The Sphinx

CHAPTER 8

Qian-Ling was the largest tomb in the world, larger than even the stone pyramids of Egypt and the dirt mound pyramids in Central and South America. According to historians, the Emperor Gao-zong, Third Emperor of the Tang Dynasty, and his empress, the only empress ever to rule in China, were buried inside the massive man-made hill.

Qian-Ling was located west of Xian, the city that had been the first imperial capital in China and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road that had stretched in ancient times from western China across Central Asia to the Middle East and on to Rome. It was now on the border between the rebelling Muslim majority in the west of China and ruling powers to the east in Beijing.

Since the disclosure that Earth had been visited by aliens, the ethnic and religious unrest that had always simmered below the surface in China had reached a boiling point, and there were many parts of the country, particularly in the western half, that were in open rebellion. It was part of a growing pattern around the world where the upset of accepted history was leading to an upset of traditions and norms.

As an outgrowth of that unrest what had been one of China’s most revered monuments of antiquity had been seared by the thousand-degree heat from a low-altitude nuclear blast several days earlier. A CSS-5 cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead had been fired from eighty miles away, traversed the distance in less than two minutes, and exploded two kilometers from its intended target.

The outside of the tomb was now desolate, many artifacts of antiquity destroyed. The stone statues of the sixty-one foreign ambassadors and rulers who had attended the funeral of Emperor Gao-zong that had lined the way to the tomb had been vaporized. The vegetation that had grown along the slopes of the three-thousand-foot-high man-made hill that was his grave had been burned away in a flash. The hill itself, though, was relatively undamaged, hidden behind a shimmering shield-wall of alien origin.

It was a sign of the desperation of the Chinese government that they’d not only detonated a nuclear weapon inside their own borders, but they’d aimed it at the grave of an emperor and empress. The Chinese revered their ancestors and thus their dead. Grave robbing was unknown and archaeological digging was considered practically the same thing: defiling the burial place of someone’s ancestors. A nuclear bomb definitely outranked both grave robbing and archaeological digs.

Qian-Ling, though, was now almost a shelter from the storm that waged around it. All around the mountain, the air shimmered from the strange alien shield that had been activated just prior to the nuclear weapon’s detonation. There was nothing alive on the surface of the earth within a ten-kilometer circle of the tomb, but underneath, inside the protective mountain of earth and alien barrier, the bomb had had little effect.

Inside a large cavern filled with alien equipment, Professor Che Lu sat cross-legged on the floor, just outside the control room that led to the guardian computer. She was an old woman, her skin creased with age, but her mind was as sharp as it had ever been.

Che Lu had seen all of the history of modern China, often participating rather than just watching it go by. She had been one of the twenty-six women who had started the Long March with Mao sixty-four years before. Only six of those women had made it to the end alive. Only ten percent of the one hundred thousand men who had started the march had been alive when they arrived at Yanan in Shaanxi Province in December 1935 after walking over six thousand miles to escape Chiang Kai-shek’s forces.

She knew how significant it was that her government had tried to destroy Qian-Ling. It was more than just a blind fear of the aliens… it was also a desperate attempt by the leaders to keep the country in ignorance and remain in power.

Metal beams came up from the nearest wall and disappeared overhead, curving to follow the dome ceiling around to touch down on the far side. There were numerous large objects scattered about on the floor, the exact purpose of which was still unknown, except for one large cylinder that gave off a hum… that one had propagated the shield that had saved their lives. The black metal covering it had slid back at Elek’s command through the guardian. A drum had been revealed, about fifty meters long by ten in diameter. It was mounted on both ends in a cradle of black metal that attached at the center. The drum continued to rotate with streaks of color… red, orange, violet, purple… intermingled on its surface. The other, unopened containers, were in the form of black rectangles ranging from a few feet in size to one over a hundred meters long and sixty high.

Fifty feet away from where Che Lu sat there was a bright green light glowing out of the wall, brighter even than the one overhead. Inside was a control room, and beyond that, the chamber housing the golden pyramid that was the Qian-Ling guardian computer.

