The Reply a5-2

by Robert Doherty

  After much discussion Che Lu decided to continue along the corridor past where the image had appeared. One of the students, more eager than the rest, took the lead. The young man was ten meters farther down the tunnel when suddenly there was a bright flash of light. Che Lu stopped, her eyes momentarily blinded. When she opened them and could see again by the dim glows of wavering flashlights, she gasped. The student had been neatly cut in half, the top half of his body lying just behind his legs, blood still gushing forth from a heart that had just a few more beats left in it, the eyes in the head blinking, then going dull and dead.

  As one of the girls screamed, Che Lu held up her hand. “No one move!” Edging forward, she approached the body. Now she could see the tiniest of protuberances from the wall at waist height. She reached down and pulled the dead student’s hat off. She tossed it by the bump and another beam of fierce light flashed, cutting the hat as it flew through.

  “Ah,” Che Lu said. Even as she pondered the problem, there was a deep, dull, thud reverberating down the tunnel from behind.

  “The doors!” Ki cried out. He turned and ran back the way they had come. In a minute he was back, fear playing across his young features. “The doors are shut. I can hear soldiers on the other side. We are trapped!”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Help?” Lisa Duncan had Nabinger’s notebook in her hand. “I don’t get it.” Everyone looked up as a distant peal of thunder rumbled through the tent. The storm wasn’t showing any signs of abating soon.

  “I don’t either,” Nabinger said, “but that’s what it says. It makes sense that the Airlia would use the Wall if they were in China. They did the same thing in Egypt with the Sphinx and the pyramids.”

  “Wait a second,” Turcotte said. “What are you talking about there? I didn’t know there was any message in the way the pyramids were built. You told me that the flat surface of the pyramids, when they were covered with their original layer of white limestone, could send out an immense radar image to outer space, but not that there was a message in that image.”

  Nabinger shook his head. “No, not in the radar image, it’s in the ground image when you’re near them. Maybe it was sort of like a secret symbol, known only to the Airlia. But archaeologists have long known, even before we knew about the lower chamber and the high runes, that the way the two largest pyramids are positioned, if you stand to the right of the Sphinx and line all three objects up, you get a hieroglyphic symbol with the Sphinx’s head between the two pyramids.” He sketched on his pad, drawing two pyramids and a rough outline of the Sphinx’s head between them, with the ground a flat line at the bottom.

  Turcotte was more interested in the map of China and getting the big picture before he tried to figure out pieces and parts. “Jesus, look at this thing. How long did it take to build this Wall?”

  Kelly had her laptop open and was accessing a CD-ROM she had put in. “I’ve got it here. Let’s see. The Great Wall is over twenty-four hundred kilometers long. That’s about fifteen hundred miles. It officially became the Great Wall in the third century B.C. when Emperor Shi Huangdi of the Ch’in dynasty linked together separate walls that had been built earlier. Shi was the first emperor to unite China.”

  Kelly looked from the computer to the map. “This section that makes the symbol, it’s mostly part of those first walls, so it was built at a much earlier time.”

  “So it could have been done back when the rebels and Aspasia’s people were fighting?” Turcotte asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But such a thing would take hundreds of years to build, wouldn’t it?” Turcotte asked.

  Kelly shook her head. “No. According to what I have here, the greater part of the Wall was built in less than ten years. Millions of peasants were used to build it and the bodies of those who died in the labor were made part of the Wall. So based on that, this section could have been built in a relatively short period of time if there was a strong leader who wanted it done. Remember, China has never lacked for bodies to do manual labor such as this.”

  Turcotte leaned forward to look at the map more closely, and in doing so brushed against Lisa Duncan. She didn’t move away, but leaned forward with him to check the map.

  “You know,” Turcotte said, “this part of the Wall doesn’t really seem to follow a natural defensive line. You have this river here, which would have supplemented the Wall’s defenses, yet the Wall doesn’t follow it. You’re right. This was built to make that high rune symbol visible from space, not to form the best defensive perimeter possible given the terrain. How the hell did the rebel Airlia get the Chinese to build it?”

