PROLOGUE: From the Past to the Present

EARTH

Area 51 is ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas, in the middle of nowhere on the way to nowhere, established on land that held no value other than its isolation and what had been hidden there years ago. Numerous mountains surrounded the dry lake bed; land the US government had gobbled up to make the location secure.

During World War II, in a cavern inside Groom Mountain, a massive alien spaceship had been discovered; the mother-ship. Not only had the mothership been discovered there, but also directions to the location of nine smaller atmospheric craft, nicknamed bouncers by the test pilots who subsequently learned to fly them. Test flights of bouncers over the years after World War II had led to reports of alien sightings and fueled speculation among the general public about what was hidden at the base in the Nevada desert. The speculation was mostly right, but grossly underestimated the reality.

From the very beginning, the existence of Area 51 had been classified at a higher level than anything had ever been in the United States: A committee — Majestic-12 — had been immediately established to oversee the alien artifacts and granted powers by a presidential decree that allowed it to do as it pleased. For over fifty years Majestic kept the discovery secret from foreign nations and American citizens alike as it tried to find out who had put the ship there and why.

Unfortunately, Majestic hadn't been able to discover the truth about the mothership or the aliens: that Earth had been visited by aliens over ten thousand years ago who had headquartered themselves on a large island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — the legendary Atlantis. And that when other aliens of the same species, the Airlia, had arrived thousands of years later, there was civil war among them.

The initial group of aliens had been led by Aspasia; the second wave by Artad. The battling resulted in the destruction of Atlantis and a tenuous truce. Aspasia was banished to an Airlia base underneath the surface of Mars at Cydonia where human astronomers had long been intrigued by anomalies on the surface. The two primary sites were nicknamed the Face and the Fort based on the observed shapes. Artad and his followers went to China, underneath the massive tomb of Qian-Ling, and like Aspasia and his people, went into suspended animation.

Why the aliens had fought among themselves remained a mystery. During the Third World War, both sides had issued proclamations to the United Nations. Each claimed it had been sent to Earth to protect mankind from an interstellar threat by another alien race called the Swarm. And each claimed that the other side had tried to withdraw from this task and hide on Earth, ruling mankind as Gods.

Despite the Atlantis Truce, each side had continued a subversive war throughout the millennia on Earth. Aspasia's side was represented by the Mission, led by a continually regenerated human known as Aspasia's Shadow, who passed Aspasia's memories and personality through succeeding generations via the ka, a memory device that could be updated much like a computer hard drive. Artad's side was represented by the Ones Who Wait, Airlia-Human clones, and Shadows of Artad, such as King Arthur and ShiHuangdi, the first emperor of China.

Throughout human history both groups fought covertly, using humans as pawns in their battles. The tenuous truce began to unravel when a guardian computer was discovered at a dig at Temiltepec in South America by Majestic-12 and brought back to Area 51's secret sister base at Dulce, New Mexico. The guardians were small golden pyramids that had been secreted around the world by the Airlia. When a guardian came in contact with a human it initiated a direct mind-computer interface through which the guardian would take control and turn the person into a Guide, who would do as the computer programmed him or her to. The members of Majestic were corrupted in this manner, prompting Presidential Science Adviser Lisa Duncan to send a covert operative named Mike Turcotte to infiltrate Area 51 and discover what was going on.

Turcotte had learned that Majestic was preparing to fly the mothership on programmed orders from the guardian, most likely to go to Mars and pick up Aspasia and his followers. He also found information on Easter Island that indicated that initiating the mothership's interstellar engine would attract the attention of the Swarm and bring destruction to Earth. Turcotte foiled that plan and all-out civil war had once more erupted between the two Airlia sides, the human race caught between them, resulting in the Earth's Third World War.

Prior to the war, Turcotte and the others had discovered much, but they still didn't know the full extent of this alien interference in human history. What they did know were just terrifying glimpses into a perverted but true history of mankind. They'd learned about the clash between Arthur (Artad's Shadow) and Mordred (Aspasia's Shadow) in early England; the development and spread of the Black Death in the Middle Ages by Artad's followers; the rise of the SS in Nazi Germany, which was manipulated by Aspasia's Shadow; the invention of the atomic bomb by the Americans prompted by their study of a similar Airlia weapon discovered underneath the Great Pyramid of Giza in the early days of World War II; and many other events throughout history. All of these were the result of efforts by one side or the other to gain the upper hand in the Airlia civil war.

Turcotte and the others had also learned that some of the human survivors of Atlantis had formed a group to monitor the aliens. Known as Watchers, they were former priests who had once worshipped the Airlia as gods, and subsequently tried to monitor their conflict over the millennia.

Turcotte had killed Aspasia and destroyed his fleet coming from Mars, but Aspasia's Shadow had secreted himself on Easter Island with the Grail in his possession and a burgeoning military force. Aspasia's Shadow had used a nanovirus and nanotechnology to capture most of the American fleet in the Pacific, invade Hawaii and threaten the West Coast of the United States. And in China, Artad had been awoken by the Ones Who Wait. He had allied with the Chinese government and supported them in their invasions of both Taiwan and South Korea.

Both sides' efforts had fallen apart when the Area 51 team Turcotte led gained control of the Master Guardian computer and its key, Excalibur, and shut down the alien computers. Artad and Aspasia's Shadow abandoned their offensives on Earth.

The Third World War had been brief, but what it lacked in length it made up for in savagery and devastation.

Seoul, South Korea, was a ghost town, having been struck by both Chinese nerve agents and American nuclear weapons. The best estimate was at least three million dead and four times that displaced.

Half of Taiwan had been scorched by a nuclear blast in a desperate attempt to stop the invading mainland forces supported by Artad. Scattered fighting was still raging as

Taiwanese troops sought out and destroyed remnants of the invading forces. At least two million had died in fighting on that island.

Muslims in western China were rising in revolt, seeing their opportunity as Beijing's backing of the alien Artad had backfired. That battle was still raging.

In the Pacific, the US Navy's Task Force Eighty, centered on the super-carrier Kennedy, was linking up with Task Forces Seventy-eight and Seventy-nine. The latter two had been released from alien control and their crews once more had free will, as Aspasia's Shadow's nanovirus had been rendered inert without input from the Guardian computer. The US once again ruled supreme in that part of the world.

Iran and Iraq were still fighting, and other Middle Eastern countries continued to stand on the edge of war as diplomats desperately tried to avert disaster. Israel had its nuclear arsenal fully deployed for the first time in history and it was only that threat that kept the surrounding Arab nations from invading.

Still, the world was slowly backing away from the precipice of complete disaster and the two alien sides were fleeing.

With the aliens and their followers defeated, the Third World War was officially over, although the world was far from peace.

The toll: at least twelve million dead with twice that many wounded and countless more displaced from their homes.

If the First World War had started with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Second World War with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland (although many would argue that the Second was actually begun with the end of the First and the Treaty of Versailles), then the Third World War had begun at a remote desert site in the United States called Area 51, with the discovery of an alien mothership by the United States government. That event started a low flame boiling underneath an uneasy truce that had spanned millennia. It took over fifty years for the lid to blow off, but in terms of millennia, that was a relatively short period of time.

Unfortunately, while the Third World War was over, the First Interplanetary War for Earth was looming as a very real possibility, a fact known only to a select few. And this danger was not currently known by the man who had retrieved Excalibur, the key to the Master Guardian, from its hiding place near the top of Mount Everest, and who now sat there, unconscious, slowly freezing to death.