Che Lu reached into the old straw bag next to her and pulled out a leather sack. She emptied the contents onto the floor with a clatter. Four pieces of bone lay there.

“Did you ever figure out what those are?” the old man next to her asked. Che Lu had known Lo Fa for most of her life. He had been branded a thief a long time before by the government, but now she supposed he might be called a freedom fighter. He wore a faded blue shirt and black pants. His AK-47 lay next to him. He had found the bones near the tomb and sent them to her in Beijing, prompting the beginning of her journey here.

She picked up one of the bones and handed it to him. The bone was from the hip of some animal, perhaps a deer, triangular in shape, with two long fiat sides that had markings etched into them.

“They’re oracle bones.”

Lo Fa turned it in his hands, then tossed it back. “Are you a witch who throws bones to read the future now? I thought you were an educated person.” He spit to the side. “I can read yours and my future without using those… we’re going to die in this tomb along with that alien creature.” He nodded his head toward the tall figure of Elek, wandering through the stacks of equipment and large containers that filled the floor of the cavern.

Che Lu agreed that Elek was not completely human… the red, elongated eyes confirmed that. But he also wasn’t Airlia, as he was shorter than the projection of the Airlia sentinel in the upper-level passageway had shown and some of his other features were different. Some sort of hybrid between human and alien, Che Lu had decided, a bastard designed to do the bidding of hidden alien masters. Ever since Lo Fa had found the oracle bones and sent them to her, her beliefs had experienced more change than in the previous seven decades.

“You must have hope,” she told Lo Fa.

He snorted. “Hope is a bad thing. Hope is what children have before they know any better. I am too old for hope.”

Che Lu pointed at Elek. “They… and the aliens they work for… came to Earth a long time ago. Many, many generations before you were born. But we… humans… are still here. You have lived a long life. We must work to ensure that our children’s children also have the same opportunity.

“They are not all-powerful. Look how he searches the cavern. And he cannot get into the lowest level, which is where he wants to go. He is as weak as we are.”

“And as trapped,” Lo Fa noted.

Che Lu indicated the oracle bones. “I could not read those at first.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a leather notebook. It was battered, with burn marks on it. “This is Professor Nabinger’s, the man who deciphered the high rune language. I have been using it to read the writing on the bones and on the walls of the upper levels of this tomb, since we have had nothing else to do since being sealed in.

“I always thought our civilization was the first to develop writing. In fact, the Chinese word for ‘civilization,’ wenha, means the transforming influence of writing. But the language on these bones is older than ours.”

“Spare me the lecture,” Lo Fa said. “You are not at the university now. What do the bones and the walls say?”

“You have something else to do?” Che Lu asked. “Perhaps a lecture will open your mind up, old man, keep it from turning into a rock.”

Lo Fa laughed. “Go ahead, Mother-Professor.”

The latter term was what her students at the university in Beijing had called her. Che Lu felt a pang for those she had left in the capital. She had no doubt the upcoming turmoil would make the Tiananmen Square massacre look mild in comparison. Always blood had to be spilled to grease the wheels of change. She wished it were not so, but her long life had shown her that it was the way of reality.

She rested a hand on the battered leather notebook. “Professor Nabinger was a very smart man. His mind was open, unlike yours.” She picked up one of the oracle bones. “The writing on this was dismissed as gibberish by most scholars I showed them to. The same as similar writing all around the world. What we do not understand, we choose to ignore.

“Nabinger was an Egyptologist. He didn’t ignore the markings that didn’t fit with standard hieroglyphics. He searched around the planet and found similar writing in other places. Dating those sites, he was amazed to discover that this strange runic writing predated the oldest recorded language that was generally accepted by historians.

“The problem he had was explaining how a similar written language could be in places as far apart as Egypt and South America. Remember, old man, this was in an age when man would rarely sail out of sight of shore. Despite not being able to explain the why, he decided to study the what he did have. He gathered as many examples of what he dubbed the high rune language and tried to decipher it.”

“I am more interested in the why,” Lo Fa said. “Why was this same language in such diverse places? Did the Airlia leave the writing?”

