conversation sheds any light our situation. We’ll be back soon,” Bark says, turning to follow the others.
The Senator, never one to argue (at least that is how he sees himself) finds a space on the rock ledge and sits down.
It doesn’t take Bark and the others long to reach the perimeter fence. They stop in front of it, and look along its length and then at each other. They shrug, as if deciding something not very important at all, and then walk through it. It flickers briefly, creating a brief nimbus of fairy lights around them.
* * *
Underground in the control room, a private currently more interested in a recent earthquake in the Ukraine than anything else was making a coffee when he was drawn back to his computer by the beeping of an alarm.
On the screen he saw that the fence’s field had been breached in five places, all close together, as though a group of something was moving together.
“Shit,” he thought and said in Ukrainian. “Intruders.” He flicked through the cameras along the fence. There was nothing there. Everything was fine; the fence was intact.
Damned machine. It hadn’t acted properly since they hauled it off the truck. Private Dosteyin went back to his coffee.
* * *
Archeology 101
THE GENERAL AND THE ARCHAEOLOGIST were standing with a group of engineers in front of a wall, surrounded by the crumbling remains of subterranean buildings. The General reflected, not for the first time, on the attraction of archeology. To unveil these things that had been buried, unseen and unsuspected, for so long that no human had any idea of the time involved…
The original inhabitants of the excavations had been human, or at least humanoid, judging by the architecture. Whoever they were, they had been tall; the doorways and steps suggested a height of seven or eight feet. They didn’t yet know how many kilometers of tunnels there were, but it was a large system, bigger than the others that had been found in other parts of the world.
There were three other locations that were known of. One was in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. Another was in the Himalayas, inside the Chinese border, which had meant that some high-level and very careful cooperation was going on. The third site had been found under the sand in Saudi Arabia, at a place where nomads had gathered for rituals for as long as they could remember, and where earthmovers and trucks and scientists and soldiers now gathered.
And there was this site, near the northern tip of the North Island of New Zealand. It was the fourth site, the last to be identified.
Time was short. The other three sites were ready and waiting. Everything was in place.
The UN had been sure that there was something to be found when they sent the first party of surveyors here. The ruins had been found exactly where they had been expected; at the point which, combined with the other three sites around the world, formed an irregular but very precisely shaped tetrahedron, the four corners of which were occupied by these impossible ruins, buried under rock that was millions of years old.
The workers who had been involved in the initial exploration had been given all the normal mind-clearing drugs, after which all memory of the excavations had been removed. As always, there were a few in whom the suggestion didn’t take, so there had been some accidents to arrange. Training mishaps, the odd helicopter crash, that sort of thing.
The New Zealand site was the last piece of the puzzle. There had been some tension in the air at Mount Weather when the General had left to come here. There was doubtless a lot more now.
The wall in front of them was at the end of one of the labyrinth’s main tunnels. They were almost a kilometer underground.
Both men could feel what had been described in the reports. The soldiers and engineers who were with them stirred uneasily. The first people to stand here three months ago had described it as a feeling of apprehension that grew
The Senator, never one to argue (at least that is how he sees himself) finds a space on the rock ledge and sits down.
It doesn’t take Bark and the others long to reach the perimeter fence. They stop in front of it, and look along its length and then at each other. They shrug, as if deciding something not very important at all, and then walk through it. It flickers briefly, creating a brief nimbus of fairy lights around them.
* * *
Underground in the control room, a private currently more interested in a recent earthquake in the Ukraine than anything else was making a coffee when he was drawn back to his computer by the beeping of an alarm.
On the screen he saw that the fence’s field had been breached in five places, all close together, as though a group of something was moving together.
“Shit,” he thought and said in Ukrainian. “Intruders.” He flicked through the cameras along the fence. There was nothing there. Everything was fine; the fence was intact.
Damned machine. It hadn’t acted properly since they hauled it off the truck. Private Dosteyin went back to his coffee.
* * *
Archeology 101
THE GENERAL AND THE ARCHAEOLOGIST were standing with a group of engineers in front of a wall, surrounded by the crumbling remains of subterranean buildings. The General reflected, not for the first time, on the attraction of archeology. To unveil these things that had been buried, unseen and unsuspected, for so long that no human had any idea of the time involved…
The original inhabitants of the excavations had been human, or at least humanoid, judging by the architecture. Whoever they were, they had been tall; the doorways and steps suggested a height of seven or eight feet. They didn’t yet know how many kilometers of tunnels there were, but it was a large system, bigger than the others that had been found in other parts of the world.
There were three other locations that were known of. One was in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. Another was in the Himalayas, inside the Chinese border, which had meant that some high-level and very careful cooperation was going on. The third site had been found under the sand in Saudi Arabia, at a place where nomads had gathered for rituals for as long as they could remember, and where earthmovers and trucks and scientists and soldiers now gathered.
And there was this site, near the northern tip of the North Island of New Zealand. It was the fourth site, the last to be identified.
Time was short. The other three sites were ready and waiting. Everything was in place.
The UN had been sure that there was something to be found when they sent the first party of surveyors here. The ruins had been found exactly where they had been expected; at the point which, combined with the other three sites around the world, formed an irregular but very precisely shaped tetrahedron, the four corners of which were occupied by these impossible ruins, buried under rock that was millions of years old.
The workers who had been involved in the initial exploration had been given all the normal mind-clearing drugs, after which all memory of the excavations had been removed. As always, there were a few in whom the suggestion didn’t take, so there had been some accidents to arrange. Training mishaps, the odd helicopter crash, that sort of thing.
The New Zealand site was the last piece of the puzzle. There had been some tension in the air at Mount Weather when the General had left to come here. There was doubtless a lot more now.
The wall in front of them was at the end of one of the labyrinth’s main tunnels. They were almost a kilometer underground.
Both men could feel what had been described in the reports. The soldiers and engineers who were with them stirred uneasily. The first people to stand here three months ago had described it as a feeling of apprehension that grew
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