Chin glanced back with a menacing glare nearly as intense as the explosion a few minutes earlier, but then turned back around and paced down the rest of the corridor in silence.
Just before stepping out into the Terracotta Army pit, Frank saw a flash of electric blue light flash past. Then another and another, until a constant stream was rushing past into the open and flooding the soldier pits with a soft haze of blue.
“What in the world is that?” Chin asked of Frank while stepping out into the open and headed toward a row of statues.
“You tell me,” Frank countered while holding his aim level at Chin’s back as they zigzagged their way between soldier statues. “This is your country and those were your men who opened the burial chamber.”
“Yes this is my country, and I am curious how you intend to leave my country? The nearest US embassy is five hundred miles away in Beijing. I have many more men just outside waiting to help me. How about you, super agent Frank Graves?” Chin mocked.
“I figure I’ll just wait for the proper authorities to show up,” Frank answered casually.
“And you will be shot on sight.”
Frank roared with laughter at Chin’s statement. “I’m not the one who violated the sanctity of that burial chamber. I expect you will be shot and I will go home with yet another medal pinned to my chest.”
“My government does not give awards to foreigners.”
“Well then, I’ll just have to make one up for myself, won’t I?” Frank concluded as they came to the last set of clay soldiers before reaching the steps leading back to the observation deck.
For stability, Frank wrapped his free arm around the waist of the statue and made ready to step by, but in that instant he suddenly felt the statue’s arm move.
Frank took a brief moment to question his sanity while he watched the clay statue step down off its pedestal. Reality rushed back to him when he saw the statue’s sword wielding hand cut a downward arc aimed at his head. Instinctively Frank dove to the side, rolled back onto his feet, raised his pistol and fired off a trio of rounds to no effect. The statue stalked toward him like he just pelted it with marshmallows.
Out of options, Frank dashed for the steps at a full sprint. On his way Frank glanced around the football field sized dome and saw hundreds, maybe even thousands of statues coming to life. He didn’t stick around to perform a head count; he was in full retreat up the steps and onto the observation deck where the Professor, Alex and two of Chin’s men awaited him.
“Frank?!?” Alex exclaimed when he reached the top of the steps. “What the hell; you’re dead. I saw you dead back in Cairo.”
Frank flicked his head toward the now thoroughly active soldier pit down below, “You should know by now sweetheart, death is only the beginning.”
Chin and his men took aim with their weapons at Frank which drew a sarcastic sneer, “Really? We have bigger problems don’t you think. Now buy me some time; I have a call to make.”
Chapter 70: Matter of Trust
“Alright get off my brother,” Mark ordered to the two men pinning his brother on the ground. He pointed to Hastelloy lying still on the ground in front of Terry. “Cuff him and let’s get out of here.”
Mark watched one man pull a set of cuffs from behind his back as he turned to face his brother. The soft zip of metal gears locking into position let him know Hastelloy was being handled, so he lent Jeff a hand to his feet.
“I guess we will have a lot more to talk about than the good old days when I come visit your family this Christmas,” Mark said in a conciliatory tone and an apologetic pat on the shoulder. “We’ll catch up later to make this right.”
“You’re leaving?” Jeff exclaimed. “Now?”
Mark nodded his head, “I wasn’t lying when I said time is short. I need to leave with him right now.”
Mark heard a commotion behind him and turned to see Hastelloy, with his arms bound behind his back, being carried between two of his men. The captive looked groggy from the head blow, but he was moving his feet as the set of agents moved to the door. Mark joined the other two agents and Terry on their way toward the closed door. His brother just stood dumbfounded in the middle of the room like a man witnessing a mugging, but was too scared to do anything to stop it.
Terry turned the knob, pulled open the office door and led the group through. Mark was the first to notice the four bodies lying crumpled unconscious on the floor in the outer office. Before his brain could process the details, he saw Terry go down gasping for air and holding his throat with both hands.
The two agents not carrying the suspect immediately moved to draw their weapons. With blinding speed a slender leg snapped in from around the door frame and caught one of them in the side of the face slamming the man’s head into the door frame.
Following the attacking leg into the inner office was the attractive form of Tara. She brought her left hand down to pin the other agent’s gun hand and delivered an openhanded thrust to his windpipe, crushing it.
Mark threw a right hook at the side of Tara’s head, but was too slow to connect. She opened her stance to let the blow pass harmlessly in front of her face and then used Mark’s momentum to fling him into the outer office. In midflight, he felt the pistol held in a holster at the small of his back get pulled away. An instant later a single shot rang out as Mark crashed into the side of Tara’s desk.
He looked back in time to see the agent on Hastelloy’s left side fall to the ground with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. The last agent managed to get a hold on Tara’s gun hand to knock the weapon away. The agent went for his own gun, but in the middle of drawing he had the barrel disassembled from the main body of the weapon by Tara’s skilled hand.
While Mark lay prone on the floor still recovering from the blinding pain racing up and down his spine from hitting the desk, he observed Tara and the agent square off for hand-to-hand combat. By the look of things, they both knew what they were about in the finer points of martial arts. Still, Mark liked his man’s odds considering he had six inches and fifty pounds of muscle on the little lady.