Che Lu shrugged. “Some of it, maybe. But most examples Nabinger found had slight, sometimes major, differences in style and syntax from place to place, which indicated to him that they all came from a root language, and then, as people who had learned this root language spread across the planet, they made changes to it as their own societies developed.

“My fellow anthropologists at the university always argued that civilization began in such diverse places as Egypt, China, Southeast Asia, and Central America, all at roughly the same time period. They called this the isolationist theory of civilization. Isolationists believe that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of each other. These isolated groups of people all crossed a threshold into civilization about the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ. Isolationists explained the timing with natural evolution. We particularly like that theory here in China because we believed our early civilization was much more advanced than the others. After all, we believed we were the first to have a written language, the first to invent gunpowder, the printing press… all those things we were so proud of for so long.”

Che Lu rubbed her wrinkled fingers across the bone. “Now we know this isn’t true. We weren’t the first to invent writing, and we were not the first to invent civilization. Indeed, the earliest dynasties here and in the other places were probably just shadows of the civilization our forefathers had to abandon at Atlantis. Even if the humans were just servants to the Airlia there, they probably lived in a style greater than even our current level.

“When Artad destroyed Atlantis to stop Aspasia and his rebels, some humans escaped. They not only seeded the myth of Atlantis and the Great Flood wherever they went, they also started to rebuild civilization. This is the diffusionist theory of the birth of civilization, which we now know to be correct.”

“And the aliens who survived?” Lo Fa asked. “Where did they go?”

“We believe that Aspasia and his followers went to the Airlia base on Mars. And now we think he is dead, killed by Captain Turcotte during the destruction of the Airlia talon ship fleet. Artad”… she waved her hands around the cavern… “perhaps he sleeps below us like Aspasia slept on Mars. I think that is the reason Elek desperately wants the key for the lower level.”

“Waking Aspasia was a bad thing,” Lo Fa said simply. “Why should waking Artad be any better?”

“I cannot answer that,” Che Lu said.

“Something else,” Lo Fa said. “If they used Gao-zong’s tomb to hide Artad, then maybe the Airlia had much more to do with our country’s growth than we could even imagine.”

“True,” Che Lu conceded. “Nabinger did determine that the high rune symbol for ‘help’ was built into the very shape of the Great Wall in western China, north of the city of Lanzhou. It is the only man-made object that can currently be seen from space with the naked eye. There is no way the people who built the Great Wall could have known the shape they were building was more than just protection against the barbarians.”

Lo Fa still had one of the bones in his hands. “What do these tell you?”

Che Lu leaned close. “They give hints. Of Shi Huangdi. The First Emperor. The Son of Heaven who unified China and pulled together the Great Wall.”

Lo Fa nodded. “You said earlier he might be buried here in the tomb, even though Gao-zong was of the Tang Dynasty, well after Shi Huangdi.”

Che Lu simply waited. She knew Lo Fa was much smarter than he appeared, or else he would have died long ago plying his chosen profession.

Lo Fa’s eyes widened. “Do you think the alien Artad could have been Shi Huangdi… the founder of the First Dynasty?”

“I told you of the legends surrounding Shi Huangdi. It is written that when he was born there was a great radiance in the sky, coming from the direction of Ursa Major. But the word ‘born’ can have different connotations. It could also mean when he arrived.”

“From the stars,” Lo Fa filled in.

“Or simply from the sky in one of the bouncers the Americans have, or even the mothership that is now floating in orbit around our planet.

“The stories say that when Shi Huangdi met the Empress of the West in the mountains of Wangwu, they invented something. But again, invented could be used to explain something no one had ever seen before. The best the storytellers could describe it was twelve large mirrors mounted on tripods that pointed to the sky. These devices were supposed to be able to manipulate gravity. When they were operated they emitted loud noises. They were also supposed to be able to look at the stars.

“And there is Chi Yu, the Lord of the South who fought with Shi Huangdi.” Che Lu was excited, and some of it was rubbing off on Lo Fa. “There was indeed a chance that the old legends were stories of fact.”

