Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (14 page)

There was no doubt the crater was a spectacular and remote place. It was difficult to get to with only one, often washed out, dirt track covering the last fifty miles to it. Once the dirt road reached the rim of the crater, it switchbacked down the steep rim, in places so narrow that even Mualama, who had been here before, had feared for the ability of his old Land Rover to stay on the road.

The land inside the crater was mostly open grassland with intermittent thick bush, although near the rim there was thick forest. Soda Lake, which filled the center, was a broad expense of water, but it was not deep, less than four feet in most places. Because of its isolation, difficult access, and the resulting lack of human intrusion, the crater teemed with wildlife.

At the edge of the pit they were digging, a surveyor's scope rested on a tripod. This morning, Mualama had used it to make his final measurements, incorporating the data from the drawing in Burton's manuscript. This spot had been triangulated to within ten meters. But ten meters was still a large area when one had to dig using only two shovels, and it was uncertain how deep the object sought was.

"Are you sure something's here?" Lago asked, a

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question he was asking with increasing frequency the more dirt that was removed.

Mualama paused. "We are never sure until we find what we are searching for."

Lago waved his hand about, taking in the entire crater. "This is a big place.

Why here? This specific spot? How did you know the drawing referred to the crater?"

"I've been here before," Mualama said. "I have information from other sources.

Burton's drawing was just the final piece. Even he didn't know the exact location-he just knew something was somewhere and he had some clues. Years ago I found the first sign there." Mualama pointed to the crater wall, two miles distant.

Lago looked, confused. "What?"

"The dragon," Mualama said. "Do you see its head?"

Lago squinted. "That rock outcropping?"

"Yes. With a little imagination, it could be the profile of a dragon. That was the first sign. Drawn on a piece of ancient parchment, carefully preserved by monks, who themselves did not know what they were guarding or where the dragon sign was to be seen.

"Of course I—like Burton—didn't know where to look for the sign, or the other signs I learned about. It was only last year that I learned that it was in Ngorongoro Crater that I could line up the signs. And now I have the last piece of alignment." He pointed. "The notch there in the crater wall matches the drawing we just found. Where Burton found that, I do not know, nor does he say.

And that, Nephew, is why we are here."

"If it wasn't from Burton's manuscript, how did you discover that it—whatever it is—would be in this crater?" Lago wanted to know, not satisfied with his uncle's vague answers.

"Have you heard of the church of Bet Giyorgis?"

Lago indicated he hadn't.

Mualama pointed at the canteen hanging from Lago's

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shoulder. The young man passed it across, and Mualama drank deeply before continuing.

"Legend has it that one night King Lalibela of Axum was taken up to heaven while he was asleep and ordered to build a temple, a place of worship. It was said that when he came back he ordered construction begun on Bet Giyorgis and that the workers were aided by 'angels.'

"The church is very strange. Certainly given the tools and level of technology of the time, the temple would have been impossible to make. It is constructed inside of solid rock. In a way, you could call the entire church a sculpture cut into the rock. A most intriguing mystery that has begged to be answered for centuries."

"The Airlia built it?" Lago guessed.

Mualama nodded. "Perhaps. The entire perimeter of the church is a trench cut into rock four stories deep. Then the remaining large square of stone in the center was made into the temple. The central church was shaped in the shape of a cross, but you can get to it only through passageways cut through the stone.

Then the center of that cross shape was hollowed out of solid rock. There are numerous paintings and frescoes on the walls throughout. On one of those I found drawings that led me to question the monks.

"A couple in particular interested me as they would have interested an explorer like Burton. One showed two snow-covered peaks. Another showed only one such peak. The peak in both panels I recognized as Mount Kilimanjaro."

"But you said two peaks in the first drawing?" Lago was confused.

"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.

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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

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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

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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 communique 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

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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

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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 small 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

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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.