ENGINE POWER.

DANGER.

ALL THINGS CONSUMED.123.

"This," Nabinger said, "is very similar to what I got off the pictures of the high rune stones left with the mothership and the rongo-rongo tablets from here."

"I don't get it," Duncan said. "What does this cavern in the Rift Valley and the ruby sphere have to do with the mothership?"

"And with China?" Nabinger added, looking at the photo of the black stone.

"I don't like that all-things-consumed part," Turcotte said. He looked at Duncan. "Sounds too much like your doomsday-device idea."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Nabinger said, staring at the photo. He turned to Kelly Reynolds. "Do you have that satellite phone the network gave you?"

She handed it over, but not without comment. "I wouldn't worry too much about the ruby sphere. We'll have all the answers soon."

"Why do you think that?" Turcotte asked.

"Aspasia's coming."

"What, he's rising from the dead?" Turcotte said.

Kelly ignored him and addressed Duncan. "Do you think Aspasia and the other Airlia with him have been in suspended animation?"

"It's a possibility, but we can't be sure of anything right now," Duncan said.

She turned to Nabinger. "You're the language expert. How do you read the message sent from Mars?"

Nabinger looked up from dialing. "The same as you. After all, it's not in high rune but English encoded in binary. I don't think it was Aspasia who sent the message, but rather the Guardian II computer, and now I think it's implementing a 124.

program to bring Aspasia back to consciousness from whatever state he's been in."

"Do you think they can do that?" Duncan asked.

"That's the way I read the message," Nabinger said with a shrug. "h.e.l.l, they built the mothership and the bouncers. I'm sure suspended animation is not beyond their technical capabilities. I'm amazed that no one thought of it before as being what happened to the Airlia."

"No one thought of it," Turcotte said, "because we never found any sign of the actual aliens here on Earth."

"Now you know why," Nabinger said. "They're on Mars."

"How'd they learn English?" Turcotte asked.

"Probably from intercepted radio and TV transmissions," Nabinger said. "It wouldn't take a computer like the guardian long to decipher our language."

"It's fantastic," Kelly said. "Imagine, not only will we soon meet our first extraterrestrial life, but life that was present on Earth over five thousand years ago! How do you think they got to Mars?" Kelly asked. "Another mothership?

Or some other craft?"

"If they fly a mothership back here from Mars," Turcotte said, "wouldn't that bring the Kortad?"

"Maybe they have contact with their home planet," Nabinger said. "The war is probably over. It's been five thousand years." He put the phone to his ear and turned his back to the conversation for the moment.

"There's a lot we don't know," Turcotte said.

"But we're going to find out!" Kelly was pacing125.

about the tent. "It's just fantastic. Here we were, hoping that at best we could access the guardian computer. Now we have the people who built the thing coming!"

"That was our best hope," Turcotte acknowledged. "What about our worst fears?"

"Oh, you're always so pessimistic," Kelly said, thumping a fist into his shoulder.

"Didn't your dad teach to always worst-case things?" Turcotte asked. He knew that her father had been a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, during World War II.

"Oh, give me a break," Kelly said. "Aspasia saved mankind by defeating the rebel Airlia five thousand years ago and leaving us alone to develop. The facts speak for themselves."

"Then why's he coming back now?" Turcotte wanted to know. "Isn't that interference?"

"Because we're ready now. We weren't five thousand years ago. He tells us that in the message."

"Don't you think . . ." Turcotte began, but he could see the enthusiasm in Kelly's eyes and he just couldn't bring up the negative strength to fight it. He had vague feeling of unease, not the thrill of antic.i.p.ation of first live contact with an alien race like she did.

He noticed that Nabinger had gotten off the phone and was looking at a pad on which he had made some notes. "What's up?" Nabinger seemed quite preoccupied.

Nabinger looked up. "I got a contact I can fax the Chinese writing to and get a translation. I also126.had a message on my answering service. Someone's found a place with more high runes."

"Where?" Turcotte asked.

Nabinger smiled. "China."

"China?" Turcotte repeated. "Well, isn't that nice. What a coincidence."

