The Reply

CHAPTER 5

The command center for the United Nations Alien Oversight Committee, or UNAOC, as it was being referred to, on Easter Island was set inside four connected communications vans that had been flown in from the mainland aboard a massive C-5 cargo plane. Two of the vans retained their original function, connecting Easter Island UNAOC with New York UNAOC. The other two had had the connecting wall removed and now housed banks of computers, a large display screen along the front wall, and several desks where the ranking members sat.

Peter Nabinger had spent many hours inside the command center. There were live television feeds to the cavern below the volcano that housed the guardian computer. He always felt a strange sensation slither up his spine each time he looked at those screens and saw the large golden pyramid. He’d gone down to the cavern several times, attempting to reestablish his mental communication with it, but to no avail.

Today, though, he was in the CC for a different reason. The director of operations for UNAOC on the island had called him in for a conference meeting with the main UNAOC council in New York. The purpose of the meeting had not been disclosed.

Nabinger hated video conferencing. He felt strange sitting in front of a computer screen that showed him the others in the conference and having to look into the small camera on top of the screen that beamed his image to them.

As he took his seat, the man who had called him in took the seat to his left. Gunfield Gronad was the ranking representative from UNAOC on Easter Island, and Nabinger knew that so far his tour of duty had been one large bust. The guardian was still inactive, there was no more information flowing, and the world media, not to mention UNAOC headquarters, were less than pleased. Nabinger felt sorry for the young Norwegian, who had to report failure even though they had no control over the guardian.

Nabinger knew Gunfield was further distressed to see the face of Peter Sterling fill up the screen on the computers in front of them. Sterling was the chief commissioner of UNAOC. He was the former head of NATO, who had been coopted to lead UNAOC by the Security Council three days ago. Sterling was a distinguished-looking man who had been very high profile in the media for the past several days. His enthusiasm for the UNAOC position and what they were uncovering was unbounded, and he most definitely was in the camp of the progressives.

Nabinger leaned back in his seat and waited as Sterling reached down and did something with his keyboard and his image grew smaller. Now Nabinger could see that they were connected to the main UNAOC conference room on the top floor of the UN Building. He could see the second-in-command of UNAOC, Boris Ivanoc, seated to Sterling’s left and the other members of UNAOC arrayed around the table, their own teleconference computers in front of them. Ivanoc was a concession to Russia, an attempt to balance the immense power that UNAOC would hold if they could get back into the guardian and gain access to the knowledge secreted there. The camera zoomed back in, and Sterling’s patrician face stared at both Nabinger and Gunfield.

“Anything to report, gentlemen?” There was the hint of a smile around Sterling’s lip.

“No, sir,” Gunfield said. “The guardian is still inactive and—”

“No sign that the guardian transmitted or received a transmission?” “No, sir.”

“You need to be alert,” Sterling eagerly interrupted. “We’ve received a reply.”

Nabinger leaned forward. “To the message?”

“Of course to the message,” Sterling said. “It came in yesterday. Several tracking stations picked it up and recorded it.”

“I’ve heard nothing from the media,” Nabinger began, but again he was cut off.

“We’re not releasing this information quite yet, but we will shortly, I can assure you. We’re still coordinating with the various governments that picked it up. Are you certain that the guardian did not receive the message?” Sterling asked once again.

“Sir,” Gunfield replied, “the guardian may well have received this message. There is no way for us to know. Reception is a passive action. Now, if the guardian sends a reply, our tracking instruments will certainly pick it up.”

“In what format is the message?” Nabinger asked.

“Most of it is very complex, and we can’t make heads or tails of it,” Sterling said. “We think that part was directed to your guardian. Some sort of special code.”

Nabinger leaned forward. “And the other part?”

“It’s digital. Basic binary.” Sterling’s face was flushed. “That part was directed to us. Humanity.”

“What does it say?” Gunfield asked.

“We’ll send you the text via secure SATCOM. You’ll have it when we release it publicly. It’s not long.”

“The basic gist?” Nabinger asked.

“You’ll see,” Sterling said mysteriously, like a child holding on to a secret. “I’m not authorized to tell anyone in advance, as it has to be released simultaneously around the world. But I can tell you one thing, gentlemen; things have changed and are going to change even more.”

Nabinger raised a hand. “Where did the message come from? Is there a mothership coming?”

Sterling’s eyes shifted, looking about his conference room, then settled back on the camera. “Mars.”

Gunfield couldn’t help himself. “Mars?”