  “How’d they get the Egyptians to build the pyramids?” Nabinger asked in turn. “Aspasia can give us the answers,” Kelly Reynolds said from her location on the other side of the tent, seated on the edge of a cot.

  “You know,” Turcotte said, “for all his great effort to keep our development from being influenced by their presence, Aspasia did a pretty crappy job.”

  Something occurred to him. “Maybe they got those people to build those things the same way they got General Gullick and Majestic-12 to attempt to fly the mothership. By taking over their minds using guardians!”

  Turcotte tapped his finger on the map. “That would mean there’s another guardian here in Qian-Ling.”

  There was a momentary silence in the tent.

  “What I want to know,” Lisa Duncan finally said, “is why the rebels would want to transmit HELP in such a manner to someone coming in from space.”

  “That goes with something that’s been bugging me for a while,” Nabinger said. “We determined after learning that the Airlia had hidden the nuclear weapon in the Great Pyramid that the Pyramid itself must have been built as a space beacon. The thing that bothered me about that was why would the rebels want to signal into space? Who were they signaling to with the Great Pyramid?”

  “And who,” Duncan said, “were they asking for help from with the Great Wall?” She walked over to the coffeepot set on a field table and poured herself a cup. She held up an empty cup to Turcotte and he nodded.

  “Let’s take it logically,” Turcotte said. “The Pyramid was to get attention. The symbol in the Great Wall was to send a message after they got attention. That’s the way I would have done it,” he said.

  “Done what?” Duncan asked as she handed him the coffee.

  “Sent a message to outer space with the technology and manpower present on the Earth at the time if I’d lost my primary means of communication,” Turcotte said. “In Special Forces one of the first things we learn in training is that you always have to have a way to communicate back to home base. A primary, a backup, an emergency, and a pull-it-out-your-ass way. I think this symbol built into the Great Wall was a pull-it-out-your-ass.”

  “Hold on here,” Duncan said. “These aliens were rebels, outlaws. Aspasia defeated them, destroyed their base at Atlantis, and scattered them across the face of the planet. I get back to my question of who were they trying to signal to? You’d think rebels would want to lay low.”

  “The Kortad?” Nabinger suggested. “Maybe they just weren’t rebels. Maybe they were traitors too.”

  “And were the people who built this part of the Great Wall the same ones who put the Ruby Sphere in the Great Rift Valley?” Turcotte asked. “Is that the China connection?”

  “I’d say so,” Duncan said. “It makes sense.”

  “You people are shooting in the dark,” Reynolds called out, but the others ignored her.

  “You know,” Nabinger said hesitatingly, “I got some confusing stuff out of the guardian just before it cut contact. I didn’t tell UNAOC because I didn’t know if what I saw was a recording of reality or something the computer was making up.”

  “What did you see?” Turcotte asked.

  Nabinger rubbed his temples. “I think it might have been the destruction of Atlantis by the mothership. It was very confusing.”

  “Aspasia can clear all this up when h
e wakes up and comes back to Earth,” Kelly said. “We’ll just have to wait.”

  “Waiting gives away initiative,” Turcotte said in a low voice.

  “What?” Kelly snapped at him.

  “I said waiting gives away the initiative,” Turcotte said so that everyone in the tent could hear. “It’s a maxim of combat. Victory usually goes to the side that maintains the initiative.”

  “Oh, God!” Kelly exclaimed. “We’re not at war.”

  “I don’t know what the situation is,” Turcotte said. “I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is we’ve gotten two messages from some damn machine on Mars and everyone’s getting ready like it’s the second coming of Christ. Well, I for one would like to find out a bit more about what the truth is while we’re waiting for Aspasia to awaken or thaw out or whatever the hell he’s doing up there.”

