by Bob Mayer
If you are still battling the Airlia you must continue the fight. Despite your doubts. It is the very fact you have those doubts that make you a good man.
Leaving our son behind broke me. I am not the person I was. I am not the person I was when we first landed here on Earth. I am not the person who went into the Battle of Camlann with Gwalcmai at my side.
I am a worse person now. Life holds nothing for me. My time with you was precious, but based on lies and couldn’t continue.
The Airlia must be stopped at all costs and I have always known how it would end for me.
Love.
Live.
“No wonder you two got along so well,” Yakov said, making no attempt to hide his reading the letter over Turcotte’s shoulder. “A cheery couple.”
“Realistic,” Turcotte said. “What was the point? We defeated the Airlia and? Someone just nuked Iran. Who knows what’s next?”
The flexpad inside Mrs. Parrish’s briefcase vibrated.
“You had to tempt the fates?” Yakov said. “I do not think she will leave us alone.”
Turcotte opened the case and retrieved the flexpad.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for saving my astronaut,” Mrs. Parrish said. Her face didn’t express any emotion and her voice was matter-of-fact.
“You’re welcome,” Turcotte said. “Is she still recovering?”
“Have you reconsidered? I think you underestimate the Mars problem.”
“So much for small talk,” Turcotte said.
“Major, you know that several nuclear explosions occurred in Iran. We have confirmation they were initiated by Israel. We also have intelligence that both India and Pakistan are at their highest alert level and have deployed their nuclear arsenals. The religious and cultural differences between those two countries have been exacerbated by recent events, as you can well imagine.”
“What does that have to do with Mars?” Turcotte asked.
“It’s one of many moving pieces in current events that affect the future of humanity on Earth,” Mrs. Parrish said. “But you have the only resource with which we can deal with Mars in a timely manner.”
“You said you didn’t want to use the Fynbar to go to Mars,” Turcotte said.
“That was before we learned that there are surviving Airlia. It’s an unknown variable. Such variables throw calculations off. Who knows what else the Airlia will try?”
“We’ve had this discussion,” Turcotte said. “Whoever’s there is isolated.”
“We thought the talon was dead,” Mrs. Parrish said. “We were wrong. Who knows what else we are wrong about? Perhaps our war against the Airlia isn’t over? Our mission not completed?”
“What do you mean ‘our’?” Turcotte demanded. “I didn’t see you anywhere during this fight. And let’s not bullshit each other, Mrs. Parrish. Where’s Mister Parrish? How come he’s not in on this conversation?”
Mrs. Parrish sighed. “My husband was sick for a long time.” She put a hand on her chest. “He is here. In my heart and his essence is in a ka. I want him back. He still has much to offer mankind. As do I. As do you. And Mister Yakov.”
“Thank you for including me,” Yakov said. “I am so honored.”
Mrs. Parrish ignored the Russian’s sarcasm. “The job’s not done, Major Turcotte.”
“You want the Fynbar for the regeneration tube and the body inside,” Turcotte said. “But you didn’t come right out and say it.”
“I want us to be allies,” Mrs. Parrish said. “And as much as I would love to have my husband back, with your assistance, I believe the Mars mission is now a higher priority.”
Turcotte glanced at Yakov who signaled for him to mute the flexpad. “I don’t know how to mute this thing,” he told Mrs. Parrish. “Give me a minute to talk to my friend, then call back.” He hit the off button. “I don’t trust her,” he said to Yakov.
“Yes, but if she’s willing to put off regenerating her husband, which was her priority when we met her at Area 51, perhaps we should consider the Mars situation more serious than we imagine? She does have access to better intelligence.”
“I don’t trust her,” Turcotte repeated. “She could have been up front with me at Area 51.”
“Could she?” Yakov replied. “Would you have said yes?”
Turcotte considered that. “No.”
“Then?” Yakov said. “She tried to maneuver you the way rich people do. With money. She was wrong.”
“We probably should have checked Cydonia before coming back,” Turcotte said. “But I thought the Airlia had sent everyone to finish the array.”
