by Talbot, Luke
There was a moment’s silence as they took in what he had just said.
“So where is she now?”
Kamal dove his hand into his breast pocket again and fished out his packet of cigarettes. He placed them purposefully on the small table before standing up and making to leave.
Ben stepped forward in protest. “Wait, you can’t leave without telling us where Gail is.”
“You can have the cigarettes, Mr Turner, I am giving up,” was all he said as he pushed past them and reached the door. Opening it, he turned back towards them briefly. “The agency that is behind all of this is not Egyptian, so I would recommend that you look elsewhere.”
Before they could object again, the door closed behind him.
George strode across the room and grabbed the packet of cigarettes. Ripping it apart, he discarded the foil insides and the single remaining cigarette on the table and turned the unfolded card over and over in his hands, looking for some sort of hidden message, before throwing it too onto the table.
“Bastard!” he exclaimed as he made a run for the door. Throwing it open, he launched himself out into the corridor and shot towards the lift.
Ben moved closer to the table and picked up the discarded cigarette. Turning it over in his hands, he checked the make. “George, wait!” he shouted, but the door had already swung closed behind him. He made a wet line along the length of the cigarette with his tongue, before gently peeling it open and emptying the tobacco onto the table.
There was a knock on the door. Ben checked his discovery once more and let George in.
“Bastard’s gone already!” he said.
“He left a note,” Ben said.
George looked at him in surprise. “I checked the cigarette packet; there was nothing inside but a left over cigarette!”
“Not quite. I looked more closely: why would someone buy a pack of Marlboro and use it to hold a rollup, unless they were using the rollup to hide something?” With this he lifted his hand to show George the small sliver of paper that had been hidden amongst the tobacco. “He left us a note.”
George took the piece of paper and turned it over in his hands. On it was a word, written faintly in black pencil:
DEFCOMM
They stared at each other for almost a minute, digesting the information.
“Why tell us so much then leave a secret message?” George asked. “And what’s Defcomm?”
“Maybe he wanted to leave a breadcrumb, in case they got to him before he got to us?” Ben said as he tapped the strange word into the browser on his phone. He showed the search results to George. He then asked the single most obvious question:
“What time does Martín’s flight leave?”
Chapter 56
Gail turned the pages slowly, looking at the symbols one by one and making notes with a pencil in the margin. She’d been given a copy of the Book of Xynutians, with a promise to see the original should her initial investigations be encouraging.
She was now on her tenth page, and was becoming desensitised by the overload of information. She had seen Xynutians in cars, Xynutians in what appeared to be mass-transportation systems, and even Xynutians going up and down in lifts attached to the sides of towering skyscrapers. And then she had seen Xynutians running, Xynutians on fire, skyscrapers broken and twisted and cars and mass transportation systems crumpled and destroyed. The drawings were like no other ancient Egyptian illustrations she had ever seen, though the accompanying text left no doubt that they were contemporary to the Book of Aniquilus.
She scanned through the translations that Patterson, or someone from his team, had made.
Aniquilus cast his gaze over the Xynutians, He eats their pride and ambitions with his swift punishment.
She shook her head. Eats made no sense at all in the context of the sentence. Obviously, it hadn’t to the Patterson either, who had circled the offending hieroglyphs.
Her tablet would probably tell her what they meant – she knew a lot of Egyptian verbs off the cuff, but she had become maybe a little too reliant on George’s application remembering some of the more complex contextual translations for her.
She flicked through a few more pages before stopping at a picture of a group of Xynutians, gathered around what she assumed were houses, looking up at the stars in the sky. Some calculations had been scribbled in pencil below the original hieroglyphs, along with a post-it note: Nefertiti’s return is 3344 years after the writing of the Book of Xynutians. This was in 2007!
She crossed the date out and scribbled some notes down on her own pad. Amateurs, she thought. The ancient Egyptians had followed a three hundred and sixty-five day calendar. Eventually, Roman rulers in the first century BC had imposed an earlier Ptolemaic ruling that every fourth year had to have an extra day, to account for the discrepancy between the solar year and the traditional Egyptian year.
The Book of Xynutians had been written thirteen centuries before this ruling, and at least a thousand years before the Ptolemaic kings had first suggested the change.
Therefore, the calculations in the translation she was looking at were, to the best of her mental arithmetic, about three years out. The ‘second coming’ of Nefertiti was scheduled to have occurred in 2004, not 2007.
“The year I was born,” she said with a wry smile.
She sat back and looked at the next picture carefully. Aniquilus left a trail of destruction behind him, and yet there were a handful of Xynutians, standing outside their homes looking to the stars, according to the translation waiting for the next coming of Aniquilus. She scratched her head, and then suddenly gave a satisfied laugh as she snatched the text up from the desk. On her desk was a telephone. It allowed her to dial one number: Patterson’s.
He came in with a smile a moment later. “Less than an hour into it and you’ve already made a discovery?”