Nabinger nodded as he made a connection in his mind.

“What are you thinking, Professor?” Sterling asked, catching the movement. Damn, Nabinger thought. He could never get used to being watched by a machine. “Mars makes sense, at least from an archaeological viewpoint.”

“Explain,” Sterling ordered.

“We found the Airlia atomic weapon in the Great Pyramid at Giza, just outside Cairo,” Nabinger said. “Some Egyptologists define the word Cairo as meaning ‘Mars.’ Quite a coincidence, I would say. Do you have an exact fix from where on Mars this message was broadcast?”

“The Cydonia region on the north hemisphere,” Sterling said.

“You know what has been photographed at Cydonia, don’t you?” Nabinger said. “Why don’t you tell us?” Sterling said.

“Well, first there’s what appears to be the thrust-up outline of a large face on the surface of the planet there,” Nabinger said. “It was discovered in July 1976 by NASA personnel studying the images sent back by the Viking probe.”

Nabinger paused but no one interrupted, so he continued. “In 1979 some computer engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center reexamined the digital frame that held the face, then expanded the search, checking out the imagery of the immediate area.

“They found what appeared to be a pyramid close by. A pyramid, that as nearly as they could tell, was over five hundred meters high and about three kilometers long on each base, easily dwarfing the Great Pyramid at Giza.”

“How do you know all this?” Sterling asked, a frown on his face — whether from the fact that Nabinger had stolen his thunder or wondering if Nabinger had learned more from the guardian than he had told UNAOC, Nabinger neither knew nor cared.

“I have a friend in the most unique field of archaeoastronomy: the study of archeological objects in space. Since most people believed there were no archeological objects in space, he was rather, shall we say, ignored by the other scientists. I would imagine now, though, that his expertise is in rather strong demand. We met at a conference, and since there were some similarities between what he thought he saw on the surface of Mars and what I was investigating on the surface of the Earth at Giza, we spent some time exchanging notes.”

“Go on about Cydonia,” Sterling ordered.

“The face, if I remember rightly, was estimated to be about two and a half kilometers long by two wide, and I think five hundred meters high also.” “More like four hundred meters high, from shadow analysis,” Sterling said.

“Four hundred meters, then,” Nabinger said. “Obviously you have access to data about this. Do they have any better idea about the City?”

“City?” Gunfield asked.

Nabinger turned in his seat. “Yes. Besides the Face and the Pyramid, there was a group of what appeared to be smaller pyramids to the southwest of the face. And an object that was called the Fort: four straight lines like walls, surrounding a black courtyard. The men looking at this dubbed those pyramids and the Fort as the City.”

Nabinger turned back to Sterling. “So now we know that what NASA dismissed as just shadows and natural objects, are really artifacts from the Airlia. Another Airlia colony, perhaps.”

“It appears that is so,” Sterling admitted. “If there was an Airlia outpost on Mars, it would also explain some facts that were dismissed as coincidence. The fact that the Russians have launched ten unmanned missions to explore Mars with very little success. Several exploded on takeoff. They lost control of two and couldn’t get them out of their intermediary orbits around Earth. Two missed Mars when their guidance systems went haywire. Three made it to Mars but their probes went dead. There was one lander that the Russians managed to get there and send down. They lost data link with it as it was descending for a landing while relaying back some very confusing data.”

“How about American missions to Mars?” Nabinger asked.

“Suffice it to say that they had many failures also, some public and some not so public. The Americans did manage to get their two Viking missions to the Red Planet in 1976 and get both landers down. The interesting thing about that, though, is that those landers went down a long way from Cydonia and the orbiters never went directly over that site. The one Viking satellite that is still up there does not go over the Cydonia region in its present orbit.”

“What about Pathfinder?” Nabinger asked. “That was all over the news last year.”

“Yes, indeed,” Sterling said. “But it landed very far away from the Cydonia region. And the range of the Rover is so limited that it would take several lifetimes for it to make it there and it would run out of power long before it got a tenth of the way.”

“There were many requests by my friend and others to get the orbiters to take a picture of Cydonia,” Nabinger noted. “Those requests were never acted on.” Nabinger had to wonder if Majestic-12 had known anything about Cydonia and the connection with the Airlia and that was the reason NASA had so blithely ignored the Face and Pyramid and the entire region even though they had pictures of it. And if that had had anything to do with the selection of the Mars landing site for Pathfinder.

