Despite their money, these people worried him because they believed the aliens held the key to everything good. Halls clutched his side as a spike of pain cut through him.
“Blinking ulcers,” he muttered.
“The guardian can cure your problem,” a voice behind him startled him. Halls turned. The Guide Parker had come onto the bridge.
“From the news I’m picking up, the guardian isn’t doing much of anything.”
“That is because UNAOC forced it to protect itself.” Parker walked up next to the captain and stared out the glass. “Wouldn’t you retreat and protect yourself if you were attacked?”
Halls had no desire to get into an argument.
“Whatever pain you feel, whatever trouble you have in your life, the guardian will take care of it,” Parker continued. “It holds all knowledge.”
“How do you propose to get ahold of it?” Halls asked. “It don’t seem to be talking to anybody.”
“It is talking to Kelly Reynolds, and she will give us safe passage.”
“They’re not sure that message was really from her,” Halls noted.
“Are you an isolationist?” Parker asked. “Afraid to step out of your cave?”
“I’m just a ship’s captain,” Halls replied.
“That’s not going to work.” Parker’s gray eyes focused on the captain, and he squirmed under the scrutiny.
“I mind my own business,” Halls said.
“You can’t.” Parker said it without raising his voice, but the words carried weight. “No human can. This will reach into every corner of the planet. No one is unaffected by what is happening. It is time for the human race to move forward,” Parker said, his voice almost breaking with emotion. “To gain a place in the stars.”
“But to take your line of thinking a step further,” Halls said, “what if we go out of the cave and there are lions and tigers and bears?”
“If we go with the aid of the guardian and the Airlia, we will not have to worry about those things you fear.”
“But,” Captain Halls said, “what if the very things you look to for aid are the very things we should be afraid of?”
“Disbeliever!” Parker hissed.
Captain Halls looked out the forward glass of his bridge to the storm-tossed ocean. He wondered what lay ahead on Easter Island.
But Parker wasn’t done. “Every human will have to choose soon. You will either be for or against. There will be no hiding.” Parker raised his hand toward the heavens. “You will be either a believer or a heretic. And if you are a heretic, you will burn as they burned in the past!”
“There’s a message for you.” The copilot of the bouncer held out a headset. They were thirty minutes out from Task Force 78 and Easter Island, and Duncan could see the west coast of the United States rapidly approaching. They really had no idea what the fastest speed a bouncer could achieve. Right now they were moving at over five thousand miles an hour, fast enough for Duncan and the pilots, as it almost outstripped the ability of their radar to see ahead of them and give them time to react.
Duncan put the headset on. “Yes?”
“This is Major Quinn. I’ve got a strange report that was forwarded to us via the Pentagon.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s a Professor Mualama who claims to have discovered an Airlia artifact in Tanzania.”
Duncan leaned forward, hands over the headset so she could hear clearly. “What kind of artifact?”
“It wasn’t specified. The person who sent it mentioned Professor Nabinger.” Nabinger. Duncan remembered the archaeologist who had been with Turcotte and Kelly Reynolds and von Seeckt in the attempt to stop Majestic-12.
Duncan pulled up the mouthpiece, leaned forward, and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. “Change in course. Tanzania.”
The pilot nodded, already used to the strange requests and destinations he had shuttled Duncan and the other members of her team.
Duncan pulled the mouthpiece back down. “Who knows about this?”
“It was relayed through the Pentagon intelligence channels,” Quinn said. “So everybody and their grandmother.”
Duncan remembered both her friend at USAMRIID being killed and the betrayal within the SEAL team on one of the shuttles. There was no doubt the military was thoroughly infiltrated by all three groups… The Ones Who Wait, The Mission/Guides, and the Watchers. She wondered which of those she was racing to Tanzania right now. The only advantage she had was the speed of the bouncer. “Anything from Turcotte?”
“Nothing.”
“Keep me apprised of any changes. Out.” She took off the headset. “A little faster if you please, Major Lewis,” she ordered the pilot. The southwestern United States flashed beneath them in a blur and they were over the Gulf of Mexico.
CHAPTER 11
The High Plains that ever so gradually sloped up to the Rocky Mountains contained more than just hundreds of miles of rolling grasslands. Buried into the rocky soil, hundreds of missile silos held the remnants of one of the three legs of America’s nuclear triad that had maintained the status quo of mutually assured destruction for decades.
Recent treaties with the other major nuclear powers had downgraded the alert status of the ICBMs nestled in the silos and caused their onboard targeting systems to be directed away from their war targets in Russia and China and left toward what were called Broad Ocean Areas… open spaces of ocean where a launch by mistake would cause the least possible destruction.
In the remote eastern Montana countryside, one of those missiles had been specially modified not to target a location on the surface of the planet but to break the bounds of gravity and go into space with its nuclear payload. This had been done as part of an experimental program designed to come up with ways to try to stop or deflect an incoming asteroid. Whether such a missile would work or not was a matter of debate among the scientists working on the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program.
Today, however, as the clock ticked down on Lexina’s threat, the crew manning the Launch Control Center (LCC) for this missile, code-named Interdictor, were programming it with space coordinates for a different mission.
The surface entrance to the LCC was set in the middle of an open grassy space, about the size of a football field, surrounded on all sides by a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. No Trespassing signs were hung every ten feet on the fence. The signs also informed the curious that the use of deadly force was authorized against intruders. Video cameras, remote-controlled machine guns, a satellite dish, and a small radar dish were on the roof of the small entrance building, the latter two pointing at the cloudless sky.
A hundred and fifty feet underground, the two members of the LCC crew were dressed in black one-piece flight suits. On their right shoulders they wore a patch showing Earth in the center with a lightning bolt coming off the surface into space. A Velcro tag on their chest gave their name, rank, and unit. Captain Linton was a skinny, dark-haired man. He sported Air Force-issue, black-framed, thick-lensed glasses. The LCC commander was Major Louise Greene, a tall blonde with a no-nonsense attitude befitting her position.
Rows of machinery lined the forty-by-forty room. There was a gray tile floor, and the walls were painted dull gray up to three feet, then Air Force blue to the ceiling. Twelve years before, when Greene started in missiles, the LCCs had been painted colors that psychologists had determined would be conducive to the crew’s mental health during their extended tours of duty. That policy had been rescinded because of budget cutbacks and a change in command that had brought in a no-frills policy.