The Cydonia Objective mi-3

by David Sakmyster

  She saw things, so many, all at once. Too much to process now. She saw a woman on the edge of some monument in the Grand Canyon, with Xavier holding her hand as they watched the sunset paint glorious hues upon the striated cliffs. She saw a warehouse full of shelves a hundred feet high, with locked compartments guarding things of such antiquity… and Montross sneaking out, darting from the shadows with something spherical and shiny in his grasp, a thief in the dark.

  And then she saw them: Caleb and Alexander, rushing through a shadowy maze of passageways. Hurrying, following someone in a gray cloak. Her vision fast-forwarded, piggy-backing onto Xavier’s spark of prescience.

  And now they’re outside, climbing out of a well onto the desert sands. In the distance, a motorboat revving up. Dark figures on board, holding guns and watching the skies, looking southeast, toward the distant peaks of the three pyramids. Fast forward again:

  A giant half-dome of glass, sparkling in the sun, surrounded by high-rises and minarets.

  Nina let go, backed away, gasping for breath. Wiping the sweat from her brow, she turned away from Montross, who wouldn’t look at her. “Senator,” she whispered. “They’re not down there anymore.”

  “Where-?”

  She blinked, standing up straight and focusing on Montross. He shook his head, but she continued anyway.

  “They’re heading to Alexandria. To the library.”

  Calderon nodded. “Ah, our friends the Keepers.” He started twirling his cane in his fingers, slowly, focusing on the dragon.

  “Stepfather?” Isaac asked quietly. “Are we going there?”

  “Oh we are, my boy.” And he smiled broadly. “I’m through playing cat and mouse with them. There’s no longer any point to the chase. Not when we have a way to end this once and for all.”

  Isaac was rubbing his hands together, and even Jacob seemed excited.

  “It’s time,” Calderon said, “for the new library to meet the fate of the old.”

  10.

  Over Pakistan

  “One more unscheduled stop, I swear.” Colonel Temple emerged from the pilot’s cabin and faced his passengers. Phoebe sat beside Aria, who was sound asleep but turning fretfully, her eyelids fluttering. Orlando sat on the other side, as if they were the girl’s protective parents, and for a few minutes before takeoff, he actually let himself imagine such a fantasy—that he and Phoebe were living out normal lives. Maybe returning from Disneyworld with a tuckered out daughter.

  But then the plane banked away from the sandstone cliffs and Aria looked back on her father, sedated and asleep, hooked to an IV and sprawled out on the back three seats. Orlando met Phoebe’s eyes, which for a moment were clouded with fear and adrift in loss, before she managed to find strength in him and draw it to herself.

  She reached over and held his hand and tried to smile. “So, where are you taking me on our next date?”

  Drifting off, Aria managed a giggle. “I like you two.”

  “We like you,” Orlando said. “Even if we don’t understand how you do what you do.”

  Her eyes were the bluest he’d ever seen, but the pupils were so large, threatening to spill over into the blue. It was as if she had been drugged. And maybe she has, he thought. He knew Colonel Temple needed her fresh and alert when they got back to the Stargate base, and her powers weren’t really needed here, as long as they were a swiftly moving target at fifty thousand feet. They were safe. So maybe he did give her a little help in order to sleep.

  “I just do it,” she said. “It just happens. Natural, like if I threw a rock at you. If you couldn’t dodge it, what would you do?”

  Orlando looked at Phoebe, then back at the girl. He shrugged. “Try to block it or hide behind my arms?”

  Aria nodded. “Just like that. Reflex. Except instead of raising my arms, I raise this… thing. This layer, like a blanket, except it’s really wide and long and stretches pretty far back in time too.”

  “Neat,” Phoebe whispered. “But you look exhausted. Your dad’s stable now, he’s resting. You should do the same.”

  Aria yawned, closed her eyes and smiled. And then she was out.

  Even Temple’s entrance didn’t wake her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We don’t need her for this.”

  “For what?” Orlando asked, straining to see out the window. His ears had just popped with their descent. “We haven’t been flying for more than an hour. Where are we?”