“That action is being taken by NASA as we speak,” Sterling said. “They are going to use the last reserves of fuel Viking II has to reposition it so that it can take a closer look at Cydonia.

“The issue is, what is there? Is there any hint from what you received from the guardian when you were in contact that the Airlia had left an outpost on Mars?”

Nabinger shook his head. He had told no one of the last vision he had had, and he didn’t see that it applied here. “No. But you have to remember that there was much that was left out of what the guardian gave me. So many unanswered questions. What about the message? Didn’t it give you more information?”

“You’ll see for yourself when it gets released,” Sterling said. “I want you to stay alert. We need to know if there is communication between the guardian and whatever is at Cydonia. We suspect it is most likely another computer left by the Airlia, but if we can get a dialogue going with the Mars guardian, perhaps we can access the Airlia data base by tapping in. Just think of that!

“Besides, the one on Mars has made communication with us now. There’s no reason to think it won’t continue to do so. Also,” Sterling continued, “you are not to release any news of this message to the media quite yet.”

“I thought—” Nabinger began.

“I have to go now. That is all.” The screen went blank.

In the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, eight hundred feet underground, a system that had originally been developed to detect ICBM launches during the Cold War suddenly sprang to life.

“Sir, we’ve got activity in the Pacific. Sector four-six-three.”

The Warning Center watch officer, Major Craig, looked over his shoulder. “Can you identify the signal?”

The screen watcher stared at the information in front of him: infrared maps of the Earth’s surface and surrounding airspace downloaded every three seconds from satellites in geosynchronous orbit twenty thousand miles up.

“Multiple contacts. Very small.” He took a deep breath. “Signature matches foo fighters.”

The term foo fighter came from World War II, when American airmen reported small, glowing spheres that they occasionally spotted on missions. What had not been generally reported was that the first several times foo fighters had been spotted and aircrews attempted to engage the flying spheres, the planes had been knocked out of the sky. That had led to an Air Corps-wide policy ordering crews to ignore the foo fighters, which in turn had led to no more fatal incidents. What had been particularly intriguing was that during the Enola Gay’s run in to Hiroshima it had been shadowed the entire way by two foo fighters, almost leading to a cancellation of the mission. The consensus now was that the foo fighters were the guardian’s way of gathering information and, when needed, directing force.

“What about the Navy ships there over the site?” Craig asked. “They pick anything up?”

“The fighters are coming up fifty miles west of where the ships are, over the horizon from their radar.”

“Send the Navy the data,” Craig ordered. He knew it was too late for the Navy to do anything, but at least they couldn’t complain that they hadn’t been informed as quickly as possible.

“Put it on the screen,” Craig ordered. The large screen in front of the room displayed a Mercator conformal map of the entire world’s surface. With a few commands the data that was being downloaded from DSP could be selectively displayed on the screen. Several glowing dots appeared.

“I count three foo fighters,” the operator said.

Craig could clearly see them. One glowing dot heading due east toward the coast of South America. One heading west across the Pacific, and a third heading northeast toward Central America.

“Damn, those suckers are booking,” one of the men in the center muttered.

Craig looked down at his own computer and cleared it, then put the tracking data the other man had on his screen. He chewed absently on the nail of his right forefinger as he considered the data, then did what he knew he had to do.

He entered a code and transmitted the data to the UNAOC operations center in New York and on Easter Island along with the Pentagon, NSA, and CIA in his own government. Then, glancing around and making sure no one was watching, he entered another code consisting of the five letters STAAR, and transmitted the data to that destination. He breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the message was sent and his screen was clear again.

He looked up and watched. One of the foo fighters hit the shore of South America over Chile, then cut hard left and followed the coast north. It followed the entire coastline up to Central America and then looped back.

Meanwhile, the second one had crossed Central America and was over the mid-Atlantic while the third was passing New Guinea. The first dot returned to the spot it had originated from and disappeared.

The second foo fighter passed straight through the Strait of Gibraltar and flashed across the Mediterranean. The third had passed Taiwan and was doing a loop over mainland China.

The second reached the far end of the Mediterranean and curved right over Egypt before heading back. The third had done a large figure eight over the entire length of China and was now also heading back. At speeds in excess of thirty thousand miles an hour, the blips on the screen ate up large chunks of distance quickly and shortly all were back down underwater at the point where they had come up.

“What the hell was that all about?” someone asked.

Craig was tapping his forefinger against his lips in thought.

“Reconnaissance,” he said.

“Looking for what?”

“Damned if I know,” Sinclair answered.