“Maybe Chi Yu was Aspasia… or someone from Aspasia’s camp,” Lo Fa interjected.

Che Lu nodded. “Yes. While Shi Huangdi ruled in the north of ancient China, Chi Yu ruled in the south. And Chi Yu was said not to be a man but a machine. A metal beast which could fly about.”

Lo Fa looked about. “If Artad sleeps here, perhaps Chi Yu still exists. Perhaps the metal beast is hidden, waiting to come alive and attack us.”

Che watched as Elek strode across the chamber once more. “You might be right that awakening whatever is below might be a very bad thing.”

The leopard moved stealthily through the high grass, then paused. Nostrils flared wide as it drew in the scent borne on the breeze. Ears twitched and the head turned back and forth. It smelled fresh earth, which was strange, and, stronger than the dirt, the scent of the two-legged creatures, which was also rare here, deep inside Ngorongoro Grater.

The leopard had experience with the two-legged ones from its time on the Serengeti Plain to the west. It knew they were to be avoided. The leopard loped to the north, circling around the area.

Downwind from the leopard, Mualama looked up from the shovel in his hands. “Hush!” he hissed at the other man in the hole with him.

After a moment’s hesitation, Lago stopped digging and slumped down, wiping the sweat from his brow. “What?”

“Shh.” Mualama held a long black finger to his lips. “There is something out there in the bush.”

Lago sank down to sit on the edge of the pit they had excavated. After the climb down Mount Speke, the trek to the airfield, and the return to Tanzania, the last thing he wanted to do was come here and dig, but his uncle had been insistent.

“It was a leopard,” Mualama finally said as he heard a growl. He turned his attention back to the hole.

“A leopard?” Lago repeated, his eyes darting about the thick, four-foot-high grass that surrounded their location. “Will it attack?”

“It is more concerned that we leave it alone,” Mualama said. He found his nephew amusing. The young man would climb mountains and scuba-dive for fun, but the wonders of nature on his own continent held little interest for him.

They were in the northern part of Ngorongoro Crater, a remote spot in north Tanzania. Ngorongoro was the second-largest crater on the planet. Over twelve miles wide, it encompassed more than three hundred square miles. The crater was twenty-two hundred meters above sea level, well over a mile in altitude. Geologists claimed it was the remains of a huge, ancient volcano that had been worn down through erosion. Mualama was not sure how much stock he put in the geologists’ claims. All he had to do was look to the east from the rim of Ngorongoro and he could clearly see the snowcapped summit of Mount Kilimanjaro a hundred and twenty miles away. Being a logical man, he had to ask why that ancient volcano wasn’t worn down as far as this one. They were equally old and experienced the same weather.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 communiqué 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 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 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 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.

Now she was seeing something new from the guardian’s memory, a vision stunning in its size and realism:

The pyramids of the Giza Plateau gleamed in the early-morning light, the rising sun reflecting off the polished limestone casings. Kelly had been to Egypt and seen the current state of the pyramids, but there was no comparing the present weathered, stripped hulks to these beautifully crafted masterpieces.

Dazzled by the perfectly smooth sides of the pyramids, it took Kelly a little while to notice other startling differences from the relics she had personally witnessed to what she was “seeing” now.

At the very top of the Great Pyramid a capstone added thirty-one feet, bringing it over five hundred feet high above the surrounding sands. The capstone itself was unique. Not made of limestone, it was of a black metal. The very top… about four feet on each side, ending in an exact point… was a glowing, dark red and reminded Kelly of the ruby sphere that Turcotte and Duncan had recovered in a cavern in the Great Rift in Africa.

She tried to sort through her memories, feeling the intrusion of the guardian. Nabinger had postulated that the smooth, flat sides of the Great Pyramid had been designed to give a significant radar signature into space. But the small red pyramid at the top suggested something else.

She saw something else that was different. The Great Sphinx.

It was all black, with burning red eyes. Crouched on the desert floor in front of the three shining pyramids on the Giza Plateau like… A bolt of pain seared through Kelly’s mind, shattering the vision.