“We were grateful to be alive,” Yakov said. “It did not occur to me either.”
The flexpad buzzed. Turcotte turned it on.
Mrs. Parrish’s face grew larger on the screen as she leaned forward. “Major, how do you think that Airlia, however many there are, still survive in Cydonia?”
Turcotte glanced at Yakov, who shrugged.
“What are you talking about?” Turcotte asked.
“We assumed that Cydonia was powered by the green sphere they took from there to use to power the Mons Olympus array. Since that was destroyed, how is Cydonia still viable?”
“No idea,” Turcotte said.
“My calculations,” Mrs. Parrish said, “indicate the most likely reason is that the green sphere wasn’t Cydonia’s power source. We believe there’s a ruby sphere powering Cydonia. Which means . . .” She left it dangling for Turcotte to seize.
He looked at the letter with Duncan’s handwriting. “We could power up the mothership’s FTL.”
“Indeed. But of more urgency, that is a considerable amount of power at Cydonia. Who knows what the Airlia might be able to conjure up before I can get my originally planned mission there? Cydonia is a threat. Perhaps an immediate threat. This war is not over.”
“Hold on,” Turcotte said. “The pyramid at Cydonia opened up and deployed solar panels. That powered the weapon system that took out Voyager when we tried to drop it with its nuke. Those panels are still open. They’re providing power.”
“But they weren’t for millennia,” Mrs. Parrish noted. “They would have easily been seen given their reflection. Something has kept that base going for over ten thousand years. It’s got to be a ruby sphere.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Turcotte saw Yakov pointing out the window. He looked that way. A Blackhawk helicopter was inbound.
“Are you sending soldiers here?” Turcotte demanded of Mrs. Parrish.
She shook her head. “I do, of course, have you and Mister Yakov under observation at Ms. Duncan’s cabin. But no—“ she glanced up, then back at the screen—“that helicopter is not one of mine. Do you need assistance? I can provide it. I have forces nearby.”
“I’m sure you do,” Turcotte muttered, hitting the red button.
“Friend or foe, do you think?” Yakov asked.
The chopper flared above the steep slope, no place for it to land. A fastrope was tossed out and a single figure slid down. As soon as he was down, the fastrope was disconnected and the chopper banked away.
Turcotte smiled for the first time in a while. “Friend.”
BROOKHAVEN AIRPORT, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK
The pilot looked at Leahy, past her at the empty van, then back to her. “Where’s the second person I’m to pick up?”
“He couldn’t make it,” Leahy said. She indicated the case holding the Tesla computer. “Give me a hand with this please.”
The pilot carried it up the stairs into the jet. “Does Mrs. Parrish know you’re alone?” He asked as he shut the door behind her.
“Mrs. Parrish knows everything,” Leahy said.
That satisfied the pilot. “All right. We’ve got a three-hour flight time to Dreamland. Looks like you’re the only passenger. Help yourself from the galley; there’s no crew other than me and my co-pilot.”
“That’s fine,” Leahy said. She sat down on one of the plush captain’s
chairs and buckled in while the pilot entered the cockpit and closed the door behind him. Leahy heard the distinct click of the lock engaging, but that was SOP, something that occurred on every Perdix Air flight.
As soon as the twin-engine jet was airborne, Leahy brought out the Tesla computer and placed it on the table in front of her. She powered it up.
As soon as she had silver, she put her hands on it. Entered Ethos, went to a subroutine that monitored Mrs. Parrish’s flexpads and command chair. Replayed her conversation with Turcotte. Leahy shook her head, knowing that Mrs. Parrish didn’t understand what made Turcotte tick. The information about the regeneration tube she’d long suspected since the Myrrdin had spent centuries tracking down Airlia artifacts. When Mr. Parrish became ill five years earlier, he and Mrs. Parrish had made an off-the-books, off-the-Ethos, trip to Turkey.
Leahy was certain they’d visited the mothership hidden under Ararat, where Mr. Parrish’s consciousness had been copied onto a ka. He’d died just two weeks later.
