A man appeared on the screen. Stocky, muscular. Dressed in a one-piece black jumpsuit with some sort of insignia on his chest. He was standing on a shoreline. His shadow was diffused by two suns overhead at slightly different angles. The air was tinged with yellow mist. The water was perfectly smooth with a purplish tint. The man was reaching out toward the viewer when the screen flickered again.
The man appeared once more, this time dressed in antiquated armor. The metal was dented and bloody. A wound across his forehead dripped blood. And he was smiling, his eyes dancing with battle lust. In this scene, he only cast one shadow. The trees in the background were bright with the fiery colors of autumn.
Garlin frowned. Duncan’s connection with this man was strong, very powerful, overriding his inputs to the Ark of the Covenant. Garlin wanted the location of the craft that had just been shown — where it had landed on Earth and where it was now secreted.
He reached forward and tapped a command on the keys. The saucer appeared once more, heading toward Earth.
Duncan’s back arched, the restraint stretching slightly, then pulling her back onto the gurney. Her head twisted back and forth. She moaned, a low keening sound that a sleeping dog in the midst of a bad dream might make.
The craft disappeared and the man reappeared. This time he was dressed in camouflage fatigues. Garlin leaned forward. There was something different about the man. A brief smile crossed Duncan’s face.
Garlin leaned forward and tapped on the keys once more, directing the Ark to probe for the information he needed.
The man disappeared.
CHAPTER 2: THE PAST
The magnificent City of the Gods, set in the center of the island in the middle of the great ocean, was surrounded by concentric rings of land and water. On the large hill in the exact center was a golden palace over a mile wide at the base and stretching over three thousand feet into the sky. As magnificent as the building was, it was dwarfed by the large black mothership now descending upon it. The ship’s surface was unmarred, a flat black that seemed to absorb the sun’s rays.
The land in the surrounding rings had once boasted bountiful crops and many villages, but much of the land was blackened and blistered from the ravages of war. The human population was depleted, as many men had been ordered by the Gods off to distant battles and most had never returned.
Directly outside the palace, the streets were choked with people clamoring for entrance into the temple of the Gods. Warrior-priests manned the gates on the outer wall, with strict orders regarding who was to be allowed in and who was to be denied entrance. The latter outnumbered the former by a hundred to one. Some prescient souls were already in the harbor below the palace, buying their way onto sailing ships, but most had their attention on the palace from which the Gods had ruled for so long, unwilling to accept that change was coming and that the Gods would not take care of them.
Prayers were chanted, incense burned, and rich offerings were made to the warrior-priests, but no one was allowed entry unless they were on the list. A pattern soon emerged, as only those who had fought for the Gods and worshipped them with unwavering loyalty were allowed in.
The mothership came to a hover next to the top level of the palace, its center adjacent to the tower. Large hangar doors on the side of the craft slid apart and a narrow metal gangway extended out of the ship to the tallest steeple in the temple. Priests hurried across the gangplank and took up positions in the entrance to the hangar. Four priests carefully made their way across, two by two, on their inside shoulders a wooden pole. Supported by the poles was an object covered by a white shroud. Directly behind the four was a high priest, garbed in a white linen robe, over which he wore a sleeveless blue tunic, fringed in gold. On top of that was a coat of many colors, which glittered in the sunlight. The coat was fastened at the shoulders with two precious stones, carved with runes. On his chest was a breastplate encrusted with jewels. There were two pockets over each breast, each of which emitted a greenish glow thanks to the stones placed inside. On his head was a crown made up of three bands of metal. He was chanting in a strange singsong language as they made their way into the mothership and disappeared into its vastness.
Then the first of the chosen ones were allowed out of the palace, two by two, almost running, eager to be inside the safety of the mothership.
The people outside the walls of the temple had seen the Ark of the Covenant carried across. The Ark was said to hold the Grail, the bringer of immortality, the possibility of which the Gods had held out to man since the beginning of time. If the Ark and Grail were being taken, the people knew that everything was changing and they were being abandoned. Fighting broke out in places along the wall as many of those not selected rebelled.
Almost immediately a small golden orb extended from the pinnacle of the palace. Bolts of gold shot from it toward the troubled areas and when they struck, the resulting explosion killed not only the troublemakers but also hundreds of bystanders. Given such a brutal response, the fighting quickly ceased and the boarding continued uninterrupted.
After four hours of nonstop loading, there were no more to cross. The gangway retracted and the doors slid shut. As smoothly and quietly as it had arrived, the mothership rose to a hover about a mile above the palace. Larger doors near the front of the mothership now slid apart, revealing a massive cargo bay. On the north side of the palace a set of doors swung open. Two golden flying disks about thirty feet in diameter at the base and sloping up to a rounded top floated out — below them, caught in an invisible field they were propagating, was a large Black Sphinx, over three hundred feet long from the tip of the paws to the rear. The smaller craft maneuvered the Black Sphinx up and into the cargo bay. They set it down, then sped back to the palace, making several more trips, transporting up several twenty-foot-high golden pyramids, and lastly, a blood-red pyramid.
When all was loaded, the cargo doors shut and the mothership began flying to the southeast. It moved across the ocean, passing high over the Straits of Gibraltar and along the barren coast of North Africa until it came to a lush land with a large river running through it. Halting above the river, the cargo bay opened and the two saucers emerged, the Black Sphinx held in their traction beams. They lowered the Black Sphinx into a hole burned in the Giza Plateau, then did the same with the red pyramid.
When that was done, the mothership slowly descended until just above the stone plateau. A gangplank was extended to the ground. First off were the four priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant, followed by the high priest. Behind them came over a thousand people, mostly priests and warriors. Also sneaking off the ship as darkness fell, wrapped in black cloaks, were six strange creatures, over seven feet tall with red hair, red catlike eyes, and six fingers on the end of each hand. They were Airlia, the builders of the mothership, and a race that was spread across many galaxies. They entered a secret doorway into the underground chambers, while the humans remained above ground.
With this off-loading, the First Age of Egypt was begun, the time of the Gods, under the command of the Airlia couple Isis and Osiris, who sneaked in under cover of darkness and would rule through the priests.
The gangplank was withdrawn and the mothership flew to the east, across the Red Sea, and halted at a high mountain peak near the southern end of a desolate peninsula of land. Here a golden pyramid was off-loaded and hidden in a place prepared for it deep inside Mount Sinai. Also placed deep in the mountain were several pieces of machinery. Several of the aliens exited the ship pushing a coffinlike object, which they maneuvered into a chamber far inside the mountain. They hooked it up and swung open the lid. Lying inside was an adult human male with baby-smooth skin and vacant eyes that betrayed no sign of intelligence. His chest slowly rose and fell with each breath.