CHAPTER 7: The Present

CAMP ROWE, NORTH CAROLINA

Major Quinn had been the operations officer for Area 51 when Majestic-12 ran it. When Majestic's corruption was uncovered by Mike Turcotte and Lisa Duncan and subsequently purged, Quinn's ignorance of the illegal activities of the organization and his expertise at running the facility had kept him in that position.

Here at Camp Rowe, thirty miles west of the Fort Bragg main post, he was the linchpin for the survivors of Area 51, coordinating their message traffic, doing whatever research they required of him, and forwarding information to whoever would listen in the United States government. With the loss of Artad's and Aspasia's Shadow's guardians, he was finding the latter to be much easier. He had already passed on word of the defeat of Artad and Aspasia's Shadow. While the world was celebrating the defeat of the aliens, he was trying to keep track of the survivors in both camps.

He had a direct link to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, which kept track of electronic traffic, and Space Command, buried deep inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From the former he was monitoring the desperate attempts of Guides around the world to contact Aspasia's Shadow and the silence from their former leader. From the latter, the news was less positive. Space Command had tracked the Talon via satellite from Mount Ararat to Kazakhstan and now had it on an upward trajectory.

He was working out of an old aircraft hangar on the edge of a runway on which Special Forces used to train and from which it conducted airborne operations. The location was guarded by members of the army's elite Delta Force. The Area 51 survivors had been forced to move here after Area 51 was attacked by government forces operating under classified orders. Exactly who had issued those orders was something Quinn was still trying to track down, as every government agency he had contacted so far professed ignorance.

He'd even talked to the commander of the unit that had conducted the raid, who had given Quinn little to work with other than that the orders had the proper clearance and the unit had crippled the base and delivered Lisa Duncan to an airfield outside of New Orleans, where an Osprey aircraft waited.

Quinn understood the strangeness of the situation. He'd operated in the gray world of covert ops for a long time and knew that with the proper security and authorization clearance, one could do just about anything with no questions asked. And whoever had snatched Lisa Duncan and destroyed Area 51 obviously had had the clearance and authorization.

He turned away from his computer screen as he recognized the voice in his headset. "Quinn?"

"Yes, Major Turcotte?" "The Swarm has Duncan."

Quinn frowned as he considered that. They had assumed that a new Majestic-12 committee, a backup of the original, had snatched Duncan and destroyed the original Area 51 base. Quinn had since determined there was no indication that there was another Majestic committee, but he had assumed that one or the other sides of the alien civil war had been behind her kidnapping and the destruction of Area 51.

"I want to know where it's hiding," Turcotte continued. "What do you have so far?"

Quinn relayed the information about the airfield outside of New Orleans that he had acquired from the troops who had been ordered to attack Area 51. "I've queried every government agency now that we're back in favor, and received negative responses about any further information."

"Get me more," Turcotte ordered. "I want to know where she was taken from there. Track down the Osprey. Someone had to be piloting it."

"I'll try."

"Do better than try."

There was a short silence, then Turcotte's voice came hack over the radio. "I'm sorry about that. I know you're doing your best."

"What are you going to do?" Quinn asked.

"We need to get the mothership — and the Master Guardian — out of here. Do you have a location on the Talon that was taken from here?"

"Already in space, on a trajectory toward Mars."

"Time to target?"

"Say again?"

"How long until it gets to Mars?" Turcotte asked, reining in his impatience.

"Based on current speed and what we observed when Aspasia came here from Mars on board a Talon, I estimate a little over a day. But this one hasn't even made it into space yet."

"And how long does Kincaid estimate it will take the Airlia to finish the array?"

"He says it's impossible to estimate as everything has changed now that the mech-machines aren't functioning. It appears as if the Airlia from Cydonia are heading there to complete it by hand."

"All right," Turcotte said. "We're going to bring this mothership back to the States. Then we're going to take it to Mars. I need backup — people able to operate in that kind of environment. See what you can get us from Space Command. They must have more than the team that went up on the shuttle."

