Star Corps(18)

The issue was now being fought not in the desert outside of Cairo, but in the council chambers and meeting rooms of the CSD headquarters in Geneva.

The Confederation Joint Military Command had elected to hold back the relief expedition until America’s legal standing on the issue was better defined. And, after all, so long as the Marines were not under direct attack…

Unfortunately, Warhurst knew, that left Marines in a precarious position, holding a perimeter far larger than tactical doctrine allowed, growing short on sleep as they stood watch and watch, with supplies of food and especially water tightly rationed. The water supply to the Giza complex had been cut at the pumping stations on the Nile and not restored. Every indication suggested that another attack was imminent. The Pentagon had promised that reinforcements were only thirty minutes away, should the Marines’ position grow too precarious.

But a hell of a lot could happen in thirty minutes.

“Let’s see what he’s telling them,” Warhurst said.

Uplinking again to Brigade Intelligence, he requested a consecutive translation. The wildly shouting mullah was too distant for the Marines to pick up his words through their armor sensor suites, but the AI he connected with had been programmed both for Arabic and for lip-reading. Within another few seconds, a flat, atonal voice began speaking over his helmet headset, the emotionless quality of the words oddly contrasting with their evident content.

“The Western satans think to deprive us of our heritage,” ibn-Khadir was saying. “They poke and dig among our monuments, desecrate our grave sites and holy places, then tell us that these symbols of our people, these holy testaments to the power of Allah, were constructed by another people, by foreigners…with the aid of demons from another star. They corrupt these holy places and defile the name of Allah!” Ibn-Khadir turned his head, and the AI lost the next few lines of his speech.

It sounded like the standard propaganda line, though. Archeological discoveries over the course of the past two centuries had proven that the principal structures on the Giza Plateau—the three Great Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, and the Sphinx—all had been raised, at least in preliminary form, eight thousand years before the traditionally accepted dates of their building, long before the Neolithic tribes who would later be known as Egyptians had migrated to the Nile Valley. The Egyptian government and, later, after the Mahdi had unified the far-flung Kingdom of Allah, the Principiate of Cairo, had insisted that the Sphinx and Great Pyramids were an expression of the soul of the Egyptian people and not of alien invaders who’d established colonies on Earth over ten thousand years ago.

That battle was not new. Variants of it had been ongoing since the last decade of the twentieth century, when American archeologists and geologists had first noted that erosion patterns in the flanks of the Sphinx were characteristic of rain, which suggested that it was considerably older than the traditionally assigned date of 2400 B.C. Dr. David Alexander, the noted Egyptologist who later gained fame as the father of xenoarcheology on Mars, had been expelled from Egypt because his theories and finds contradicted long established traditions of Egyptian history.

Seventy years had passed, but the delicate balance of politics, religion, and national pride hadn’t changed. Two months ago archeologists from both the European union   and the UFR had opened a new chamber hewn from bedrock almost fifty meters beneath the hindquarters of the Sphinx. Artifacts discovered there tended to support the theory of extraterrestrial design, and a new tunnel had been found—one hinted at by Herodotus and other ancient writers—leading back toward the Great Pyramid of Khufu, where recent sonar and deep radar imaging suggested that a vast labyrinth of chambers remained yet undiscovered.

A deep bedrock labyrinth that could not possibly have been chipped out with the use of stone tools and wooden mallets.

A preliminary publication on the find in an archeological journal had triggered excitement worldwide, as well as a sharp rejection by the Islamic Kingdom of Allah. The local government authorities had ordered the Giza excavations closed down and all foreign archeologists to leave the country. From then on, all excavations in Egypt and other Kingdom of Allah states would be carried out by approved Islamic archeologists, under the direct supervision of the Islamic Directorate of History in Baghdad.

To Warhurst, it sounded like a hell of a stupid way to do science.

“We will not let the foreign satans take truth and twist it into blasphemy!” ibn-Khadir was shouting to the crowd. “The time has come to throw the foreigners out, to reclaim our history for ourselves, in the blessed name of Allah!”