Area 51: The Legend (8 page)

Where was Gwalcmai? Why wasn’t he by her side?

She slammed the palms of her hand against the metal above, hearing a slight thud, but experiencing no give in her prison top.

“Gwalcmai,” she cried out in a weak voice that only bounced back to her.

She screwed her eyelids shut and tried to concentrate. Where was she? What had happened?

A heavy weight suddenly hit her chest. Her son. Fynbar.

She knew he was dead.

But the name drew another thread of memory out of the confusion and she grasped onto it. A gray spaceship. Leaving a massive mothership. An Airlia mothership. Her mission. Gwalcmai’s and her mission. Earth. Atlantis. The high priest Jobb.

He had killed himself. That oriented her.

Time. That was why she was here. She was in the Airlia tube in the
Fynbar
. Coming out of the deep sleep.

Donnchadh fought to get her breathing under control.

She knew Gwalcmai was close by. In the other tube. He should also be coming out of the deep sleep. They had set the controls for five hundred revolutions of the planet around the sun. It had been just short of the number she had gleaned from the Master Guardian for the lack of messages from Earth to be noticed and a ship dispatched and travel the distance to the planet.

There was a latch. Donnchadh’s heart rate decelerated to normal as she remembered the latch on the inside of the tube. She felt to her right and her fingers curled around a small lever. She pulled it and, with a hiss, the top of the tube unsealed and slowly swung upward. At first it was just as dark, then faint red light invaded the tube and hit her eyes.

She had to close them for several minutes to adjust. This was the absolute minimum emergency lighting setting, activated by the movement of the tube’s lid as they had programmed, but it took a while for her eyes to be able to take even that much light after so many years of darkness. She used the time to remove the muscle stimulator bands from around her upper body.

Then Donnchadh sat up and opened her eyes once more. The familiar interior of the
Fynbar
was all around. She looked to her right, at Gwalcmai’s tube. The top had not opened yet. She smiled. He always was slow to rise after the deep sleep. She removed the muscle stimulators from her lower body, then carefully lifted herself over the edge of the tube and set her feet on the floor.

It was cold. And damp. Donnchadh shivered and grabbed a robe that was hung near the tube, sliding it over her head and shoulders and pulling tight a cinch at the waist. Then she slipped on a pair of leather sandals. They reminded her of the old lady in the south of this island who had made them and Donnchadh smiled once more, until she remembered that all the humans who had been alive when she entered this spacecraft were now dust.

She shivered and turned to Gwalcmai’s tube, impatient. There was the hiss of the lid unsealing. As the top swung open she went over. As Gwalcmai sat up, a slightly confused look on his face, and his eyes closed, she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

“A good way to awaken,” Gwalcmai said, his voice hoarse and cracking.

Donnchadh grabbed his clothes and handed them to him as he finished removing his muscle stimulators and exited the tube. “Perhaps one time you will wake before me.”

“Perhaps,” Gwalcmai said without much conviction. He dropped to the floor and quickly did fifty push-ups, getting the blood flowing.

“What do you think has happened?” Donnchadh asked as she went over to the copilot’s seat and powered up the computer.

Gwalcmai shrugged. “I’ve no idea.” He pulled his sword out of its sheath and checked the edge. “I hope that the metalwork has improved in the past five hundred years. This thing would not last one blow against an Airlia sword.” He actually had an Airlia-made sword, from his time as a God-killer, on board the
Fynbar
, but did not take it with him most of the time as it was so obviously an anachronism that it would draw unwanted attention.

Always the practical one, Donnchadh thought as she shut down the tubes and the computer that governed them. In thevat behind the tubes were two more fully grown clones, their limbs almost entwined, they were pressed so tightly together. She stared at them for several seconds, realizing that someday she would inhabit the female one of those bodies. She found it interesting that the two were face-to-face. Gwalcmai came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her upper body. “Even they know our love,” he whispered in her ear. His lips came close to the back of her neck. “The surface will wait.”