She nodded at the paper on her desk. “A few things, I think,” she began. “Some odd translations here, I need my tablet to verify them, but the text makes no real sense.”
He agreed. “But I probably can’t get you access to your equipment. I’ll work on that one. What else?”
“The dates. You’re about three years out, because of the leap years,” she said with more than a hint of triumph.
He looked surprised and nodded. “Well spotted. I had no idea that the ancient Egyptians had no leap years.”
“You’re obviously not an Egyptologist then, are you? Finally,” she pointed to the picture of the surviving Xynutians, “there’s this.”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What does this prove?”
“Think about it: if Aniquilus somehow punished these mythical Xynutians, but left some alive to pass the message on, then where are they now? Surely such an advanced civilisation would pick itself back up and thrive again. Even in low numbers their technology would be enough to help them survive until their numbers were restored?”
Patterson contemplated the thought for a moment. “But what if there was nothing left? What if all the scientists were dead? Would you know how to make an internal combustion engine, or indeed have the ability to, if no-one was able to assist?”
“Surely not everything would have been destroyed?”
“Maybe not, but who would maintain it all? Once the electricity stops being piped in, or the chip in your computer dies, or the satellite connecting your phone falls out of the sky, how useful is the technology then? How long would it be before a dark age came about, and rival tribes fought among themselves?”
Gail smiled. “Assuming they even existed, they had to live through that once to get to where they were. Surely they could do it again? And the human race has been through its fair share of ‘dark-ages’, and we always bounce back stronger.”
Patterson rubbed his chin pensively. “You do have a point. There is a hole in the story, something the book does not say.”
“The book doesn’t have a preface indicating it’s a work of fiction, but I’m sure that if we look hard enough it�
��ll have a ‘Made in Hollywood’ stamp somewhere on it.”
He ignored the comment. “You need to start looking at this with an aim to helping us, not trying to prove us wrong. I think that you need to see something else, Dr Turner.”
Leaving the room, they walked briskly down the corridor, to a part of the facility that Gail had not yet been in. On their left were a series of double doors recessed into the wall. The third set had been left ajar, enough for Gail to glimpse the inside of a huge hanger. Patterson was several yards beyond the door already, and she stopped to peer inside.
Before Patterson backtracked and slammed the door shut in her face she saw an open space that would have been large enough to comfortably house several average-sized passenger jets, of the type that would normally take her to Egypt. Large scaffolds filled three quarters of the space, with rockets or missiles in various stages of completion in each one. The closest scaffold to the door held a complete rocket, the tip of which was roughly twenty yards away and ten above her. From the distance to the floor of the hanger, she fancied she must have been on the third or fourth floor of the building.
Just as the door was shut, she saw a gigantic Stars and Stripes on the opposite wall, flanked by two logos. On its left was the smaller of the two, the familiar logo of NASA. On its right, several times larger, was a name she had not heard of before: DEFCOMM. Written in bold white text across a black background, the O was the planet Earth, with the USA dead-centre.
“We’re not going in there,” Patterson said sternly. He continued down the corridor, keeping her slightly behind him and to his left so he could still see her in his peripheral vision.
A few moments later, they reached a lift. He entered a long sequence of numbers on the keypad and pressed a button marked B3. She could tell because of the momentary weight loss that the lift was descending rapidly. She guessed that the B stood for Basement, so they may have descended six or seven floors, but she was surprised at how quickly. The doors slid open after less than ten seconds.
All thoughts of lifts and their mechanisms left her when she saw what the lift doors had revealed.
“This is the Agency’s control centre.” Patterson said flatly.
“Are you working for NASA,” she asked in awe. Before her were spread out dozens of computer terminals in semi-circles facing a huge screen, like seats of congress facing the leader of the house. On the big screen was a video-feed of two people in space suits leaning over a pile of dirt and rocks.
“No, this is better than NASA, they’re a little behind the times. What we’re seeing here is the direct feed from the crew of the Clarke on the surface of Mars. NASA sees the same picture in seventy-five minutes, which then gets sent to the other space agencies around the world.”
“Why do you get to see it earlier?”
He said nothing in reply, so she made the assumption that whatever the reason was, it wasn’t legal.
“How can you intercept such data? Surely someone would find out?”
“Someone nearly did, but it’s exactly because it’s so unthinkable that it became so easy. All of the messages sent to and from Clarke are sent via a network of secure satellites stationed around Earth. Breaking through their security model is impossible. Unless you built the satellites in the first place; then you have an advantage – you can get to all the data without anyone ever finding out about it. That way they can then censor out what they don’t want people to see, and make up what they do.”
“Why would you want to do such a thing?” she asked.
“They do it to gain control of information.”
Gail noted the correction. Dr Patterson was a mystery to her – he was obviously implicated in Mallus’ dealings, but was also distancing himself from him. And then there was the message he had written to her when she had been strapped into her bed.
“Look, Patterson, I get the fact that there are some dodgy things going on here, I get the fact that you didn’t want me to be here in the first place, that’s obvious. But answer me this: why does the Agency need me here? What can I do or offer that is any different to what is already being done?”
