Area 51: The Truth (12 page)

“Can the fleet get all those people off?” Turcotte asked.

“They’re evacuating by air right now, but it’s slow. The fleet won’t be offshore for another day.”

Mount Ararat

Turcotte watched with interest as the wound in Aspasia’s Shadow’s head slowly healed. The “man’s” chest had begun to rise and fall within two minutes of Turcotte’s fatal shot. Using climbing rope, Turcotte had securely tied Aspasia’s Shadow’s hands behind his back and his feet together.

As fresh skin finally closed the wound, Aspasia’s Shadow’s eyes flickered open, confusion reigning for a few seconds before he looked at Turcotte.

“That was foolish.” “Why?” Turcotte asked.

“I have much to offer you.”

“We have the mothership, the Master Guardian, and now”—Turcotte held up a cloth-covered object—”the Grail. So I didn’t have to make a deal after all. What more can you offer?”

“Information.” “About?”

“The truth that you are so desperate to discover.”

“I wouldn’t believe you even if you did tell me the truth,” Turcotte said. He put the Grail down and placed one hand on the pistol grip for his submachine gun. “I tell you what. There is something you can do for me right now to try to prove your sincerity. You started a destruct mechanism on Easter Island, didn’t you?”

Aspasia’s Shadow smiled, revealing his sharp teeth. “So you do need me.”

“How long until it detonates?” “Soon.” “Within a day?” “Yes.”

“How do we deactivate the device?” “Let me free and I will tell you.” Turcotte shook his head. “You are not in a position to bargain.”

“I am if I have information you want.”

Turcotte lifted the submachine gun. “How many times do you want to die?” A flicker of fear crossed Aspasia’s Shadow’s face. “You would not do that.” “I want to know how to deactivate the destruct. Tell me.”

“Only for my freedom and the mothership.”

“Come with me,” Turcotte said. He loosened the rope tying Aspasia’s Shadow’s legs. Then he tugged on the rope, and Aspasia’s Shadow was forced to follow him as he headed for the Master Guardian room. When they reached the doorway, Turcotte looked in. Yakov was communing with the guardian once more.

“Tell me how to deactivate the destruct,” Turcotte said. “Only if you give me the mothership,” Aspasia’s Shadow said.

“No deal.” Turcotte pulled the trigger, the round hitting the same spot the previous one had.

Easter Island

The plane carrying Kelly Reynolds and other refugees lifted off the runway of the international airport and clawed its way into the sky, grossly overloaded. The C2As could only hold a fraction of the thousands that had been captured and enslaved by the nanovirus. The rest waited around the edges of the runway, eyes peering into the sky, hoping for more planes to rescue them. They knew, in the way a desperate crowd always knows once a rumor begins, that time was ticking away.

Some more enterprising souls went to the shore and launched outriggers, paddling away. The rest could only stand and wait.

Space Command, Colorado

The message was in code with an ST-6 clearance. Captain Manning began decrypting it and began nodding before he got halfway through. He wore a black jumpsuit with his name tag sewn above the left pocket, the Budweiser insignia of the Navy SEALs above the right pocket and a unique patch on the left shoulder. The patch had a dagger up the center with a half-moon on one side and a star on the other—the insignia of the United States Space Forces.

The unit had already deployed and lost two elements in the war against the aliens—one on board the shuttle Columbia and another with Turcotte on the mission into Egypt to rescue Duncan. Manning had taken the remaining members of his fledgling force and used them to train an influx of new recruits culled from the various Special Operations forces, primarily Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs. He preferred SEALs as they were already used to working in a “weightless” environment with their water training.

Now he had orders to prepare for a third mission. Manning left the communications center with the message in his hand. They were headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base outside of Colorado Springs. The commo shack was adjacent to a large hangar that had once housed B-52 bombers, but now contained his force’s primary training area.

Manning paused as he entered the hangar, noting the activity. In the center of the hangar was a large water tank, three stories high and a hundred meters in diameter. Several ramps spiraled up the side to a platform level with the top. Suspended from the ceiling, numerous metal tracks crisscrossed the space above the tank.

