Should humanity reach for the stars before its natural time, and if we do, who — or what — is waiting out there for us? Or has the decision of first live contact been taken out of our hands by the message the guardian sent and are other interstellar craft like the mothership already racing through space, coming toward us in reply? And who is piloting those ships if they are coming? Peace-loving Airlia or the Kortad bent on destruction?
Kelly Reynolds stopped typing as a shadow filled the doorway to the army-issue GP medium tent that had been set aside for the press. Since the guardian had ceased contact, there had been little to report in the last two days. Kelly had been surprised this morning, when she’d arrived at the airfield, at how quickly the number of media people on the island had dropped. Most of the media’s focus was now on Area 51, recording the Air Force flying the bouncers and wandering through the massive bulk of the mothership on guided tours of equipment Majestic-12 had jealously guarded for so many years.
Kelly smiled when she recognized the person entering. Peter Nabinger was the man who had made contact with the guardian and received from it the information about what had happened five thousand years ago. He was also the foremost translator of the Airlia high rune language, traces of which could be found at various ancient sites all over the globe, and had sent Kelly and her comrades on the right path to finding the guardian hidden under the volcano on Easter Island, arriving just before the Majestic-12 forces.
Nabinger was over six feet tall and heavyset. He had a thick black beard below his wire-rimmed glasses. When he spoke, his thick accent showed his origins and employer, the Brooklyn Museum, where he was the head of archaeology. Kelly enjoyed his company and his unique take on things.
It was amusing, Nabinger often said, that people had always thought that first “contact” with an alien race would be done by astronauts or radio astronomers, but few people had ever considered that the most likely evidence of alien life would come in the form of the archaeological discovery of alien artifacts left here on Earth. Nabinger had argued long and hard that it was much more likely that Earth had been visited sometime in its millions of years of history rather than right now in the present and that those visitors could have left some form of evidence of their visit. Of course, Majestic-12, flying the bouncers out at Area 51 for decades, had fueled the UFO hysteria that Earth was currently being visited by aliens and directed attention away from more likely sources of contact.
“Hey, Kelly,” Nabinger greeted her with a hug. “When did you get back?”
“This morning. I feel like I’ve been in the air forever.” Kelly herself was short, just topping five feet, but she was large; not fat, but big boned. She had thick gray hair that she kept tied to the rear with a bright ribbon. Her skin was red and peeling from exposure to the harsh South Pacific sun. “I heard about you getting booted by the guardian.”
“The whole world’s heard,” Nabinger said, sitting down on a folding chair. “Looks like you’re going to have this tent all to yourself soon. We’ve suddenly become rather boring here.”
“The major networks and CNN will keep a stringer here indefinitely,” Kelly said. “They don’t want to get caught flatfooted if the guardian does come back on-line. But the smaller outlets can’t afford putting out this much money for nothing. They’ve filed all the stories they could dredge up on this island and taken all the shots of the guardian. It costs a lot to keep someone out here doing nothing, and they can get their feed off those of us who are here. I’m syndicated now in over sixty papers.”
That was a far cry, Kelly knew, from where she had been just two weeks ago, when she’d been struggling to sell articles to any paper or magazine that would pay. But being part of the group that had uncovered the secrets of Area 51 and the guardian here on Easter Island had certainly bolstered her career, a thought that brought back an image of Johnny Simmons’s casket.
Nabinger caught the look on her face. “How did it go?”
“The funeral was a media circus. I don’t think the real feelings have caught up with me yet. And I’m not sure I want them to right now. I have too much to do. I owe Johnny that. He wouldn’t want me to sit around crying when I could be hitting sixty papers with this”—she pointed at her laptop.
Nabinger nodded. “I understand.”
“So,” Kelly said, taking a deep breath. She forced a smile. “So. Since I have an exclusive with the man himself, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“The guardian is still working,” Nabinger said. “We know that because it’s taking in power. It’s just not talking to us.”
“Why not?”
“Probably because it figured out we’re not Airlia,” Nabinger answered. “They hid it here in the first place to keep us homo sapiens from finding it.”
Easter Island, known as Rapa Nui to the locals, was the most isolated island on the face of the planet. According to Nabinger’s translations of the Airlia’s high rune artifacts and interpretation of the information given him by the guardian, that was why Aspasia had chosen it to be the receptacle for the guardian computer. Underneath the lake in Rano Kau’s crater, one of the two major volcanoes on the island, the Airlia had built a chamber and put their computer in place, leaving a small, self-sustaining cold fusion reactor to power it. Even the reactor’s advanced workings were off-limits to the scientists, as the shielding guarding it was impenetrable. The dwindling power the reactor put out had recently been supplemented by numerous human generators flown in, and the guardian was at full power; but nothing was happening that could be detected.
“Hell,” Nabinger said, “we don’t even know if the guardian is a computer. We’re calling it that because it’s the closest piece of equipment we have that is like it, but the guardian can do so much more.
“They’ve tried everything in the last two days, including hypnosis, to get me back in contact with the guardian. The UNAOC people are banging their heads down there, trying to get that thing to work,” Nabinger said. “I’m about ready to tear my hair out.” Nabinger shrugged. “Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe it was set to be activated by anything living, but only long enough to ascertain the situation. Once it figured out that we weren’t Airlia, it cut us out.”
“Not before having its foo fighters obliterate Majestic-12’s biolab at Dulce and the rebel computer in there,” Reynolds noted. In the course of their search for the truth, Kelly and those with her had broken into the secret government lab at Dulce, New Mexico, where another, smaller guardian-type computer had been placed by the government after being uncovered under a massive earthen mound at Temiltepec in Central America.
They both looked up as a strong offshore breeze hit the tent and caused the canvas top to snap back and forth. The wind, the lack of trees, and the ocean completely surrounding them on all sides lent a disturbing air of isolation to the location.
Nabinger nodded at her comment. “Yeah, that’s true. But there have been no foo fighter flights since then. We know the foo fighters are based under the ocean a couple of hundred miles to the north of here. I think the Navy is discreetly poking around out there, trying to pinpoint where exactly. You can be sure they’re interested in that ray that was used to destroy Dulce.”
“I haven’t heard any of that,” Reynolds said. “Does the Alien Oversight Committee know the U.S. Navy is doing that?”
“At first I thought the U.S. Navy was working for the Oversight Committee,” Nabinger said, “but the UNAOC rep here says he doesn’t know anything about it. I’ve only heard rumors, but I think either someone in the U.S. government is poking around with UNAOC’s knowledge and tacit approval, or something else fishy is going on and they’re cutting UNAOC out.”