He smiled gently. “Under these circumstances, I didn’t want you here; but while I have a broader understanding of the Book of Xynutians, you have studied the Book of Aniquilus in infinite detail for ten years. The Agency believes, I believe,” he corrected himself, “that the book of Aniquilus is a set of rules, without which you get the Book of Xynutians.”
“Like the Ten Commandments and Revelations?”
“Not exactly; the Ten Commandments are Old Testament, and Revelations is New, which in that respect is like the two books, yes. But Revelations is something that it was suggested would happen regardless at the end of times. I believe that the Xynutians are an actual example of what will happen in our worst case scenario. I had difficulty believing the whole concept, to be honest, until I started looking at the Book of Xynutian pictures in detail. And now, I don’t doubt a word of it. Because it looks like we’ve found Xynutian remains on Mars.”
He walked up to a young man seated in front of a computer terminal and spoke to him quietly for a few moments. The operator nodded and started tapping commands into the terminal.
“Watch this,” he said.
Gail watched as the main screen of the control room split in half. On the right hand side she could see two astronauts in what looked like a dune buggy, driving through an arid desert. The pale blue-grey sky looked cold and lifeless. The camera filming the scene panned steadily as it followed the vehicle and its occupants from left to right.
The left half of the display was totally different: the camera was jolting from left to right as it made its way through a narrow corridor and under a low archway. The route ahead of it was lit by a torch beam, which brought Gail to the conclusion that the camera must be mounted somewhere near an astronauts visor. She was seeing what he or she was seeing. In front of the camera another astronaut emerged from the darkness holding a shovel. The torch beam bounced off the astronaut’s visor, but as it changed direction she glimpsed the excited features of a middle-aged man, his grin taking up half of his face.
“On the right is what the world sees. A computer generated mission to Mars, perfect in every conceivable way: Captain Marchenko and Dr Richardson on a routine outing to drill ice cores from the bed of an ancient frozen river. On the left is what is actually happening on Mars: Dr Richardson has just entered what they have called The Gallery for the first time, and Captain Marchenko is coming to greet her.”
She looked at the two feeds for a moment. “How do I know it’s not the other way round? What if the reality is the dune buggy, and the faked images are the Xynutian remains?”
“Why would we do that?” he asked.
Gail had to admit that she couldn’t think of a reason.
“But the world knows that they found the Stickman on Mars. That’s why I went to Egypt in the first place. Why would the world accept that they would simply return to drilling ice cores?”
“Because since you have been with us, the images captured by Beagle 4 and broadcast so readily to the media have been debunked. Dismissed as fakes by the scientific community. They were an attempt by the European Space Agency to cause a sensation, and I believe that attempt is failing.”
“No help from you, of course.”
He looked at her sideways and raised an eyebrow. “Please pay attention to the video. This was recorded this morning, and should give you all the convincing you need.”
As Gail watched, Captain Marchenko led Dr Richardson’s helmet camera down the dark corridor until it stopped abruptly at a dead end. Marchenko pointed eagerly towards where the dirt-covered floor met the perfectly smooth walls. As Dr Richardson’s camera refocused, Gail began to pick out familiar shapes, and her heart sank. Embossed in the wall, at waist-height, was a small procession of humans. From their clothing it was clear they were Xynutians, but with a difference: these were not Egyptian caricatures as in the Book of Xynuti
ans, but detailed, lifelike renditions. They were being marched towards the dead-end of the corridor, and towering over them, almost squashing them into the dirt-floor, was the Stickman, Aniquilus.
Dr Patterson looked at Gail intently, waiting for a reaction. When none came, he broke the silence. “You see, Dr Turner? The Xynutians are not imaginary, they did exist and they were wiped out, in all probability by Aniquilus.”
Gail looked at the displays in disbelief. Nothing proved to her that what she was looking at hadn’t been made up in an elaborate computer simulation, but there was one absolute certainty: DEFCOMM, and anyone involved with it, was up to no good.
“And now that I’ve seen all this, all these things that you’re hiding so effectively from the entire world, what are my chances of ever being released?” she said as calmly as she could.
“I hope that what you’ve seen will make you understand how important our cause is, and that you will agree to join us,” he replied hesitantly.
It didn’t, and she certainly wasn’t going to join anyone. “And what about the astronauts on Mars? When they get back, how will you keep them quiet?” She asked the question loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, but her only response was a heavy silence; Dr Patterson looked at his shoes briefly before looking back at the displays. She scanned the control room and her eyes met the fleeting glance of the controller who had reset the displays for them earlier.
Looking back at the video feeds, she could see Captain Marchenko through the eyes of Dr Richardson. His grin was unmoving as he gesticulated excitedly at the Xynutians. Somehow, she had to contact her husband. She had to get out and tell everyone what was really going on. Because now it wasn’t just her life at stake; although they may be millions of miles away, she now knew that she could be the astronauts’ only real chance of ever getting back to Earth alive.