Manning heard one of his senior noncommissioned officers standing on the walkway yelling instructions into a radio. Manning walked over to one of the ramps and went up. The tank was full of water and inside a half dozen men in full body suits were being put through the paces by the
NCO
.

The men were wearing
TASC
suits, which stood for Tactical Articulated Space Combat suits. They were self-contained, self-breathing, and with full body armor were designed for combat operations in space. Next to actually going up into space, the tank was the best training preparation the men could get—simulated zero g and a nonbreathable medium.

The most intriguing thing about the suits was that the outside of the helmets were solid, with no visors. Images were picked up by cameras and relayed to a screen just in front of the wearer’s eyes, along with tactical information. Also the arms ended in flat black plates, attached to which were various weapons that could be used in space. On the feet were miniature rockets, used to supplement the propulsion unit on the backpack, which also contained the rebreather and a sophisticated computer.

A large part of the development of the
TASC
suit came out of the Air Force’s Pilot 2010 Program. Realizing that their jets’ capabilities were growing faster than the ability of pilots to man them, the Air Force understood that it needed to approach the entire issue in a different manner. There were fighters on the drawing board that would be able to make a twenty-g turn, but pilots would pass out at half that force. Additionally, at multiple Mach speeds, a pilot’s reactions at normal speed weren’t quick enough to pilot the plane accurately.

The
TASC
suits addressed both those problems by protecting the pilot and by allowing a faster mind-action interface via a device called a SARA—Sensory Amplified Response Activator—link. Inside the helmet was a black band with microscopic probes that went directly into the brain. The link was a two-way feed of electrical current sending input from the suit’s sensors to the brain and taking orders directly from the nerve centers. The suit’s miniature motors would be acting even as the nerve signal was traveling through the wearer’s nervous system to his muscles.

On the previous two missions, they had not used the
SARA
link because of fears that the system had been built on alien technology—even Manning didn’t know exactly how the skunk works had developed the damn thing. He’d had his men begin training with it again, now that it appeared the aliens had been defeated and the guardian computers were off-line. The suit itself was armored, capable of sustaining a hit from a 7.62mm round.

“Bring them up, Top,” Manning ordered.

The six men surfaced, their black helmets bobbing in the water. Manning knew they could hear him, as mikes on the outsides of the helmets could amplify sound if needed.

“Men, we have a mission.” He held up the decoded message. “We need to be ready to go in two hours. Area of operations—Mars. It appears the aliens are building some sort of communications facility there. We will destroy that facility. That is all.”

Mount Ararat

Turcotte grabbed Yakov’s shoulder and pulled him away from the Master Guardian. The Russian was confused for a moment as he switched from the virtual world of the guardian to the real world. “What is wrong?”

“Our friend there”—Turcotte pointed at Aspasia’s Shadow, lying on the floor, the fresh blood behind his head contrasting with the pale skin that was already beginning to heal around the edge of the wound—”rigged Easter Island for destruction. There’re about ten thousand people trapped there.”

“What can we do?”

“Save them,” Turcotte said.

“Don’t we have other priorities?” Yakov asked.

Turcotte stared at the Russian. “You mean other than saving people?” “Saving the planet?” Yakov countered.

Turcotte laughed, months of worry and strain seeming to fall from his face for a moment. “We’ve already done that several times.” The smile disappeared. “First things first. Let’s do this, then we’ll worry about Mars and Artad and the Swarm and every other Tom, Dick, and Harry who threaten us.” He headed for the main corridor. “Come on. Let’s get this thing moving.” As he entered the corridor, he broke into a dead sprint.

Easter Island

For thousands of years, Airlia scientists had watched worlds being formed, carefully studying the mechanics of creation. In doing so, they’d also learned the opposite: how to use that information to damage or even destroy a planet. They’d tracked the evolution of a planet’s birth at various stages and that data was stored inside the guardian computers. What Aspasia’s Shadow had prepared on Easter Island as part of his revenge was based on that information.