"Yep," Nabinger said. "It's not surprising that the Airlia were there too.

Remember, they did have the bouncers to fly. They could go anywhere on the face of this planet in a matter of minutes."

"How come we haven't heard anything from China before now?" Kelly asked.

"Same reason the Russians just offered up their crashed Airlia craft,"

Nabinger said. "Probably keeping it secret for their own reasons. Or, even more likely, the Chinese don't know they have Airlia artifacts. Traditionally, the Chinese are very reluctant to do any sort of archaeological work."

"Remember the third foo fighter did a flyby over China," Turcotte said. "You can be sure the guardian knows something we don't."

"The guardian knows a lot of things we don't," Nabinger said.

Turcotte looked at him. "There something you aren't telling us?"

The professor shrugged. "h.e.l.l, I got hit with so much when I was in contact with the guardian, there's a lot that I don't know I know."

Turcotte wasn't satisfied with that answer, but he didn't think now was a time to push Nabinger, especially with the way Kelly was acting. He went back to thinking about China. "One of those foo fighters overflew the Great Pyramid, where the rebel Airlia left an atomic weapon. Another overflew Temiltepec, where the rebels left their guard-127.

ian computer. What do you think could be in China? Who left you the message?"

Turcotte asked.

"An archaeologist named Che Lu. I know of her. She's head of archaeology at Beijing University."

"Well, whatever she has can't be that important now," Kelly said. "h.e.l.l, we'll have the man himself here soon to speak for himself."

"The man?" Turcotte asked.

"Aspasia."

"Why do you call him a man?" Turcotte didn't wait for an answer. "He, if we can call it a he, is an alien. Not a human. Not a man."

The tent went silent for a few seconds, Kelly staring at Turcotte in surprise, her face turning red with anger.

Before she could retort, Lisa Duncan spoke. "How would high runes in China fit into all this? I think we need to back up and take a hard look at things with a new perspective. Especially now that we have what appears to be Chinese writing in Africa next to high runes near the ruby sphere. What's the connection?"

"The high rune language"-Nabinger laughed -"well, we call it a language now, but actually no one knew it was until just a month ago. I'd been studying hieroglyphics, the earliest known form of writing, for many years, particularly that in the three pyramids at Giza, and I noticed that there were some markings that didn't fit traditional hieroglyphics.

"I expanded my search and found examples of that writing at other places on the face of the planet, although I didn't have access to data from128.China. But all the examples I did find seemed to come from the same root language. And the dating of the various sites indicated a written language that predated the oldest recorded language that is generally accepted by historians.

"The problem back then was trying to answer the question: How could the same written language be in places so distant from one another in an age when man was frightened of sailing out of sight of sh.o.r.e? Because it made no sense, no one bothered to pull together all the various high rune artifacts and sites to build a working base for deciphering the writing. Of course, now that we know the Airlia were here, it makes perfect sense."

"Sort of like this Face on Mars thing made no sense to NASA," Turcotte asked, "but now it does?"

"Right," Nabinger said. "It was a question of accepting the data and ignoring the limitations of man at the time. Anthropologists have always argued how civilization began in such remote places as Egypt, China, and Central America, all at roughly the same time period. The popular theory was the isolationist theory of civilization. Isolationists believe that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of one another. They all crossed a threshold into civilization about the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ.

Isolationists explained the timing by arguing natural evolution.

"Of course, now we know this most likely isn't true. The Airlia did have some effect, and that is most likely why civilization prospered in those distant places at the same time." Nabinger's eyes became unfocused as he retreated inside his own129.

thoughts. "From what I saw in the guardian, I believe that there were humans on Atlantis where the Airlia had their home base and that some of those humans escaped when Aspasia destroyed Atlantis to stop the rebels. These humans dispersed and were the ones who began civilization at various places and gave us the myth of that island."

"Then the Airlia did interfere with our development as a species," Turcotte said.

"They certainly must have had some effect." Nabinger opened his eyes. "After all, they were here for over five thousand years. Atlantis had to be the place where their effect was the greatest. This one-starting-point theory is called 'diffusion.' Basically it means that all those civilizations were started by people from a single earlier civilization."

