The Reply

CHAPTER 38

“You’ve neutralized the foo fighter fleet,” Duncan said as they rode the cog railway down into the cavern. “But what about the Airlia ships that are coming?”

Turcotte felt tired, the sort of tired he had experienced before in combat and in Ranger School when he’d gone for months with a couple of hours’ sleep a night and barely one meal a day to provide energy. He knew the danger of such tiredness: thoughts became muddled, decision-making impaired. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and cleared his head, then he went back to the question Duncan had asked. He turned and addressed the man in the seat behind them.

“Colonel Spearson, do you have SATCOM with Area 51?”

“I can route through to that location,” Spearson said.

“There’s some people there I need you to send a message to.”

Spearson pulled out a small notepad from the breast pocket of his camouflage smock. “Go ahead.”

“All right,” Turcotte began. “The message is to Kelly Reynolds and Major Quinn.” He nodded toward Zandra. “I’m going to need you to pull your ST-8 authorization.”

“You’ve got it,” Zandra said.

“All right,” Turcotte said. “Here’s what I need.”

A tunnel had been blasted and drilled through the side of Rano Kau to the chamber containing the guardian. Kelly Reynolds went down the tunnel in a mental fog, her brain and heart swirling with thoughts and emotions she was having a very hard time sorting out and controlling.

She’d heard of the success in wiping out the foo fighter base and seen the military personnel at the airfield on Easter Island celebrating even while they were evacuating the island. Fools, she thought. All they had done was spit in the face of those who could save the human race. And there were still the talon ships closing on Earth.

Think what they had done to Atlantis, she wanted to shout at the idiots. Didn’t they realize the Airlia could do the same to New York or Moscow or any major city?

She reached the bottom and entered the chamber. There was no one around. The U.S. military was getting everyone off Easter Island, clearing it of all human life. Her clearance from Major Quinn had allowed her to pass the military police guards and the captain in charge had warned her that if she wasn’t back up in thirty minutes they weren’t coming down to get her and she’d be on her own. Bouncer 6 had its orders, too, and the pilot took off and headed back to Area 51, leaving her stranded on the island.

She knew why they were evacuating the island and she knew why the captain was nervous. They wanted to destroy the guardian. They wanted to destroy the machine that held the key to mankind’s history and its future. Just as they wanted to destroy the Airlia.

Kelly paused as she entered the chamber. The golden pyramid was surrounded by a haze extending out a few inches. She’d also been told that the guardian was now in constant communication with the incoming fleet. She had no doubt that Aspasia now knew of the destruction of his foo fighters.

Kelly walked across the smoothly cut stone floor to the base of the pyramid. She put her hands out and touched the strangely textured metal. “Please listen to me,” she whispered. “Please listen to me.”

Turcotte looked down at the control panel. He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket.

“What’s that?” Zandra asked.

“The code for the sphere.”

“Will it fall in the chasm and be destroyed?” Duncan asked in alarm.

Turcotte shook his head. “No. The destruct code was in the Temiltepec guardian. That’s gone. This is the code to release it.” He placed his hands over the panel. He touched a spot in the upper left corner and a glow suffused the surface, seeming to come from within, highlighting a series of interlocking hexagons, eight across by eight down, each hexagon containing a high rune symbol.

Looking at the paper, Turcotte began touching the panel, following the pattern of symbols as they had been dictated to him by Nabinger. There were eighteen in all.

When he touched the last one, there was a loud hissing noise, followed by the startled yell of the SAS guards. Turcotte looked up. The ruby sphere had been released from the three poles going to the far side and two of the ones on the near side. The one arm in the center of the near side was retracting, pulling the sphere toward Turcotte. Twenty feet from the end the arm started to rotate, bringing the sphere up into the air, then going down, until the sphere rested at the edge of the chasm.

“We need to get that up to the surface,” Turcotte ordered.