"Yes, sir —" Quinn paused as a new report flowed across his computer screen. "I think you might want to know that it appears Aspasia's Shadow booby-trapped Easter Island. They're trying to evacuate it right now. Artad apparently did the same thing to Qian-Ling — we have reports of a massive explosion in that vicinity."

"Can the fleet get all those people off?" Turcotte asked.

"They're evacuating by air right now, but it's slow. The fleet won't be offshore for another day."

MOUNT ARARAT

Turcotte watched with interest as the wound in Aspasia's Shadow's head slowly healed. The "man's" chest had begun to rise and fall within two minutes of Turcotte's fatal shot. Using climbing rope, Turcotte had securely tied Aspasia's Shadow's hands behind his back and his feet together.

As fresh skin finally closed the wound, Aspasia's Shadow's eyes flickered open, confusion reigning for a few seconds before he looked at Turcotte.

"That was foolish."

"Why?" Turcotte asked.

"I have much to offer you."

"We have the mothership, the Master Guardian, and now" — Turcotte held up a cloth-covered object — "the Grail.

So I didn't have to make a deal after all. What more can you

offer?"

"Information." "About?"

"The truth that you are so desperate to discover."

"I wouldn't believe you even if you did tell me the truth," Turcotte said. He put the Grail down and placed one hand on the pistol grip for his submachine gun. "I tell you what. There is something you can do for me right now to try to prove your sincerity. You started a destruct mechanism on Easter Island, didn't you?"

Aspasia's Shadow smiled, revealing his sharp teeth. "So you do need me."

"How long until it detonates?" "Soon."

"Within a day?" "Yes."

"How do we deactivate the device?" "Let me free and I will tell you."

Turcotte shook his head. "You are not in a position to bargain."

"I am if I have information you want."

Turcotte lifted the submachine gun. "How many times do you want to die?"

A flicker of fear crossed Aspasia's Shadow's face. "You would not do that."

"I want to know how to deactivate the destruct. Tell me."

"Only for my freedom and the mothership."

"Come with me," Turcotte said. He loosened the rope tying Aspasia's Shadow's legs. Then he tugged on the rope, and Aspasia's Shadow was forced to follow him as he headed for the Master Guardian room. When they reached the doorway,

Turcotte looked in. Yakov was communing with the guardian once more.

"Tell me how to deactivate the destruct," Turcotte said. "Only if you give me the mothership," Aspasia's Shadow said.

"No deal." Turcotte pulled the trigger, the round hitting the same spot the previous one had.

EASTER ISLAND

The plane carrying Kelly Reynolds and other refugees lifted off the runway of the international airport and clawed its way into the sky, grossly overloaded. The C2As could only hold a fraction of the thousands that had been captured and enslaved by the nanovirus. The rest waited around the edges of the runway, eyes peering into the sky, hoping for more planes to rescue them. They knew, in the way a desperate crowd always knows once a rumor begins, that time was ticking away.

Some more enterprising souls went to the shore and launched outriggers, paddling away. The rest could only stand and wait.

SPACE COMMAND, COLORADO

The message was in code with an ST-6 clearance. Captain Manning began decrypting it and began nodding before he got halfway through. He wore a black jumpsuit with his name tag sewn above the left pocket, the Budweiser insignia of the Navy SEALs above the right pocket and a unique patch on the left shoulder. The patch had a dagger up the center with a half-moon on one side and a star on the other — the insignia of the United States Space Forces.

The unit had already deployed and lost two elements in the war against the aliens — one on board the shuttle Columbia and another with Turcotte on the mission into Egypt to rescue Duncan. Manning had taken the remaining members of his fledgling force and used them to train an influx of new recruits culled from the various Special Operations forces, primarily Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs. He preferred SEALs as they were already used to working in a "weightless" environment with their water training.

