“Yes, sir.”
“Assume control.”
Global Hawk had been developed by Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical and Raytheon E-Systems to fit a very specific requirement proposed by the Department of Defense. The need was for what was called in military procurement jargon a HAE UAV: high altitude endurance, unmanned aerial vehicle.
It was shaped like the famous U-2 spy plane, except slightly smaller and having no need for the cockpit since it was flown remotely by a pilot or computer on the ground. Long black wings stretched almost 120 feet, with a thin body, all painted flat black. A pod in the bottom held the imaging gear, controlled by a central computer. A jet engine gave the aircraft power.
Global Hawk was currently at sixty thousand feet and descending rapidly. Speed was relatively slow, about 120 knots. The long, wide wings gave the aircraft plenty of lift and the small jet engine had to put out little thrust to keep the vehicle moving. It had been launched from Edwards Air Force Base in California the previous day and had been controlled via satellite link from Edwards, directed to fly toward Easter Island.
As it got closer to Easter Island, the satellite link with Edwards was cut and it entered a glide path that had been determined by the computer. The jet engine cut off and it swooped down, heading for the dark gray clouds below and the island hidden underneath them.
“See those four lines that center up?” The officer who had answered Poldan inclined his head at the screen. “That’s the glide path.”
As far as Duncan could tell, the lines did little good, as the entire screen was filled with gray cloud. The pilot was sitting in a padded chair, surrounded by flight instrumentation and computer screens. Directly in front of him, a joystick, such as Duncan remembered her son using for computer games, rested on a small platform. The pilot’s right hand was wrapped around the stick.
“I’m ready to fly it by keeping the small red figure that represents Global Hawk centered on those lines, which are projected by the computer using a satellite uplink to a global positioning satellite.” He reached forward and flipped a switch with his free hand. The gray was gone. A black bubble on a blue field filled the screen. “We’re looking forward now from the Global Hawk using a thermal imager. That’s the shield surrounding the island. The blue is the ocean surface outside of the shield.”
The image shuddered. “Turbulence,” the pilot explained, his hand hovering over the controls. “Four minutes to shield.”
He hit a red button on his console. “Exit program is loaded and ready to run.” He hit the button again. “Computer is off and timer is set. I have complete control by radio link.”
The black bubble got closer. The guardian had made the shield opaque after the last failed conventional attack by Admiral Poldan’s fleet. Up to that point, it had been invisible. The best guess UNAOC scientists had been able to come up with was that the field that comprised the shield was similar to the electromagnetic one used by the bouncers. The fact that in all the years Majestic had worked on the electromagnetic drives of those craft not a single clue as to how they actually worked had been discovered told Duncan that the key to the shield would not suddenly reveal itself.
The pilot flipped four switches one right after the other. “I’m powering down nonessential systems,” he explained. “There are only two things still on… the forward heat imager, which we’re watching, and my radio link.
“One minute out,” the pilot said. “Going off-line completely.” He hit the red button one last time. Then he let go of the controls. “Global Hawk is on a glide path that will take it through the shield. Prior to takeoff from Edwards, the central computer was shielded and a special program loaded. When I cut all links to the UAV, the central computer will go to sleep, which should allow it to pass through the shield, as the Airlia automated equipment seems to respond only to electric signals. It will wake up once inside, take the needed images, then shut down once more on the way out.”
“We hope that’s the way it works,” Duncan said.
The pilot shrugged. “It’s the best plan we have, given what we know about Airlia technology.”
Duncan wasn’t too sure. The foo fighters had been taken out that way, using “dumb” weapons that gave off no EM signal, but she had a feeling the guardian was learning and adapting. Admiral Poldan had used “dumb” bombs to strike at the island during the last attack, and the shield had destroyed every one of them, unlike their success against the foo fighters. The hope of the UNAOC scientists was that the guardian… if it picked up Global Hawk… would see that the unmanned plane carried no weapons and therefore would not consider it a threat.
The pilot checked the time. “Entering shield.”
The microbug was no bigger than a hornet. The microrobots, directed by the guardian, had built it from parts cannibalized from one of the FM radios left by the UNAOC scientists.
The microbug flitted through the tunnel the humans had drilled from the surface into the guardian chamber. It was shaped like an elongated teardrop, with a tiny electromagnetic gravity drive, no bigger than the flat end of a thumbtack, giving it power and the ability to fly.
The microbug sped into the sky, toward the object that had just been allowed through the shield. It easily caught up to the Global Hawk and raced alongside. Global Hawk was fifteen hundred feet over Easter Island, moving at eighty knots.
The microbug slid in through an air duct in the front of the aircraft. It immediately noted the imagers now taking pictures and readings. It flew down a wiring conduit straight to the aircraft’s master computer.
A miniature door on the side of the microbug slid open and a wire, no thicker than the finest of threads, punched directly into the computer’s main processor.
The Global Hawk banked and headed for a landing on the main airstrip on Easter Island. Like a group of ants awaiting a picnic basket, a small army of microrobots was at the edge of the runway.
Lisa Duncan looked pointedly at the clock.
The pilot slumped back in his seat. “We’re past due,” he admitted. “But it went in, we know that.”
Admiral Poldan pointed forward. “We need to nuke that damn place. Nothing but a bunch of old statues anyway.”
“And Kelly Reynolds,” Duncan noted.
“Hell, she’s a traitor,” Poldan snarled.
“A lot of people think differently,” Duncan said.
“Who gives a damn what a lot of people think?” Poldan asked.
“That’s supposedly what democracy is all about,” Duncan dryly noted. “Kelly helped uncover the secret of Area 51, Admiral. We owe her.”
Poldan stabbed a finger toward Easter Island. “Tell it to that thing.”
Lisa Duncan checked the clock once more. Forty hours before Lexina’s deadline was up. She left the communications shack.
“What is it?” Lago asked.
It had taken the two of them several hours to completely clear the sides of the stone. It was ten feet long by four wide. The edges were exact, the surfaces perfectly smooth except where there was high rune writing. Mualama doubted that any modern stonemason could do such a good job, even using lasers to cut the markings.
Mualama stepped back, wiping a hand across his sweaty brow, not caring that it left a streak of mud. “You were the student,” he said. “The first thing you must consider at a dig is how old you think the site is.”
Lago frowned. “It’s very strange. From the depth, given the data you gave me on this area, it should be several thousand years old. But… ”