Area 51: The Reply-2 (14 page)

"Maybe, maybe, maybe," Kelly repeated. She was pacing back and forth, the plywood floor squeaking under her boots. "Why don't we stick with the facts?"

"Which ones?" Turcotte asked. "If any of the rebel Airlia are still around somewhere, what if they're coming awake also? What if these two sides pick up where they left off five centuries ago? What if this Che Lu professor has stumbled onto something significant and dangerous? Based on this marker we found in the Rift Valley, there's a good chance whatever she's onto is linked to the ruby sphere we found, which seems to be linked to the mothership, according to what Peter just translated."

"I don't know what is in China," Nabinger said. "But it could help me decipher the Airlia Earth coordinate system if I can pinpoint the location." He had an atlas in his hand and was searching through it. "All Che Lu said was she found some high runes and she was going into the ancient Chinese tomb of Qian-Ling to investigate further. I've heard of Qian-Ling." He proceeded to briefly fill them in on the mountain tomb's background.

"The runes she found could be a whole lot of nothing or just copied religious text, as is much of

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what is in the Great Pyramid. They could . . ." He paused, his finger moving over the glossy page that showed a map of China. "Holy shit!" he exclaimed. He spun around on the stool and reached into his battered leather backpack and pulled out the spiral notepad with his high rune notes.

"What is it?" Turcotte asked.

Nabinger was thumbing through the pages of his notebook, the paper filled with hand-drawn high rune symbols. "You aren't going to believe it. I don't believe it myself."

"What?" Lisa Duncan and the others crowded around.

Nabinger stopped turning pages. He looked from the map to the paper several times, then up at the others. "It's been right there all this time and I never saw it. Hell, I never looked. And even if I had looked I probably would—"

"What was right there?" Turcotte was losing patience.

"The word," Nabinger said.

"Word?" Duncan repeated.

"The symbol." Nabinger tapped the map. "It's been there for centuries." His eyes were focused on something outside of the tent in his mind's eye. "It makes sense, though. We would have been able to see it only in the last fifty years or so since we went into space. And then no one would have thought to look because we didn't know about the high rune language. Brilliant! Simply brilliant."

Turcotte looked at the others in the room, then back at the archaeologist.

"What is so brilliant? What symbol?"

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"This." Nabinger's finger was resting on a section of the map.

The others peered. "I don't get it," Turcotte said. "China? That town near your finger? What?"

"No," Nabinger said. "The Wall. The Great Wall. Look at this section here in Western China, north of the city of Lanzhou." He looked at the others. "The Great Wall is the only manmade structure that can currently be seen from space with the naked eye."

"What about it?" Turcotte asked, although he was beginning to get the idea and the magnitude of it stunned him.

Keeping his finger in place, Nabinger used his free hand to pull his notebook next to the map. "Look at the Wall here and look at that symbol."

They all saw it right away. The two were identical.

"It can't be. . . ." Turcotte began, but his voice trailed off. There was no denying it. A three-hundred-mile section of the Great Wall of China had been built in the form of a high rune symbol to be seen from space.

"What does the symbol mean?" Turcotte asked.

"As near as I have been able to translate," Nabinger said, "that is the Airlia high rune symbol for HELP."

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After much discussion Che Lu decided to continue along the corridor past where the image had appeared. One of the students, more eager than the rest, took the lead. The young man was ten meters farther down the tunnel when suddenly there was a bright flash of light. Che Lu stopped, her eyes momentarily blinded. When she opened them and could see again by the dim glows of wavering flashlights, she gasped. The student had been neatly cut in half, the top half of his body lying just behind his legs, blood still gushing forth from a heart that had just a few more beats left in it, the eyes in the head blinking, then going dull and dead.

As one of the girls screamed, Che Lu held up her hand. "No one move!" Edging forward, she approached the body. Now she could see the tiniest of protuberances from the wall at waist height. She reached down and pulled the dead student's hat off. She tossed it by the bump and another

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beam of fierce light flashed, cutting the hat as it flew through.