The two exchanged a flurry of blocked punches, with a few snap kicks thrown in, before the agent pressed his size advantage. The man grabbed hold of Tara by the collar and tried to lasso her into a bear hug takedown, but she had other intentions.
On the way back to his feet, Mark watched Tara leap up and summersault over the agent’s left shoulder. On her way down she grabbed hold of the man’s head with both hands. As the pull of gravity brought her down to the floor with her back against the agent’s back, momentum did all the work. The agent’s head was pulled backwards, bending him in half. His body had no choice but to follow the head’s lead or else suffer a broken spine.
The man’s body rotated backwards over Tara’s shoulder with his head as the fulcrum and slammed into the floor with the force of a magnitude ten earthquake. Tara wasted no time and delivered a punch to the base of the man’s skull rendering him motionless.
Mark charged back into the room to try and tackle Tara before she could reset her position, but he was too late. Still five feet away from her, Mark screeched to a halt and stared down the barrel of a pistol pointed between his eyes.
All he could do was stand there with his arms raised and look about the office and audit the body count. Nine of his men were down. Some were dead, most unconscious, and none would be of any further help in the situation.
His brother still stood frozen in the center of the room as Hastelloy got back to his feet under his own power to stand next to Tara. Unarmed, the ferocious woman faced nine well trained operatives and downed them all in the span of a few minutes. Now she was armed and had Mark and his brother as captives.
“You alright, Captain?” Tara asked.
“I suppose I should have expected the orderly to be working for them,” Hastelloy said with a frustrated sigh while holding the back of his head and massaging the base of his neck. He turned his upper body to look toward J
eff. “Dr. Holmes, would you please join your brother on this side of the room. You have my word no harm will come to you.”
Mark was busy internally debating how to play the situation as his brother slowly paced over to his side. Jeffrey’s perplexed stare never left Tara as he came to a stop to stand next to Mark. To say he was in a state of shock at the betrayal was akin to comparing a category five hurricane to a gentle breeze.
“Your reputation precedes you,” Jeffrey finally managed to say. “I see the calculations for your escape pod flight back from Mars were well done, Commander Gallono.”
Tara inclined her head slightly to acknowledge the reasoning. “I thought for sure that was the end. I still don’t like trusting computers with my life though.”
“Am I to discern from that statement, Doctor, that you believe my story to be true?” Hastelloy asked of Jeffrey. “Am I now free to leave this facility?”
“Oh yes, you’ve made a believer out of me,” Jeffrey confirmed. “As I recall though, you checked yourself into Henderson Home. You have been free to leave whenever you wanted. So the question now is, why were you ever here in the first place?”
“For him,” Hastelloy said inclining his head toward Mark. “His job is to know everything about me and my crew’s activities on this planet. He is the one person on this planet who knows, without question, that the stories I have been telling you are true. Unfortunately, his skeptical nature prevents him from trusting our intentions to be decent or honorable. That’s where you come in, Doctor.”
“You and I have built a relationship over the last two weeks built on friendship and trust,” Hastelloy went on. “I need you to stand by your brother as an advocate of my good, honorable nature.”
“Why, to what end?” Mark insisted. “Who cares what I think? You could have remained hidden away for thousands of years to come. Why bother with me and my trust or distrust of your intentions on this planet?”
“The probe,” Hastelloy said quietly. “The Novi will be here soon, and I need to be the one they speak to first. Not your president, his security advisors, or even your executive committee overseer. You and I are the only people who can make that happen, but only if you trust me.”
Mark was about to respond, but got interrupted by another buzzing and vibration on his hip. Tara stepped forward and pulled the phone from its case.
“Allow me.” She quickly glanced at the display screen and then passed the phone over to Hastelloy. “It’s his partner Frank.”
Hastelloy passed the phone back to Mark. “Put it on speaker. Let’s all hear what your feisty Texan has been up to today.”
Before releasing his grip on the phone Hastelloy added, “If you feel the need, you may openly divulge your current state of captivity rather than some coded phrasing.”
Mark blew a soft chuckle through his nostrils and then pushed talk on the phone. “Frank, where are you?”
“China,” came an efficient response. “The archeologists were taken here to run their mapping equipment on the burial mound of the Chinese first emperor.”
“Qin Shi Huang’s pyramid near Xi’an,” Hastelloy added. “We are quite familiar with the mausoleum. What are they looking for?”
“Who the blazes is that?” Frank demanded.
“Frank, meet Captain Hastelloy and his first officer Commander Gallono,” Mark said with some annoyance in his voice. “They have subdued my men and now hold me at gunpoint, but they...”
“Shut up and listen, all of you,” Frank frantically interrupted. “I don’t care what is going on over there; this is bigger. Remember a few years back the reports we got about a radiation frequency from inside the pyramid that was close to, but not an exact match to frequency Alpha?”
“Yes, we disregarded it as coincidence and moved it to a secondary threat level,” Mark said with concern sneaking into his voice.
