“Which way?” Tolya asked for the third time since they’d halted. The dot had not moved except in relation to their moves. But it seemed as if every time they got close, they had to take another tunnel that took them farther away.
Sweat dripped off the lieutenant’s chin… even though it was cool in the tunnel… and splashed onto the top map. “Sir, I think we need to backtrack to the last intersection. I believe we should have taken a right there, not a left.”
“You ‘believe’?” Tolya checked his watch. Katyenka had instructed him to be no more than five minutes behind, and he had been close behind the walls outside the Kremlin to her group entering the tunnel. He had a feeling things had not worked out the way Katyenka had planned.
Tolya reined in his anger. He pointed back the way they had come. “Let’s go.”
“What were you going to say about the Knights Templar?” Duncan asked. The bouncer was at 40,000 feet altitude, moving swiftly west to east, already over the Atlantic, approaching Africa.
Professor Mualama had been unusually silent as they left the hospital at Nellis Air Force Base and boarded the bouncer for the trip to Egypt. Duncan had not interfered with that silence, as she was also trying to sort out the information von Seeckt had given them. Quinn had informed her that Turcotte was not answering his SATPhone, which was further unsettling news.
Mualama stretched his long legs out in front of him. “I think the answer to that lies in Burton’s manuscript. We are searching for pieces just as he did over a century ago. He dedicated a lifetime to it.”
“What pieces?” Duncan asked.
“Pieces of legend and myth that are something else entirely. I think Burton discovered how many of the pieces ended up where they currently are. Learning that will tell us something of where they came from, which will tell us, perhaps, how they should be put together, which, in the end, I believe will be the most important thing.”
Duncan followed that line of reasoning to an extent. “Why did Burton make such a secret of what he was doing?”
“He made a promise not to reveal something he had learned. Also, you have to remember there was no urgency to his revealing the truth. The world seemed unaffected by the aliens or their followers during his day.”
“Lucky him,” Duncan said. “Let’s hope we do a better job than our predecessors, because we don’t have much more time.”
Captain Billam had a map of the world spread out in front of him on top of the conference table located just off the Cube.
“Big operational area,” his team sergeant, Greg Boltz, noted.
“We can make it smaller,” Billam said.
“How?” Major Quinn had just walked in the door along with the bouncer pilot, Major Remmick.
“Duncan is going to Cairo and Turcotte is in Moscow.” Billam placed a finger on each location. He turned to Major Remmick. “How long can you hover?”
“If I let go of the controls,” Remmick said, “we remain stationary until I touch the controls again. So we can ‘hover,’ as you put it, forever.”
Billam slid his two fingers together. “If we stay here, over the Black Sea, we’ll be halfway between Duncan and Turcotte and a hell of a lot closer than we are now.” He looked up at Quinn for approval.
“Get moving,” Quinn ordered. He held up his hand as they headed for the elevator to Hangar One. “Two things. I’ve got your SADM waiting up there for you. And I put it in a rather interesting package.”
The two bodies were fully formed inside the clear tubes filled with an amber liquid. Lexina recognized the figures, even though both heads were covered with a black helmet from which numerous leads extended through the top of the tube to the console in front.
She had watched Coridan and Gergor, comrades for many years, die just hours before. And now she was watching the completion of the rebirth of their bodies. There was only one more step and it would be done.
Lexina took out the two Ka necklaces she had removed from around her comrades’ necks. Going in front of Coridan’s tube, she slid the two upraised hands into a receptacle on the console. They fit perfectly. A golden glow suffused the panel as the memories and personality encoded on the Ka were sent to the blank mind that waited under the black helmet.
Lacking, of course, were the memories the two men had accumulated since the last time the Ka were updated. And even the original programming had degraded over generations of use as bodies wore out and new operatives were needed. Lexina herself knew there were gaps in her own mind, things she should know and didn’t. Skills she should have… that generations of Lexina’s back to the beginning of The Ones Who Wait had had… that were no longer present.
After several minutes, the glow went away. The amber fluid drained out of the tube. Lexina opened it and removed the helmet from the body, cradling the new Coridan in her arms as she took him out and laid him on the floor.
Coridan gasped for air, the eyes flickering open.
“Welcome back, old friend,” Lexina greeted him.
The USS Anzio was a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. It cost over one billion dollars to build, and its primary purpose was to be a carrier battle group’s primary defense against air attack. Its job was to defend the battle group’s aircraft carrier at all costs… a job that, it could be argued, it had failed in, given that the Washington was lost.
That fact did little to improve the morale or temper of the crew. That no one could have guessed the returning Global Hawk was the threat it had turned out to be did little to assuage that feeling. The presence on board of more than eight hundred survivors of the Washington not only crowded the ship, it added to the burning desire for revenge.
The Anzio had already earned a battle star in the war against the Airlia by dropping the nuclear weapon that had… they thought… destroyed the foo fighter base north of Easter Island.
When the message came in, via high-frequency radio from Pearl Harbor, for it to prepare a nuclear weapon to be fired against Easter Island, the initial feeling among the crew was one of anticipation. But when the fact that almost two thousand members of the crew of the Washington were missing behind the black shield they were now ordered to penetrate and destroy, sunk in, the mood became more somber.
As they had against the foo fighters’ base, the weapons specialists on board the ship opened up one of their BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles and began disabling the electronic guidance equipment.
The captain of the Anzio also sent a message to the long-suffering crew of the Springfield to prepare for action.
In response to the command she had slipped into the system, the microscopic machines that had thoroughly infiltrated Kelly Reynolds’s body began to leave, traveling through her bloodstream and out the needle that had been inserted in her neck by the guardian.
When the last one departed, the part that was still Kelly Reynolds was now larger and stronger than it had been since she’d come down into the chamber deep under Rano Kau. She still had the mental link via the golden tendril coming out of the guardian itself, but that was weaker than before, because the alien computer had relied on the nanovirus to a great extent after infecting her with it.