The Russians had speculated that the missions lost on Earth or en route had been sabotaged by the Ones Who Wait or Guides from the Mission. Because of the lack of data from Mars, they could only guess that there was some sort of defensive mechanism in Cydonia that destroyed craft that came close.
It was only after the current war with the aliens began that the true nature of what was at Cydonia was revealed, as Aspasia and his followers came out of their millennia-long sleep, powered up their Talon spacecraft hidden underneath the Fort, and headed for Earth, leaving behind only a token crew to man the base. When Turcotte destroyed this fleet by booby-trapping the Area 51 mothership, the Airlia left on Mars were stranded but not inactive.
They sent a small army of mech-machines from Cydonia across the surface of the planet toward Mons Olympus while other robots tore into the Face, pulling metal parts out of the wreckage of whatever had once been there.
At Mons Olympus, the mech-machines had begun the greatest engineering feat in the solar system as they built a ramp up to and through the four-mile-high escarpment surrounding the peak. After making a way through the escarpment, the mech-machines had continued up the long, gradual slope to a point just below the summit of the extinct volcano. There they dug out a deep, dish-shaped depression, while lining it with a latticework of black metal. At three points around the circumference, the base for a massive pylon tower was put in place and two of the pylons were now completed.
When Yakov used the Master Guardian to shut down the Cydonia guardian, which controlled the mech-machines, the dish array was already complete and two of the three towers finished. The third pylon towered over eight hundred meters high in the thin Martian atmosphere, but needed another two hundred meters of work to be completed.
Without the aid of the mech-machines, there was only one option for the surviving Airlia — to complete the last tower and emplace the transmitting array by hand. Tracked surface vehicles that had long gathered dust in an underground depot were serviced and started. Space suits and portable surface habitats were checked and tested.
Within eight hours of the guardian’s shutdown, a convoy of twenty vehicles carrying sixty Airlia departed Cydonia, heading toward Mons Olympus to finish the array.
Someone was pounding on the door, very loudly.
Mike Turcotte opened his eyes to the unique vision of floating in midair, a thousand feet above a desert with a jet fighter roaring toward him at five hundred miles an hour, spraying bullets. The rounds slammed into the side of the bouncer and ricocheted off, producing the noise that had brought him back to consciousness. His eyes followed the jet as it narrowly missed his craft. Iranian markings. At least that gave him an idea of where he had been when he passed out. Other than the noise, the rounds had no apparent effect on the surface of the alien craft.
He shook his head, immediately regretting the act as his head throbbed painfully. Coming down off the blood doping and amphetamines he had taken in order to survive on Everest was proving as painful as climbing the mountain had been. At least he wasn’t cold, his body drenched in sweat inside his heavy clothing. He took a moment to take off the outer garments. As he did so, he saw sunlight glinting off metal close by.
He turned, reaching out for the sword that lay next to the slight depression in the center of the bouncer, wrapping his fingers around the handle. Reality and the immediate past came back to him in fragments. Excalibur. Sword of legend, made by aliens. The key to the Master Guardian hidden for generations on the nearly inaccessible north face of Mount Everest.
That told him why he was where he was and where he had been heading. The Master Guardian. Yakov — the Russian must have made it into the second mothership, known as Noah’s Ark in legend, and located the alien computer. Turcotte briefly closed his eyes and brought up a mental image of this part of the world. Turkey was west and slightly north of Iran. And Ararat was in eastern Turkey.
The jet was coming in for another gun run, this time from the opposite direction. Turcotte pressed forward on the control stick. The bouncer accelerated and easily outdistanced the jet as it reached two thousand miles an hour. The ground was zipping by below. The Iranian jet faded in the distance behind.
Turcotte grabbed the mike and keyed it. “Quinn, this is Turcotte. Over.”
An excited and concerned voice answered. “Geez, Major, we thought we lost you again. You just dropped off the air.”
“Have you heard from Yakov?”
“Negative. We haven’t received communications from him or any of the Delta men who went with him. I’ve intercepted some National Security Agency intelligence briefs indicating a lot of military action around Ararat. I don’t think we were the only ones going after the Ark and Master Guardian. Fortunately, it appears Yakov got to it first.”
Which meant Ararat — and the mothership/Master Guardian — weren’t secure yet, Turcotte realized.
“Do we know anything about Duncan?”
“Not much more than we did,” Quinn admitted. “I’ve been checking and there is no indication there is another Majestic-12. No one knows who took Duncan but I don’t think it was any government agency.”
“I’m heading for Mount Ararat,” Turcotte said. “I want to see what kind of mess Yakov’s gotten himself into. Keep looking for Duncan. I want to find out what the hell her story is. There’s another layer to all this that we don’t know yet.”
Yakov stepped back from the Master Guardian and staggered, almost falling off the narrow platform on which the red pyramid sat. He blinked, reorienting himself from the world the guardian had shown him to the real world.
The large Russian smiled broadly in victory. He’d shut down the Easter Island, Qian-Ling, and Cydonia guardians. The damn aliens — both sides — were minus their base of power now.
Yakov had spent most of his adult life serving in Section IV, the secret Soviet organization that had tried to keep track of the aliens and their minions just as the American’s Majestic-12 had. It had been a mission fraught with danger. Yakov vividly remembered going into the wreckage of Section IV’s base on the remote island of Novata Zemlaya, seeing the bodies of his comrades, killed by the Ones Who Wait, Airlia-Human clones who had waited millennia for Artad to be reborn. They’d done that to recover something from the Section IV archives. Today he had paid them back for that deadly deed.
The room he was in was deep inside the mothership, a perfectly round chamber encompassing the Master Guardian. He had sealed himself off from the rest of the ship as Artad’s troops were on board and had almost caught him before the Master Guardian was activated. The mothership was buried in a cavern deep inside Mount Ararat, hidden from sight for over ten thousand years.
Yakov heard a buzzing noise and reached into his pocket, pulling out his SATPhone. “Yes?” “This is Quinn. Turcotte’s coming to your location.”
“And how will he get to me?”
“I don’t know. Can you move—” Quinn’s next words were lost since Yakov turned his head to the right as a loud thud echoed through the mothership. The sound was repeated a few seconds later. Yakov put the phone away and placed both hands on the side of the Master Guardian, making contact with the computer. He sorted through the rush of images that assaulted him, searching for some information on the current status of the mothership. He zoomed through several internal views until he received one relayed from a monitor in the cavern, looking down on the mothership just as a third thud reverberated through the ship.