Mrs. Parrish’s speculating about a ruby sphere with Turcotte was almost humorous. Leahy had learned there was one there a long time ago, via the Tesla computer, via the msats, via the master guardian. Checking the Strategy, Leahy saw the same array of possibilities that Mrs. Parrish was facing. There was no need for Mrs. Parrish to change her plan, but there were more options.
There always were.
Leahy checked her version of the Strategy and it was a bit different than the official one. The critical factor right now was whether Turcotte would allow them to use the Fynbar to get to Mars. Otherwise, it would take Perdix time to prepare and mount a Martian expedition.
Leahy checked across the array and zoomed in on a bit of news: the Paris Watcher cell had gone dark. Leahy nodded, eyes closed, hands on computer. Foolish to try to take out Nosferatu and Nekhbet. That was Mrs. Parrish’s anal desire to close out loose ends; in reality, Leahy suspected Mrs. Parrish was focused on simplifying the possibilities in the Strategy. It’s always easier to make decisions when there are less choices with less variables. There was also Mrs. Parrish obsession with ‘confusion and misdirection’.
A new blip on that thread appeared. The London Cell had gone dark. Leahy smiled. Nosferatu was working his way up the structure. But the cut outs were already being implemented and his next target up the chain connected to London would be gone by the time he—Leahy paused the projection.
Nosferatu had to know what he was facing. He’d been in too many wars, too many revolutions, met too many spies. He knew a triangular cut out arrangement.
What would he want more? Revenge for the abortive assassination attempt or knowledge?
She instinctively knew the answer: knowledge.
Leahy accessed her own database on the ‘Undead’. Nosferatu’s recent purge had narrowed the Elders to just him and Nekhbet. There were ‘quarters’, of course, the descendants of the Elders, but they weren’t anywhere near as powerful or long-lived. It didn’t appear his partner was in very good shape after all these years. There were descendants of the Elders in various places around the world, but none as pure as Nosferatu and Nekhbet. The Watchers had kept tabs on Nosferatu for thousands of years, but the timeline was sketchy. She wasn’t concerned right now with what he’d done, it was more what he knew. And he knew of the Watchers, the Myrddin and, most importantly, he knew where the Watchers had been created by Donnchadh.
That is where he would go.
She shifted back to Mrs. Parrish Strategy and wasn’t surprised the quantum computer had come up with the same likelihood. Great minds think alike, Leahy thought. But there was more to this than thinking. She noted Mrs. Parrish’s pre-emptive decision on that thread.
The old lady couldn’t leave well enough alone. She didn’t understand—
Leahy froze as an alert intruded. From the Airlia msats. The last time that had happened was 1908, when her grandfather had picked up the alert of the inbound Swarm scout ship.
Leahy ignored everything and focused on the alert.
This wasn’t a Swarm scout ship. The image, forwarded from a Sentinel, was something she’d never seen. It took her a few moments to grasp the scale of what she was seeing, based on the accompanying Sentinel data.
It connected with data her grandfather had learned from the guardian.
The Ancient Enemy was inbound.
DREAMLAND, TEXAS
Mrs. Parrish was in a foul mood. People simply did not hang up on her. Maria could pick up her boss’s vibe and had one hand on George’s head, fingers rubbing behind his ear.
“Come,” Mrs. Parrish snapped. She left the Dreamland control center and slid into the driver’s seat of an electric cart. George jumped on the passenger seat, and then into the back. Before Maria was fully seated, Mrs. Parrish accelerated down a tunnel almost throwing her assistant out of the cart.
The overhead lights flashed by as they went down the tunnel bored out of solid rock. Twice a cart coming the other way scooted out of the way, one scraping up against the wall with a grinding sound in its haste to avoid a collision. Mrs. Parrish didn’t look back.
After several miles, the only sound the rubber tires on the concrete floor and the whine of the electric engine, the tunnel opened to a wide, circular cavern carved out of volcanic stone. They were underneath a peak in the Davis Mountains.
