"Let's get inside," she told him.

"Oh, yeah," Spearson added as they headed for the main doors to the building.

"Your buddy is okay."

The only acknowledgment Duncan made was to slow her walk slightly.

Turcotte's head rang from the explosion, and swirling dust choked his lungs.

SAS men with gas masks on ran through the hole in the twisted metal.

Turcotte forced himself to wait. He turned as Lisa Duncan and Colonel Spearson came down the hallway and joined him.

"This has got to be it," he said.

"We wait on my people to clear," Spearson said.

"Fine," Duncan acknowledged. She turned to Turcotte. "You all right?"

"I'm getting too old for this," he said, earning a laugh from Spearson.

The minutes stretched out. Finally, after almost a half hour of waiting, a dust-covered Major Rid- 63.

ley crawled back out of the hole. He pulled his gas mask off and wiped his eyes.

"Did you find any of the scientists?" Duncan asked.

Ridley looked slightly disoriented. "Scientists? They're all dead in there.

All dead."

"How?" Colonel Spearson demanded.

Ridley shrugged, his thoughts elsewhere. "Gas, most likely. Must have been set off by the guards when we attacked. It's clear in there now. The merks were just delaying us until the gas worked. The scientists were trapped in there like rats. Looks like they hadn't been allowed out in a long time. Probably lived down there for years. There's plenty of tunnels full of supplies. Living quarters. Mess hall. All that."

"What about Airlia artifacts?" Turcotte asked.

"Artifacts?" Ridley's laugh had a manic edge that he was trying hard to control. "Oh, yeah, there's artifacts down there, sir." He slumped down into a chair. "But you best go see for yourself."

Spearson leading the way, they went through the destroyed doors. They were in a large open tunnel with concrete walls and a floor that sloped down and to the right, disappearing around a curve a hundred meters away. Ridley had been correct about the supplies, Turcotte noted as they walked down. There were numerous side tunnels cut into the rock, full of equipment and supplies. Several of the side tunnels housed living areas, and as Ridley had noted, one was a mess hall. SAS soldiers stood guard at each door and told the colonel that there was no one alive inside.

Bodies were strewn about here and there, 64.

wherever the poison gas had caught them. Whatever Terra-Lei had used on its own people must have been fast acting and had dissipated quickly, Turcotte noted, but also appeared to have been painful. The features of each corpse were twisted in a grimace and the body contorted from violent seizures.

As they went around the bend, the three stopped momentarily in surprise. The wide walkway expanded to a sloping cavern, over five hundred meters wide, the ceiling a hundred meters over their heads hewn out of the volcanic stone. As far as they could see it descended at a thirty-degree slope. Rubber matting had been placed over the center of the smooth stone floor to form a walkway and there was a cog railway built next to the rubber matting.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," Spearson whispered.

"Look," Duncan said, pointing to the right. A black stone stood there, like a dark finger pointed upward into the darkness. It was ten feet high and two in width, the surface a polished sheen except where high runes were etched into the stone.

"Hope it doesn't say, NO TRESPa.s.sING," Turcotte said.

An SAS sergeant stood next to the small train and pa.s.senger cars. He saluted Spearson. "Already been down there, sir, with the captain," he reported, pointing into the unseen deep distance where a row of fluorescent lights next to the rail line faded into the dark haze. "Left a squad on guard." The sergeant swallowed. "Never seen nothing like it, sir."

"Let's take a look for ourselves," Spearson said, climbing into the first open car.

65.

Duncan and Turcotte joined him while the sergeant got in the cab and pushed the throttle into the forward position. With a slight jolt they began rattling down the cogs, descending farther into the cavern. As they went down, the cavern widened until they couldn't see an end to either side, just the meager human light fading into the darkness ahead and behind. Turcotte pulled the collar of his battle-dress uniform tighter around his neck, and he could feel Duncan pressing closer to him. There was the feeling of being a tiny speck in a ma.s.sive emptiness. Turcotte glanced over his shoulder back the way they had come.

Already the brighter light of the cog railway terminal where they had boarded was over a mile behind them. The train was moving at almost forty miles an hour now, clattering over the cogs, but there was no sense of movement other than the fluorescent lights strung on poles next to the rail line flashing by.

After five more minutes they could all make out a red glow ahead. At first it was just the faintest of lines across the low horizon. But as they got closer, they could see the line grow clearer and larger over a mile ahead, perpendicular to their direction of travel. Turcotte had no idea how deep they were, but the temperature was starting to rise and he could feel beads of sweat on his forehead.

