“We cannot fly into Moscow in that thing”… Katyenka nodded at the bouncer… “and expect to be able to accomplish our mission quietly.”
“We will fly to an airfield outside the city, where I have a contact,” Yakov said. “He will get us into the city.” He turned to Katyenka. “Then I go into Lubyanka to visit this Lyoncheka.”
Turcotte knew the name Lubyanka. During the Cold War, just the mention of the famed headquarters for the KGB on Red Square was enough to make prisoners break down.
“Let me have a second,” Turcotte said. He walked away and pulled out his SATPhone. He dialed the number for the phone that had been assigned to Captain Billam and ODA 055.
It was answered on the second ring. “Billam here.”
“It’s Turcotte. I’m heading to Moscow, and Yakov is going into Lubyanka to talk to an FSB official. If he doesn’t come out, I’m going in after him. If I don’t come out, you come in after both of us.”
Billam’s response was immediate. “You’re joking, right?”
“I don’t joke, Captain.”
“Lubyanka. FSB headquarters. In the middle of Moscow. Rescue you. Right. Got it.”
“I’ll update you once we’re in Moscow.”
“Roger that.”
“Out here.”
Turcotte flipped the phone shut and headed for the bouncer, remembering Duncan’s last words… she wanted him back at Area 51 as soon as possible and that time was running out. He didn’t think he should update her on this side trip. If the key was in Russia, then he would find it. She had enough on her mind right now. “Let’s get going.”
Che Lu had not worked on mathematics this hard since she had attended college over fifty years before. But there it was on the paper finally, the two sides of the equation she had worked out: transforming a twelve-digit system to ten, and given the known on one side as the earth’s diameter… 12,753 kilometers.
The result was a number she hoped was the Airlia standard of measurement.
Given that, she went to work on the next line on the notebook, which detailed a location using two variables. Nabinger’s notes indicated one variable was a measurement in Airlia units from the South Pole. The other was a longitude distance from a vertical line along the Earth’s surface, much like the 0-degree line that went through Greenwich, England; unfortunately, Nabinger didn’t write down what the Airlia 0-degree line was, if he had known it. Also, it went in increments of twelve, not ten.
Still, though, as Che Lu thought about it, she realized she could come up with the set of numbers. Then she would have a definite latitude for each set of coordinates. Then it would be a question of maneuvering the longitude to knowns… and she had little doubt that Qian-Ling, Easter Island, and most likely the Giza Plateau were three of the sites listed.
She went to work.
The steel point scraped against the reddish-brown rock, sliding a few millimeters before finding purchase. If this had been Earth, there would have been sparks and sound. But in the thin Martian atmosphere there was neither. The point was at the end of an articulated leg two meters long, one of eight that came out of a center pod.
On both the top and bottom of the center pod were small globes at the end of a forty-millimeter stem, the sensors for the device allowing it 360 degrees of observation above and below.
The legs continued their way along the surface until it reached the site. Following its orders, the mech/worker reached with its large grasping arm and picked up a boulder. Carefully balancing the rock, it slowly stalked across the Martian surface until it was over two kilometers away, then it dropped the burden. It was not alone, just one of thousands of similar devices, like an army of giant ants moving across the surface.
It turned and went back the way it had come. And every ten minutes, another worker scurried out of a tunnel and joined the line of workers digging.
What had taken the workers at Newport News Shipyard three years to put together was being torn apart in a matter of hours. The guardian had had the microrobots power down the two nuclear power plants for the moment, to prevent meltdown.
The large island where the bridge had been was just a frame. Most of the flight deck and the planes that had been on it were gone, already taken apart and examined. As the side plating was being removed by swarms of microrobots, steel girders poked into the air, like the ribs of some massive dead dinosaur.
As quickly as it was being taken apart, it was also being reassembled, in some cases the new construction being much superior to the old.
Of the 6,286 men and women who had been on board, most had escaped. Many of the rest had been killed when the ship was taken over. They were the lucky ones.
Along the edge of the main runway, the remaining hundreds of bodies were laid out, their arms and legs pinned to the ground by U-shaped brackets slammed into the ground by a large mech/robot, kin to the ones digging on Mars. The sailors were spread in clumps of ten, covering a large portion of the runway’s edge, each group set in a circle, heads toward the center. All of the captives were unconscious, the result of a large electromagnetic burst by the guardian once the ship was inside the shield.
But as time went by, the men and women began to come awake, and as they did, a different type of robot went down the line. It would roll up to a group, stopping just outside the circle. A tube extended out the front of this mech and would be positioned directly over the center of each cluster.
The tube would spray a small cloud, then move on.
Behind it, as the various forms of the nanovirus settled onto the prone bodies, other mechs pulled up to record the results and forward it to the guardian.
Some went as the guardian had predicted, others not so well, as the screams of the men and women indicated.
Lisa Duncan watched the Nevada desert flow by below the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter as she headed from Area 51 to Nellis Air Force Base. She was thinking about the time she’d flown in the other direction, toward Area 51, prepared to shut down Majestic-12. So much had happened since then, and she felt every new truth she uncovered led to more mysteries.
Her musings were cut short by her SATPhone buzzing. She opened the phone and pressed on. “Duncan.”
“Dr. Duncan, this is Lexina.”
Duncan closed her eyes and shifted gears. “Still need your key?”
“Your time runs short.”
“You knew the space shuttles were going to be attacked, didn’t you?”
“I knew the automatic defenses on the surviving talon were still operating.”
“You allowed those people to get killed. I thought you were here to protect humans. You destroyed Section Four to get the control for the talon.”
“You are learning,” Lexina said, “but much too slowly.”
“You killed many in Florida when you destroyed Atlantis,” Duncan continued.
“I must be given the tools I need to do that job,” Lexina said. “I need the key.”
“You destroyed our missile in Montana and killed our people there.”
“You were going to attack the talon, and I could not allow that. The longer you play your games, the more dangerous it becomes.”
“‘More dangerous’?” Duncan repeated. “We just barely stopped the world from being wiped out by the Black Death manufactured by The Mission… with no help from you, I might add… and you’re talking about things getting worse? The only worse I see is you’re attacking us now along with The Mission.”