  “Over part of Pakistan.”

  “Ugh,” Phoebe said with a groan. “Please tell me we’re not making another extraction or going into another cave.”

  Temple shook his head. “This one’s simple. We land, you get out and you give me your impression of the site.”

  “What site?” Orlando asked. And he started wracking his brain for possibilities. What was in the mountains of Pakistan that they needed to see? What, besides another terrorist cell, or a cache of weapons or something?

  “Just something I have my team members probe to test their talents.”

  “Another test?” Phoebe asked. “Really? After all we just did?”

  Temple folded his arms over his chest. “Okay, it’s not a test. I just want to see if you two can give me more information than those other psychics. Please, it’s important.” He took a seat in front of them, strapping himself in.

  “Important for whom?” Orlando muttered. He grabbed hold of the armrests, preparing for a bumpy landing.

  “For you,” Temple replied. “Because this… you just have to see. I don’t have your gifts, but I’m told it’s quite… earth shattering.”

  #

  “Mohenjo-Daro,” Temple said after he had led them from the small landing strip to the edge of a hill overlooking a vast plain and a sprawling view of ancient red brick walls, ledges and boundaries, a few silo-like towers, arches and perfectly aligned streets. “The Mound of the Dead, as it’s translated.”

  Orlando whistled. “I know this place.”

  “Thought you might,” said Temple.

  “Figures,” Phoebe said, rubbing the sleeve of her blouse across her forehead, dabbing the sweat. The sun was just descending, but painfully intense, baking the ancient ruins below. “It’s an old city, right? Archaeologists found it, and yeah it’s pretty cool. So why are we here?”

  “We’re here to take a peek,” Orlando guessed. He cracked his knuckles, stretched his arms and gave a little jog in place, as if warming up before a race.

  “Yes, a peek.” Temple waved his arm over the view. “Mohenjo-Daro was re-discovered in the 1920’s. They believed it was built in 2600 BC and that it served as one of the centers of the Indus Valley civilization, of which very little is known. An incredible degree of sophistication went into the planning and design of this city. Urban sanitation systems like we wouldn’t see again for two thousand years.”

  “Always a good thing, but probably no plumbers union back then.” Orlando grinned, then shrugged at Phoebe.

  “Precise geographical and astronomical layouts of the streets and buildings, and despite the best efforts of the world’s leading linguists, a written script that has never been successfully translated. A mature language that appeared in these two cities as well as several thousand other sites across the area—for which they can find no evolution or development. It seems to have just appeared.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Orlando said. “Get on with the real juicy morsels. You know, tell her what’s really crazy about this place.” He glanced at Phoebe. “I tried to get your brother to let us make Mohenjo-Daro an objective that we should scout out during our downtime. But he thought it wasn’t worth our effort.”

  “Doesn’t sound like him. He must’ve been preoccupied.” Phoebe kept staring at the city, and in the hazy sun the ancient buildings began to shimmer and wobble. She was feeling the tug of a vision.

  Temple coughed. “I can understand Caleb’s reluctance. But I must also now tell you in complete sincerity that what I’m about to say is above top secret, and—”


  “Yeah, we know. Tell no one…” Orlando raised his hands in a gesture of being terrified. “…or else you’ll have to kill us.”

  “Oh, I won’t kill you,” Temple said with a smirk. “But someone else assuredly will. Now, listen Phoebe, since I gather Orlando has already been briefed by Wikipedia or Conspiracies-R-Us…”

  “Hey!”

  “But this site, and its sister city not far from here, called Harrapan, are much, much older than 2600 BC.”

  “How old?”

  “Undetermined. The problem with you psychics is that while you can see the past, you never manage to glimpse a newspaper or something with the date on it.” He grinned. “Just kidding. But the problem of dating remains unsolvable. Best we can do is look to the geographic landmarks—or in some rare cases, we’ve had luck with the remote viewer coming out of the vision and drawing what the night sky looked like.”

