Area 51: The Legend by Robert Doherty Page B

Had the Airlia here defeated whoever had come? She knew where to find Gwalcmai now that the shield wall was down. He was just outside the metal grate, waiting in the canoe.
    “Look,” Gwalcmai said, pointing up as she climbed on board.
    The gangway retracted into the mothership and the door slid shut. The mothership moved smoothly and without sound to a position a kilometer and a half above the palace. Larger cargo doors in the front of the Airlia craft opened. Two golden saucers exited a door just above the base of the palace. Below them, caught in a tractor beam, was an object that Donnchadh had heard of but never seen—the one on her world had been destroyed in the nuclear explosion that took out the palace—a massive crouching Black Sphinx, over a hundred meters long from the tip of the paws to the rear. The Hall of Records. It was supposed to have been the place where the Ark and Grail were securely stored.
    The two saucers flew the sphinx into the cargo bay and set it down. As soon as they released it, they raced back to the palace and made several more trips, each time carrying a twenty-foot-high golden pyramid.
    “They’re bringing out the guardians,” Gwalcmai noted.
    “They’re deploying to Stage Two,” Donnchadh said. “Dispersing.” She stiffened as one of the saucers came out of the temple with a red pyramid caught in its beam. “The Master Guardian.”
    “That means they’re really abandoning this place,” Gwalcmai said.
    “We need to get out of here.” Donnchadh grabbed an oar and began paddling.
    As they reached the innermost ring, the cargo bay on the mothership closed and the huge craft began to move away to the southeast. They leapt out of the canoe and raced across the land to the next circle of water. Even as they slowly madetheir way across the land, the mothership disappeared from sight.
    Aspasia sat in the command chair in his mothership. His tactical display indicated that Artad was in orbit, shadowing his movements to make sure he complied with the terms of the truce the two had agreed on. It was a patchwork solution to a problem both had contributed to. If the Swarm had transmitted the location of this star system to a Battle Core, then there was only a slight chance they could survive—and that slight chance would revolve around making themselves as scarce as possible and making it appear that the Airlia had abandoned the system. The ruins of the transmitter on Mars would help in that matter. A Battle Core might harvest the humans and be satisfied with that. Even if the Swarm had not sent a message out, Artad’s precipitous destruction of the interstellar array on Mars had made an already bad situation worse and implicated him in Aspasia’s isolation. There was no way either could return to the empire without getting to at least Phase IV of the seed program on Earth. That would take at least ten thousand revolutions of this planet around its star. A long time for the humans, but not so long for the Airlia, especially given the fact they had the deep sleep tubes.
    Aspasia watched as the mothership passed over a strait connecting two oceans—what would be known as the Atlantic and Mediterranean and the rocks on either side would be called the Pillars of Hercules—and flew along the northern coast of Africa almost to the eastern end of the continent, where it paused above a lush land with a large river coursing through the center and emptying into the Mediterranean. On the entire planet, this was the place where Aspasia’s scientists had decided human life could best develop. Because of that report he had sent his chief engineer, Rostau, to prepare the site many years previously for part of Phase II. This was going to be a bit different, but the site would serve nicely.
    They flew upriver to a point where a stone plateau projected up on the west side of the river. Aspasia had the mothership halted. A weapon fired from the nose of the massive ship, cutting into the rock, burning