Mutation by Michael McBride

Author:Michael McBride [McBride, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

30

TESS

The Hangar

Tess returned to her office with the biggest mug she could find and an entire pot of coffee. Programming the system to reconstruct the data from the ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer at more frequent intervals had taken longer than she’d anticipated, but things were actually progressing faster than expected. The combined data had already produced the first digital elevation model, which was little better than a photograph of television static, although it would gain more and more detail with each subsequent reconstruction. She only hoped Barnett’s team in the field had enough patience to wait it out. While she understood the need for speed, there was only so much she could personally do to expedite the process. That didn’t mean she was going to sit on her hands while the program ran, though.

It would help if she knew what Evans’s team had found in Göbekli Tepe, assuming they’d found anything at all. If there was nothing there, then the whole theory about the map leading to something of great importance didn’t necessarily fall apart, but it meant they were going to have to check all of the other locations corresponding with the various planets, which would take time they simply didn’t have.

She sat in the chair behind her desk, poured herself the first of what would likely be several dozen cups of coffee, and speed-dialed Evans. The call went straight to voicemail. She tried Anya and Jade, too, but achieved the exact same result. Considering they were thousands of miles away and in the middle of nowhere, she wasn’t overly surprised. She debated calling Maddox, but figured she’d be heading down to the command center with what she hoped would be useful information in a matter of minutes anyway. While she didn’t like the idea of plowing ahead without some form of confirmation, it was a million times better than doing nothing.

The map of Giza was still on her primary computer screen. Because it was one of the most famous archeological sites in the world, she was certain the entire area had been studied with every scientific instrument known to man, and was rewarded when her search returned both GPR and magnetometric surveys. In combination, the two produced a grayscale map of the entire city, from the modern aboveground structures to the ancient ones buried underneath up to fifty feet of sand. The resulting three-dimensional digital elevation model always reminded her of scarring on human skin. Terrestrial buildings like the pyramids and contemporary houses appeared white and raised, while those buried beneath the gray earth were as dark as bruises. Where an aerial photograph showed only sand and the general shape of the structures that breached the surface, the digital elevation model revealed the entire buried city as it must have looked five thousand years ago.

There were hundreds of square and rectangular dwellings surrounding the pyramids, packed tightly into grids separated by archaic roads that now registered as little more than ghostly lines, smudged away by the wind that had ultimately buried them beneath the desert.

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