  “Ah,” Orlando said, clapping. “Plug the constellations into a computer program and let it match up the orientation with the patterns of stellar drift and the Earth’s precession and wobble, and—”

  “All right, all right.” Phoebe rubbed her temples. “So did you do any of that with this site?”

  Temple nodded. “But I’m not divulging that information yet, as uncorroborated as it is. I don’t want to taint your impressions. Bad enough you already have a guess as to the target, and Orlando has his… theories. I need you to try to see for yourself.”

  “The target is Mohenjo-Daro,” Phoebe said, nodding and taking a deep breath, focusing on the city.

  “The target,” Temple corrected, “is the event.”

  “What event?” she asked.

  Orlando let out a big sigh. “What he means, what he’s getting at but won’t tell you, is that the government’s not stupid.” He glared at Temple. “He knows what the scientists and the so-called quack archaeologists found. The skeletons flattened in the streets. Huddled in their homes, holding hands as they met their doom.”

  “Flattened?”

  “Devastated. The walls bear evidence of extreme heat and exposure to an unknown source of energy. Something that left a radiation signature across this whole place. A signature not seen again until Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  Phoebe frowned at him. “Conspiracies-R-Us?”

  “Try, The Mahabarata. The old Vedic epic and holy book… there’s a whole battle scene in there that describes the gods raining these kinds of arsenals down upon their foes. I recall one of the verses went something like: ‘…a single projectile, charged with all the power of the universe/ as bright as the thousand suns / a column of smoke and flame rose in all its splendor.’ Then something about reducing the people to ashes, corpses burning, hair and nails falling out. Descriptions that sounded way too much like nuclear fallout.”

  Temple grinned. “You’ve said too much, Orlando. Let her work with an unclouded mind. Phoebe, just try to see what happened here. What did them in?”

  “Why?” she asked. “If you guys apparently know it all? What’s the point?”

  “Because,” he said. “We need to know exactly what we’re up against, and we need you to understand that what we’re doing isn’t because we’re power-hungry elitists who want to jealously guard the truth from the pitiful masses.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “That’s the truth,” Temple said. “We have much bigger problems. Because whatever did this, whatever happened here, it’s going to happen again if we don’t get that Tablet back.”

  #

  She saw it on the way down the hill. Just a few steps from the first wall of red brick, the dust already kicked up by her shoes. Maybe it was the smell, the proximity to the ancient stone. The sudden feeling of belonging here. Being one of with Mohenjo-Daro’s population. Seeing it-

  -for the first time… The sound, the bustling throbbing sound. A perfect cadence of voice and motion. People, such a mass of people. Bright colors, hats, silken scarves, elegant robes and practical coverings. Commoner and royalty, it seemed, merge as one in the streets and… flee.

  Out of the city. Not a mob, but not so orderly as to be a ceremonious event. They’re scared. Carrying some possessions, boxes, bags. A little girl carrying a dragon-shaped doll…

  A rumbling in the earth.

  Screams, people turning.

  Something in the center of the city draws their attention. A tower, of sorts. Pyramid-shaped, glowing at its tip. The rumbling continues, intensifies—and a gathering light at the tip of the pyramid appears. Brighter and brighter, until the crowd moves slowly away, as if mesmerized by the sight, yet terrified of what might happen next.

  There are things in the sky. Lights moving bright against the blue background, multi-colored orbs and flattened disc-shaped brilliances. They seem to be at war with each other. Some are spinning, dissolving, falling in snowflake-like patterns across the sky and over the mountains.

  And the light from the pyramid turns darker, a deep indigo hue that in the blink of an eye blasts upward with a force that shatters the outer layer of stones from the pyramid and flattens nearby homes. Now there’s a beam of light, pure nearly blinding light stabbing through the sky—and beyond. The air shimmers, people cover their eyes.

  And as if in reply to this city’s offensive, something comes down from the sky. Nothing entirely visible, but this nothing lands with an impact like a god’s fist striking the ground. The earth trembles, the walls and buildings shake. But then the aftershocks, like concentric circles of energy, descend one upon the other, in widening diameters until the whole city, the entire plain is caught in its frequency.

