Allan Ashinoff - The Vostok Revelation

Several seconds crept by before Alex became annoyed and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

Without taking his eyes from the monitor, Satish gently nudged Alex’s desk chair aside, rolling it just far enough to give him unimpeded access to her keyboard. Before Alex could protest, Gavde had parsed the string of characters into four groupings. He then mumbled something incomprehensible beneath his breath before changing the case of a few of the letters and shifting a few letters from one grouping to another.

“Yes, as I thought, this is a form of Sanskrit.” Gavde said with a degree of arrogant smugness that, despite his good looks, always irritated Alex whenever he tried to speak to her. “Sanskrit is a sacred language in Hinduism and also a scholarly language in Buddhism.”

“Can you read it? What does it say?”

“Its a question: ‘dinner at Monte’s steakhouse tonight at 8,’” Satish responded with a wolf’s eyes and wry grin.

“Not a chance,” Alex countered with a spurious smirk.

“Monte’s! Hell, I’ll go,” Robert Smith said quickly. “But it’s only fair to warn you that I’m not a cheap date and I’m not easy.”

July 13, 2014. 0600 Hours. National Security Agency, Langley Virginia.

“Analyst Satish Gavde discovered that the ciphertext was in Sanskrit, a historical Indo-Aryan language. I moved Alexis Kline off the project and handed the ball to Satish.” Robert Smith said into his handset before taking a sip of his tepid coffee, his fifth cup for the night. “No sir, I can see no reason why the Russians would encrypt and use a dead language.” Smith shifted some papers on his desk, found the page he was after, and then crudely attempted to speak the four words: ‘SAdhanalekha- hi- kepha- puSpa.’ Gavbe assured me that this translates to ‘recipe for kepha flower.’ No, he had no idea what a kepha flower is and we’ve been unable to find any record of any kind of a flower by that name now or in history.”

July 13, 2014. 0730 Hours. Somewhere in Austin, Texas.

Sam Granger hung up the receiver. This shit is getting weirder and weirder by the hour. Why the hell would the Russians use and encrypt a message in a long dead language, broadcast it to an orbiting satellite, and then rebroadcast it into empty space?

July 13, 2014. 1930 Hours. National Security Agency, Langley Virginia.

Satish Gavde plopped into his desk chair, entered the password to his computer system and frowned at the lack of progress made by his custom Sanskrit compiler. After working for several hours to interpret as much of the file he was given, he’d grown tired of struggling with the peculiar Sanskrit variant and chose to modify one of his routines to automate the process while he got some rest.

Refreshed from a good day’s sleep and revved-up with a double shot of espresso, he looked on his scripts output file with renewed interest. It was disappointing to see that only 100 megabytes of the 1.3 terabyte file had been analyzed in the fifteen hours he’d been away from his desk. And of that 100 megabytes only sixty-eight percent had been translated into something meaningful.

Undeterred, Gavde constructed a query to seek out the most common words and phrases from what were available in the NSA data-store. A column of words and combinations of three, four and five words quickly filled his screen. While Satish was able to passably understand Sanskrit when he heard it or saw it written, the European letters on his monitor forced him to sound-out what he was seeing in his mind.

SAdhanalekha, recipe, thirty-one references. UpakaraNa, device, twenty-six references. Punarjanma, rebirth, eight references. AgAmi-janmani, next life, five references. Anatarnhas, end of world, five references. anuvAdaka, translator, three references.

Intrigued, Gadve minimized his report and looked over what text was translated. He conducted a word search for anuvAdaka. Three instances were highlighted on the screen. Each of the instances was in the phrase SAdhanalekha hi anuvAdaka UpakaraNa.

Recipe for translator device?

Gavde searched again, this time for Punarjanma. Again the instances of the word came up on the screen connected to other words.

Recipe for rebirth device?

Vostok Station, Antarctica. February 24, 2014. 2030 Hours.

Despite a strong push from its port side, Valentina was kept within claws reach of the suspected Nazi antenna as the drone slipped deeper into the dark abyss. Three kilometers above, twenty-nine scientists and engineers clustered around a laptop to witness history being made.

“A weld spot!” a male voice pointed out as an arm shot over her right shoulder.

“The post is widening at .02 centimeters every second the drone descends,” said another male voice, also from over her right shoulder.

The space grew quiet as the drone continued its descent. After twenty seconds the girth of the antenna stabilized at thirty centimeters and a bold white line began to appear across the bottom of the laptop display. Curious, Elena angled the drone’s nose downward five degrees. Fifteen meters away a circular expanse of white sat atop a broader field of white.

“A raised platform? The object stands on a raised platform that is sitting on what appears to be a manufactured base of some sort,” Commander Lebedev stated. “Engineer Babanin, as much as I hate to have to say this, despite what the Russian Academy of Science has instructed, the storm is almost upon us, we cannot stay much longer. I suggest that you circle the drone around the base of the platform. Perhaps we can find some marking to better identify what we are looking at before we must go.”

“Commander, It is obviously a Nazi an-”

“Technician Solovyov! Please try to conduct yourself with less enthusiasm and some degree of scientific objectivity.”

Elena ignored the outburst and did as the Commander requested. She had no desire to spend one more moment on the bottom of the world than she needed to. Using the current, she skillfully avoided looping the drone’s tether around the antenna while examining the platform. One hundred and eighty degrees from where it began, approximately three meters distant from the structure, the drone’s cameras revealed a column of seven capsule-like horizontal indentations flanked by thin elongated U-shaped rails.

“It is a ladder,” Commander Lebedev said in astonishment. “This is man-made. Do you realize what this means?”

“It means we found the Nazi bunker,” Artur said firmly.

“It means we’ve found something man-made, nothing more,” Commander Ledebev’s eyes never left the screen. “Engineer Babanin, we should acquire some wide images of as much of the structure as possible before we depart.”

“I was thinking the same, Commander,” Elena had already leaned her joystick forward, dipping the drone’s nose downward, pressed the back arrow on her keyboard and accelerated. The image on the screen slowly began to pan-out to reveal the entire circular raised platform, several meters of the antenna, and the continually expanding white foundation that the platform rested on. Elena halted the drone progress once the shape of the foundation came into view, a wide convex circle.

“Its flying saucer!” A man shouted from the back of the group and several others vocalized their agreement.

“Meh,” Another male voice chastised. “You and your U.F.O.’s and little green men, Timur. Anyone can see that it is a building. Look at the top of the antenna. That object, the thing that looks like a flower, is a broadcast dish.”