“Well the Chinese Ministry of State Security must have put it at the top of their priority list. That’s why they kidnapped the archeologists. They discovered a large room above the emperor’s burial chamber as the source of the radiation.”
Mark glanced at Hastelloy to see if this was new information to him. The creased stress lines running across the man’s forehead were a dead giveaway that this was surprising and decidedly unwelcome news to him.
“They opened the emperor’s burial chamber before I could stop them, and something happened,” Frank reported.
“The Terracotta Army?” Hastelloy offered without emotion.
“Yeah. This blue energy wave overtook the pits and they ... well, as crazy as it sounds, they are all coming to life. We’ve tried guns and grenades, but the clay just seems to absorb it all with little effect.”
“Who is we?” Mark asked for clarification.
“The Chinese and I sorta set aside our differences when this happened.”
“Pull everybody back,” Mark ordered. “Try and find weapons that work against them, and I’ll make sure help is on the way shortly.”
Mark ended the call and looked at Hastelloy with his best ‘what now’ face. “It appears the Alpha are still a threat. Can we follow Frank and the Chinese’s example and set aside our differences to deal with it?”
Hastelloy looked at Tara and shook his head fiercely. “I knew that silver sphere was out of place with the rest of the ceiling design. I should have investigated it further.”
“At the time, we had the Mars colony to destroy. There were more immediate concerns,” Tara offered and handed the pistol over to Hastelloy.
“You know what to do,” Hastelloy said to her and then raised the pistol to her temple and pulled the trigger.
“No!” both Mark and Jeff managed to shout in stereo before Tara’s lifeless body hit the floor. Mark went on in a rage, “What have you done? My boss has the tunnel exit under siege. Assuming you bring Gallono back with your Nexus device, he will be trapped inside the Sphinx chamber.
Hastelloy looked over at Jeffrey leaning to the side as he vomited at the sight of his long time secretary’s grey matter and blood sprayed against his office wall. “Gallono is fine,” he reassured the doctor and then looked to Mark. “You don’t seriously think I am foolish enough to only have one way out of the Nexus do you?”
Before Mark could form a response Hastelloy did the unthinkable. For the second time that day he released his grip on the gun controlling the room and handed it over to Mark. “Once again the causes we both fight for are aligned. We are on the same side.”
“For how long?” Mark interrupted while helping his brother back to an upright position while shielding his eyes away from the carnage on his office wall and floor.
Hastelloy extended an open palm toward Mark, “If you trust me, get me in front of your president or his science advisor. If not, then send me back to the Nexus and I will deal with the Alpha threat on this planet as I always have - alone.”
Mark pursed his lips and shook his head in a moment of contemplation. He hated giving up control, but if his brother truly did trust this man enough to risk his life for him, then that was good enough for him. Mark took the pistol, slid it into the holster behind his back, and shook Hastelloy’s hand to seal the arrangement.
Epilogue: Aftershock
Lodie raised his head and pulled his eyes away from the ground to look toward the sky. Even through the visor of his environmental suit, the deep red tint of the planet’s surface overwhelmed his eyes after a while. Dust kicked up by the surface winds made the sky appear pink near the ground, but looking farther up the horizon granted his optic nerves relief with a vista of purple and blue.
He would have loved to rub his eyes, but a layer of clear plastic a quarter inch thick prevented his gloved paw from making contact. He had to settle for blinking and squinting his eyelids to wash out the red blindness. With his eyes no longer screaming for relief, Lodie looked around by turning at the waist to make sure that no one in his team had gotten lost.
After months spent lobbying for the opportunity, L
odie finally had his first command, and he was determined to succeed so that it would not be his last. He looked out across the three mile crater and took count. Thirty men and women were busy testing the soil, while another ten were setting up the core sampling rig. They needed to verify the initial readings that the survey drone flying overhead had detected.
The equipment onboard the fixed wing aircraft had only a fifty percent success rate when trying to detect deposits of titanium. Before investing thousands of valuable man hours to set up a mining and smelting facility, the colony elders insisted the readings be verified, hence the survey crew.
The transport ship was nearing completion, but the current source to mine titanium for the ship’s outer hull was just about exhausted. To complete the build, a new source was needed. The one hundred mile distance from the colony mountain was inconvenient, but not insurmountable. A rail line could easily be built to move machinery here and haul ore back. Initial surface readings were promising, but taking a core sample would give conclusive proof if the site was viable.
Lodie was about to walk over and check on the rig when he suddenly felt an odd tremor beneath his feet. The vibrations were subtle enough that he would have ignored it, but several of his team began frantically pointing toward the sky behind him.
He resisted the impulse to immediately turn and look at the spectacle because he did not want to appear as a follower. He was the leader and it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness, and that was the last impression Lodie needed to give during his first command.
An instant later the radio communication channel erupted with panic. “What in the name of Mother Nature is that?” seemed to be the phrase of choice among the frantic team.
Lodie felt the ground tremors intensify, which finally caused him to turn around and join the crowd of gawkers. Once the turn was completed, the sight that greeted him sent a wave of terror through every fiber of his being.
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