Reformation (23 page)

Before he could find any words, Hastelloy
’s arm was in motion to parry a sword swing coming from his lower right.  He deflected the blade, spun around the soldier’s arm and delivered a slice across the creature’s back resulting in a nearly imperceptibly shallow gash across the dense, wet clay. 

Three more blows were deflected and countered with identical
results, inducing a demonic cackle from his adversary.  “
It’s a pity my ancestors consider reanimating flesh an act of blasphemy.  I do so miss the sensation of touch, but bringing life back to hardened clay that feels nothing at all certainly has its advantages
.”

“
Goron, what have you done?
” Hastelloy demanded as he reestablished a firm footing.  “
This violates everything you hold dear.  Are you so consumed with defeating me that you have forgotten who you are and what you stand for?
”

“
That overly conservative traditionalist would never condone my vision, but many others will come around to my way of thinking
.”  The warrior paused long enough to look around at the fallen Alpha bodies.  “
I’m quite certain you will see these six warriors again
.”

Hastelloy heard a harsh snap followed by a crackling sizzle.  He looked to his left and
found Gallono holding one of the unused hand cannons with a lit fuse pointed directly at the clay warrior.  “Be sure and tell them I look forward to it.”

An instant later hundreds of metal shards exploded from the hand cannon
.  The sheer force and volume of shrapnel unleashed at point blank range shredded the clay figure like a raw egg slamming into a mesh fence.  The thick white smoke cleared just in time for Hastelloy to watch the last remnants of an Alpha relic flame hovering where the clay figure once stood fade to nothing.

Hastelloy
knelt down and picked up a handful of orange dust that used to be the clay soldier.  Apparently without the relic providing life, the figure reverted back to its original fire hardened exterior.  Slowly he tipped his hand to the side and allowed the fine red powder to fall back to the deck boards.

Hastelloy was at a total loss.  He made a living being prepared for any and all possible outc
omes from a situation, but this?  This he was completely unprepared to handle.  How could he be?  “My god, Gallono, somehow they are reanimating.  How can we fight them now?”

“We start by assaulting the burial mound of
Qui Shi Huang,” Gallono said without missing a beat.  “Whatever they’re doing to make this possible, it’s happening there.”

“No,” a despondent voice shouted from the far corner of the deck.  Hastelloy saw the voice belonged to Zhu.  “That tomb is cursed
, and I will not risk god’s wrath any further by desecrating the honored grave of Qui Shi Huang. 

“L
egend has it that thousands of stone soldiers protect that tomb,” Zhu frantically pointed with both hands to the clay shards strewn about the deck.  “Clearly that legend is true.”

“But the evil must be stopped,” Hastelloy began
, but was cut short by Zhu.

“No!  I must get away from this place.
We will head north and drive Kublai Khan and his horde back to the mountain steppes of Mongolia.  Perhaps that accomplishment will pacify god’s anger with me.”

Hastelloy wanted to argue the point further, but he could see it was no use.  Zhu was terrified to his core by what he just witnessed and would not be dissuaded from his course of action.

Still, this new and terrifying Alpha threat needed to be stopped, and the job that would determine the fate of the entire planet in the next few weeks rested solely on the shoulders of Hastelloy and Gallono.  There was no time to reach the others for help, and his human allies were now hopelessly spooked away.

The concerned look in Gallono’s eyes let Hastelloy know he was not the only one
who came to that conclusion.

Professor Russell settled
into his seat as the procession of Mengshi off-road vehicles and trucks drove away from the Xi’an airport.  He was about ready to close his eyes to pass what was sure to be several hours of driving through the countryside to reach the burial mound of Qin Shi Huang when Alex jabbed him in the side.

“Look, right there,” Alex pointed across Brian’s nose and out the side window.

The professor shrunk down in his seat a bit to have a look and was amazed to see a steep sided pyramid partially lit up by the street lighting standing proud and tall alongside the highway.

From the front seat Chin looked back in amusement.  “That is just one of many my friends.  That relatively small pyramid was unearthed in the early 19
90s when the new airport was under construction and the main road to the city was built.”

“I was expecting these pyramids to be farther out in the countryside,” Professor Russell replied.

Chin let out an uncharacteristically playful laugh at the professor’s flawed assumption.  “No.  They are all over this region in and around the city, so I would not get too comfortable.  This will be a short drive.”

As the procession of vehicles drove west from the city, Profes
sor Russell and Alex spotted no fewer than twenty pyramids dotting the evening landscape.  Some were multi-tiered, others had straight angled sides.  Most were covered with trees and other vegetation while a few were only covered with grass to allow their once precise shapes, now worn by weather and time, to be seen.

