Now the remnants of those who had operated out of Area 51 called the remote site their headquarters. Given that Yakov was in Turkey and Turcotte was on Everest, and Che Lu and Mualama were dead, the only ones left here were Major Quinn and Larry Kincaid.
The two worked out of a pair of communications vans that had been brought here from nearby Fort Bragg by the Delta Force commander, an old army buddy of Turcotte’s. The vans were linked into the military’s secure MILSTAR communication system. With access to this, both men could try to stay on top of the swirl of recent events.
Larry Kincaid checked the latest imagery from Mars relayed from the Hubble Space Telescope. Kincaid had worked at JPL — the Jet Propulsion Lab — and NASA for decades. He’d been drawn into Area 51 when it was discovered that the Airlia had an ancient base at Cydonia on Mars. Since then he’d been monitoring activity on the Red Planet, specifically at Cydonia and the recent construction on the high slope of Mons Olympus.
Prior to Yakov gaining control of the Master Guardian, the construction on Mons Olympus had seemed to be progressing swiftly. A series of black struts crisscrossed the massive bowl that had been excavated in the side of the volcano near the summit. By the shadows Kincaid could tell the struts were lifted above the ground about ten meters. On top of most of the struts, latticework was completed. It reminded him of a spider’s web with the spaces between filled in with shiny material. Looming over the bowl and latticework he could see three inward curving pylons, two apparently finished, twins of each other, the third slightly shorter, not yet done. Their scale was staggering, even given Mars’ lower gravitational field, only three-eighths that of Earth. Each one had to be at least fifteen hundred meters high, well over three times the height of the Empire State Building in New York City. And they curved toward the center of the bowl, coming within four hundred meters of each other.
Even given the massive size of the construction, it was still dwarfed by the extinct volcano near whose peak it was located. Mons Olympus is the tallest mountain in the solar system. The peak is over fifteen miles above the surrounding Martian landscape. The base is 340 miles in width. The volcano, along with its smaller comrades that comprised the Tarsis Bulge, was so massive that it actually affected the rotation of the planet.
The mech-machines that had been working on the construction had been forced to dig partially through a four-mile-high escarpment surrounding the mountain and build up a hundred-mile ramp to clear a path to the peak. The mechs had come from Cydonia, carrying scavenged material from the “face” that had long been noted from Earth at that location.
Something had been destroyed there at Cydonia, Kincaid had concluded. And now they were rebuilding it at a much higher location. Yakov’s control of the Master Guardian had shut down the control the Cydonia guardian had exercised over the mechs and construction had been halted. So close to completion, Kincaid could tell, but completion of what?
Something was nagging at the edge of Kincaid’s mind — he was certain he had seen something like this before. Where? When? And more importantly, what had it been? He cleared his mind. If he had seen something like it, then it had to have been somewhere here on Earth. He ignored the Mars angle and simply thought about the construction.
A deep dish. Towers around the edge. Latticework.
Then it suddenly came to him. Where he had seen something like this on Earth. In Puerto Rico. The Arecibo Observatory — the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. Over a thousand feet in diameter and covering twenty acres. Kincaid had visited it several times while working for NASA. It had taken three years to build, from 1960 to ’63, if he remembered rightly. The Airlia had this thing almost done in that many weeks and it was so much larger.
He grabbed the imagery for a second look and had no doubt. What was being built on Mons Olympus was very similar, yet on a scale that dwarfed what had been done in Puerto Rico. He quickly did some measurements and came up with the astounding fact that the Mons Olympus array was going to be over a hundred times larger than Arecibo.
Why would they need something that large? Kincaid wondered. Arecibo was designed to pick up radio waves from deep space. Were the Airlia at Cydonia looking to receive a message? If so, from whom? And — Kincaid stopped his runaway thoughts as something frightening occurred to him — Arecibo, while primarily a receiver, could also transmit. Of course, it had never really been used like that because who was there in the heavens to transmit to? And radio waves were relatively slow when measured against interstellar distances. Even the first radio transmissions made on Earth were still making their way to the nearest star.
Unless — he felt a chill run up his spine — unless the Airlia had a way of transmitting that was faster than radio waves. Perhaps faster than light? After all, the mothership was suspected of faster-than-light travel. And if they did have a way of communicating at a reasonable speed given the distance between star systems—
Kincaid spun in his seat toward Quinn, who was on the radio monitoring events. “I need to get ahold of Mike Turcotte ASAP.”
Quinn pulled the mike away from his lips. “I’d like to hear from him, never mind get ahold of him. I don’t think he’s coming down off the mountain.”
Garlin walked down the corridor and stopped in front of the elevator doors. They slowly slid to the side, revealing the second set of doors. He ignored the blood coating the floor from the Israeli agents who had brought the Ark and were subsequently killed. Their bodies still littered the floor, sliced in half at the waist. He walked up to the far side, stepping over a bloodless torso. The doors slid open, revealing a smooth, black, slightly curving surface. A rectangular outline appeared, then that section opened from the top, lowering to the floor. A very short passageway was beyond the hatch, ending at a metal door. Garlin walked to the door and hit a code on a panel to the left. The door slid aside, revealing a spherical chamber about fifteen feet in width, filled with gear and lit with a dull green glow. In the exact center was a thick pedestal on which rested a bizarre creature. It consisted of a gray orb, four feet in diameter with numerous eyes spaced evenly around the body. One gray arm, six feet long, extended upward, wavering in the air like a cobra ready to strike. The tip of a second tentacle was inserted into a square black box. Out of three other knobs, smaller versions of tentacles were growing, none yet at full maturity. Several eyes turned and watched Garlin approach. It was one of the Swarm, and the last thing the Israeli agent Sherev had seen when he brought the Ark of the Covenant here, believing he was delivering it to a new Majestic-12 committee.
Garlin knelt in front of the pedestal and leaned his head back, mouth opening wide, pointing directly up. A gray tentacle appeared in his throat, slowly slithering out, until all six feet of it was free of the human’s body, which remained still. An identical arm on the orb reached forward and grasped the three fingers on the end of the tentacle. It lifted it free of the human body and the tentacle bent, the thick end coming toward the orb and attaching itself to a knob on the front side. Within seconds the two were reconnected.
Data was relayed from the one-hemisphere brain at the stem of the tentacle to the four-hemisphere brain inside the Swarm scout: The Ark of the Covenant was working but slowly. The mental shield around Duncan’s real memories had been pierced in places. Penetration and retrieval into Duncan’s real memory was progressing but there was a long way to go, particularly with regard to her real identity, purpose, and origin, which were of utmost importance to the Swarm, as was the secret of her immortality.
The details of the planet’s surface that had been displayed on the Ark’s screen were sent to the black box, which was a mainframe computer. The images were analyzed for a match. The result came back within seconds. Duncan’s home world was pinpointed along with the information that the Swarm had already harvested it thousands of years previously. And they knew a mothership had left there prior to the fleet arriving. The assumption had been that the Airlia had abandoned the planet on board that mothership. That assumption appeared to be in error. Not Airlia, but Duncan’s people had been on board. Which raised a new issue.