  “I would too,” Lisa Duncan said. She held up her hands as Reynolds angrily stood up. “Let’s slow down a second here. What else did you see about Atlantis, Professor?”

  Nabinger grimaced. “People dying. Ships sailing away, trying to escape. That’s why I think the diffusionist theory is…” He paused as he suddenly remembered. “Ships. Spaceships. Seven of them. Not bouncers, but bigger. They flew away just before the mothership arrived.”

  “Flew where?” Turcotte asked.

  “Straight up.”

  “The rebels escaping,” Duncan summarized.

  “Yes. That must be so,” Nabinger agreed.

  “So they did get away!” Turcotte was looking at the map of China again. He stabbed his finger down on the map. “I bet they went here.” He looked up. “And if Aspasia and his people are awakening, who’s to say the rebels aren’t also?

  “And,” Turcotte continued, “I think the only way we’re gonna find out more is to go to China, get inside this damn tomb, and take a look at what’s written there. Find the guardian computer, if there is one there. If it was the rebels who did this part of the Wall, then maybe we need to know about it as soon as possible and not wait on Aspasia. After all, his guardian computer here on Earth seemed concerned enough about this to send out a foo fighter recon.”

  “Going there is easier said than done,” Duncan replied. “China’s in a lot of turmoil right now. From what I understand, Taiwan is doing considerable covert pushing in the midst of all this to try and overthrow the regime in Beijing.

  “China has pulled out of the UN to protest UNAOC’s actions. I think the leadership in Beijing is at a complete loss as to how to deal with this situation of alien contact, and they’re doing what China has done repeatedly over the years: retreat inside of itself. All borders have been closed and communication cut off with the outside world.

  “Not only that,” she continued, “but I don’t think UNAOC is going to be too thrilled about throwing any sort of monkey wrench into the anticipation of Aspasia’s return.”

  Turcotte crossed his arms and stared at Lisa Duncan. “You’re the ranking person here. It’s your call. Remember, you work for the U.S. Government also. I say let’s skip UNAOC and bounce this up our chain of command.”

  “I’ve already decided to do that,” Duncan said.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Guardian II computer was a golden pyramid twenty feet high by twenty across at the base. It was four hundred meters under the surface of Mars, in a cavern hollowed out of solid rock. The route back to the surface had been sealed five thousand years ago with only links to the sensors secreted on the planet’s surface left in place.

  For the past several hours Guardian II had been running a self-diagnostic of itself and all the systems under its control. The priority was power. The cold fusion reactor also buried under the Martian soil was down to fourteen percent output. That was not enough to implement the other programs that had to be run.

  The decision was made with simple logical computation. The majority of that fourteen percent was routed to the surface to run the alternate power program.

  * * *

  At the JPL control center, a large red digital clock gave the time remaining until Viking would complete its orbital pattern shift and then go over the Cydonia region. There were less than three hours on it.

  In the meanwhile Kincaid’s people had accomplished what they said they couldn’t do: extend Surveyor’s able mast with the IMS on the end of it and orient it toward Mars — at least it was oriented twelve percent of the time, as Surveyor tumbled around in space in its erratic orbit. That percentage was slowly increasing as the engineers worked their programs to rotate the IMS in conjunction with the spin of the craft. With some luck and some time they might even be able to keep the IMS oriented on Mars full-time.

  One of the large screens in the front of the room showed a slowly moving image from the IMS. The Face stared back at Surveyor, with the large pyramid just off to the side, the entire thing moving across the screen as the camera rolled. It was a very distant shot at a hard angle, but there was no denying that the image very clearly looked like an elongated face.

  Every time Larry Kincaid looked up and saw that image, he felt a shiver run through him. To know that somewhere among those apparent ruins, aliens were coming out of their long hibernation — aliens that had traveled among the stars while man was still living in grass huts and caves — made him feel very small in the universe.

  Kincaid was checking some of the new data his flight engineers had come up with for Surveyor when a sudden explosion of commotion in the front of the room drew his attention up.

