“Hubble is capable of tracking moving targets with the same precision as for fixed targets.” Forrester spoke as he typed into his laptop, which was hooked into the secure Department of Defense Interlink. “The images you had of Mars before were just snapshots taken by the Hubble’s FOC… faint object camera.”
Kincaid had dealt with men like this for decades, so he knew enough to just let Forrester talk as he worked.
“To track a moving object in our solar system we maintain a FGS… fine guidance sensor… fine lock on guide stars, and drive the FGS star sensors in the appropriate path, thus moving Hubble to track the target. Tracking under FGS control is technically possible for apparent target motions up to five arcsec.” Forrester looked up. “That is how we were initially able to follow the talon fleet as it came toward Earth.
“However, as happened in that case, this technique becomes unfeasible for targets moving more than a few tenths of an arcsec. What we do then is begin observations under FGS control and then switch over to gyros when the guide stars have moved out of the FGS field of view. If sufficient guide stars are available, it is possible to hand off from one pair to another, but this will typically incur an additional pointing error.”
With great difficulty, Kincaid still said nothing.
“Targets moving too fast for FGS control, but slower than seven point eight arcsec, can be observed under gyro control, with a loss in precision that depends on the length of the observation.”
“Can you see Mars?” Kincaid finally asked.
“We’ve always been able to see Mars,” Forrester said. “What you want is to see it with the full capabilities of Hubble, and I’m trying to explain to you what is needed to accomplish that.” Forrester continued without missing a beat. “The track for a moving target such as Mars is derived from its orbital elements. Orbital elements for all of the planets and most of their satellites are available at STScl. Moreover, STScl has access to the ASTCOM database, maintained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory… which you have so kindly provided me with through the Interlink… which includes orbital elements for Mars.”
Forrester hit a key. “And thus we can get a tight shot, with the best that Hubble has to offer, of the target area in the Cydonia region you gave me. Much better resolution than we had before.”
Kincaid stared over the man’s shoulder as pixels changed color on the screen and a picture began to appear.
The most noticeable thing that became coherent in the image was the bright reflection from the large solar array from the open “pyramid.” It was still intact, no damage from the nuclear explosion apparent. The “Fort” where the talons had taken off from also became visible, the roof still open, the interior empty.
“At least they have no backup ships,” Kincaid muttered.
The “Face” on Mars, a massive structure two and a half kilometers long by two kilometers wide, and over four hundred meters high, appeared next.
“I wonder what that thing is,” Kincaid said.
“We’ve taken quite a few shots of the so-called Face,” Forrester said. “To those pictures we’ve applied bit-error correction, reseau removal, and brightness alteration. Then we’ve projected the images to a standard Mercator view. Two things we didn’t do that had been done with the previous photos of the Cydonia region… and which caused much of the controversy whether there was an actual ‘face’… were contrast/brightness enhancement and image sharpening. The reason we didn’t do those is that using those techniques would create different images, depending on the monitor on which they were viewed, and NASA didn’t want to get embroiled in the controversy.
“Another problem with much of the earlier imaging was the problem of accounting for shading. For example, light on one side of a slope can greatly distort the image of a hill. To account for this, we use a technique called shape-from-shading. We have even been able to project images of the Cydonia region so that it appears as if you are viewing it from a ground-level view.”
Kincaid waited, still not having received an answer. He often wondered about these men who called themselves scientists… to Kincaid they were technicians, experts at their field of study but with little interest in fields outside their own, and worse, little imagination.
The image of a “face” on Mars had been noted as far back as the 1970s, when the first Viking orbiter had taken pictures. The fact that NASA had never investigated the strange anomaly further until now and called it a natural phenomenon Kincaid knew lay with the influence of STAAR.
“So what is it?”
“Here.” Forrester turned his laptop so Kincaid could see the screen. “Looks like a bunch of rubble,” Kincaid said.
“It is,” Forrester said.
“Rubble of what?”
“We have no idea.”
“Can you print me a copy?” Kincaid asked.
“Certainly.” Forrester hit the enter key on his laptop. The printer hummed and a piece of paper rolled out. Kincaid looked at it. Something wasn’t quite right. He grabbed a magnifying glass and studied the image. He pulled open a file folder and retrieved an image of the same area made by Surveyor before it was destroyed. He put the two side by side and began comparing them.
“What the hell is that?”
There was something in the new image, to the side of the solar panels and Fort, in the direction of the Face. It wasn’t there in the earlier Surveyor picture. It could be an equipment problem, but Kincaid had a feeling it wasn’t. “Can you get a better image of this spot?” Kincaid asked, pointing to the small, darker-colored area that disturbed him.
“I can try different spectrums,” the scientist said. “Also, we’ll get some slightly different angles due to Hubble’s and Mars’ relative positions changing. Not much, but some.” He typed in some commands. “By the way, you were quite correct about the Face.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not a face carved into the surface, as many UFOlogists wanted to believe. But it’s not natural either. It does indeed appear to be rubble. As best we can determine, there was a larger structure or mountain there and it was severely damaged.”
