Kelly Reynolds existed in a netherworld of physical stasis and extreme mental activity. She was barely aware of her body, pressed up against the guardian computer, surrounded by the golden field. The metal probe along with the nanomachines had been removed from her body through her insinuation of the commands in the steady stream she could monitor coming out of the guardian computer.
To penetrate into the guardian itself, to examine its database, was a different story. She’d had “visions” of the building of the moai on Easter Island, of the Giza Plateau at the height of its glory, and even the current situation with the nanovirus swarming over the crew of the Washington and the ship itself.
Her delicate probing, like trying to consciously manipulate a dream in a half-awake stage, had come across something quite intriguing: a large pathway for data in and out of the guardian, like an electronic superhighway among secondary roads, but empty of traffic. It originated in the core of the guardian, and Kelly found her psyche there, alone in the empty conduit. She “followed” it out of the guardian, her mind ranging along the pathway until she reached an abrupt end, where the data link had been severed.
How she knew these things she couldn’t consciously elaborate, but her subconscious was picking up enough for her to have realizations. It suddenly came to her where this data superhighway had gone and why it was no longer functional. The Easter Island guardian was a complicated machine, far more powerful and aware than any computer made by humans, but Kelly now knew it had once been only one piece of a whole system. She “saw” it as the guardian had once seen it… a network of guardian computers on Earth, the one at Cydonia at Mars, on board the mothership, others in places she couldn’t quite grasp all linked together. And on Earth there had been one guardian that every other guardian on the planet had been linked to. The place where the data highway had been linked to.
That guardian had been on Atlantis, and for a moment Kelly thought the reason the pathway had been severed was that the master guardian had been destroyed when that island had been blasted by the mothership.
But the data recorded indicated otherwise. The severing had come after Atlantis was destroyed and the Airlia split into their two factions.
That meant the master guardian had been removed from Atlantis prior to destruction. But the machine was no longer active; the core of it had been removed. She saw the removal of the core by two Airlia, the vision startlingly real to her, then the vision went black, as if a TV had been turned off, and she knew that was when the highway from the Easter Island guardian… indeed all the other guardians on Earth… had been severed from the master.
Kelly knew that Duncan and Turcotte had to know the master guardian existed, and they had to know the core also existed. She turned her attention once more to the string of data the guardian was moving outward into the world and slowly worked her own small, very discrete bits of data into it.
Without ceremony Elek had escorted Che Lu and Lo Fa into the metal dragon immediately after getting a call from Lexina. The interior was as elegant as the exterior. A series of half a dozen red chairs faced forward in the belly. One center seat was in front with a black globe centered in front of it, a wide screen beyond showing the view outside.
“What is this thing?” Che Lu asked as Elek took the forward seat.
“A weapon. Built from scrap during an ancient war.”
Elek placed his hands on the black sphere. Che Lu could see that they were lifting off the ground even though it felt as if they had not moved.
“Between Shi Huangdi and the Empress of the South?”
Elek shrugged. “That is your legend. There have been many battles over the millennia between the Guides and The Ones Who Wait, and the humans who have chosen sides. This is another one.” The dragon was now facing the rubble in the wide tube that led to the surface. Elek pressed on the top of the sphere, and a lance of red came out of the mouth, blasting rock aside, opening a path to blue sky beyond.
“But this one is different,” Che Lu said, which earned her a sharp glance from Elek as he edged the machine into the tunnel.
“This is the final one,” he said. “There will be no more truce, and only one side will prevail.”
Duncan forced himself to move toward the veils. The heads tracked her once more, the four sets of ruby eyes fixed on her movement.
Duncan almost jumped as a flash of light came out of the frontmost, right-side head. A red beam struck the ground in front of her, quickly ran up her body, stopped on the essen for two seconds, continued on to the crown, then disappeared. She froze, waiting for more, but there was nothing.
She reached the veil. Kneeling, she lifted the bottom of the veil and then stepped inside.
CHAPTER 28
Sand dunes stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Turcotte’s boots sunk into the sand a couple of inches as he walked around the bouncer, checking out the terrain with a set of binoculars. Nothing.
“Sir!” Master Sergeant Boltz was digging in the sand with his hands. Turcotte hurried over. “What is it?” Boltz pointed. “Something is buried here.” Turcotte could see part of a piece of granite exposed by Boltz’s digging. Stomping his boot down, Turcotte could feel something hard underneath, indicating that the stone extended quite some distance. Turcotte checked his watch. Time was indeed getting short, and there was no time to investigate this strange find.
He turned to Captain Billam, who had the rest of his team deployed in a defensive perimeter around the bouncer. “Here’s what I want you to do.”
All was ready on board the Anzio. The flight path for the Tomahawk had been calculated so that the missile would fire up, reach apogee, then glide down toward Easter Island, letting gravity make sure it hit the center of the top of the alien shield. The warhead in the nose was fitted with a time delay, calculated to go off ten seconds after the missile passed through the shield.
A flight of four F-14s was already between the launching ship and Easter Island, making sure the airspace was clear. Captain Breuber had all the authorizations he needed to launch, but he hesitated. He knew the Washington and what was left of her crew were under that shield.
He also knew that the Springfield was ready. They had picked up banging noises from the submarine in Morse code indicating the crew was ready to execute their part of the plan. Sent through the same rudimentary communication system was the interesting information that there might possibly be a slight opening in the shield on the ocean bottom. There was no way to factor that into the plan other than to direct the Springfield to change the target of some of its wire-guided torpedoes to try to take advantage of the chink in the armor.
The loss of the space shuttles, the explosion in Montana, the assassination of the Secretary of Defense and UNAOC chief, topped off by the inert nuke landing at Area 51, had added impetus to the decision to take out Easter Island just prior to the deadline from Lexina. The information about the Chinese attack on Qian-Ling had been downloaded from the National Security Agency, and while it confirmed the fact that the shield was not totally impervious to a nuclear blast, it made it all the more imperative that they get the warhead through the shield before detonation, given that the guardian was buried deep under Rano Kau.