Duncan cried out, a mixture of pain and denial. Her body vibrated against the table and restraints. Then suddenly she stopped.
The image disappeared.
Garlin shifted his gaze from the screen to the table. Duncan was still, not moving for the first time since he’d placed the crown on her head. He reached down, fingers around her neck, feeling for the carotid artery.
No pulse.
She was dead.
Garlin was still as the Swarm tentacle pondered this development for a few moments. Then he was directed to check the Ark, retracing the probe. The cause of death was uncovered almost immediately: an aneurysm in her brain, the cells of the blood vessel set to burst if activity exceeded a certain level in a specific portion of her mind.
The Swarm had seen such extreme conditioning before among Airlia captives, programmed to die before giving up the final secret. They had never discovered the Airlia’s home world because of this. The captives all died before giving up that information, and captured guardian computers shut down when that data was attempted to be accessed.
And now Duncan wasn’t revealing where her ship was hidden. She was conditioned to die before giving that up.
Except Duncan was now immortal. Garlin stepped back and waited. The artery repaired itself. After slightly over a minute her heart began beating again.
Garlin’s fingers caressed the controls, the Ark’s probe shooting for that memory. To press beyond and find the location.
The Ark’s electronic probe followed the same path and smashed through the blockage. The screen flickered. Duncan and the man were inside the ship, standing in front of some equipment. The Swarm recognized the scene and gear — two regeneration/sleep tubes. Duncan was older, her hair almost completely white, her back bent with age, her face lined.
How had they gotten in? Where was the ship?
The artery gave way, blood poured into Duncan’s brain, and the screen went black. As the virus inside the body rebuilt the artery, the blood in the brain was forced through the brain lining and trickled out Duncan’s ears, forming a pool under her head, staining her hair. The virus she had been given by the Grail not only worked on repairing the blood vessel, but produced additional blood cells as needed.
Garlin waited, the Swarm tentacle freezing him in place. Waiting was something the Swarm was very good at. Scouts, such as this one, sometimes spent thousands of years on target planets, observing and preparing. Occasionally acting. This Swarm had followed a previous scout’s path into this star system. A scout that had simply disappeared.
That happened. The universe was a large place, and many dangers accompanied traveling through it. But such a disappearance had to be investigated, even if it was thousands of Earth years later. The weapon that had destroyed this Swarm’s scout ship was something that had not been encountered before. Because of that — and the way these humans had thrown off the shackle of the Airlia — the Swarm knew it was important that information about this world be sent back so that this world be targeted for priority harvesting.
The Swarm had encountered other potentially dangerous life-forms in the past, most of them at such a primitive level that harvesting quickly prevented them from developing sufficient technology to become a true threat.
Duncan was alive once more, the pool of blood underneath her head now so large, some of it dripped over the edge onto the floor. Garlin’s fingers manipulated the controls, pushing the probe toward the same spot.
The image of the resurrection tubes reappeared. However, this time the screen showed a newly cloned Duncan inside one of the tubes while the man watched. He pulled a ka out of a slot on the console in front of him and placed it in a case. Then he went over to the tube and helped Duncan out. A young Duncan.
The screen went black again as Duncan’s brain once more shut down. The Swarm tentacle inside of Garlin waited.
Four glittering dragons waited on the desert floor, one in the lead, the other three flanking it slightly to the rear. Each was ten meters long and five wide. Long arced necks stretched up from the short-winged bodies to end in serpent faces with large jaws that held black teeth. Dark red, unblinking eyes peered out over the sands.
Inside the lead dragon, Artad was watching the display screens showing the outer world. When he saw the Talon come toward his location, flying just above the desert floor, he hit a control and the back ramp to his dragon-machine slowly opened, lowering to the sand. He got up and walked out of the aircraft, followed by his Kortad.
The Talon slowed and the point rose toward the sky as the bottom settled on the ground. Five meters up a hatch opened and a long gangplank extended to the sand. The Kortad exited the flying dragons and followed as Artad walked to the plank.
The alien commander paused. He looked about, red cat eyes taking in the surrounding terrain. His troops waited patiently. They had slept for thousands of years; a few moments did not concern them. He turned to one of the Kortad, his deputy commander, speaking in the language of the Airlia.
“This is a poor planet.”
“It is habitable, Lord,” the deputy said.
“Barely. We should leave it for the Swarm to harvest. It has caused considerable trouble.” The deputy remained silent.
Artad finally turned back to the gangplank. “I will do my duty. We will bring these creatures back into the coalition. And then we will make them pay dearly for their impudence.” He walked up the metal into the Talon.
When the last Airlia was on board, the plank retracted, the hatch closed, and the Talon rose to an altitude of one thousand meters where it paused.
A golden bolt shot from the tip of the Talon, striking in the center of the four dragons. When the dust and smoke from the explosion cleared, the desert floor was scattered with debris for miles.
The Talon then began gaining altitude, accelerating toward space.
In 1961 slightly over $8.5 million was appropriated for excavation work in Cheyenne Mountain. One year and two days later, over seven hundred thousand tons of rock had been removed from the interior of the mountain and construction on a power plant, steel building, fuel and water storage and other supporting systems was begun.
The fifteen buildings were made of three-eighths-inch continuous welded steel and set on top of huge springs. The theory was that the entire facility had a 70 percent probability of withstanding a five-megaton blast within three miles. A tunnel led into the mountain one-third of a mile to the twenty-five-ton blast doors, behind which lay the main cavern.
Initially the center was designed to link with the DEW line to counter the threat of Soviet bombers. It was updated then to track intercontinental ballistic missiles. As technology advanced, the mission of the center also evolved to the extent where it tracked SCUD missile launches during the Gulf War.
After the end of the Cold War, more and more attention was paid to space and peacetime missions, such as coordinating space shuttle flights and tracking drug smugglers. Upon receipt of a warning order from Major Quinn, the facility had shifted its capabilities to tracking the Talon from Ararat to Kazakhstan. The link-up with the four dragon-craft was captured by a KH-14 spy satellite to the degree that Artad and his followers were clearly visible walking across the desert and boarding the Talon. The destruction of the dragon-craft was also captured.
As the Talon accelerated into the atmosphere, tracking was shifted from space down-looks to ground up-shots. The Air Force operators kept the Talon firmly on their tracking screens, monitoring it as carefully as they would the space shuttle.