“By what?”
“We don’t know. There doesn’t appear to be any volcanic activity in the region, so perhaps an earthquake?”
“Or maybe the Airlia?” Kincaid didn’t wait for an answer. “Any idea at all what was there originally?”
“No.”
Another piece of paper came out of the printer. The black smear was still present.
“How large is this black area?” Kincaid asked.
The scientist looked at it, then pulled out a clear plastic rectangle with various measurements on it. He measured, then punched into a calculator. “About five hundred meters long by sixty wide.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“No, but it appears to be moving.” Forrester pulled a picture out of his briefcase. “This is imagery from last week. Notice the change in location. Appears to be moving from the Fort area toward the Face.”
Kincaid tapped the photo. “Keep Hubble on that site.”
Forester looked as if Kincaid had just asked him to commit a felony. “Hubble’s time has been locked in for over two years. Taking it off-line like that… well, there’s going to be a lot of very upset… ” The scientist paused when he saw the look on Kincaid’s face.
Kincaid returned his attention to the imagery for several seconds, deep in thought. What the hell were the Airlia doing? What had been where the Face was now? And what had destroyed that object, whatever it was? And why were the Airlia sending something across the surface toward it? And what were they sending?
Kincaid reached into a drawer and pulled out a handful of ibuprofen and popped them into his mouth, washing the painkillers down with coffee, hoping it would help with the raging headache these pictures had incited.
He looked up as another of his specialists entered the Cube. This one did not look like the scientist geek; he sported a Fu Manchu mustache, his
long hair was tied in a ponytail, and he wore torn jeans and a black T-shirt.
“Give me some good news, Gordon.” Kincaid had taken over all scientific aspects of the Airlia investigation for Major Quinn. The newcomer was the computer expert into whose care the STAAR hard drives from Scorpion Base that Turcotte had recovered had been entrusted. The drives had been hastily wiped clean as STAAR abandoned the base, but Gordon was trying to recover the “shadow” of the information that was on them. The major problem he’d run into was that it seemed STAAR had also been trying to recover lost information, so they were two steps removed from what they wanted.
“We’re still tracking keywords according to Dr. Duncan’s instructions… Key, The Mission, and Ark.” Mike Gordon sat down across from Kincaid and rubbed his hands across his eyes.
“Anything?”
“Nothing on those words.”
“What do you have?”
“That name of the Guide from the Inquisition… Domeka… we’ve found it again in a couple of places.” Kincaid held out his hand. “Give me what you have.” Gordon handed over a file. Kincaid pointed a finger. “Get back to work.”
Stantsiya Chyort (Russian Area 51), Novaya Zemlya Island
D — 27 Hours, 30 Minutes
“It’s dead.” Yakov tapped the glass, as one would the side of an aquarium to get the fishes’ attention.
“What is it?”
Katyenka had turned on the small computer terminal at the base of the tank. The screen glowed with Cyrillic writing. “It says here it is called Otdel Rukopashnyi.”
“What does that mean?” Turcotte asked.
Katyenka translated. “Literally that means ‘sections of hands.’ They shortened that here to Okpashnyi. According to what I’m reading, they had no idea what it is.”
“I heard nothing of this being found,” Yakov said.
Katyenka had scrolled down. “As you noted, it was recovered at the end of the Great Patriotic War from the rubble of Berlin.”
“Ah,” Yakov said. “That makes sense. As I told you earlier, Section Four began during the war, when our aircraft encountered what you call foo fighters. But we had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with, until we found what the Germans had.”
Turcotte was very familiar with the German interest in the alien and occult. “The Nazis were very hot after any sort of strange information or material,” Turcotte said. “They were the ones who were the first to realize the significance of the high runes.”
“They were also big believers in UFOs,” Yakov said. “They had enough information in the records we recovered to make your Project Blue Book look like a thin file.
“They knew the foo fighters were something very different the first time their aircraft encountered them. The Luftwaffe lost many planes trying to shoot a foo fighter down. They also sent many expeditions around the world, searching down clues for anything that seemed abnormal or paranormal. Hitler was obsessed with the subject.”
“What does that have to do with Ivan there?” Turcotte forced himself to look at the strange creature.
Katyenka answered that. “They must have found it in the same vault as the German foo fighter and other alien information files. That led the Section Four scientists to assume, besides the fact no one’s ever seen anything like that in the natural world, that it is extraterrestrial in origin. It is possible that it is some bizarre creation that came from the Nazi butchers in the camps, but they did not think so.”
“It’s an organism?” Turcotte confirmed.
Katyenka nodded. “Yes.”
“An Airlia pet?”
“They had no idea.”
“Was it found with Airlia artifacts?”
“It doesn’t say.” Katyenka had finished reading the material available. “It does say there were two found. The German scientists did an autopsy on the other one.”
“That’s one thing?” Turcotte stared at the parts floating in the solution.