Kelly’s body vibrated against the side of the guardian, spasming from the pain. The only part that didn’t move was the metal probe into the base of her skull, the source of the agony.

After a minute the spasming subsided, her body slumped like a rag doll, the brain retreating into the deep inner core and hiding, no longer seeking out images.

Major Quinn took the cigarette Larry Kincaid offered and slumped down in one of the leather chairs around the Area 51 conference table. He noted the photos spread out in front of the scientist. “What do you have?”

“Imagery the Department of Defense just took of Stratzyda using a KH-14 spy satellite.” He handed Quinn one of the pictures.

Stratzyda was a long black cylinder drifting against a backdrop of stars. The hammer-and-sickle insignia painted in red on the side of the long cylinder was a throwback to a time when the world stood on the edge of destruction by divisive human hands.

“Where is it?” Quinn asked.

“A free polar orbit.”

“And it’s been up there for years and we never did anything about it?”

“First,” Kincaid said, “the Russians said it was a test platform in preparation for launching Mir. The intelligence guys might have suspected something, but they couldn’t be sure. Then the Russians said it was no longer functional after a year or so. What did you want us to do? Go up and park a shuttle next to it and check it out? You know how many things are in orbit? Or would you have preferred we shoot it down? That would have been illegal and started a war in space and probably on Earth, too.”

“Will the warheads still work?” Quinn asked.

“Some have probably degraded and are no longer functional, but I suspect more than half will still detonate upon deployment. Knowing the Russians, they built the simplest… and dirtiest… possible weapon with very few parts to break down. And it’s in the vacuum of space.”

“What exactly is a cobalt bomb?”

“It’s a nuke that has a thick cobalt metal blanket wrapped around the core. The cobalt is used to capture the fusion neutrons to maximize the fallout hazard from the weapon… the nuke guys call this ‘salting’ the bomb. Instead of generating additional explosive force from fast fission of the U-238, the cobalt is transmuted into Co-60… natural cobalt consists entirely of Co-59. Cobalt 60 has a half-life of five point two six years and produces energetic, very penetrating gamma rays.” Kincaid paused to see if Quinn was following this technical explanation before he continued.

“The Co-60 fallout hazard is greater than the fission products from a U-238 blanket because most fission-produced isotopes have half-lives that are very short, and thus decay before the fallout settles or can be protected against by short-term sheltering. Also, other fission-produced isotopes which have very long half-lives do not produce very intense radiation. The half-life of Co-60, on the other hand, is long enough to settle out before significant decay has occurred, and to make it impractical to wait out in shelters, yet is short enough that intense radiation is produced. In terms of the people who are in the fallout area, it’s the worst of both effects. And although the threat is greatest for the United States from this”… he tapped the photo of Stratzyda… “in reality I think it might be a doomsday device for the entire planet, since no one really knows what will happen.”

“But if the bombs go off only over the States, how can it destroy the rest of the world?” Quinn asked.

“The idea for a cobalt bomb originated with Leo Szilard, who theorized such a thing in 1950 to point out that it would be possible in principle to build a weapon that could kill everybody on Earth. To design such a theoretical weapon, he needed a radioactive isotope that could be dispersed worldwide before it decayed. Such dispersal through the atmosphere takes months, perhaps even years, so the half-life of cobalt 60 was the ideal choice. At detonation, gamma radiation from an equivalent-size normal fission-fusion-fission bomb is much more intense than Co-60: fifteen thousand times more intense at one hour; thirty-five times more intense at one week; five times more intense at one month; and about equal at six months. Thereafter fission drops off rapidly, so that Co-60 fallout is eight times more intense than fission at one year and one hundred and fifty times more intense at five years.

“We thought no one had ever really developed a cobalt bomb because its effects weren’t really useful… in terms of military objectives, that is. We also thought no one had ever built one or tested one, never mind deployed them. Then again, the Russians never thought we’d put a functional laser weapon in space, either. We sure managed to fool each other, didn’t we?”

“These bombs hit the States, the entire continent will be uninhabitable for decades.” Kincaid lit another cigarette. “Makes me glad I didn’t quit smoking.”