“Hard to know what to believe and who to trust,” Turcotte said.
“I trust you.”
Turcotte rubbed the stubble of beard on his chin. Duncan came up next to him, standing close by his side. He regarded her for a moment, taking in her dark eyes. “Where’s your son?” He felt bad for not having asked before, but it had been one heck of a trip just getting some time off and coming here. He’d noticed the picture of Lisa and her son on the mantelpiece inside.
“He’s been staying with his father since school started. I knew this assignment was going to consume all my time, and it wouldn’t have been fair to leave him here.”
“It would be kind of lonely,” Turcotte noted.
“It is, but we enjoy it when we’re here together,” Duncan said. “When I taught at the University we would drive to town together.”
“You miss him.” Turcotte said it as fact, not a question.
Duncan nodded. “They’re away now on a camping trip. I’d hoped to be able to see him, but…” Her voice trailed off.
“I’m sorry,” Turcotte said.
“Next time in town,” Duncan promised, “I’ll introduce the two of you. You’ll like Jim.”
“I’m sure I will.”
“He got his license last year,” Duncan said. “I was so scared, letting him drive these roads. I almost sold the house and moved into town. But then the presidential appointment came and, well, I didn’t have time and Jim likes it here. He likes the quiet. I like it too.
“When we’re done with all of this”—she pointed at the sky, and Turcotte knew she meant the mothership—“I want to come back here.”
“I’m glad you didn’t move,” Turcotte said. “It’s beautiful.”
Duncan was the President’s science adviser and primary point of contact for everything to do with the Airlia. This was the first chance the two of them had had in weeks to simply stop and be still for a little while. Turcotte knew it was a temporary respite, but one both of them terribly needed.
They lapsed into silence for a few moments, taking in the spectacular view. The moon was shining down on them. To the west it reflected off the white-covered peaks.
“There’s Longs Peak.” Duncan pointed to their left. “A fourteener,” she added, referring to one of the many peaks in Colorado over 14,000 feet.
Turcotte nodded. “I climbed it when I was in Tenth Special Forces.”
Duncan laughed. “I should have known.” She gestured toward the south. “On a clear day you can see the top of Pikes Peak, over a hundred miles away.”
“I always wanted to retire out here. I don’t think you can beat the mountains,” Turcotte said.
That brought another long silence. Turcotte looked up once more at the sky. Finally he spoke. “Anything from Kelly?”
Duncan sighed, realizing the real world was never far away. “Nothing. The only change has been that the shield surrounding Easter Island is now opaque. Overflights, satellite imagery, thermal, infrared, radio waves — nothing can get through. There’s just a big black half-circle sitting on the ocean now. We don’t have a clue what’s going on inside of the shield.”
“And Mars? The Airlia base?” Turcotte asked.
“Nothing. We hope the Surveyor nuke took out the guardian there.”
Turcotte shook his head. “You’ve looked at the imagery from Hubble and the other data like I did. The bomb went off a couple of miles up. There’s no surface damage.”
“I was trying to be optimistic. Mars is a long way off.” Duncan tried to put more confidence in her voice than she felt. The talon fleet had powered up after being left in storage for more than five thousand years and crossed that distance in less than two days.
They were lost in their own thoughts until Duncan broke the silence. “Some people think we did the wrong thing.”
Turcotte laughed. “That’s understating it a bit. I have had a moment or two to watch the news.”
“All right,” Duncan said, “a lot of people think we did the wrong thing.” “We had to act,” Turcotte said. “There wasn’t time to sit around and have a debate.”
“I’m not saying I agree with those people,” Duncan said. “I think we did the right thing. What I’m concerned about is what happens next.”
Turcotte took a sip of beer, then put his mug down. “Hell, Lisa, I’m not exactly sure what happened, never mind what is going to happen.” He closed his eyes in thought. “First, we had the Easter Island guardian computer tell Nabinger what a great guy this alien Aspasia was. How he saved mankind from some other terrible alien force the Airlia were at war with by keeping the rebels among his own people from engaging the interstellar engine of the mothership and bringing those aliens here. So we stopped Majestic from flying the mothership. Then we get inside Qian-Ling and that guardian computer says no, Aspasia was the bad guy and this Artad fellow and his police, the Kortad, were the good guys. But that there was indeed an interstellar war between the Airlia and some other alien race and the mothership’s interstellar engine shouldn’t be engaged anyway. So at least both agreed on that, and stopping Majestic and keeping the mothership’s interstellar drive off was a good thing.
“So then we get Aspasia coming in from Mars — where he’d been snoozing for a hell of a long time — with what looks like a fleet of warships ready to finish what he started ten thousand years ago. And his foo fighters destroy a navy sub and look none too friendly. So we stopped him.”
“And the foo fighters,” Duncan added.
“And the foo fighters,” Turcotte acknowledged. “We stopped Aspasia based on what Nabinger told us and the actions of the foo fighters.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what the truth is, and I’m not sure Nabinger did either.”
“He was trying to tell me something important when he got killed,” Duncan said.
Turcotte nodded. “I think he figured out what was in the lower level of QianLing we couldn’t get into. Peter was a brave man.”
“Quite a few brave people have died in this conflict,” Duncan said.
“That’s the nature of war,” Turcotte said. It was a subject he was very familiar with, having been in the military ever since graduating from the University of Maine. He’d served in the elite of the U.S. Army, from infantry to Special Forces, to a counterterrorist unit in Germany until the assignment that had brought the two of them together when he’d been picked to join the top-secret security force guarding Area 51.
Now he was assigned to Lisa Duncan, to help her deal with the results of opening up Area 51 and the shocking fact that aliens — the Airlia — had arrived on Earth over ten thousand years ago and established an outpost. And that the Airlia had never left. They had had a civil war, during which the island humans knew in legend as Atlantis had been destroyed. It appeared now, at least from the evidence they had gathered so far, that an uneasy truce had existed between the two Airlia factions for millennia, maintained by computers — called guardians by the humans who found them.
Duncan interrupted his thoughts. “Did you know that ten percent of Americans don’t believe we ever got to the moon? They think the whole Apollo program was done in a hangar out in the desert.”
Turcotte raised an eyebrow.
Duncan continued. “CNN just did a survey and they found that over forty percent of Americans don’t believe the Airlia are real. They think the whole thing was staged. That there was no fleet. No aliens. No base on Mars. None of it.”
“How do they explain the bouncers secreted at Area 51? And the mothership hidden there?”
“Some say none of them exist. You have to remember that only a very small percentage of the population has actually seen a bouncer in person, even with the publicity tours we sent some on. With the special effects Hollywood can churn out now, many people think it’s all fake. Or they think the bouncers are military prototypes and the government is trying to scam the public. That this whole alien thing is a ploy to misdirect attention.”