In the beginning, Earth was merely a cluster of small rocks that came together 4.6 billion years ago as a result of the minute gravitational forces of those rocks. Six billion years later the collection was bombarded by asteroids and meteorites. That lasted millions and millions of years, producing immense amounts of energy, which in turn produced extremely high temperatures that reduced the entire planet to molten rock. It has been cooling ever since and still has not completely recovered, 4 billion years later.

Earth is currently at a stage where its interior is divided into layers depending on the extent of cooling. There are four major layers: the inner core, outer core, mantle, and crust. Inside, the rock is still molten and in flux, producing a magnetic field. The Airlia had learned that almost all planets with living creatures were at the same stage of inner flux. The Airlia had learned to tap this source of power for propulsion for their craft whenever they were within such a planet’s field.

Dead planets such as Mars and the moon had no intrinsic electric and magnetic fields because they were cold and solid. On a dead planet, generators inside the Airlia ships had to produce their own fields at a great expenditure of energy.

The surface of Earth is a very thin skin representing less than .2 percent of the planet’s entire mass. The skin under the continents is five times thicker than that under the oceans. However, since Easter Island is so isolated in the Pacific, it has only a very thin layer of planetary crust beneath it. Thus, the molten outer core is only six miles below the island’s surface, where molten rock bubbles at four thousand degrees Celsius.

Deep under Rano Kau, the southwesternmost of the volcanoes that dotted the surface of Easter Island, a shaft had been dug by Aspasia’s Shadow’s mech-machines through hardened lava, extending downward until it reached molten rock. The shaft had originally been dug to tap the heat as a power source.

Aspasia’s Shadow, however, after millennia of war and deception, had learned always to be prepared for disaster. One of the first things he had done after arriving on the island was prepare both an escape plan—which he had executed via the bouncer—and a destruct plan, which he had activated just prior to departure. At the bottom of the shaft, just above the glowing magma, he’d placed several five-hundred-pound bombs scavenged from the American fleet.

By themselves, the bombs weren’t a threat to the island. He’d detonated them just before getting on the bouncer, and the effect had not even been felt six miles above. But the explosion had achieved what he intended, widening the energy tap beyond a controllable size. Under extreme pressure, liquid rock was now pouring upward into the vent.

Dormant for thousands of years, Rano Kau was now in the first stages of eruption.

Such an event would devastate Easter Island and kill all that lived there. However, Aspasia’s Shadow had planned for something much more devastating to happen. Easter Island was merely the first domino in his scheme.

Mount Ararat

Turcotte settled into the center seat in the pilot room of the mothership. Not long ago he had flown Aspasia’s mothership into orbit, so he was somewhat familiar with the controls. He pressed his hand down on one console, and the curved wall in front of him gave a panoramic view of the chamber outside.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Yakov asked.

Turcotte responded by pressing his other hand down on one of the hexagons covered with rune writing. The floor beneath them shuddered as the ship’s electromagnetic planetary drive was activated for the first time in over ten thousand years. The massive craft lifted off its cradle and was airborne.

“How will we get out of this place?” Yakov asked, hands grabbing on to the back of Turcotte’s oversize chair, knuckles white.

Again, Turcotte answered with action, turning the prow of the mothership toward the hole the Talon had made in exiting. It was, of course, much too small to accommodate the mothership, but Turcotte had to assume that a craft designed to travel interstellar distances would not be greatly inconvenienced by a rock wall.

He was proven right as the black alien metal hit the cavern wall, knocking stone aside without slowing. Seeing clear sky ahead, Turcotte slid his palm forward and the mothership moved out of the cavern.

“Question,” Turcotte said. “Yes?”

“Which way is quicker? East or west?”

“I think they are approximately the same,” Yakov guessed.

Now clear of Ararat, Turcotte accelerated while gaining altitude. “We’ll go east,” he announced.

A pair of Turkish jets were visible on the display, but unlike their colleagues who had intercepted the bouncer, these were racing away as quickly as possible, the pilots obviously spooked by the tremendous size of the mothership.