Larry Kincaid remembered crunching numbers with a slide ruler, something the new generation of scientists thought as quaint as using an abacus. His opinion was that while the technology advanced, the human minds using that technology retreated into specialty niches, losing the ability to think with imagination beyond what the machines could do.
That’s not to say he didn’t appreciate what modern technology could accomplish. Sitting in a small office just down the hall from the conference room, he had the imagery from the Hubble spread across his desk.
The black smear representing the mech-robots was still moving across the surface, their path relatively straight since leaving Cydonia. Occasionally there was a slight detour as they went around various obstructions in their path.
And there was something else. A second group of mech-robots was leaving the Cydonia region. These were carrying long black objects. Kincaid shifted the magnifying glass to Cydonia. Part of the black network had been disassembled. They were moving it. To where? he wondered.
There was a knock on the door and one of the technicians from the Cube handed him a long cardboard tube and departed. Kincaid pulled out a large rolled-up paper from the inside and spread it out on the floor — it was a mosaic of Mars photographs taken by the first Surveyor probe years ago.
He located Cydonia. Then he marked each location the Hubble had caught the mech-robots at. He took a yardstick and put one end on Cydonia and then aligned it through the median of those points. He drew a line, then removed the ruler.
His eyes followed the line from the present location of the mechs outward. There was no mistaking where the line led — and where the mech-robots were heading. Mons Olympus. The largest volcano on Mars and in the Solar System. It was over fifteen miles high, the equivalent of three Mount Everests. However, its sides sloped so gently, only two to five percent, that its base was over three hundred and forty miles in diameter. The entire mountain complex was surrounded by a four-kilometer-high escarpment.
Why were they going there? Kincaid wondered. The Airlia seemed to have a fascination with high mountains, he thought, as he remembered the story from Burton’s manuscript about the destruction of Mount Ngorongoro in Africa.
He went to the desk and searched through the imagery until he found what he was looking for — a shot of the Cydonia region, focused on the “face.”
Mech-robots were still working over the black metal grill-work that they had uncovered. The description from Burton’s manuscript from the Watcher who had seen the complex on the side of Mount Ngorongoro had reported the same thing. This one on Mars had obviously been destroyed a long time ago also. And now it was being rebuilt. To what end? And how did that connect with Mons Olympus?
Kincaid wondered.
His musings were interrupted by a light knock on the door. Che Lu stuck her head in. “Am I intruding?”
“No, come on in.”
She walked around the large mosaic of Mars and took the seat across from him. “I need some assistance.” She slid a piece of paper across to him, on top of the Hubble images. “I have checked and rechecked my figures, but I still cannot align Nabinger’s grid system with our planet.”
Kincaid picked up the paper and scanned it. “What is your reference point?”
“I have used both poles, aligning every point at least once with each, but it doesn’t make sense. Then I used Easter Island, Qian-Ling, and Giza in the same manner — as one would expect those to be marked by the Airlia — and there has been no sensible correlation among the three points. I even used Ngorongoro — and still nothing.”
“What are you hoping to discover with this?” Kincaid asked.
“I think that the current location of The Mission is hidden among those coordinates.”
“The Mission has moved often — according to the STAAR records we uncovered from Antarctica and Burton’s manuscript. These coordinates are old. Why would The Mission be at one of these ancient sites?”
“I think this is a listing of where guardian computers were located,” Che Lu said. “And given the current situation, it would be logical for The Mission to have relocated from Devil’s Island to one of the ancient bases that has a guardian in order to stay in touch with Mars and Easter Island.”
“How did Nabinger compile this list?” Kincaid asked.
“From his travels and archaeological studies of the High Runes,” Che Lu said.
“So not from one source, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Maybe some of these are false locations, then,” Kincaid said. He counted. “We have twenty-four spots. If even a few are false, that would make it very difficult to orient the grid. What we need to do is run a computer simulation on the spots, removing them one by one, then the various permutations of more than one. We’ll use Giza, Easter Island, and Qian-Ling as three fixed points because we know there were guardians at each of those sites.”
“How long will that take?”
Kincaid closed his eyes in thought. “It will take me a little while to develop the program. Then, when you consider the factorials of possibilities, even using the computer we have here, it will take a while to crunch the numbers. Several hours at least, maybe a day.”
Turcotte was on his side on the desert sand, hands uncomfortably cuffed behind his back. A squad of soldiers milled about nearby, smoking cigarettes while they waited for the commander to make a decision. He was arguing in Arabic with a man in civilian clothes.
Turcotte found he could not focus or bring his energy level up to face the current threat — of course, there wasn’t much he could do in the present circumstances. He’d felt like this before, but never so deeply. He knew he was drained of not only energy, but the ability to produce any more adrenaline.
His reserve was tapped out and he also knew it was more emotional than physical. That still didn’t change the overwhelming feeling of exhaustion.
Turcotte twisted slightly. He could see the civilian and the colonel. They were outside of Cairo, about forty-five minutes from Giza, as near as Turcotte had been able to tell from the bumpy ride in the back of the two-and-a-half-ton army truck he’d been thrown into after getting captured on the Nile. The colonel had taken charge of them and Turcotte first thought he’d be taken into the city, but the civilian — whoever he was — had appeared and presented some sort of credentials, redirecting them to this location.
Turcotte could see the officer nodding and then heard him barking orders to the six soldiers.
One of the soldiers kicked Turcotte in the side, indicating for him to get up, as the other five deployed in a rough line about ten feet away and began checking their weapons.
Turcotte could see the late-morning sun and feel the warmth of the rays on one side of his face and sand on the other. He swore he could feel every little grain pressing against his skin.
The soldier kicked once more and gestured.
Turcotte hardly noticed the pain. He thought of how many times he had seen the sun come up in so many different places around the world, and how often he had simply taken it for granted. To think this was the last he would see seemed more like a bad dream than reality.
The officer knelt next to Turcotte. “You must stand,” he said in surprisingly good English, with a slight British accent.
“I don’t think I’ll be giving you any assistance in killing me,” Turcotte said. For some reason, he was thinking how hard it must have been in the old West to hang someone in the desert. He tried to focus his thoughts, but couldn’t.
“Show some bravery,” the colonel said.
Turcotte didn’t think it was brave to stand before a firing squad. It was the ultimate surrender.