Area 51: Excalibur-6 by Robert Doherty Page A

From there ships could sail on to Greece and Rome and traders could travel the land routes inside those kingdoms.
    It was the route that Marco Polo traveled for three years to become the first Westerner to see the Inner Kingdom of China, but that was long after the road had been established. The Silk Road was also the path that the Black Death had taken in the opposite direction hundreds of years later in the fourteenth century. Historians had traced the deadly track of the bubonic plague from China, along the Silk Road, to Mediterranean ports and on to the rest of Europe.
    In five years it killed over twenty-five million people, reducing the human population of the planet by one-third. Percentagewise it was the most devastating event ever to strike mankind, far eclipsing the devastation of the world wars centuries later.
    And it had started right there in Qian-Ling—an attempt by Artad's followers to strike at the Mission's growing power in Europe and the Middle East and level the playing field. And the Mission had just recently tried the same thing in South America in an attempt to wipe out mankind and pave the way for Aspasia's arrival from Mars—an attempt that was stopped at the last minute by Mike Turcotte.
    When China was young, the balance of power was in the West, and Xian was the capital city. The first true ruler of

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    China, the Yellow Emperor ShiHuangdi, held sway there during his reign. In reality, ShiHuangdi had been a Shadow of Artad. According to legend, when he died, he was buried in a massive tomb, larger than even the Great Pyramid of Giza. This tomb was called Qian-Ling. A man-made mountain, over three thousand feet high, Qian-Ling, like Area 51 and the Great Pyramid, was more than it appeared to be. In reality the Shadow had simply returned to the place where he had been "born," and his memories absorbed.
    Deep inside was an Airlia base, complete with a guardian computer. It was also the site where Artad, leader of one side of the Airlia, had gone into hibernation along with his followers. The outside of the mountain was now blackened soil, the foliage stripped bare by the Chinese government's detonation of a nuclear weapon in a vain attempt to destroy the alien base. However, the same type of shield wall that protected Easter Island had limited the effect of the blast to the charring of the surface around the shield.
    Inside the alien base, Lexina, the leader of the Ones Who Wait, had managed to gain entry to the lowest level of Qian-Ling and resurrect Artad and his followers. Now they were ignored as Artad accessed the guardian, assessing the situation in the outside world.
    Artad was Airlia, standing almost seven feet tall and looking almost exactly like the Horus statue that had once guarded the entrance between the paws of the Great Sphinx. Red hair, red elongated eyes, six fingers, disproportional body—all indicated his alien heritage.
    Artad rapidly processed information concerning the ten thousand years since he had gone into deep sleep, until he was current on the present situation: Aspasia's Shadow was moving, using the power of the humans. He cloaked his forces with a shield that rendered them practically impervi-

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    ous to the weapons of the humans. Infecting those humans his forces contacted with a nanovirus to control them.
    Artad did a search of the guardian's database and frowned when he didn't get the answer he was looking for. He stepped away from the guardian and went out of the chamber. His Kortad, Airlia who had come to Earth with him so long ago, were lined up, awaiting his orders.
    "Excalibur?" he asked Ts'ang Chieh, the human court adviser from the days when his Shadow ruled as the Emperor ShiHuangdi, commander of all the known world.
    While he had been working the guardian, Ts'ang Chieh had been outside the chamber questioning Lexina.
    "The key to the Master Guardian?"
    "Yes."
    'The humans—the Watchers, or those who had been Watchers—hid it long ago. So long ago