Katyenka tapped the glass. “The center part… the ball with the eyes… is the head, as near as they could determine. The Germans found a four-hemisphere brain housed inside a very hard protective covering, much stronger than our human skull. The brain was complex, similar to ours but different in some key ways, besides having twice as many hemispheres.
“The other things… well, those are arms, legs, whatever. Each one is the same. The strange thing… well, there are many strange things… is that each arm has a small, complex stem of its own at the thick end, the end that connects with the ball. Perhaps just a nervous system end point, but it appeared to be more than that.”
“Why did they take all the arms off?” Turcotte asked, trying to assimilate this information.
“They didn’t. That’s the way it was found in the Nazi archives. From the autopsy it was determined that the arms… well, the best they could figure was that they were detachable and interchangeable. Not only on the main body.” She looked up from the computer screen and pointed. “See those humps? That’s where the arms attach, but possibly even between different main bodies.”
Turcotte blinked. “You’re joking. Like I could give you my arm.”
Katyenka shrugged. “That is a theory postulated by the scientists who left this record.”
“But what is it?’ Turcotte said. “Where did it come from?”
“We recovered much from the Nazis, but not everything. After all, you got the Airlia atom bomb. And there is much the Nazis didn’t find.”
Turcotte tried to imagine the thing in the tank alive, the arms attached, the three fingers at the end of each arm moving.
He shuddered.
Area 51
D — 27 Hours
Lisa Duncan paused in the door of the conference room and surveyed the two men already inside. Major Quinn had an unlit cigarette in his hands, turning it over and over. Larry Kincaid’s hands were wrapped around a large coffee mug, dark bags under his eyes, his gaze unfocused. In the corner of the room a clock indicated that Lexina’s deadline was only twenty-seven hours away.
She stepped inside, ushering Professor Mualama to a seat near the end of the table. She quickly made introductions.
“What happened in Montana?” she asked Quinn.
Quinn’s report was brief. “The NSA authorized use of an ICBM called Interdictor to try to take out the talon and Warfighter with a nuclear warhead. Somehow Lexina must have gotten intelligence about that and fired first. The warhead went off in the silo. Local damage was minimal, as the silo site was remote, but fallout could be a problem. Luckily, there are no winds in the area right now.”
“How did Lexina learn of the planned launch?” Duncan sat down at the end of the conference table, Mualama flanking her to the right.
Quinn shrugged. “A leak somewhere. We have to assume STAAR still has operatives infiltrated throughout the military and government.”
“Is the NSA planning any further action against the talon?” Duncan asked. “Not that they will admit to me,” Quinn said.
“Anything on the key?”
“No.”
“Anything on the runes?” she asked. She’d sent an image of the stone marker ahead via SATCOM to Quinn so the UNAOC high rune experts could take a look at them.
“Nothing so far,” Quinn said. “They’re still working on it.”
“That’s helpful.” Duncan’s tone indicated how she felt about that. “And the skeleton we brought back?”
“Sent to the lab,” Quinn said. “It will be examined.”
“Any word from Turcotte?”
“Nothing. Last report was he was landing at Stantsiya Chyort.”
Duncan turned to her right. “Dr. Mualama, anything you care to say?”
Mualama steepled his fingers together. “It is obvious that the Airlia have been on this planet for a very long time. The discovery of this particular corpse is the first Airlia body that we know of that has been found. The dating of the grave site puts it about ten thousand years ago, or after the dest
ruction of Atlantis.”
“We know the Airlia have been here a long time,” Quinn said wearily.
“But the thing you don’t know,” Mualama said, “is how much influence the Airlia have had on our development. Initially, Professor Nabinger believed they had little to do with us after they destroyed Atlantis over thirteen thousand years ago. However, the skeleton site was newer than that, and the marker on top of the coffin was only about two to three thousand years old. Someone put that marker there a long time after the coffin was in place.
“The question that has to be answered is how much interference have the Airlia had in our history? Think of the discoveries by Professor Nabinger in China about the Great Wall and the tomb of Qian-Ling. The possible true purpose of the Great Pyramid that he uncovered. The guardian on Easter Island, the statues there that we now know mimic the Airlia themselves.” Mualama leaned forward. “We have to reevaluate everything we think we know about our history.”
“We know that,” Duncan said. “We’ve discovered other interference. We know the Guides from The Mission have been active at times throughout our history. We believe the Black Death in the Dark Ages was caused by The Mission. The thing we don’t know is why the various Airlia factions have been doing what they’ve been doing other than it appears to be a continuation of the millennia-old civil war and we happen to be caught in the middle.”
A phone buzzed, and Quinn picked it up. He listened for a second, then put his hand over the receiver. “We finally have Captain Turcotte on the SATPhone.”
”Put it on the speaker,” Duncan ordered. She leaned forward. “Mike, you there?”
Turcotte’s voice sounded clear, relayed through Department of Defense satellites from his location in Russia. “Yes.”
“The control for the talon?”
“Stolen.” Turcotte quickly updated her. “At least we know why Section Four was attacked,” he concluded.
Duncan told him of the explosion in Montana. Then she moved on to the actions off Easter Island.
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