It was raining as the hidden door set in the standing stone slid open. That was nothing unusual. What was unusual and stopped Donnchadh and Gwalcmai in their tracks was the fact that the stones they had set in place had been surrounded by a circle of wooden stakes set upright in the ground. Each stake was between six and ten feet high. And, of particular notice, on the top of each stake was a human skull, the bone bleached white by the sun and rain.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai stood still as the door slid shut behind them. They slowly turned, surveying the area, but there was no sign of whoever had erected the stakes or placed the skulls there.

“They could be long dead,” Gwalcmai said.

“They could be,” Donnchadh agreed. She’d known that the stones sitting in the middle of the grasslands would attract attention from humans passing by, but not enough to attract attention of the Airlia. Apparently, for someone, that attention had turned into a form of gruesome homage. Or a threat, Donnchadh realized with a shiver not caused by the cold rain.

“Come on,” Gwalcmai said, stepping forward.

Donnchadh noticed that he had drawn his sword. They made their way onto the plain, heading south.

Metalworking had not improved much at all on the outer ring of Atlantis, they discovered shortly after landing there, having taken passage on a trading vessel. Gwalcmai found no sword much better than what he had had made the last time they were there. In fact, things in all areas appeared to have gotten somewhat worse, if anything. All they had known were long dead, but the black market and underground network were still alive and well. Human greed had not changed in five hundred years.

They integrated themselves into this fringe of society with more alacrity than the previous time, given their experiences. They learned that the Airlia were hardly ever seen anymore outside of the palace, and that even the high priests and Guides had begun to isolate themselves on the center island, as if the Airlia and their minions were drawing into themselves, away from their mission and the demands of the outside world.

The stories of the Grail and the promise of eternal life for obedience had faded into myth, as if the Airlia cared little for what humans believed anymore. Donnchadh took that as a sign that the Airlia here, having had no new communiqué from their home system, were losing track of their mandate. Her hope had been that they would feel abandoned.

Apparently they did, but rather than be troubled by it, they appeared to be quite content with being out of the interstellar war with the Swarm and to rule the humans immediately around them as Gods. Donnchadh learned this by infiltrating the center island and mixing with those uncorrupted by the guardian. There were still many high priests and Guides in evidence, but their mission seemed more one of service toward the Airlia than spreading the word and influence of the aliens.

Donnchadh felt a little bit of satisfaction in that the Airlia plan for this planet seemed to be stalled, but there had been no apparent response from the Airlia Empire about the loss of contact with the outpost.

Now she and Gwalcmai must do as they had always done—wait.

The guardian on Mars was in contact with not only the Master Guardian on Earth and the transmitter but an array of sensors on the planet’s surface. They did not have to be very sophisticated to pick up the incoming spaceship as it passed the outer limits of the solar system, especially considering that it made no attempts to disguise its approach.

It was an Airlia mothership and it had been on sublight vector for the Sol System for over ten years—the amount of time the Airlia estimated to allow the transition from light to sub-light speed to be far enough away not to give the Swarm the opportunity to find the system. Traveling just below the speed of light, the mothership began to decelerate as it passed Pluto’s orbit. Nestled around the nose of the mile-long ship were nine smaller ships, shaped like a bear’s claws, curving inward from a large base to a sharp point. They were the Talons, Airlia warships, designed to defend the mothership and attack other spacecraft and planets. They weren’t capable of faster-than-light speed, so for long journeys they were attached to the mothership like remoras.

As they came in, an override code was sent from the mothership to the guardian on Mars via the interstellar array. A link from the mothership’s Master Guardian to the Mars guardian was quickly established. Data was uplinked and analyzed. The recurring fake transmitter program that Donnchadh had implanted in the guardian was quickly discovered and disabled.

Since the only one who could have programming access to the Master Guardian was the Airlia High Commissioner on Earth, the program had to have been put in place by that individual. The only reason such a program would be used would be to fool the Airlia who worked for the High Commissioner into believing contact with the empire was being maintained, when in reality the High Commissioner had no desire to remain in contact with the empire.