Turcotte looked down and could see that the floor of the cavern was still perfectly smooth. He'd seen Hangar Two at Area 51 where the mothership had been hidden, but this cavern dwarfed even that ma.s.sive structure. He couldn't imagine the technology that would be needed to 66.

carve this out. And for what purpose? he wondered. Directly ahead there was a red glow coming out of a wide crevice that split the cavern floor. Turcotte spotted several smaller glowing lights, the flashlights of the SAS squad at the end of the railway. As they slowed down, Turcotte could see the far side of the crevice, over half a mile away, but he couldn't see down into it because they were still over a hundred meters from the edge when the train stopped at the end of the line.

"Sir!" An SAS trooper nodded at Colonel Spearson as they got out.

They walked together toward the edge and stopped where the smooth stone, which had been sloping down at thirty degrees, suddenly went ninety degrees straight down. Duncan gasped and Turcotte felt his heart pound as he carefully peered over the edge. There was no bottom that they could see, just a red glow emanating up from the bowels of the Earth. Turcotte could feel heat washing over his face, accompanied by a strong odor of burning chemicals.

"How deep do you think that goes?" Spearson asked.

"We must be at least seven or eight miles underground already," Duncan said.

"If that red glow is the result of heat generated from a split in the Mohorovicic discontinuity-"

"The what?" Spearson barked.

"The line between the planet's crust and the mantle-then we're talking about twenty-two miles altogether to the magma, which is what's giving off that red glow."

"Jesus," Turcotte exclaimed.

67.

"Look over there," Colonel Spearson said, drawing their eyes from the spectacle of a doorway into the primeval inner Earth. To their right, about two hundred meters away, a series of three poles stretched across the chasm to the other side. Suspended from the cables, directly in the center, was a large, bright red, multifaceted sphere about five meters in diameter.

They walked along the edge of the crevice until they came to the first of the poles that held the sphere in place. The pole ran right into the rock face several feet below the lip. Turcotte had seen that black metal before. "That's Airlia," he said. "Same material as the skin of the mothership. Some incredibly strong metal we still haven't been able to figure out."

"What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l is that thing?" Spearson was pointing at the ruby sphere. It was hard to tell if the sphere itself was ruby or if it was reflecting the glow from below. Duncan didn't answer, but she led the way farther right where a group of low structures had been erected. It was obvious most of them had been built by the Terra-Lei scientists who'd been working down here. But in the center was a console that immediately reminded Turcotte of the control panel in one of the bouncers. "That's Airlia too," he said, walking up the panel. . The surface was totally smooth. There was high rune writing etched on it and Turcotte imagined that once it was powered up, more rune writing would appear, pointing to various controls that could be activated with just a touch on the surface. He wished Nabinger were here to give them an idea what they were looking at.

68.

"This"-Duncan was pointing at the panel- "controls that"-she pointed at the ruby sphere.

"And what does that do?" Spearson asked.

Duncan was looking about the great cavern. "I'm not too sure what more it can do, but I do believe it might have done this." Her hands were spread wide taking in the s.p.a.ce they were in.

"That thing blasted this out?" Spearson was incredulous.

"Something made this cavern," Duncan said. "It isn't a natural formation. The Airlia had technology beyond our imaginings, so I think it's safe to say something of theirs made this cavern. And the Terra-Lei people spent a lot of years down here trying to figure this out. Now we know why they never moved this to South Africa."

"They couldn't move it," Turcotte agreed. "That metal in those poles took the guys at Area 51 over fifty years to get through, and then only after they were taken over by the rebel guardian and given the information needed."

"And the South Africans must have been scared of what they were working on,"

Duncan added.

"Scared?" Colonel Spearson repeated.

"They killed all their own people," Turcotte noted. "The guys we fought upstairs were just mercenaries who I'm willing to bet don't have a clue who really hired them or what was in here."

Spearson was looking about. "Why do you think it's here? Over a crack in the Earth's crust?"

"It picks up thermal energy?" Turcotte suggested.

Duncan didn't appear to hear him. "I think I've 69.

just figured out what this is and I think they did too. And they had sixteen years to sit here and look at it. No wonder they were scared."

"What is it?" Turcotte asked.

Duncan was staring over the ma.s.sive crevice in the Earth at the ruby sphere.

"I think it's a Doomsday device set there to destroy the planet."

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 ma.s.sive 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.

71.

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 72.

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 a.s.sure you. We're still coordinating with the various governments that picked it up. Are you certain that the guardian 73.

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 pa.s.sive 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."