"Ah," Che Lu said. Even as she pondered the problem, there was a deep, dull, thud reverberating down the tunnel from behind.

"The doors!" Ki cried out. He turned and ran back the way they had come. In a minute he was back, fear playing across his young features. "The doors are shut.

I can hear soldiers on the other side. We are trapped!"

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Help?" Lisa Duncan had Nabinger's notebook in her hand. "I don't get it."

Everyone looked up as a distant peal of thunder rumbled through the tent. The storm wasn't showing any signs of abating soon.

"I don't either," Nabinger said, "but that's what it says. It makes sense that the Airlia would use the Wall if they were in China. They did the same thing in Egypt with the Sphinx and the pyramids."

"Wait a second," Turcotte said. "What are you talking about there? I didn't know there was any message in the way the pyramids were built. You told me that the flat surface of the pyramids, when they were covered with their original layer of white limestone, could send out an immense radar image to outer space, but not that there was a message in that image."

Nabinger shook his head. "No, not in the radar image, it's in the ground image when you're near them. Maybe it was sort of like a secret symbol, known only to the Airlia. But archaeologists have

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long known, even before we knew about the lower chamber and the high runes, that the way the two largest pyramids are positioned, if you stand to the right of the Sphinx and line all three objects up, you get a hieroglyphic symbol with the Sphinx's head between the two pyramids." He sketched on his pad, drawing two pyramids and a rough outline of the Sphinx's head between them, with the ground a flat line at the bottom.

Turcotte was more interested in the map of China and getting the big picture before he tried to figure out pieces and parts. "Jesus, look at this thing. How long did it take to build this Wall?"

Kelly had her laptop open and was accessing a CD-ROM she had put in. "I've got it here. Let's see. The Great Wall is over twenty-four hundred kilometers long.

That's about fifteen hundred miles. It officially became the Great Wall in the third century B.C. when Emperor Shi Huangdi of the Ch'in dynasty linked together separate walls that had been built earlier. Shi was the first emperor to unite China."

Kelly looked from the computer to the map. "This section that makes the symbol, it's mostly part of those first walls, so it was built at a much earlier time."

"So it could have been done back when the rebels and Aspasia's people were fighting?" Turcotte asked.

"Yes."

"But such a thing would take hundreds of years to build, wouldn't it?"

Turcotte asked.

Kelly shook her head. "No. According to what I have here, the greater part of the Wall was built in less than ten years. Millions of peasants were used 137

to build it and the bodies of those who died in the labor were made part of the Wall. So based on that, this section could have been built in a relatively short period of time if there was a strong leader who wanted it done. Remember, China has never lacked for bodies to do manual labor such as this."

Turcotte leaned forward to look at the map more closely, and in doing so brushed against Lisa Duncan. She didn't move away, but leaned forward with him to check the map.

"You know," Turcotte said, "this part of the Wall doesn't really seem to follow a natural defensive line. You have this river here, which would have supplemented the Wall's defenses, yet the Wall doesn't follow it. You're right.

This was built to make that high rune symbol visible from space, not to form the best defensive perimeter possible given the terrain. How the hell did the rebel Airlia get the Chinese to build it?"

"How'd they get the Egyptians to build the pyramids?" Nabinger asked in turn.

"Aspasia can give us the answers," Kelly Reynolds said from her location on the other side of the tent, seated on the edge of a cot.

"You know," Turcotte said, "for all his great effort to keep our development from being influenced by their presence, Aspasia did a pretty crappy job."

Something occurred to him. "Maybe they got those people to build those things the same way they got General Gullick and Majestic-12 to attempt to fly the mothership. By taking over their minds using guardians!"

Turcotte tapped his finger on the map. "That

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would mean there's another guardian here in Qian-Ling."

There was a momentary silence in the tent.

"What I want to know," Lisa Duncan finally said, "is why the rebels would want to transmit HELP in such a manner to someone coming in from space."

"That goes with something that's been bugging me for a while," Nabinger said.

