, but they must be left alone. In turn, they promise not to take any action that can affect us negatively.
“Jesus, talk about spin control,” Major Quinn said. “According to this, we started the Black Death!”
“Kelly didn’t write this,” Duncan said. “I don’t think Kelly exists anymore. That’s why I had you read the earlier article. These words are from the guardian under Easter Island.”
“I’m not concerned about that or the spin control,” Turcotte said. “I’m worried why the Easter Island guardian sees a need to have Kelly send this.”
“Why are you so sure the Easter Island guardian is the evil one?” Yakov asked in a rather mild tone.
“Because of what Nabinger uncovered under Qian-Ling,” Turcotte answered. “Which could have been as much of a lie as what he uncovered under Easter Island,” Yakov noted once more.
Turcotte held up the article. “So we should believe this? We knew that The Mission was behind the Black Death. You talked to General Hemstadt on Devil’s Island.”
“I think—” Duncan was interrupted by the buzz of her SATPhone. She pulled it out and turned it on. “Duncan here.” She listened for a second, her face tightening, then pulled it away from her ear. “Can we put this on the speaker in here?” she asked Quinn.
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