The Dulce facility was now crushed rubble, blasted by foo fighters, and Nightscape disbanded. Major Quinn had a different job now, aiding Duncan in her attempt to find out the truth about the aliens and their influence on mankind, which even Majestic-12 had been relatively clueless about.
Quinn was of medium height and build. He had thinning blond hair and wore tortoiseshell glasses with oversized lenses to accommodate the split glass he needed for both distance and close-up viewing.
The other person waiting in the room, Larry Kincaid, had worked for JPL… Jet Propulsion Laboratory… and NASA for over three decades. He was an outsider to Area 51 and had been as shocked as the rest of the world to learn what had been hidden there for decades. He was short and overweight, and his face bore the stress of his having sat through numerous space launches. He was the one who had spotted the Airlia base at Cydonia on Mars, right next to the enigma known as the Mars Face. Kincaid looked more dour than ever, with the recent word of the loss of Atlantis.
They all quickly scanned the clipping of Kelly Reynolds’s article:
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 lay just a few inches away. The details of the mothership’s interstellar engine lay just as distant. The technology of the guardian computer is just as jealously guarded by the machine. Control of the foo fighters also rests inside the guardian. 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 thousands of 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 homebased. 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 important, to whom was the transmission the guardian made four days ago when it was uncovered, directed to? And what did it say?
And how do we turn the guardian back on?
“Most of this is already out of date,” Turcotte noted.
“We damn well know where the message was sent,” Larry Kincaid confirmed. “And we know where Aspasia was, and we know he’s dead now, thanks to Mike.” He inclined his head toward Turcotte.
“Are we sure they’re all dead up there?” Turcotte asked. “After what happened here and at the Kennedy Space Center?”
“We think the talon is operating on an automatic program,” Kincaid said. “It’s shown no indication of being able to maneuver. It’s drifting in orbit.”
“An automatic program that sucked in Warfighter and used it to destroy the hangar that just happened to be holding the two bodies here?” Turcotte’s tone indicated his disbelief. “And took out Atlantis as it was prepping to go up?”
Kincaid shrugged. “I’m just telling you our best guess,”
“Back to this.” Duncan tapped the news release.
“We know Aspasia was the rebel, the bad guy, not the Kortad,” Major Quinn said. “And that the Kortad were some sort of Airlia police, led by Artad.”
“Are we certain of those so-called facts?” Yakov asked “We have only your dead Professor Nabinger’s word on that… what he learned from a Kortad guardian (…) Qian-Ling in China. Aspasia’s guardian under Easter Island told him the opposite thing, and did you not believe that first? It is to be expected that each side’s computers would make them out to be the… How would you say? Men, or in this case, aliens in white hats?”
Turcotte was tired, more mentally than physically. First stopping the flight of the mothership by Majestic-12, then intercepting Aspasia’s fleet from Mars, then stopping the new Black Plague… he saw no end in sight to this war with a foe that had yet to make themselves apparent. The fact that The Mission had escaped from Devil’s Island and was now somewhere in the world, preparing the next phase of battle, was something he had thought about ever since coming back to Area 51.
“Something bothers me.…” Quinn hesitated, as if uncertain whether to air his thoughts in front of the group.
“Go ahead,” Duncan prompted.
Quinn tapped the article. “One thing that has been lost in recent events is the factor that started all this… the danger of activating the mothership’s interstellar drive.”
Turcotte stirred. “I destroyed the power source for the drive… the ruby sphere we found in the Great Rift Valley. So that’s not a problem.”
“And the mothership was damaged badly when Aspasia’s fleet was destroyed,” Duncan added. She pointed to the ceiling. “And it’s also in orbit abandoned, so we got it out of everyone’s reach.”
“What actually concerns me,” Quinn said, “is if the Kortad were actually one side of the Airlia in the civil war they fought, who is the interstellar threat that the guardians referred to? That’s the one thing both guardians… Aspasia’s and Artad’s… agreed on, as far as Nabinger could determine: that if the mothership’s drive was activated, there was an enemy out there”… Quinn pointed up… “who would track back along the drive and destroy our planet.”
Larry Kincaid shrugged once more. “We now know for certain there’s at least one other life-form out there among the stars, so it’s not a stretch to accept there are others.”
“Are they still out there is what concerns me,” Quinn said.
“Aspasia and Artad went at it over ten thousand years ago,” Turcotte said. “Who knows what’s out there now.”
Yakov suddenly stirred. “There is an ancient Chinese saying that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Maybe this enemy of the Airlia could be an ally in our fight?”
Everyone turned as Lisa Duncan tapped the top of the conference table. “We have to concern ourselves with more immediate problems here. On Earth. We can’t count on anyone bailing us out.” Duncan pulled out another sheaf of papers, giving a copy to each man. “Here’s the update, supposedly, from Kelly. It was burst-transmitted on the Navy FLTSCOM network off Easter Island, into the Internet, with e-mail addresses to every media outlet. It will be hitting the papers tomorrow and is already on radio and TV and posted on the Internet.”
“We can’t stop it?” Turcotte asked.