Such an act was treason. There was no other explanation.

The mothership’s commander, Artad, came to that decision within minutes of examining the data. He quickly issued orders.

Once inside Pluto’s orbit, the nine Talons peeled off the larger craft, deploying around the nose of the mothership in a protective formation as it headed inward toward the sun.

On Earth alarms were relayed to the Master Guardian, then to a subordinate guardian deep underneath the palace tower. Reacting to the alarms, the two Airlia on duty quickly awakened the High Commissioner Aspasia from the deep sleep. He issued orders for Excalibur to be removed from the Master Guardian safekeeping and to be brought to him.

Sword in hand, Aspasia went to a control room shaped as a perfect sphere, centered below the tall tower. As soon as he entered, the door shut behind him, sealing the room. He went to a crystal in the very center of the room, into which he slid the sword. The walls of the sphere came alive with the view from the very top of the temple spire.

Aspasia placed his hands on the pommel of the sword and pressed. The view swiftly changed from the area visible from the top of the spire to space, linking with other sensors. He immediately picked up the incoming mothership and the Talons. He knew what the deployment of the warships meant—there was to be no bargaining. Whoever was in command of the mothership meant to shoot first and discuss things later.

But discuss what?

Aspasia quickly accessed the link to his Master Guardian. He found the probe from the incoming mothership and what had been accessed. He was momentarily stunned. Who had reprogrammed the Master? He realized his outpost had been out of contact with the empire for five hundred years. Little wonder the Talons were deployed. He had spent over 99 percent of the past five hundred years in deep sleep, so it seemed like only a week or so had passed.

A glowing red dot appeared on the wall of the chamber directly in front of him. It extended upward and downward into a red line, which then expanded into the shape of an Airlia. When Aspasia saw who it was, he knew there was another factor at play behind the rapid deployment of the Talons before an inquiry had been made.

“
Artad,
” Aspasia said.

“
It has been a long time, High Commissioner Aspasia,
” Artad responded. “
And you will refer to me by my proper title: Admiral
Artad
.”

“
The lack of communication was not
—” Aspasia began, but the other cut him off.

“
You are High Commissioner. You have only one duty and that is to prepare the seedlings on this planet for combat to support the empire. My scan indicates you are still on Phase One even though the order for Phase Two was issued long enough ago for it to be well under way
.”

“
I never received
—” Aspasia once more tried to speak, but again he was interrupted.

“
You are High Commissioner. All is your responsibility. You have failed to report in far beyond the maximum period allowed. It
was believed the only thing that could cause such an occurrence was an attack by the Swarm. My ship was diverted from an important mission to see if our seeding process had been compromised here by the Swarm. I arrive only to find deception and failure
.”

Aspasia said nothing for several moments. Artad and he had served together a very long time ago, when Artad had been a lowly first lieutenant. They had always hated each other. And then there was the issue of Harrah. She had been Artad’s mate-to-be, also an officer on the same ship they had all been assigned to. Had been. She was here now on this forsaken outpost with Aspasia. Because of her choice between the two them.

“
Harrah sleeps
,” Aspasia finally said. “_ Admiral,_” he added.

“
I care not,
” Artad said, such a blatant lie that Aspasia wanted to laugh out loud.

“
You dare not use the mothership’s weapons, Admiral. You will bring the Swarm here
.”

“
I do what I wish,
” Artad replied.

“
So be it,
” Aspasia said. The image of Artad disappeared from the sphere’s wall and he could see the incoming ships once more. Aspasia had to wonder what kind of power play was going on. Even though it had been millennia since he had last seen Artad, he knew little had probably changed. The seed planets had been a controversial plan, as the best Airlia scientists had speculated that the Swarm was a form of weapon designed genetically by another species. A weapon that had apparently turned against its master and now rampaged through the universe on its own. There were those who wondered if they were not repeating the mistake of whatever race had invented the Swarm. Because of that fear, limits had been deliberately built into the humans—limits that could be removed by the Grail when needed.