The Sphinx a5-4 Read online

  “This was the other peak. The sister of Kilimanjaro.”

  “But this has been a crater for ages,” Lago said.

  “Perhaps,” Mualama said. “Perhaps not.”

  “There’s no indication the volcano has been active for over twenty thousand years,” Lago argued.

  At least the student had done his geological homework while in school, Mualama granted. “Perhaps the top of the mountain was destroyed in some other manner.”

  To that, Lago had no answer. The thought of something powerful enough to shear off the top of a mountain as large as Kilimanjaro and leave this crater behind was beyond his ability to comprehend.

  “Why did you go to the church in the first place? Why did you start following this dead man’s trail?”

  “That is a long and complex story that began when I was a young man… about your age… studying in England. What do you know of Sir Richard Francis Burton?”

  “Only what you have told me so far.”

  “Your education is lacking,” Mualama said. “Sir Burton translated the Book of the Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra. He was quite a linguist, with a mastery of many languages. It was because of one of his trips here to Africa and an unpublished letter he left written in a tongue that no one else could read… like his manuscript, but a different language… that I was first directed to this location. At first I thought it was a work of fiction, but now I know it was not.”

  “But…” Lago paused as his uncle picked up his shovel.

  “We must work,” Mualama said. “It is all speculation so far.”

  Lago reluctantly picked up his tool and got back to work.

  Two hours later, Mualama struck down into the soft earth with his spade and was startled when it reverberated in his hands, hitting something solid. He blinked away the sweat in his eyes and stood perfectly still for a seconds, his heart racing.

  He knelt and scraped with his hands, pushing the loose dirt aside. His fingers touched stone. A flat stone, with something etched on the surface.

  “Stop.” Mualama said it so quietly that Lago at first didn’t understand.

  “Did you find something?”

  “Yes.” Mualama pointed at the aged Land Rover. “Bring the brush and the hand trowels.”

  Lago did as ordered. “What is it?”

  Mualama didn’t answer. He lightly scraped with a hand trowel, removing dirt, tossing it to the side. Red stone appeared, inch by inch, foot by foot. He used the trowel and hand brush to clear off the top. When he was done, he stepped back up on the lip of the hole. The stone was nine feet long by four wide. The top was smooth except where markings were etched in it. It was a dark, almost blood red. Mualama knew a thing or two about stones, and he had never seen this kind.

  Mualama did recognize the markings, though… high runes. The language of the aliens.

  Easter Island

  D — 42 Hours, 30 Minutes

  Easter Island fell under the jurisdiction of the government of Chile, but the events of the past month had superseded that rule, and frankly, the rulers in Santiago were quite happy to wash their hands of the island. They had ceded any action to be done about it to UNAOC… the United Nations Alien Oversight Committee.

  Chileans weren’t too concerned about losing control of the island, for two reasons. One was that it was over two thousand miles away from their shoreline, making it the most isolated piece of terrain on the planet. The second reason was that UNAOC’s forces… primarily the United States Navy… couldn’t pierce the opaque shield that now surrounded the entire island. It was anyone’s guess what was happening inside the shield.

  The last attempt to penetrate the shield, using a remote sensing torpedo from the USS Springfield, had resulted in the submarine’s being trapped on the bottom of the ocean floor offshore of the island by several foo fighters… small golden spheres that wielded tremendous power and focused their energy on electromagnetic sources. As long as the submarine didn’t move, it was safe. Of course, there was a limit to the amount of air, food, and water on the submarine, and when one of those three vitals ran out, the crisis would escalate, but that was several weeks off and UNAOC’s decision had been to withhold taking any further drastic action, a decision greatly influenced by the growing planet-wide isolationist movement.

  Before the discovery of the guardian computer underneath the island, the only distinction Easter Island had was the massive statues that dotted its shoreline. With no one left alive on the island… with the possible exception of Kelly Reynolds, and her latest communiqué indicated she supported the new isolationist line… there seemed little justification in taking further action.

  Easter Island was shaped like a triangle, with a volcano at each corner. Its landmass totaled only sixty-two square miles, but despite its small size it had once boasted a bustling civilization, one advanced enough to have built the moai, the giant stone monoliths that peered out to sea. There was no doubt now that the moai were representative of the Airlia… the red stone caps like the red hair of the aliens, the long earlobes similar to what had been seen on the holograph of the Airlia under Qian-Ling.

  The island had been called Rapa Nui by the few surviving natives, but to the rest of the world Easter Island had been its name since its discovery by Europeans on Easter Day in 1722.

  It was below the Rano Kau volcano that the guardian had been secreted. Deep underneath the dormant volcano, Kelly Reynolds’s body was pressed up against the side of the twenty-foot-high golden pyramid that housed the alien computer. The golden glow that surrounded her body kept it in a stasis field. The mental field had been supplemented by a metal probe that came from the guardian and ended in the back of Kelly’s neck.

  The line between Kelly Reynolds’s mind and the guardian machine was a thin one. It was more of a spiritual separation than a physical one, as the guardian invaded her with machinery and quantum waves.

