“And who,” Duncan said, “were they asking for help from with the Great Wall?” She walked over to the coffeepot set on a field table and poured herself a cup. She held up an empty cup to Turcotte and he nodded.
“Let’s take it logically,” Turcotte said. “The Pyramid was to get attention. The symbol in the Great Wall was to send a message after they got attention. That’s the way I would have done it,” he said.
“Done what?” Duncan asked as she handed him the coffee.
“Sent a message to outer space with the technology and manpower present on the Earth at the time if I’d lost my primary means of communication,” Turcotte said. “In Special Forces one of the first things we learn in training is that you always have to have a way to communicate back to home base. A primary, a backup, an emergency, and a pull-it-out-your-ass way. I think this symbol built into the Great Wall was a pull-it-out-your-ass.”
“Hold on here,” Duncan said. “These aliens were rebels, outlaws. Aspasia defeated them, destroyed their base at Atlantis, and scattered them across the face of the planet. I get back to my question of who were they trying to signal to? You’d think rebels would want to lay low.”
“The Kortad?” Nabinger suggested. “Maybe they just weren’t rebels. Maybe they were traitors too.”
“And were the people who built this part of the Great Wall the same ones who put the Ruby Sphere in the Great Rift Valley?” Turcotte asked. “Is that the China connection?”
“I’d say so,” Duncan said. “It makes sense.”
“You people are shooting in the dark,” Reynolds called out, but the others ignored her.
“You know,” Nabinger said hesitatingly, “I got some confusing stuff out of the guardian just before it cut contact. I didn’t tell UNAOC because I didn’t know if what I saw was a recording of reality or something the computer was making up.”
“What did you see?” Turcotte asked.
Nabinger rubbed his temples. “I think it might have been the destruction of Atlantis by the mothership. It was very confusing.”
“Aspasia can clear all this up when he wakes up and comes back to Earth,” Kelly said. “We’ll just have to wait.”
“Waiting gives away initiative,” Turcotte said in a low voice.
“What?” Kelly snapped at him.
“I said waiting gives away the initiative,” Turcotte said so that everyone in the tent could hear. “It’s a maxim of combat. Victory usually goes to the side that maintains the initiative.”
“Oh, God!” Kelly exclaimed. “We’re not at war.”
“I don’t know what the situation is,” Turcotte said. “I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is we’ve gotten two messages from some damn machine on Mars and everyone’s getting ready like it’s the second coming of Christ. Well, I for one would like to find out a bit more about what the truth is while we’re waiting for Aspasia to awaken or thaw out or whatever the hell he’s doing up there.”
“I would too,” Lisa Duncan said. She held up her hands as Reynolds angrily stood up. “Let’s slow down a second here. What else did you see about Atlantis, Professor?”
Nabinger grimaced. “People dying. Ships sailing away, trying to escape. That’s why I think the diffusionist theory is…” He paused as he suddenly remembered. “Ships. Spaceships. Seven of them. Not bouncers, but bigger. They flew away just before the mothership arrived.”
“Flew where?” Turcotte asked.
“Straight up.”
“The rebels escaping,” Duncan summarized.
“Yes. That must be so,” Nabinger agreed.
“So they did get away!” Turcotte was looking at the map of China again. He stabbed his finger down on the map. “I bet they went here.” He looked up. “And if Aspasia and his people are awakening, who’s to say the rebels aren’t also?
“And,” Turcotte continued, “I think the only way we’re gonna find out more is to go to China, get inside this damn tomb, and take a look at what’s written there. Find the guardian computer, if there is one there. If it was the rebels who did this part of the Wall, then maybe we need to know about it as soon as possible and not wait on Aspasia. After all, his guardian computer here on Earth seemed concerned enough about this to send out a foo fighter recon.”
“Going there is easier said than done,” Duncan replied. “China’s in a lot of turmoil right now. From what I understand, Taiwan is doing considerable covert pushing in the midst of all this to try and overthrow the regime in Beijing.
“China has pulled out of the UN to protest UNAOC’s actions. I think the leadership in Beijing is at a complete loss as to how to deal with this situation of alien contact, and they’re doing what China has done repeatedly over the years: retreat inside of itself. All borders have been closed and communication cut off with the outside world.
“Not only that,” she continued, “but I don’t think UNAOC is going to be too thrilled about throwing any sort of monkey wrench into the anticipation of Aspasia’s return.”
Turcotte crossed his arms and stared at Lisa Duncan. “You’re the ranking person here. It’s your call. Remember, you work for the U.S. Government also. I say let’s skip UNAOC and bounce this up our chain of command.”
“I’ve already decided to do that,” Duncan said.
CHAPTER 13
The Guardian II computer was a golden pyramid twenty feet high by twenty across at the base. It was four hundred meters under the surface of Mars, in a cavern hollowed out of solid rock. The route back to the surface had been sealed five thousand years ago with only links to the sensors secreted on the planet’s surface left in place.
For the past several hours Guardian II had been running a self-diagnostic of itself and all the systems under its control. The priority was power. The cold fusion reactor also buried under the Martian soil was down to fourteen percent output. That was not enough to implement the other programs that had to be run.
The decision was made with simple logical computation. The majority of that fourteen percent was routed to the surface to run the alternate power program.
At the JPL control center, a large red digital clock gave the time remaining until Viking would complete its orbital pattern shift and then go over the Cydonia region. There were less than three hours on it.
In the meanwhile Kincaid’s people had accomplished what they said they couldn’t do: extend Surveyor’s able mast with the IMS on the end of it and orient it toward Mars — at least it was oriented twelve percent of the time, as Surveyor tumbled around in space in its erratic orbit. That percentage was slowly increasing as the engineers worked their programs to rotate the IMS in conjunction with the spin of the craft. With some luck and some time they might even be able to keep the IMS oriented on Mars full-time.
One of the large screens in the front of the room showed a slowly moving image from the IMS. The Face stared back at Surveyor, with the large pyramid just off to the side, the entire thing moving across the screen as the camera rolled. It was a very distant shot at a hard angle, but there was no denying that the image very clearly looked like an elongated face.
Every time Larry Kincaid looked up and saw that image, he felt a shiver run through him. To know that somewhere among those apparent ruins, aliens were coming out of their long hibernation — aliens that had traveled among the stars while man was still living in grass huts and caves — made him feel very small in the universe.
Kincaid was checking some of the new data his flight engineers had come up with for Surveyor when a sudden explosion of commotion in the front of the room drew his attention up.