“What about Airlia artifacts?” Turcotte asked.
“Artifacts?” Ridley’s laugh had a manic edge that he was trying hard to control. “Oh, yeah, there’s artifacts down there, sir.” He slumped down into a chair. “But you best go see for yourself.”
Spearson leading the way, they went through the destroyed doors. They were in a large open tunnel with concrete walls and a floor that sloped down and to the right, disappearing around a curve a hundred meters away. Ridley had been correct about the supplies, Turcotte noted as they walked down. There were numerous side tunnels cut into the rock, full of equipment and supplies. Several of the side tunnels housed living areas, and as Ridley had noted, one was a mess hall. SAS soldiers stood guard at each door and told the colonel that there was no one alive inside.
Bodies were strewn about here and there, wherever the poison gas had caught them. Whatever Terra-Lei had used on its own people must have been fast acting and had dissipated quickly, Turcotte noted, but also appeared to have been painful. The features of each corpse were twisted in a grimace and the body contorted from violent seizures.
As they went around the bend, the three stopped momentarily in surprise. The wide walkway expanded to a sloping cavern, over five hundred meters wide, the ceiling a hundred meters over their heads hewn out of the volcanic stone. As far as they could see it descended at a thirty-degree slope. Rubber matting had been placed over the center of the smooth stone floor to form a walkway and there was a cog railway built next to the rubber matting.
“Bloody hell,” Spearson whispered.
“Look,” Duncan said, pointing to the right. A black stone stood there, like a dark finger pointed upward into the darkness. It was ten feet high and two in width, the surface a polished sheen except where high runes were etched into the stone.
“Hope it doesn’t say, NO TRESPASSING,” Turcotte said.
An SAS sergeant stood next to the small train and passenger cars. He saluted Spearson. “Already been down there, sir, with the captain,” he reported, pointing into the unseen deep distance where a row of fluorescent lights next to the rail line faded into the dark haze. “Left a squad on guard.” The sergeant swallowed. “Never seen nothing like it, sir.”
“Let’s take a look for ourselves,” Spearson said, climbing into the first open car.
Duncan and Turcotte joined him while the sergeant got in the cab and pushed the throttle into the forward position. With a slight jolt they began rattling down the cogs, descending farther into the cavern. As they went down, the cavern widened until they couldn’t see an end to either side, just the meager human light fading into the darkness ahead and behind. Turcotte pulled the collar of his battle-dress uniform tighter around his neck, and he could feel Duncan pressing closer to him. There was the feeling of being a tiny speck in a massive emptiness. Turcotte glanced over his shoulder back the way they had come. Already the brighter light of the cog railway terminal where they had boarded was over a mile behind them. The train was moving at almost forty miles an hour now, clattering over the cogs, but there was no sense of movement other than the fluorescent lights strung on poles next to the rail line flashing by.
After five more minutes they could all make out a red glow ahead. At first it was just the faintest of lines across the low horizon. But as they got closer, they could see the line grow clearer and larger over a mile ahead, perpendicular to their direction of travel. Turcotte had no idea how deep they were, but the temperature was starting to rise and he could feel beads of sweat on his forehead.
Turcotte looked down and could see that the floor of the cavern was still perfectly smooth. He’d seen Hangar Two at Area 51 where the mothership had been hidden, but this cavern dwarfed even that massive structure. He couldn’t imagine the technology that would be needed to carve this out. And for what purpose? he wondered. Directly ahead there was a red glow coming out of a wide crevice that split the cavern floor. Turcotte spotted several smaller glowing lights, the flashlights of the SAS squad at the end of the railway. As they slowed down, Turcotte could see the far side of the crevice, over half a mile away, but he couldn’t see down into it because they were still over a hundred meters from the edge when the train stopped at the end of the line.
“Sir!” An SAS trooper nodded at Colonel Spearson as they got out.
They walked together toward the edge and stopped where the smooth stone, which had been sloping down at thirty degrees, suddenly went ninety degrees straight down. Duncan gasped and Turcotte felt his heart pound as he carefully peered over the edge. There was no bottom that they could see, just a red glow emanating up from the bowels of the Earth. Turcotte could feel heat washing over his face, accompanied by a strong odor of burning chemicals.
“How deep do you think that goes?” Spearson asked.
“We must be at least seven or eight miles underground already,” Duncan said. “If that red glow is the result of heat generated from a split in the Mohorovicic discontinuity—”
“The what?” Spearson barked.
“The line between the planet’s crust and the mantle — then we’re talking about twenty-two miles altogether to the magma, which is what’s giving off that red glow.”
“Jesus,” Turcotte exclaimed.
“Look over there,” Colonel Spearson said, drawing their eyes from the spectacle of a doorway into the primeval inner Earth. To their right, about two hundred meters away, a series of three poles stretched across the chasm to the other side. Suspended from the cables, directly in the center, was a large, bright red, multifaceted sphere about five meters in diameter.
They walked along the edge of the crevice until they came to the first of the poles that held the sphere in place. The pole ran right into the rock face several feet below the lip. Turcotte had seen that black metal before. “That’s Airlia,” he said. “Same material as the skin of the mothership. Some incredibly strong metal we still haven’t been able to figure out.”
“What the bloody hell is that thing?” Spearson was pointing at the ruby sphere. It was hard to tell if the sphere itself was ruby or if it was reflecting the glow from below.
Duncan didn’t answer, but she led the way farther right where a group of low structures had been erected. It was obvious most of them had been built by the Terra-Lei scientists who’d been working down here. But in the center was a console that immediately reminded Turcotte of the control panel in one of the bouncers. “That’s Airlia too,” he said, walking up the panel. The surface was totally smooth. There was high rune writing etched on it and Turcotte imagined that once it was powered up, more rune writing would appear, pointing to various controls that could be activated with just a touch on the surface. He wished Nabinger were here to give them an idea what they were looking at.
“This”—Duncan was pointing at the panel—“controls that”—she pointed at the ruby sphere.
“And what does that do?” Spearson asked.
Duncan was looking about the great cavern. “I’m not too sure what more it can do, but I do believe it might have done this.” Her hands were spread wide taking in the space they were in.
“That thing blasted this out?” Spearson was incredulous.
“Something made this cavern,” Duncan said. “It isn’t a natural formation. The Airlia had technology beyond our imaginings, so I think it’s safe to say something of theirs made this cavern. And the Terra-Lei people spent a lot of years down here trying to figure this out. Now we know why they never moved this to South Africa.”
“They couldn’t move it,” Turcotte agreed. “That metal in those poles took the guys at Area 51 over fifty years to get through, and then only after they were taken over by the rebel guardian and given the information needed.”