  A frequency that shatters living beings, flattening them like insects underfoot. The crowds, as one, are gone. Everyone still in the main center of the city—just pulverized. Whatever this force is, it spares the bricks, the earth, the structures, but leaves them smoking, simmering.

  Everyone’s gone except those who had just made it out of range. Stumbling away into a ravine, looking back in horror, back toward the beam from the pyramid. The beam that’s flickering now. Fizzling, its power used up.

  Amid the wailing, screaming and desperation, a last, lone look up at the sky…

  And the tiny light, tinged in the approaching dusk with a light reddish hue. The only object in the sky above the pyramid. The only available target…

  #

  “What… the hell…” Phoebe clutched at Orlando’s shirt, meeting his eyes with such lingering horror, “…was that?”

  Orlando shook his head. “I didn’t get enough. Just saw, I don’t know, like I was in some structure, and I had a tablet. It might have been the same one you guys found. I was sitting in some throne-like contraption, and all these strange symbols and I don’t know, equations or something, were whirling about my head. And it seemed they were directing this device, this coiled apparatus that had colored electricity sparkling from it, and—”

  “Jeez,” Phoebe backed away from him. “Where were you?”

  He shrugged.

  “Probably,” said Temple, “you could find out with another vision. But not now. I think Phoebe saw what we needed her to see. Now, before we head back. There’s one more target.”

  “Come on, man. Phoebe’s been through enough. Let her rest.”

  “I’m fine.” She smoothed back her hair, stood up straight and turned back to the city’s ruins, looking over the ancient walls, seeing for a moment the former glory of Mohenjo-Daro, and again feeling the crushing loss, the doom that was so decisively brought to them.

  “I saw them! I don’t know, it seemed like it was a war. In the skies, with lights attacking each other. But I think the people here, they got off a shot from some tremendous weapon. Maybe the same thing that hit them a moment later.”

  “A shot to where?” Temple leaned in, focused.

  “Dumb question,” Orlando said. “If they launched a missile, it would go up straight, then follow the curvature of the earth as it approached its target.”

  “Let her
finish.”

  Phoebe raised a finger to the sky. “It wasn’t a missile or anything like that. It was a beam of light. So I’m guessing it went straight. The only thing I saw up there was a tiny light. Maybe it was a ship.”

  Temple was nodding, but looking at her closely.

  “…or maybe it wasn’t. It looked like a star. Or a planet. And… it was reddish-colored.”

  Orlando closed his eyes. “Mars.” He shook his head and stepped in front of Phoebe, facing Temple. “You know more about this than you’re telling us. Come on, spill it.”

  “Not here. And anyway, you need to see one more thing. Final pop quiz, if you like. Before you join us.”

  Orlando let his shoulders sag, but his fists were clenched. “You’re really pissing me off.”

  “I can live with that. Now here goes. It’s a trick that seems to work well with the other recruits. Kind of like free association. I’ll give you the target, you give me the first thing that comes to you, the first thing you see.”

  Phoebe sighed. “Sure, let’s get it over with.”

  “Okay,” Temple said, taking a step back. He lifted his face to the sun and closed his eyes. “Here’s the target: Seven-seventeen AM, central Siberia. June 30th, 1908.”

  Phoebe heard Orlando make a choking sound, but it was lost in a tremendous roar, a deafening explosion of sound and fury. She stood on a muddy hill looking down toward a river. But in a miles-long stretch of terrain, the forest was decimated: trees flattened, others blackened, the ground churned up, smoking. A huge swath cut through the wilderness.

  And then: it was as if the viewing reversed. A rumbling, which rose and rose to such horrific volume and intensity until it swallowed up the world, the trees rising, filling, turning green just after an immense light retracts into a glowing wave of energy, rippling backwards and up at an oblique angle into the sky…

  Orlando was doubled over. “Tunguska,” he whispered. “Another target Caleb should have put on the list.”