Area 51: The Truth (11 page)

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.

Kyzul-Kum Desert, Kazakhstan

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.

Space Command, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

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.

Mars

While the rest of the Airlia vehicles headed toward Mons Olympus, a lone tracked vehicle rolled over to the site of the Face. Each track pad was over a meter long, the entire length of the tread over eighty meters. The two tracks supported a thirty-meter-long bullet-shaped pod with dual manipulating arms at the front. In the crew compartment, three Airlia manned the controls.

The Face had already been largely excavated by the mech-machines before the Cydonia guardian went off-line. The original array there had been specially designed using equipment brought from the Airlia home world. After it was destroyed, the resulting face figure had emerged from the rubble piled up at the spot. It no longer held that shape. The center had been dug through by mech-machines scavenging material. The vehicle slowly made its way up the rubble, treads crushing boulders beneath them.

It navigated over the top and down into the center, where the digging had gone the deepest. Carefully the Airlia edged their vehicle into the hole. At the bottom there was a dim green glow, and they headed in that direction. Just before the bottom was reached even the huge treads began to lose their traction and the vehicle lurched.

On the rear top a panel slid open and a tube extended outward. It fired a harpoon back the way they had come and the four-foot-wide barbed head slammed into the rubble, digging deep. A cable extended from it to the craft. Using the harpoon as an anchor, the Airlia slowly spun out cable, getting closer to the glow.

One of the Airlia in the control compartment slid his hands into articulated gloves and took control of the arms. Gingerly the large metal claws at the end dug through. Finally, one of them gently cradled the source of the green glow: a multifaceted crystal, eight feet in diameter. The arm lifted the glowing green crystal out of the debris, then carefully brought it over the top of the vehicle and halted.

From a hatch near the front, an Airlia in black armor exited the craft, a pack on its back supplying air. Special boots kept it attached to the skin of the craft as it made its way to the wide middle part just below the crystal. The Airlia knelt, sliding open an access panel and tapping in a code on the hexagonal display revealed. A large cargo door slid open, revealing an open bay.

The Airlia was speaking to the one controlling the arm. Slowly the crystal came down. The Airlia on the outside anxiously made sure it didn’t touch the sides of the hatch, guiding it with delicate touches. As soon as it was clear, the Airlia ordered the controller to halt movement. The Airlia then slid between the crystal and the sides of the hatch into the cargo bay. It checked the cradle that had been specially built to accept the crystal, then ordered the controller to continue.

Gingerly, the crystal was placed in the cradle. The Airlia in the bay waited until all its weight was supported, then gave the all clear. The metal fingers released the crystal and the arm retracted from the bay. The Airlia touched a control panel and the cradle locked down on the crystal securing it.

The bay pressurized. A door in the front slid open, revealing a corridor, but the Airlia didn’t leave right away. It pulled off its black helmet, revealing pale skin and red cat eyes. It regarded the crystal for almost a minute, then slowly, almost reluctantly, turned and headed back toward the crew compartment.

Reeling in the cable and with the treads tearing in reverse, the vehicles slowly backed up out of the hole. As it crested the top, the crew turned it around. It moved downslope toward the line gouged in the red sand by the other vehicles, heading toward Mons Olympus.

Camp Rowe, North Carolina

Major Quinn had been the operations officer for Area 51 when Majestic-12 ran it. When Majestic’s corruption was uncovered by Mike Turcotte and Lisa Duncan and subsequently purged, Quinn’s ignorance of the illegal activities of the organization and his expertise at running the facility had kept him in that position.

Here at Camp Rowe, thirty miles west of the Fort Bragg main post, he was the linchpin for the survivors of Area 51, coordinating their message traffic, doing whatever research they required of him, and forwarding information to whoever would listen in the United States government. With the loss of Artad’s and Aspasia’s Shadow’s guardians, he was finding the latter to be much easier. He had already passed on word of the defeat of Artad and Aspasia’s Shadow. While the world was celebrating the defeat of the aliens, he was trying to keep track of the survivors in both camps.

He had a direct link to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, which kept track of electronic traffic, and Space Command, buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From the former he was monitoring the desperate attempts of Guides around the world to contact Aspasia’s Shadow and the silence from their former leader. From the latter, the news was less positive. Space Command had tracked the Talon via satellite from Mount Ararat to Kazakhstan and now had it on an upward trajectory.

He was working out of an old aircraft hangar on the edge of a runway on which Special Forces used to train and from which it conducted airborne operations. The location was guarded by members of the army’s elite Delta Force. The Area 51 survivors had been forced to move here after Area 51 was attacked by government forces operating under classified orders. Exactly who had issued those orders was something Quinn was still trying to track down, as every government agency he had contacted so far professed ignorance.

He’d even talked to the commander of the unit that had conducted the raid, who had given Quinn little to work with other than that the orders had the proper clearance and the unit had crippled the base and delivered Lisa Duncan to an airfield outside of New Orleans, where an Osprey aircraft waited.

Quinn understood the strangeness of the situation. He’d operated in the gray world of covert ops for a long time and knew that with the proper security and authorization clearance, one could do just about anything with no questions asked. And whoever had snatched Lisa Duncan and destroyed Area 51 obviously had had the clearance and authorization.

He turned away from his computer screen as he recognized the voice in his headset. “Quinn?” “Yes, Major Turcotte?” “The Swarm has Duncan.”

Quinn frowned as he considered that. They had assumed that a new Majestic-12 committee, a backup of the original, had snatched Duncan and destroyed the original Area 51 base. Quinn had since determined there was no indication that there was another Majestic committee, but he had assumed that one or the other sides of the alien civil war had been behind her kidnapping and the destruction of Area 51.

“I want to know where it’s hiding,” Turcotte continued. “What do you have so far?”

Quinn relayed the information about the airfield outside of New Orleans that he had acquired from the troops who had been ordered to attack Area 51. “I’ve queried every government agency now that we’re back in favor, and received negative responses about any further information.”

“Get me more,” Turcotte ordered. “I want to know where she was taken from there. Track down the Osprey. Someone had to be piloting it.”

“I’ll try.”

“Do better than try.”

There was a short silence, then Turcotte’s voice came hack over the radio. “I’m sorry about that. I know you’re doing your best.”

“What are you going to do?” Quinn asked.

“We need to get the mothership—and the Master Guardian—out of here. Do you have a location on the Talon that was taken from here?”

“Already in space, on a trajectory toward Mars.” “Time to target?”

“Say again?”

“How long until it gets to Mars?” Turcotte asked, reining in his impatience.

“Based on current speed and what we observed when Aspasia came here from Mars on board a Talon, I estimate a little over a day. But this one hasn’t even made it into space yet.”

“And how long does Kincaid estimate it will take the Airlia to finish the array?”

“He says it’s impossible to estimate as everything has changed now that the mech-machines aren’t functioning. It appears as if the Airlia from Cydonia are heading there to complete it by hand.”

“All right,” Turcotte said. “We’re going to bring this mothership back to the States. Then we’re going to take it to Mars. I need backup—people able to operate in that kind of environment. See what you can get us from Space Command. They must have more than the team that went up on the shuttle.”

“Yes, sir—” Quinn paused as a new report flowed across his computer screen. “I think you might want to know that it appears Aspasia’s Shadow booby-trapped Easter Island. They’re trying to evacuate it right now. Artad apparently did the same thing to Qian-Ling—we have reports of a massive explosion in that vicinity.”