“At least they have no backup ships,” Kincaid muttered.
The “Face” on Mars, a massive structure two and a half kilometers long by two kilometers wide, and over four hundred meters high, appeared next.
“I wonder what that thing is,” Kincaid said.
“We’ve taken quite a few shots of the so-called Face,” Forrester said. “To those pictures we’ve applied bit-error correction, reseau removal, and brightness alteration. Then we’ve projected the images to a standard Mercator view. Two things we didn’t do that had been done with the previous photos of the Cydonia region… and which caused much of the controversy whether there was an actual ‘face’… were contrast/brightness enhancement and image sharpening. The reason we didn’t do those is that using those techniques would create different images, depending on the monitor on which they were viewed, and NASA didn’t want to get embroiled in the controversy.
“Another problem with much of the earlier imaging was the problem of accounting for shading. For example, light on one side of a slope can greatly distort the image of a hill. To account for this, we use a technique called shape-from-shading. We have even been able to project images of the Cydonia region so that it appears as if you are viewing it from a ground-level view.”
Kincaid waited, still not having received an answer. He often wondered about these men who called themselves scientists… to Kincaid they were technicians, experts at their field of study but with little interest in fields outside their own, and worse, little imagination.
The image of a “face” on Mars had been noted as far back as the 1970s, when the first Viking orbiter had taken pictures. The fact that NASA had never investigated the strange anomaly further until now and called it a natural phenomenon Kincaid knew lay with the influence of STAAR.
“So what is it?”
“Here.” Forrester turned his laptop so Kincaid could see the screen. “Looks like a bunch of rubble,” Kincaid said.
“It is,” Forrester said.
“Rubble of what?”
“We have no idea.”
“Can you print me a copy?” Kincaid asked.
“Certainly.” Forrester hit the enter key on his laptop. The printer hummed and a piece of paper rolled out. Kincaid looked at it. Something wasn’t quite right. He grabbed a magnifying glass and studied the image. He pulled open a file folder and retrieved an image of the same area made by Surveyor before it was destroyed. He put the two side by side and began comparing them.
“What the hell is that?”
There was something in the new image, to the side of the solar panels and Fort, in the direction of the Face. It wasn’t there in the earlier Surveyor picture. It could be an equipment problem, but Kincaid had a feeling it wasn’t. “Can you get a better image of this spot?” Kincaid asked, pointing to the small, darker-colored area that disturbed him.
“I can try different spectrums,” the scientist said. “Also, we’ll get some slightly different angles due to Hubble’s and Mars’ relative positions changing. Not much, but some.” He typed in some commands. “By the way, you were quite correct about the Face.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not a face carved into the surface, as many UFOlogists wanted to believe. But it’s not natural either. It does indeed appear to be rubble. As best we can determine, there was a larger structure or mountain there and it was severely damaged.”
“By what?”
“We don’t know. There doesn’t appear to be any volcanic activity in the region, so perhaps an earthquake?”
“Or maybe the Airlia?” Kincaid didn’t wait for an answer. “Any idea at all what was there originally?”
“No.”
Another piece of paper came out of the printer. The black smear was still present.
“How large is this black area?” Kincaid asked.
The scientist looked at it, then pulled out a clear plastic rectangle with various measurements on it. He measured, then punched into a calculator. “About five hundred meters long by sixty wide.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“No, but it appears to be moving.” Forrester pulled a picture out of his briefcase. “This is imagery from last week. Notice the change in location. Appears to be moving from the Fort area toward the Face.”
Kincaid tapped the photo. “Keep Hubble on that site.”
Forester looked as if Kincaid had just asked him to commit a felony. “Hubble’s time has been locked in for over two years. Taking it off-line like that… well, there’s going to be a lot of very upset… ” The scientist paused when he saw the look on Kincaid’s face.
Kincaid returned his attention to the imagery for several seconds, deep in thought. What the hell were the Airlia doing? What had been where the Face was now? And what had destroyed that object, whatever it was? And why were the Airlia sending something across the surface toward it? And what were they sending?
Kincaid reached into a drawer and pulled out a handful of ibuprofen and popped them into his mouth, washing the painkillers down with coffee, hoping it would help with the raging headache these pictures had incited.
He looked up as another of his specialists entered the Cube. This one did not look like the scientist geek; he sported a Fu Manchu mustache, his long hair was tied in a ponytail, and he wore torn jeans and a black T-shirt.
“Give me some good news, Gordon.” Kincaid had taken over all scientific aspects of the Airlia investigation for Major Quinn. The newcomer was the computer expert into whose care the STAAR hard drives from Scorpion Base that Turcotte had recovered had been entrusted. The drives had been hastily wiped clean as STAAR abandoned the base, but Gordon was trying to recover the “shadow” of the information that was on them. The major problem he’d run into was that it seemed STAAR had also been trying to recover lost information, so they were two steps removed from what they wanted.
“We’re still tracking keywords according to Dr. Duncan’s instructions… Key, The Mission, and Ark.” Mike Gordon sat down across from Kincaid and rubbed his hands across his eyes.
“Anything?”
“Nothing on those words.”
“What do you have?”
“That name of the Guide from the Inquisition… Domeka… we’ve found it again in a couple of places.” Kincaid held out his hand. “Give me what you have.” Gordon handed over a file. Kincaid pointed a finger. “Get back to work.”
“It’s dead.” Yakov tapped the glass, as one would the side of an aquarium to get the fishes’ attention.
“What is it?”
Katyenka had turned on the small computer terminal at the base of the tank. The screen glowed with Cyrillic writing. “It says here it is called Otdel Rukopashnyi.”
“What does that mean?” Turcotte asked.
Katyenka translated. “Literally that means ‘sections of hands.’ They shortened that here to Okpashnyi. According to what I’m reading, they had no idea what it is.”
“I heard nothing of this being found,” Yakov said.
Katyenka had scrolled down. “As you noted, it was recovered at the end of the Great Patriotic War from the rubble of Berlin.”
“Ah,” Yakov said. “That makes sense. As I told you earlier, Section Four began during the war, when our aircraft encountered what you call foo fighters. But we had no idea of the scope of what we were dealing with, until we found what the Germans had.”
Turcotte was very familiar with the German interest in the alien and occult. “The Nazis were very hot after any sort of strange information or material,” Turcotte said. “They were the ones who were the first to realize the significance of the high runes.”
“They were also big believers in UFOs,” Yakov said. “They had enough information in the records we recovered to make your Project Blue Book look like a thin file.