"We determined after learning that the Airlia had hidden the nuclear weapon in the Great Pyramid that the Pyramid itself must have been built as a space beacon. The thing that bothered me about that was why would the rebels want to signal into space? Who were they signaling to with the Great Pyramid?"

"And who," Duncan said, "were they asking for help from with the Great Wall?"

She walked over to the coffeepot set on a field table and poured herself a cup.

She held up an empty cup to Turcotte and he nodded.

"Let's take it logically," Turcotte said. "The Pyramid was to get attention.

The symbol in the Great Wall was to send a message after they got attention.

That's the way I would have done it," he said.

"Done what?" Duncan asked as she handed him the coffee.

"Sent a message to outer space with the technology and manpower present on the Earth at the time if I'd lost my primary means of communication," Turcotte said.

"In Special Forces one of the first things we learn in training is that you always have to have a way to communicate back to home base. A primary, a backup, an emergency, and a

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pull-it-out-your-ass way. I think this symbol built into the Great Wall was a pull-it-out-your-ass."

"Hold on here," Duncan said. "These aliens were rebels, outlaws. Aspasia defeated them, destroyed their base at Atlantis, and scattered them across the face of the planet. I get back to my question of who were they trying to signal to? You'd think rebels would want to lay low."

"The Kortad?" Nabinger suggested. "Maybe they just weren't rebels. Maybe they were traitors too."

"And were the people who built this part of the Great Wall the same ones who put the Ruby Sphere in the Great Rift Valley?" Turcotte asked. "Is that the China connection?"

"I'd say so," Duncan said. "It makes sense."

"You people are shooting in the dark," Reynolds called out, but the others ignored her.

"You know," Nabinger said hesitatingly, "I got some confusing stuff out of the guardian just before it cut contact. I didn't tell UNAOC because I didn't know if what I saw was a recording of reality or something the computer was making up."

"What did you see?" Turcotte asked.

Nabinger rubbed his temples. "I think it might have been the destruction of Atlantis by the mothership. It was very confusing."

"Aspasia can clear all this up when he wakes up and comes back to Earth,"

Kelly said. "We'll just have to wait."

"Waiting gives away initiative," Turcotte said in a low voice.

"What?" Kelly snapped at him.

"I said waiting gives away the initiative," Turcotte said so that everyone in the tent could

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hear. "It's a maxim of combat. Victory usually goes to the side that maintains the initiative."

"Oh, God!" Kelly exclaimed. "We're not at war."

"I don't know what the situation is," Turcotte said. "I don't know what's going on. All I know is we've gotten two messages from some damn machine on Mars and everyone's getting ready like it's the second coming of Christ. Well, I for one would like to find out a bit more about what the truth is while we're waiting for Aspasia to awaken or thaw out or whatever the hell he's doing up there."

"I would too," Lisa Duncan said. She held up her hands as Reynolds angrily stood up. "Let's slow down a second here. What else did you see about Atlantis, Professor?"

Nabinger grimaced. "People dying. Ships sailing away, trying to escape. That's why I think the dif-fusionist theory is. . . ." He paused as he suddenly remembered. "Ships. Spaceships. Seven of them. Not bouncers, but bigger. They flew away just before the mothership arrived."

"Flew where?" Turcotte asked.

"Straight up."

"The rebels escaping," Duncan summarized.

"Yes. That must be so," Nabinger agreed.

"So they did get away!" Turcotte was looking at the map of China again. He stabbed his finger down on the map. "I bet they went here." He looked up. "And if Aspasia and his people are awakening, who's to say the rebels aren't also?

"And," Turcotte continued, "I think the only way we're gonna find out more is to go to China, get inside this damn tomb, and take a look at 141

what's written there. Find the guardian computer, if there is one there. If it was the rebels who did this part of the Wall, then maybe we need to know about it as soon as possible and not wait on Aspasia. After all, his guardian computer here on Earth seemed concerned enough about this to send out a foo fighter recon."

"Going there is easier said than done," Duncan replied. "China's in a lot of turmoil right now. From what I understand, Taiwan is doing considerable covert pushing in the midst of all this to try and overthrow the regime in Beijing.