Turcotte leaned forward. "Let me ask something. How did the rebel computer get into that temple in Temiltepec? And the atomic bomb inside the Great Pyramid?

Wasn't that the work of the rebel Airlia, not humans fleeing Atlantis?"

"I don't know," Nabinger answered. "It would seem likely."

"Well, if Aspasia went to Mars to snooze for a couple of millennia, then where did the rebel Airlia go?"

"I a.s.sume they died out," Nabinger said, but it was clear he had not really considered it.

"Maybe they're snoozing somewhere too?" Turcotte said. "Maybe they're snoozing in China?"

"Oh, give me a break," Kelly said.

"Maybe the guardian is worried about that and130.

that's why it sent out the foo fighters," Turcotte said. Something else occurred to Turcotte. He turned to Duncan. "Or maybe that was what was on that lower level in Dulce. Maybe they recovered the bodies of rebel Airlia in the temple at Temiltepec along with the rebel computer? Maybe that's why Guardian I had the foo fighters take the lab out. Maybe Majestic was trying to thaw the aliens out or jump-start them or whatever?"

"Maybe, maybe, maybe," Kelly repeated. She was pacing back and forth, the plywood floor squeaking under her boots. "Why don't we stick with the facts?"

"Which ones?" Turcotte asked. "If any of the rebel Airlia are still around somewhere, what if they're coming awake also? What if these two sides pick up where they left off five centuries ago? What if this Che Lu professor has stumbled onto something significant and dangerous? Based on this marker we found in the Rift Valley, there's a good chance whatever she's onto is linked to the ruby sphere we found, which seems to be linked to the mothership, according to what Peter just translated."

"I don't know what is in China," Nabinger said. "But it could help me decipher the Airlia Earth coordinate system if I can pinpoint the location." He had an atlas in his hand and was searching through it. "All Che Lu said was she found some high runes and she was going into the ancient Chinese tomb of Qian-Ling to investigate further. I've heard of Qian-Ling." He proceeded to briefly fill them in on the mountain tomb's background.

"The runes she found could be a whole lot of nothing or just copied religious text, as is much of131.

what is in the Great Pyramid. They could . . ." He paused, his finger moving over the glossy page that showed a map of China. "Holy s.h.i.t!" he exclaimed. He spun around on the stool and reached into his battered leather backpack and pulled out the spiral notepad with his high rune notes.

"What is it?" Turcotte asked.

Nabinger was thumbing through the pages of his notebook, the paper filled with hand-drawn high rune symbols. "You aren't going to believe it. I don't believe it myself."

"What?" Lisa Duncan and the others crowded around.

Nabinger stopped turning pages. He looked from the map to the paper several times, then up at the others. "It's been right there all this time and I never saw it. h.e.l.l, I never looked. And even if I had looked I probably would-"

"What was right there?" Turcotte was losing patience.

"The word," Nabinger said.

"Word?" Duncan repeated.

"The symbol." Nabinger tapped the map. "It's been there for centuries." His eyes were focused on something outside of the tent in his mind's eye. "It makes sense, though. We would have been able to see it only in the last fifty years or so since we went into s.p.a.ce. And then no one would have thought to look because we didn't know about the high rune language. Brilliant! Simply brilliant."

Turcotte looked at the others in the room, then back at the archaeologist.

"What is so brilliant? What symbol?"132.

"This." Nabinger's finger was resting on a section of the map.

The others peered. "I don't get it," Turcotte said. "China? That town near your finger? What?"

"No," Nabinger said. "The Wall. The Great Wall. Look at this section here in Western China, north of the city of Lanzhou." He looked at the others. "The Great Wall is the only manmade structure that can currently be seen from s.p.a.ce with the naked eye."

"What about it?" Turcotte asked, although he was beginning to get the idea and the magnitude of it stunned him.

Keeping his finger in place, Nabinger used his free hand to pull his notebook next to the map. "Look at the Wall here and look at that symbol."