The chamber was a hub of activity, with several tunnels heading out in different directions. Mrs. Parrish parked at the entrance to one guarded by two heavily armed men.
They showed no deference as she walked up, followed by Maria and George. While one remained at the ready with his weapon, the other brought a scanner up to Mrs. Parrish’s face and identified her via retina.
He turned to Maria and George and scanned the dog’s eyes. Sure Mrs. Parrish wasn’t watching, he also gave the dog a slight pat on the head. Then he stepped back and hit the switch to open the door. It slid up to reveal another tunnel.
Mrs. Parrish walked down the tunnel, Maria a full step behind, George on the other side of her.
The walls of the tunnel were lined with high-definition screens. Some portrayed film loops of various natural disasters: hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, and man-made ones: wars, genocide, oceans clogged with plastic, executions, oil spills, food riots, and more. Others showed simulations. Graphics of the planet as sea levels rose, flooding coastal areas, water surging inland in low lying areas. CGI of cities devastated. Barren farmland. Some flashed statistics in a numbing display of projections: population, food supply versus demand, CO2 levels and more. It all made the opening of the worst science fiction disaster movie appear lame.
It was real or most likely become real. The latter screens had a countdown on them in bright, red numbers. The countdowns represented Strategy projections to stages of climate change and its effect; significant coastal cities and when they would become unlivable; and more.
Mrs. Parrish didn’t spare any of the screens a glance. She knew it all. These images were not for her. They were for the people who worked in support of the Facility. She and Mr. Parrish had learned early on, studying the Watcher Scrolls, history, and psychology, that fear was a great motivator. But one had to mix in a bit of hope or else despair would overwhelm.
The hope was behind the door at the end of the tunnel. The Facility.
Two guards, not visibly armed, waited in front of the door.
“Mrs. Parrish,” one acknowledged. The other opened the door.
They went inside and the door was quickly shut behind them, as if a whiff of outside air could contaminate what was inside, which was not the case.
A tall, black woman, whose head was completely shaved and skull covered with faint tattoos, was waiting for them at the end of a short corridor, flexpad in hand. She wore a colorful kanga wrap over khaki slacks and shirt. She stood on a semi-circular balcony shielded by one-hundred and eighty degrees of thick one-way glass. The floor was made of the same material, disorienting for someone not used to it. The first
time George had entered the observation pod, Maria had had a difficult time getting him to step onto it.
“Welcome, Mrs. Parrish,” the woman said. “Maria. And George,” she added.
Mrs. Parrish ignored her, although Maria nodded a greeting and whispered. “Hello, Asha.” George gave a sniff of approval and angled his head for a scratch. Mrs. Parrish moved to the edge so she could overlook the scene. As she did so, Asha surreptitiously passed a Braille embossed note to Maria as she scratched George hello, then went to Mrs. Parrish’s side.
The balcony overlooked a massive open space that had taken four billion dollars and twelve years to build. They were high on the curving wall of a cavern six miles across at the base and a mile high at the apex. Laid out below them was a complete ecosystem.
In the very center was a small town, including parks, schools, houses and even a narrow river running through it. There were some things lacking though, that a normal town would have. The most immediate was no vehicles. The streets were wide, lined with trees, and paved with bricks but no cars. Looking up from the town, the dome roof represented a nice day, a bright glowing sphere providing light. A few wisps of slowly moving clouds were displayed here and there. It was the result of thousands of huge HDTV displays. The sun was in the correct place, mimicking the position of the sun above. As the walls arced down to the surface, the displays extended whatever was adjacent with images of continuation to a horizon that didn’t exist.
Surrounding the town was a dizzying array of miniature ecosystems: rainforest, savannah grassland, small copses of trees, a fog desert, and larger patches of agricultural land. A slice along one edge of the dome contained ‘ocean’ complete with a coral reef and a crescent shaped beach. Small waves lapped on the beach.
It was a closed, self-sustaining ecological system, a mimic of the real world.
Someone from the real world would note the discrepancies.
Most of those inhabiting the town had only vague memories of the ‘real’ world on the surface.
