But it was the living clusters that simply lay there that interested the guardian most. The mech/biomanipulator stalked up on steel legs to one group. The imager noted the steady rise and fall of the chests. Eyes were open, but staring up, slightly averted from the sun’s rays.
The guardian took the slightly averted eyes as a good sign… it meant the autonomic nervous system was still working properly, taking care of the body. It instructed the mech/biomanipulator to remove the U restraints pinning one group of this type to the ground. The ten men remained motionless, despite the restraints being removed.
Then the guardian accessed a new program, sending out commands.
One by one, the men began to stagger to their feet. One couldn’t do it. He collapsed, tried to get up, then the body was still. Two made it to their feet but then crumpled to the ground and rose no more.
The other seven remained standing. With jerky motions they began moving. Over half fell on the first step. Two didn’t get up. Within three minutes, all ten were down and dead.
But the guardian had learned much. It issued new instructions to its nanovirus-producing robots.
Caught in the thrall of the alien computer, Kelly Reynolds’s mind was still alive, although her body was thoroughly invaded by various nanoviruses. The mind was connected to the guardian via the golden electromagnetic field, and she received information from the computer even as it extracted it from her.
Like a withering vine, she was kept against the side of the pyramid. As her mind received the same images the guardian did of the men of the Washington being tested and tossed, a tear rolled down one cheek, the only sign she was alive.
She studied the data as the guardian did. As the guardian spewed out a series of orders to the various nanoviruses that had been implanted, recovering the effective ones, directing the ineffective to be broken down and reconfigured, Kelly focused her mind, mimicking the process by which the guardian had drawn information from her.
The tears on her cheeks mingled with sweat as the extreme effort to get a coherent thought into the proper format strained her to the utmost.
It was a small command, insignificant in the flow of hundreds of thousands of decisions and orders being calculated and sent by the guardian every second. It fell into the stream, a small blip, and raced along the pathways.
Duncan stared down at the old man in the bed for several moments as the drugs did their work and brought him into consciousness.
“You’ve lied to us all along.” Duncan wasted no time on greetings. “Have you ever told the truth?”
“I have told you more truth than you know,” von Seeckt said.
“Did you tell me the truth about the Spear of Destiny?”
“Yes.”
Duncan wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but she wanted to get to what she had just learned. “There was more to the SS, wasn’t there?” Duncan asked. “A secret rite of passage, wasn’t there?”
When von Seeckt didn’t respond, Duncan pulled out a piece of paper. “I had your blood analyzed against the blood we drew from the hybrid STAAR personnel. You have traces of the alien blood in you. Tell me how.”
“After all these years it is still there?” von Seeckt marveled.
“How did you get it?”
“When I joined the SS, I was given an injection. To purify me, to bring me back to my roots, I was told. You tell me how much I lie… think of that lie that the Nazis perpetrated. Purity of the race, we were told, when in fact the opposite was being attempted.
“In a way, though, most people have never realized what the purity concept was about. Historians have focused on the efforts by the Nazis the eradicate the unpure in the camps, but never much on the efforts to develop the pure.
“Again, List was in on it. He had a partner named Lanz, who was a defrocked Cistercian monk. Lanz’s group was called the Order of the New Templars.”
“Templars?” Mualama interrupted. “I have heard much of the Templar Knights interwoven with the history of the Ark. The original Templars… ”
Duncan kicked Mualama, out of sight of von Seeckt. Getting the archaeologist’s attention, she shook her head very slightly. “Tell me about Lanz,” she said to von Seeckt.
Von Seeckt’s eyes shifted between Duncan and Mualama.
“Answer,” Duncan snapped.
“Lanz was from Vienna, the bitch city that eventually gave birth to the Hitler of the Third Reich. Lanz desired to become a Knight Templar, even though that group had officially been disbanded for many centuries. He chose the next best thing… at age nineteen he entered the Cistercian Monastery of the Holy Cross. A year after being in the order he wrote a bizarre paper about a vision he had from the time of the Crusades, of a godly man treading upon an animal-like human being. He believed that vision delineated the pure line of man treading on the unpure.
“After he was kicked out of the monastery for carnal desires, he founded his order. The symbol was the swastika. The slogans: Race fight until the castration knife, and Love thy neighbor as thyself… if he’s a member of your own race!
“He bought a castle in lower Austria and flew the swastika flag above it. He believed that his pure beings had electromagnetic-radiological organs and transmitters which gave them special powers.”
“Like foo fighters or a guardian computer?” Duncan asked.
Von Seeckt spread his hands. “This is all secondhand knowledge to me. I am repeating what I have read and heard from others. I don’t know exactly what Lanz meant by that. Hitler and Lanz first ran into each other in 1909. They met several times after that. Most interestingly, Hitler had Lanz barred from publishing anything after the Nazis took over Austria in 1938. List and Lanz together had a very strong influence on Hitler, something he turned his back on after his rise to power.”
“What exact influence did Lanz have on Hitler?” Duncan asked.
“Lanz did what you’re trying to do,” von Seeckt said. “He looked backward in time. To the origin of mankind, or at least his version of it. He divided early man into two groups. The ace-men and the ape-men. The former, of course, were white, blond, and blue-eyed, and responsible for everything noble and good. The latter was every other racial trait. In German the ace-men were called the Asings and the others the Afflinge. The Afflinge always threatened to contaminate the purity of the Asings through interbreeding.” Von Seeckt coughed. “The image of the Aryan woman being raped by the impure was one Hitler and his minions used in many posters to rally support to his cause.”
“Lanz developed a scorecard by which he could grade candidates for his organization. So many points for eye color, skin, hair, even the size and shape of the skull. It was called the Rassenwertigkeitindex.”
Von Seeckt’s mouth twisted in an evil smile. “They urged members to breed with women of the same traits, but even then they knew women could not be trusted, Ms. Duncan. Women were the source of all evil.”
“Spare me the lecture and give me the facts,” Duncan said.
“That is a fact,” von Seeckt replied. “That is the way the groups that eventually formed the Nazis felt. It was brought out in the purification rights of the SS.”
“How did the SS get the Airlia blood?” Duncan asked.