Now he had orders to prepare for a third mission. Manning left the communications center with the message in his hand. They were headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base outside of Colorado Springs. The commo shack was adjacent to a large hangar that had once housed B-52 bombers, but now contained his force's primary training area.

Manning paused as he entered the hangar, noting the activity. In the center of the hangar was a large water tank, three stories high and a hundred meters in diameter. Several ramps spiraled up the side to a platform level with the top. Suspended from the ceiling, numerous metal tracks crisscrossed the space above the tank.

Manning heard one of his senior noncommissioned officers standing on the walkway yelling instructions into a radio. Manning walked over to one of the ramps and went up. The tank was full of water and inside a half dozen men in full body suits were being put through the paces by the NCO.

The men were wearing TASC suits, which stood for Tactical Articulated Space Combat suits. They were self-contained, self-breathing, and with full body armor were designed for combat operations in space. Next to actually going up into space, the tank was the best training preparation the men could get — simulated zero g and a nonbreathable medium.

The most intriguing thing about the suits was that the outside of the helmets were solid, with no visors. Images were picked up by cameras and relayed to a screen just in front of the wearer's eyes, along with tactical information. Also the arms ended in flat black plates, attached to which were various weapons that could be used in space. On the feet were miniature rockets, used to supplement the propulsion unit on the backpack, which also contained the rebreather and a sophisticated computer.

A large part of the development of the TASC suit came out of the Air Force's Pilot 2010 Program. Realizing that their jets' capabilities were growing faster than the ability of pilots to man them, the Air Force understood that it needed to approach the entire issue in a different manner. There were fighters on the drawing board that would be able to make a twenty-g turn, but pilots would pass out at half that force. Additionally, at multiple Mach speeds, a pilot's reactions at normal speed weren't quick enough to pilot the plane accurately.

The TASC suits addressed both those problems by protecting the pilot and by allowing a faster mind-action interface via a device called a SARA — Sensory Amplified Response Activator — link. Inside the helmet was a black band with microscopic probes that went directly into the brain. The link was a two-way feed of electrical current sending input from the suit's sensors to the brain and taking orders directly from the nerve centers. The suit's miniature motors would be acting even as the nerve signal was traveling through the wearer's nervous system to his muscles.

On the previous two missions, they had not used the SARA link because of fears that the system had been built on alien technology — even Manning didn't know exactly how the skunk works had developed the damn thing. He'd had his men begin training with it again, now that it appeared the aliens had been defeated and the guardian computers were off-line. The suit itself was armored, capable of sustaining a hit from a 7.62mm round.

"Bring them up, Top," Manning ordered.

The six men surfaced, their black helmets bobbing in the water. Manning knew they could hear him, as mikes on the outsides of the helmets could amplify sound if needed.

"Men, we have a mission." He held up the decoded message. "We need to be ready to go in two hours. Area of operations — Mars. It appears the aliens are building some sort of communications facility there. We will destroy that facility. That is all."

MOUNT ARARAT

Turcotte grabbed Yakov's shoulder and pulled him away from the Master Guardian. The Russian was confused for a moment as he switched from the virtual world of the guardian to the real world. "What is wrong?"

"Our friend there" — Turcotte pointed at Aspasia's Shadow, lying on the floor, the fresh blood behind his head contrasting with the pale skin that was already beginning to heal around the edge of the wound — "rigged Easter Island for destruction. There're about ten thousand people trapped there."

"What can we do?"

"Save them," Turcotte said.

"Don't we have other priorities?" Yakov asked.

Turcotte stared at the Russian. "You mean other than saving people?"

"Saving the planet?" Yakov countered.

Turcotte laughed, months of worry and strain seeming to fall from his face for a moment. "We've already done that several times." The smile disappeared. "First things first. Let's do this, then we'll worry about Mars and Artad and the Swarm and every other Tom, Dick, and Harry who threaten us." He headed for the main corridor. "Come on. Let's get this thing moving." As he entered the corridor, he broke into a dead sprint.