Kelly Reynolds had originally been drawn into the Area 51 mystery because of the investigation of her fellow reporter, Johnny Simmons. His death at the hand of the Majestic-12 committee that ran Area 51 and its sister bio-research facility at Dulce, New Mexico, had destroyed her professional detachment. She had believed that mankind’s best hope lay in communicating with the aliens… and the best way to do that had been the guardian computer. But since coming down here just before Turcotte destroyed the Airlia fleet, she had been caught in the same field that had changed the members of Majestic-12.
The guardian computer under Rano Kau was now the centerpiece of a bizarre structure of which Kelly Reynolds’s body was just one part. Metal arms reached out of the side of the pyramid, making machines out of parts cannibalized from the material UNAOC had left behind.
All around the guardian, microrobots raced about like oversized mechanical ants. A line of microrobots went up to the surface through the tunnel UNAOC had drilled. There were several types of microrobots. The carriers, three inches long, had six metal legs, and two arms for grasping and holding that could reach forward, then rotate back and hold whatever they picked up on their backs. The makers, now six inches long, had four legs and four arms. The arms were different on each, depending on what function they served in the production line making more of their own kind, each generation smaller than the one before it.
Already the microrobots had succeeded in digging a hole in the floor of the cavern to a plasma vent two miles deep from which the guardian drew more power. The fusion plant left by Aspasia to power the guardian was insufficient for the tasks now at hand.
All of the abandoned UNAOC computers were now hardwired into the guardian. Across the monitors information flashed, faster than a human eye could follow, as the alien computer sorted through what it had learned from its foray into the human world via the Interlink/ Internet. The guardian also maintained its link to Mars, to its sister guardian deep under the surface of the red planet and the alien hands that controlled that computer.
Deep inside Kelly’s mind there was a small place, the center of her self that still existed. While the guardian experimented on her, drew on her memories and knowledge to supplement its database, Kelly was able to pick up visions from the guardian, like feedback on a loop. Peter Nabinger had made “first contact” with this guardian and been fed a vision of how Aspasia had been the savior of mankind. Then Nabinger had made contact with the guardian under Qian-Ling and been given the opposite vision. But this guardian had no need to “feed” anything in particular to Kelly Reynolds. The visions she saw were inadvertent blips on the stream of data the guardian was constantly evaluating, processing, storing, moving about,
She’d already “seen” the movement of the moai from the quarry on the flanks of Rano Raraku volcano where they were carved, to their position on the coastal platforms. And she understood one mystery that had plagued westerners in the centuries following the discovery of the island… why the statues were carved and placed there. She now knew they were warnings by the people who had inhabited Easter Island against others landing on their island, warning them of the presence of the Airlia artifacts.
The warning had failed and other people had come. Trekking down from the city of Tiahuanaco in the high mountains of South America to the Pacific Coast, these others set sail in reed boats to the west, seeking to band together to fight the guardians… one of which was hidden deep under a pyramid in the center of their city. It was an ill-fated trip. The guardians, through the power of The Mission, hit both Easter Island and the Aymara people of Tiahuanaco with a devastating plague that effectively destroyed the civilizations at both locales.
Now she was seeing something new from the guardian’s memory, a vision stunning in its size and realism:
The pyramids of the Giza Plateau gleamed in the early-morning light, the rising sun reflecting off the polished limestone casings. Kelly had been to Egypt and seen the current state of the pyramids, but there was no comparing the present weathered, stripped hulks to these beautifully crafted masterpieces.
Dazzled by the perfectly smooth sides of the pyramids, it took Kelly a little while to notice other startling differences from the relics she had personally witnessed to what she was “seeing” now.
At the very top of the Great Pyramid a capstone added thirty-one feet, bringing it over five hundred feet high above the surrounding sands. The capstone itself was unique. Not made of limestone, it was of a black metal. The very top… about four feet on each side, ending in an exact point… was a glowing, dark red and reminded Kelly of the ruby sphere that Turcotte and Duncan had recovered in a cavern in the Great Rift in Africa.
She tried to sort through her memories, feeling the intrusion of the guardian. Nabinger had postulated that the smooth, flat sides of the Great Pyramid had been designed to give a significant radar signature into space. But the small red pyramid at the top suggested something else.
She saw something else that was different. The Great Sphinx.
It was all black, with burning red eyes. Crouched on the desert floor in front of the three shining pyramids on the Giza Plateau like… A bolt of pain seared through Kelly’s mind, shattering the vision.
Kelly’s body vibrated against the side of the guardian, spasming from the pain. The only part that didn’t move was the metal probe into the base of her skull, the source of the agony.
After a minute the spasming subsided, her body slumped like a rag doll, the brain retreating into the deep inner core and hiding, no longer seeking out images.
Major Quinn took the cigarette Larry Kincaid offered and slumped down in one of the leather chairs around the Area 51 conference table. He noted the photos spread out in front of the scientist. “What do you have?”
“Imagery the Department of Defense just took of Stratzyda using a KH-14 spy satellite.” He handed Quinn one of the pictures.
Stratzyda was a long black cylinder drifting against a backdrop of stars. The hammer-and-sickle insignia painted in red on the side of the long cylinder was a throwback to a time when the world stood on the edge of destruction by divisive human hands.
“Where is it?” Quinn asked.
“A free polar orbit.”
“And it’s been up there for years and we never did anything about it?”
“First,” Kincaid said, “the Russians said it was a test platform in preparation for launching Mir. The intelligence guys might have suspected something, but they couldn’t be sure. Then the Russians said it was no longer functional after a year or so. What did you want us to do? Go up and park a shuttle next to it and check it out? You know how many things are in orbit? Or would you have preferred we shoot it down? That would have been illegal and started a war in space and probably on Earth, too.”
“Will the warheads still work?” Quinn asked.
“Some have probably degraded and are no longer functional, but I suspect more than half will still detonate upon deployment. Knowing the Russians, they built the simplest… and dirtiest… possible weapon with very few parts to break down. And it’s in the vacuum of space.”
“What exactly is a cobalt bomb?”
“It’s a nuke that has a thick cobalt metal blanket wrapped around the core. The cobalt is used to capture the fusion neutrons to maximize the fallout hazard from the weapon… the nuke guys call this ‘salting’ the bomb. Instead of generating additional explosive force from fast fission of the U-238, the cobalt is transmuted into Co-60… natural cobalt consists entirely of Co-59. Cobalt 60 has a half-life of five point two six years and produces energetic, very penetrating gamma rays.” Kincaid paused to see if Quinn was following this technical explanation before he continued.