“We can’t contact anyone,” Compton said. She was speaking from memory, seeing the pale blond-haired man in her mind. “This data and this facility are now both classified and closed by National Security Directive forty-nine dash twenty-seven dash alpha.”
“Bullshit,” Brillon said, reaching for the phone. He turned to her when he couldn’t get a dial tone. “What did you do?”
“We’re sealed off to the outside world, except for the NSA and STAAR,” she said.
“Screw you!” Brillon said. “You sold out to the government.” He stood, grabbing his jacket. “I’ll drive and call it in on a pay phone, then. You people aren’t going to pull another Majestic!”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Compton said in a surprisingly calm voice. “Why not?” Brillon was tensed, his body leaning toward hers. “Are you going to stop me?”
“No.”
“Then screw you and your national security directive.”
“I won’t stop you, but I think they will.” She pointed to the ceiling. They could both hear the dull thud of helicopter rotor blades coming closer. “Shit!” Brillon threw his car keys down.
Compton turned back to her computer and pulled up Brillon’s display and looked at it for a moment before typing in a few commands. In a second an electronic green line reached out from the small dot representing Earth. It speared through space and intersected dead-on with a red circle.
“Goddamn,” Compton muttered. She looked up at Brillon. “Besides owing me your life, you also owe me your paycheck. The message isn’t coming from a spaceship. It’s coming from Mars!”
CHAPTER 3
The screen of the laptop was difficult to read even though it was in the tent’s shade, guarded from the fierce sunlight beating down on the rim of the volcano on Easter Island. Kelly Reynolds’s fingers flew over the keys, her eyes slightly unfocused as her mind worked over the thoughts, fears, and questions she was trying to translate into the black-and-white of letters on screen so that readers back in the United States would understand the significance of what had been discovered here. Her quick trip to the mainland for Johnny’s funeral had disconcerted her, as she saw that the major import of all that had happened seemed to be mixed up with the search for culprits over the entire Majestic-12 operation and fear over the message the Guardian had sent out into space.
The discovery of the alien computer known as the “guardian” hidden here on Easter Island at least five thousand years ago, has been the most significant and most disappointing discovery in recorded human history. Significant because it conclusively tells us we are, or at least were, not alone in the universe. Disappointing because we can no longer access the wealth of information the computer contains. Like a hacker breaking into a top-of-the-line computer, we can read the file names but we don’t have the code words needed to open those files and read the advanced secrets they contain. The guardian shut down less than forty-eight hours after transmitting a message up into the skies, toward whom or where we do not know.
The secret to the bouncers’ drive system lies just a few inches away. The details of the mothership’s interstellar engine lie just as near and just as far. The technology of the guardian computer is guarded with equal jealousy by the machine. Control of the foo fighters also rests inside the guardian. The answer to the mystery of where the Airlia, as the alien race called itself, came from and exactly why they were here on our planet also lies within.
We know some basics, the barest sketch of what happened five thousand years ago when the alien commander Aspasia decided to get rid of all trace of his people’s, the Airlia’s, presence here on Earth to save the planet from their mortal enemies, who we now know are called the Kortad. Upon making that decision, Aspasia had to fight rebels among his own people who did not wish to go quietly into the night and in doing so destroyed the land that in Earth legend we have called Atlantis, where the Airlia colony was home-based. By doing this he protected the natural development of the human race and for that we owe him a large debt of gratitude.
But beyond those few facts there are so many unanswered questions:
— What happened to Aspasia and the other Airlia?
— Why was an Airlia atomic weapon left hidden in the depths of the Great Pyramid of Giza? Indeed, as we now suspect, were the pyramids built as a space beacon by the Airlia?
— What really happened to Atlantis, site of the Airlia colony? What terrible weapon did Aspasia use to destroy it?
— And, perhaps most importantly, to whom was the transmission directed that the guardian made four days ago when it was uncovered? And what did it say?
— And how do we turn the guardian back on?
Kelly Reynolds frowned at that last line. Her finger paused over the delete key. There were many who felt that no attempt should be made to access the guardian. Those people were the ones who looked to the skies full of fear of what the guardian might have called toward the Earth. In the last few days since the computer had been uncovered nothing had happened, but that had not allayed the fears of the Isolationists, as the media were calling them, but rather left them to stew in what was becoming a cauldron of paranoia. The United Nations had taken over the entire problem and there were demands from isolationist groups in many countries to pull out of the UN and not to support the UNAOC, the United Nations Alien Oversight Committee.
Screw them, Kelly decided. It was more than likely that the message had gone to no one, since the Airlia outpost on Earth had been abandoned over five millennia ago. For all anyone knew, the Airlia’s home planet, wherever that was, might have been wiped out by the Kortad, who might have become extinct themselves, their knowledge of the Earth returning to the ether.
As vocal as the isolationists were, there was another movement just as keen to gain the new technology and information held by the guardian, and they were pressing UNAOC to go forward. Dubbed the progressives, they believed the alien machine held answers for the multitude of complex problems the human race faced.
There was even a very strong argument made by the progressives to fly the mothership, something that Reynolds and her comrades had raced against time to stop the Majestic-12 Committee in Area 51 from doing. At least by finding the guardian, they had discovered the reason the massive mothership shouldn’t be flown: the interstellar drive, once activated, could be detected by the Kortad and traced back to Earth, which, according to records they’d uncovered, would lead to Earth’s destruction. That is, if the Kortad still existed, not a likely possibility in the opinion of the progressives.
Practically everyone on Earth had an opinion about what should be done with the alien artifacts, but the control of the guardian computer and all the technology the United States has had kept hidden over the years at Area 51 in the Nevada desert outside of Nellis Air Force Base had been ceded to the Alien Oversight Committee, since this issue clearly transcended national boundaries. The bouncers, nine disk-shaped craft that operated inside of Earth’s atmosphere, and the mothership had finally been opened to public scrutiny and international inspection after decades of secrecy.
Kelly typed on.
Ultimately it comes down to two key questions, one looking back and the other forward:
What is the truth of Earth’s history now that we know an alien outpost was established on our planet ten thousand years ago and disappeared over five thousand years ago?
What is our future now that we have uncovered artifacts from those aliens, one of which has been activated and has sent a message, and what do we do with a large craft capable of interstellar flight?