Assault on Atlantis a-5 Page 15

Bouyer nodded. “Yes. I know where they go also.”

  Sitting Bull picked up the skull that Bouyer had indicated was his, hefting it in his blood-covered hand. “I sense great power.”

  Bouyer waited. He could feel the difference in Crazy Horse. The warrior’s anger was muted, blanketed by despair. Bouyer put the other skulls away and closed the case. He carried it back to the mule and tied it off. He was exhausted having pressed the ride north from Colorado. Knowing time was short. Bouyer climbed up on his horse, aware all were staring at him. Sitting Bull was peering into the crystal skull as if he could see the future there.

  Gall was the most dangerous one, Bouyer knew. The chief was an impressive physical specimen, over six feet tall and built like a beer barrel, with a thick chest and muscular arms. He was known for bravery in battle as much as Crazy Horse. was edging around to Bouyer’s flank, a hatchet in his hand.

  “Where do you go?” Crazy Horse demanded.

  “To find Son of the Morning Star,” Bouyer said.

  “What of Three Stars?”

  “He is not important,” Bouyer said. ‘’1 will see you on the banks of the Greasy Grass.”

  Gall was moving closer, hatchet rising.

  “Let him go,” Sitting Bull ordered.

  Gall stopped but didn’t lower the hatchet. “You talk to us of uniting and killing whites. But you want me to let him go?”

  “This is not his time to die,” Sitting Bull said.

  Bouyer didn’t wait. He nudged the horse’s head to the north and kicked in his spur.

  * * *

  It was as Bouyer had said. There were a dozen Crow, stalking a herd of buffalo on the north side of the Rosebud. There were no pickets around the blue-coat encampment. The soldiers were lounging about, seemingly unconcerned. The cavalry had unsaddled their horses. Crazy Horse could even see Three Stars through the telescope-the commander of the blue coats was playing cards with his officers.

  Shots rang out as Sioux charged toward the Crow hunters. Still the soldiers seemed unconcerned; most likely thinking the firing was coming from the hunters. Crazy Horse watched the unfolding battle from a knoll a half-mile from the Rosebud. The skull Bouyer had left for him was in a bag tied off to his horse.

  The first response by the blue coats to what was really happening only came when a couple of retreating Crow galloped into the camp, screaming that they were being attacked. Soldiers scrambled to saddle their horses while the infantry hurriedly grabbed their rifles.

  The charging Sioux and Cheyenne would have overrun the camp, but two hundred Crow warriors who had joined Three Stars rallied and formed a skirmish line that broke the first charge. This gave the blue coats a chance to get somewhat organized.

  Crazy Horse watched as the battle raged back and forth. He could see both Sitting Bull and Gall leading charges. Crazy Horse was tempted to join the fray, but he remained where he was, simply observing. If Bouyer was night-and he had been right about this-then there would be time shortly for much fighting.

  The superior massed firepower of the whites was negating the expertise of the Indians at using both their horses and terrain to charge close. Back and forth across the creek came the assaults, each one beaten back.

  Time was critical, Crazy Horse realized as he watched the battle. If it had not been for the Crow defensive line, the first charge would have made it into the white man’s camp and the battle might have been over very quickly with the white man routed. But given time to organize a defense, their line produced too much firepower to break no matter how bravely the Indians charged. Attacking straight into the power of the Whites was a poor tactic, he realized.

  After a few hours, with no decisive move on either side, Sitting Bull came riding up to Crazy Horse’s position. “Why do you just sit there?”

  Crazy Horse lowered the telescope. “This battle is already over. The next one will be much different.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE SPACE BETWEEN

  When they reached the camp site, Earhart quickly introduced Dane and Kolkov to the other refugees, then the three huddled together near the wall to formulate the next step. Dane quickly updated her on what was happening in his time line.

  “I picked up some of that from Rachel,” Earhart said when he was done. “She let me know you were coming so Asper and I could be ready to get you. I didn’t know how many of you there would be and we only had the two suits. We did the best we could. I am sorry about your comrade,” she said to Kolkov.

  “Is the sphere still out there?” Dane asked, indicating the Inner Sea.

  Earhart nodded. “On the far side of the portal you were headed toward. Just floating there dead in the water. Only about ten feet of it is above the surface. I assume the crew is dead. The Shadow doesn’t seem to miss it. I’ve been out to it but didn’t go inside.”

  “What else has happened?”

  “Taki took the crystal skulls into a portal,” Earhart said.

  “He what?” Dane felt a moment of panic. “We need the skulls to power the sphere.”

  “You need the skulls to be energized first,” Earhart said. “I’d already taken one back.”

  “Back to when? Who did you give it to?”

  “To Crazy Horse’s brother-well, not actually his brother.”

  “’Crazy Horse’s brother’? You’d better start at the beginning,” Dane said. “For me it’s only been a day since I was here. I assume it’s been longer than that for you.”

  Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know how long it’s been, but, yes definitely longer than a day. After you left to go back to your time, things quieted down for a little bit. Then I heard the voices of the Ones Before. They wanted me to go to the Valkyrie chamber.”