  Kelly Reynolds had originally been drawn into the Area 51 mystery because of the investigation of her fellow reporter, Johnny Simmons. His death at the hand of the Majestic-12 committee that ran Area 51 and its sister bio-research facility at Dulce, New Mexico, had destroyed her professional detachment. She had believed that mankind’s best hope lay in communicating with the aliens… and the best way to do that had been the guardian computer. But since coming down here just before Turcotte destroyed the Airlia fleet, she had been caught in the same field that had changed the members of Majestic-12.

  The guardian computer under Rano Kau was now the centerpiece of a bizarre structure of which Kelly Reynolds’s body was just one part. Metal arms reached out of the side of the pyramid, making machines out of parts cannibalized from the material UNAOC had left behind.

  All around the guardian, microrobots raced about like oversized mechanical ants. A line of microrobots went up to the surface through the tunnel UNAOC had drilled. There were several types of microrobots. The carriers, three inches long, had six metal legs, and two arms for grasping and holding that could reach forward, then rotate back and hold whatever they picked up on their backs. The makers, now six inches long, had four legs and four arms. The arms were different on each, depending on what function they served in the production line making more of their own kind, each generation smaller than the one before it.

  Already the microrobots had succeeded in digging a hole in the floor of the cavern to a plasma vent two miles deep from which the guardian drew more power. The fusion plant left by Aspasia to power the guardian was insufficient for the tasks now at hand.

  All of the abandoned UNAOC computers were now hardwired into the guardian. Across the monitors information flashed, faster than a human eye could follow, as the alien computer sorted through what it had learned from its foray into the human world via the Interlink/ Internet. The guardian also maintained its link to Mars, to its sister guardian deep under the surface of the red planet and the alien hands that controlled that computer.

  Deep inside Kelly’s mind there was a smal
l place, the center of her self that still existed. While the guardian experimented on her, drew on her memories and knowledge to supplement its database, Kelly was able to pick up visions from the guardian, like feedback on a loop. Peter Nabinger had made “first contact” with this guardian and been fed a vision of how Aspasia had been the savior of mankind. Then Nabinger had made contact with the guardian under Qian-Ling and been given the opposite vision. But this guardian had no need to “feed” anything in particular to Kelly Reynolds. The visions she saw were inadvertent blips on the stream of data the guardian was constantly evaluating, processing, storing, moving about,

  She’d already “seen” the movement of the moai from the quarry on the flanks of Rano Raraku volcano where they were carved, to their position on the coastal platforms. And she understood one mystery that had plagued westerners in the centuries following the discovery of the island… why the statues were carved and placed there. She now knew they were warnings by the people who had inhabited Easter Island against others landing on their island, warning them of the presence of the Airlia artifacts.

  The warning had failed and other people had come. Trekking down from the city of Tiahuanaco in the high mountains of South America to the Pacific Coast, these others set sail in reed boats to the west, seeking to band together to fight the guardians… one of which was hidden deep under a pyramid in the center of their city. It was an ill-fated trip. The guardians, through the power of The Mission, hit both Easter Island and the Aymara people of Tiahuanaco with a devastating plague that effectively destroyed the civilizations at both locales.

  Now she was seeing something new from the guardian’s memory, a vision stunning in its size and realism:

  The pyramids of the Giza Plateau gleamed in the early-morning light, the rising sun reflecting off the polished limestone casings. Kelly had been to Egypt and seen the current state of the pyramids, but there was no comparing the present weathered, stripped hulks to these beautifully crafted masterpieces.

  Dazzled by the perfectly smooth sides of the pyramids, it took Kelly a little while to notice other startling differences from the relics she had personally witnessed to what she was “seeing” now.

  At the very top of the Great Pyramid a capstone added thirty-one feet, bringing it over five hundred feet high above the surrounding sands. The capstone itself was unique. Not made of limestone, it was of a black metal. The very top… about four feet on each side, ending in an exact point… was a glowing, dark red and reminded Kelly of the ruby sphere that Turcotte and Duncan had recovered in a cavern in the Great Rift in Africa.

  She tried to sort through her memories, feeling the intrusion of the guardian. Nabinger had postulated that the smooth, flat sides of the Great Pyramid had been designed to give a significant radar signature into space. But the small red pyramid at the top suggested something else.

  She saw something else that was different. The Great Sphinx.

  It was all black, with burning red eyes. Crouched on the desert floor in front of the three shining pyramids on the Giza Plateau like… A bolt of pain seared through Kelly’s mind, shattering the vision.

  Kelly’s body vibrated against the side of the guardian, spasming from the pain. The only part that didn’t move was the metal probe into the base of her skull, the source of the agony.

  After a minute the spasming subsided, her body slumped like a rag doll, the brain retreating into the deep inner core and hiding, no longer seeking out images.

  Area 51, Nevada

  D — 41 Hours

  Major Quinn took the cigarette Larry Kincaid offered and slumped down in one of the leather chairs around the Area 51 conference table. He noted the photos spread out in front of the scientist. “What do you have?”

  “Imagery the Department of Defense just took of Stratzyda using a KH-14 spy satellite.” He handed Quinn one of the pictures.