Chin periodically glanced back at the two archeologists having to wipe the drool from their mouths at the spectacle.  “This is only a small sampling.  There are many hundreds more out in the unsettled countryside if our satellite imagery is to be trusted.
  Up until just a few years ago, my government vehemently denied even the existence of these pyramids, but a new era of openness for my country has changed all that.”

Forget Egypt or Central America
, Brian thought.  The future of pyramid excavation was in China.  Everyone always thinks of the Great Wall when considering Chinese monuments, but these pyramids were just as impressive.  Despite the circumstances of his arrival in the country, he was positively giddy at the prospect of working with these structures.  

The vehicle
caravan drove westward for about ten minutes.  When they came around a sharp curve, Brian saw a view through the front windshield that managed to be both impressive and underwhelming at the same time.

Straight ahead
in the dying light of early evening stood a tree covered mound that measured nearly a half mile long on all four sides and stood over a one hundred fifty feet tall.  The sheer volume of earth that needed to be moved to build the mound was mind blowing, especially considering it was all done by hand two hundred years before the birth of Christ.

Despite the impressive scope, he found the vista lacking.  He could easily tell the pyramid once
stood twice its current height making it double the size of any pyramid in Egypt, even the Great Pyramid of Khufu.  Unfortunately weather and human activity over the last two thousand years made the mound look like a shrunken cake, or a soufflé that attempted to rise but deflated at the last moment.  It would have been truly a grand sight to see in its former glory.

Another lackluster feature of the pyramid was a
n intrusive trail of steep stone steps that cut a path straight up the middle of the sloped side.  With tall evergreen trees covering the rest of the slope except for the middle strip, it almost looked like the pyramid was having a bad hair day where the barber lost control of his clippers and ran the tool down the middle resulting in a reverse Mohawk.

Along the drive toward the pyramid
they passed a long, narrow structure with a curved roof that looked almost like the wing of a giant airplane. 

“That covers the burial pits w
here the Terracotta Army is being unearthed,” Chin narrated as if he were a tour guide.  “If time permits, I think you would enjoy a tour of the facility.”

“You think,” Alex repeated in disbelief.  “Of course we want to see them.”

“In due time,” Chin responded with his tone now turning serious once more.  They drove past the tourist visitor center which was closed for the night.  They roared right past a set of barriers and drove across the surrounding gardens until coming to a stop along the far right-hand side of the shriveled earthen pyramid where a large tent with covered sides stood.

When everyone was out of the vehicle
, Chin pointed toward the burial mound.  “Recorded history through the writings of Sima Qian tells us that automatic crossbows and falling stones guard the burial chamber which is supposed to contain treasures and an ocean of mercury.”

“I have my doubts about the former, but the limited testing we have done makes us think the latter may be accurate,” Chin went on.  “There are high levels of mercury in the surrounding soil, and a magnetic scan of the site revealed that a large number of coins are lying in the unopened tomb.”

“If you know all of this already, then why do you need the two of us?” Professor Russell asked as he looked on while the six wooden crates were offloaded from the truck.

Chin once again pointed to the towering mound to their left, “As you can plainly see, the pyramid is quite large. There is plenty of room for other chambers inside
, and if the technology exists to accurately map the voluminous interior, why not employ it?”

Accepting the logic, Professor Russell walked back to the wooden crates to oversee their opening.  Three already had the lids removed
, and the familiar sight of his tripod mounted ground receptors greeted him. Two more crates were pried open to reveal the helicopter mounted emitter disassembled into two halves.

He looked expectantly at the last crate as the workers employed their crowbars.  To Brian’s surprise, the lid cam
e loose with almost no effort from the workers.  He looked over the wooden edge inside to make sure nothing happened to the sensitive equipment during transport.  To his great relief, the fourth ground emitter inside looked to be in perfect working order.

Professor Russell looked back at Chin and Alex standing next to each other.  “Let’s get to work.  I need the ground receptors positioned a
t the cardinal points of the compass around the base of the pyramid and a helicopter to mount the emitter onto.  Alex, can you set up the computers inside the tent while that’s all happening?”

**********

As he hugged the undercarriage of the transport truck with his belt looped around the small of his back and anchored to the truck’s frame, Frank counted his blessings.  He had the foresight to get out of the crate while on the road to the pyramid.  Climbing out the back and underneath the truck while it drove down the road at fifty miles per hour had been tenuous, but in the end, well worth the risk. 