  He immediately saw the cause for the excitement. The massive pyramid in the midst of the Cydonia ruins was opening. The four sides were separating, like a flower blossoming for the sun. A dark center appeared in the center as the sides slowly split.

  Kincaid knew the dimensions of that pyramid and the sheer magnitude of the engineering required to do that staggered him. He leaned forward, waiting. After five minutes of slow movement the sides reached vertical, revealing a perfect black square. Kincaid’s eyes, and those of people all over the world whose TV shows were interrupted with the live feed, were straining to see what was inside.

  Suddenly there was a sharp glistening of light all around the upper edge. The light grew stronger as the sides started over toward the planet’s surface, the inner sides reflecting the distant sun. After fifteen minutes, and twelve rotations of the IMS, the four panels finally reached the ground. The bright light they reflected was almost blinding the IMS’s image.

  “What the hell is that?” One of the flight engineers asked the question people all over the planet glued to their TVs were asking.

  Kincaid knew what it was, but the sheer size was unbelievable. “Solar panels,” he said. Solar panels were used on most of the probes and orbiters to supply power, so Kincaid had more than a passing knowledge on the subject. He pulled a calculator out of his pocket and began punching in numbers.

  “Jesus,” he muttered when the last figure came up on his screen. Human solar panels that big would produce enough power to run New York City, and Kincaid suspected that the Airlia probably had better-engineered panels. “What the hell is going to need that much power?” he asked out loud, but no one in the control room had an answer.

  He looked up at the four large, shiny triangles that now lay where the pyramid they had formed once stood. Squinting he could just make out something in the center, underneath where the apex of the pyramid would formerly have been.

  “Is this the best resolution the IMS can get?” he asked.

  “Yes,” one of the technicians answered him.

  “Any idea what’s that dark thing in the center of the panels?” Kincaid asked. “Not yet. It’s hard to make out, given the light contrast from the panels and Surveyor’s distance. We should know when Viking goes over.”

  * * *

  Duncan held a piece of paper she’d just received from a runner from the Navy communications center on the island. “We’ve got authorization to go into China and find out what Che Lu is uncovering in th
e tomb.”

  “From who?” Turcotte asked.

  She read the paper. “The National Command Authority under an ST-8 security clearance.”

  “I’ve never heard of that clearance,” Turcotte said.

  “We are instructed to get in and out without causing any international incident,” Duncan noted.

  “Easier said than done,” Turcotte said.

  The others were all gathered around the small TV, taking in the spectacle of the Airlia solar panels.

  Duncan was thinking about the problem. “We know that China is not going to let us come in. We aren’t even going to bother to ask. We’re going to have to go in on the sly and get out without being noticed.” She looked at Turcotte. “And that, Mike, I believe, is your department. According to this we’ll be met at Osan Air Force Base in South Korea by a CIA liaison who can help us get to the tomb and link up with Che Lu.”

  Turcotte stood. “Let’s get moving.”

  “No,” Kelly Reynolds said, standing in their way, her feet planted wide apart. “I don’t think we should do this.”

  “Kelly—” Nabinger began, but she cut him off.

  “It will only cause trouble. Aspasia will be here soon. Why can’t we wait? If this tomb holds Airlia artifacts, then they belong to him. If it’s where the rebels are, then we shouldn’t disturb it. Again, that’s his problem.”

  “Like the fight between the rebels and Aspasia wasn’t the problem of the people of Atlantis?” Nabinger asked.

  “Peter’s right,” Turcotte said. “We can’t sit around and be spectators. We’re involved.”

  “Don’t you see?” Kelly asked, grabbing the front of Turcotte’s camouflage shirt. “Don’t you see that you’re doing the same thing you did in Germany? People are going to get hurt for no reason.”

  Turcotte’s face went hard. He grabbed her hands and held them inside his. “This is different.”

  “Stay here with me and wait,” Kelly pleaded, looking from Turcotte to Nabinger to Duncan.