  Stratzyda was a long black cylinder drifting against a backdrop of stars. The hammer-and-sickle insignia painted in red on the side of the long cylinder was a throwback to a time when the world stood on the edge of destruction by divisive human hands.

  “Where is it?” Quinn asked.

  “A free polar orbit.”

  “And it’s been up there for years and we never did anything about it?”

  “First,” Kincaid said, “the Russians said it was a test platform in preparation for launching Mir. The intelligence guys might have suspected something, but they couldn’t be sure. Then the Russians said it was no longer functional after a year or so. What did you want us to do? Go up and park a shuttle next to it and check it out? You know how many things are in orbit? Or would you have preferred we shoot it down? That would have been illegal and started a war in space and probably on Earth, too.”

  “Will the warheads still work?” Quinn asked.

  “Some have probably degraded and are no longer functional, but I suspect more than half will still detonate upon deployment. Knowing the Russians, they built the simplest… and dirtiest… possible weapon with very few parts to break down. And it’s in the vacuum of space.”

  “What exactly is a cobalt bomb?”

  “It’s a nuke that has a thick cobalt metal blanket wrapped around the core. The cobalt is used to capture the fusion neutrons to maximize the fallout hazard from the weapon… the nuke guys call this ‘salting’ the bomb. Instead of generating additional explosive force from fast fission of the U-238, the cobalt is transmuted into Co-60… natural cobalt consists entirely of Co-59. Cobalt 60 has a half-life of five point two six years and produces energetic, very penetrating gamma rays.” Kincaid paused to see if Quinn was following this technical explanation before he continued.

  “The Co-60 fallout hazard is greater than the fission products from a U-238 blanket because most fission-produced isotopes have half-lives that are very short, and thus decay before the fallout settles or can be protected against by short-term sheltering. Also, other fission-produced isotopes which have very long half-lives do not produce very intense radiation. The half-life of Co-60, on the other hand, is long enough to settle out before significant decay has occurred, and to make it impractical to wait out in shelters, yet is short enough that intense radiation is produced. In terms of the people who are in the fallout area, it’s the worst of both effects. And although the threat is greatest for the United States from this”… he tapped the photo of Stratzyda… “in reality I think it might be a doomsday device for the entire planet, since no one really knows what will happen.”

  “But if the bombs go off only over the States, how can it destroy the rest of the world?” Quinn asked.

  “The idea for a cobalt bomb originated with Leo Szilard, who theorized such a thing in 1950 to point out that it would be possible in principle to build a weapon that could kill everybody on Earth. To design such a theoretical weapon, he needed a radioactive isotope that could be dispersed worldwide before it decayed. Such dispersal through the atmosphere takes months, perhaps even years, so the half-life of cobalt 60 was the ideal choice. At detonation, gamma radiation from an equivalent-size normal fission-fusion-fission bomb is much more intense than Co-60: fifteen thousand times more intense at one hour; thirty-five times more intense at one week; five times more intense at one month; and about equal at six months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly, so that Co-60 fallout is eight times more intense than fission at one year and one hundred and fifty times more intense at five years.

  “We thought no one had ever really developed a cobalt bomb because its effects weren’t really useful… in terms of military objectives, that is. We also thought no one had ever built one or tested one, never mind deployed them. Then again, the Russians never thought we’d put a functional laser weapon in space, either. We sure managed to fool each other, didn’t we?”

  “These bombs hit the States, the entire continent will be uninhabitable for decades.” Kincaid lit another cigarette. “Makes me glad I didn’t quit smoking.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Vicin
ity Easter Island

  D — 41 Hours

  “What’s the status of the Springfield?” Duncan asked. She felt a depressing sense of déjà vu. She had been here before, in exactly this same place, prepared to watch almost exactly the same thing occur. She was a firm believer in the adage that doing the same thing would produce the same results. Unfortunately, she had found over the years, working within the government bureaucracy, that few others thought the same way. The President had asked her to be present for the latest attempt to penetrate the shield around Easter Island at the conclusion of the conference call. His concern had been not so much the actual attempt but rather for her to gauge the mood of the military on blockade duty, to see how close they were to violating orders and attacking the island.

  Her conference call with the National Security Council had yielded little. There was even disagreement that the threat from Stratzyda was real, despite the example set by Lexina through Warfighter. The only agreement was that word of Stratzyda not be leaked. Even the cause of the explosion of Atlantis was being kept under wraps, with a cover story of a one-in-a-million catastrophic lightning strike during rollout being fed to the media.

  The President had been in contact with the Russian president, who had vehemently denied that Stratzyda was what Yakov claimed. He stuck to the old cover story of its being an experimental platform for Mir.

  Lies fighting lies, Duncan thought to herself. She was beginning to understand how easy it had been for the alien groups to manipulate mankind when truth was such an ephemeral ideal.

  Admiral Poldan, the commander of the task force, was seated in a black leather chair that was elevated so that he could oversee all that was happening in the combat control center, deep inside the island bridge of the USS Washington. He turned slightly in his chair to look at Duncan, and his gaze was not kind. Since arriving on board the aircraft carrier via bouncer flight from Area 51, Duncan had received a chilly reception from the military personnel who manned the ship.