Not only did he avoid early detection, but he also was privy to an informative conversation between the archeologists and their handler named Chin – like that was his real name.  Nothing of their experience in Egypt was mentioned which was encouraging.  The other piece of good news was that Brian and Alex were working under the impression that this was a genuine archeological research project rather than working with the Chinese out of spite to their own nation. 

They were being manipulated by Chin, of course, but they could not possibly know that.  Short of stealing classified NSA papers, they had no way of knowing the Chinese Ministry of State Security had also detected strong radiation readings during their testing. 

When they first read the reports, Mark and Frank gave it a secondary level of importance.  The radiation frequency was close, but not an exact match to frequency Alpha so it was deemed a coincidence. 
Now seeing the lengths the Chinese were willing to go in order to investigate those readings made Frank reassess the level of importance.

Frank
patiently waited for everyone to go about their work before he let himself down and slunk his way into the background scenery to keep a covert eye on things, and perhaps extricate Professor Russell and Alex from the extremely dangerous situation they now found themselves in.  He would have liked nothing better than to call Mark and report in, but he knew all too well the signal would be a dead giveaway of his presence to the Chinese.  Instead, he remained incommunicado until something more profound occurred or was revealed.

From the moment
Mark sat back down on the couch across from Hastelloy, his line of vision never wavered.  He bore down on the man with his scrutinizing stare to evaluate anything and everything the man’s body language unknowingly revealed.  Tragically, it wasn’t much.

Hastelloy
had no difficulty maintaining eye contact while reciting his story.  As a result, that usually reliable indicator of a subject telling the truth or not was unrevealing. The fact that Hastelloy carried on his story so well while a man aimed a gun and an intense stare his direction was actually quite impressive.  It took a level of focus and discipline that Mark rarely encountered.

About the only read Mark got from Hastelloy was w
hen the man paused in his storytelling.  Mark watched his eyes very closely to see where they moved during those brief breaks in conversation.  Typically, the right side of the brain housed the ability to recall memory while the left side served the more creative functions of the mind to generate fictional tales.  Hastelloy’s eyes always glanced up and to the right, toward his memory recall.  The man was either reciting a story he memorized before, or he was telling the truth.  In either case, he was not making the story up on the fly or else his eyes would have moved left.

Mark’s instinct was to take control of the room, dictate the conversation and get answers from Hastelloy.
  Instead, he forced himself to sit there quietly while Hastelloy rambled on about his supposed exploits back in the Middle Ages.  There was likely a lot of truth in the story considering Mark’s own personal experience with their Nexus device.  It was entirely possible Hastelloy and his crew were on earth four thousand years ago to place the gravity manipulation equipment inside the Egyptian pyramid while it was under construction.  Was it really so far-fetched that they also tinkered with things only five hundred years ago?

The specific circumst
ance of the story being told was not particularly important to Mark.  He was far more interested in the behaviors shown toward the situations described.  Mark found it encouraging that Hastelloy was clearly distraught about the carnage the black plague unleashed upon the world.  Then again, Hastelloy bragged about sabotaging levees that drowned potentially millions of Chinese farmers.  In the next breath he boasted about poisoning revolutionary leaders to unite their forces under one leader.  Next his subordinate engineered a weapon that leveled the walls of Constantinople, unleashing three days of rape, murder, and theft upon that wealthy city.  The man had a distinctly ruthless side to him which made the power he held over the entire planet with his gravity weapon absolutely terrifying to Mark.

For the first time in over an hour, Mark looked away from Hastelloy toward his older brother.  Jeff just sat in his chair, legs crossed with a note pad in his lap as if this were just another therapy session.  Mark knew he had to tread
lightly.  Jeff did not know the backstory going on here.  He knew nothing about the radiation frequencies, or the deep space communications probe tampered with and launched last week, or the gravity weapon.  To Jeff, this was just another day at the office with the added shock of his brother barging in holding a gun.

Brotherly love and trust went a long way, but if anything, Mark was sitting on the wrong side of things right now.  The visible evidence to this
fact was Jeff and Hastelloy seated near each other while Mark sat opposite the coffee table, alone on the couch.  Jeff clearly had a strong, trusting rapport with Hastelloy, while the trust he bore his little brother was now shaken by Mark’s shockingly aggressive behavior. 

Mark may have
held the gun, but Hastelloy had masterfully manipulated the circumstance to the extent that he ultimately controlled the situation.  A sideways glance from Jeff sent Mark’s eyes back to Hastelloy as the man continued on with his story about humanity’s past.  In the back of his mind, Mark mulled over his options to turn things with his brother back around to his favor.