  Dane suppressed a wave of dread as he remembered the cavern filled with thousands of operating tables on which the Valkyries were working on human captives-skinning them, removing limbs and organs, performing experiments. It was torture on a grand scale.

  “Taki and I went there in the suits,” she said, indicating the two empty white suits floating nearby. “I had ‘seen’ what I was to get and exactly where it was.” She turned and pulled.n object out of a pack. It looked like a strange gun with a short barrel about three inches long but very wide, almost two inches in diameter. The chamber was a red bulb about four inches in diameter. There was a red and green button on top of the bulb.

  “What is it?” Dane asked.

  Earhart laid it across her lap. “It’s a way of implanting a child-a fetus-inside a woman. When I found it, the red button was glowing. It was on a table next to a woman. A woman I recognized.”

  “Who?” Dane asked.

  “Me.”

  EARTH LINE IV

  “Leave me alone!” Robert Frost screamed the words at the metal walls of the cabin as he pressed both palms tight against his temples, trying to drive away the voice inside his head. “Haven’t I paid enough?”

  Frost banged his forehead against the edge of the bunk bolted to the wall. He didn’t even notice as he cut his skin and blood trickled down his face. Someone knocked on the hatch, and a muffled voice asked if he was all right.

  “Yes. Yes. YES!” Frost yelled. He just wanted to be left alone. He pulled his hands away from his head and looked about, as if uncertain where he was. He slumped down onto the thin mattress. He felt something wet on his face and wiped a shaking hand across his forehead. He stared at the blood smeared on his fingers with a frown.

  He reached with bloody fingers for a slim, leather-bound volume on the little shelf that served as a desk in the cramped cabin. He slid his finger to a page that was easily found, flipping the book open. The writing was in long hand, a flowing script. The poem was titled “In a Disused Graveyard.” He’d written it after a terrible night of visions of mankind’s doom.

  If it was God’s voice I heard. Then it was a very cruel God. Frost thought. The litany of pain and misfortune he had experienced over the years would have broken a lesser man. He’d lost his son El
liot at age three; he himself had almost died in the world flu pandemic of 1918; he’d had to commit a sister and daughter to sanatoriums-yes. He knew they heard the voices, but it overwhelmed their minds and both died there; another of his sons had also heard the voices and Frost had tried to talk to him about it, but the boy had killed himself with a hunting rifle in 1940.

  God? What kind of God brought such pain and misery? Frost wondered. And now death to all on the planet? The voices and visions had directed him here onboard this metal can, but he didn’t know exactly why. What could be saved?

  Frost reached under the bunk and pulled out a wooden box. He lifted the lid. A crystal skull was inside. It had a faint blue glow. The time was still not here, but it was getting closer.

  He closed the cover and lay back on the bed, pulling a pillow over his head, vainly hoping it would stop any message sent his way by the “gods.”

  THE SPACE BETWEEN

  “I do not understand,” Kolkov said, breaking the long silence.

  “It was me from another time line,” Earhart said. “One who was taken by the Shadow and not helped by the Ones Before. She was strapped to one of the vertical tables. They’d opened up her skull and put implants into her brain.” She turned to Dane. “You’ve seen what I’m talking about.”

  Dane nodded. He wondered how he would feel seeing himself-a parallel self-in such a situation. He’d been in the Valkyrie cavern and seen the people strapped down. Some bad their brains exposed with wired leads placed in them, connected to monitoring machines.

  “They’d taken a baby from her with the machine. I knew it-” here she glanced at Dane once more, and he understood how she knew it. “I also had been shown what I needed to do with it.

  “I brought it back with me. Then I went into a portal. I went to Earth, but back in time, I’m not sure exactly when, probably around the middle of the nineteenth century as I probably around the middle of the nineteenth century as I used the machine on an Indian woman in a lodge. I then went back later. When she gave birth. To two children. One hers, one mine. I told her what I’d been told to tell her-that these would meet again in battle and in the course of doing that help save a world.”

  “My world?” Dane asked.

  Earhart shrugged. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  ‘’The question is, was the world you traveled to my world’s past or another parallel world’s past?” Dane asked.

  “Does it matter?” Earhart asked in turn.

  “What great battle would these two meet in?” Kolkov asked. “And how would a battle help?”

  “Her son’s name was Crazy Horse.”

  “Little Big Horn,” Dane said.

  Earhart nodded. “That’s my guess.”

  “And your son’s name?” Dane asked.

  “He’s not really my son. He’s my parallel son. Sort of.” Earhart said, “I don’t know what the hell to call him. His lame is Mitch Bouyer. I gave him one of the crystal skulls. I’m assuming Taki took the others to him.”

  Dane let out a deep breath as he considered the information he had. “So we’ve got the Battle of Little Big Horn and two men — one’s Crazy Horse, the other Bouyer. Connected via birth, although not genetically. And at least one crystal skull-and hopefully all of them-which means there’s going to be power involved. And we’re going to need power for the sphere, because it seems dead in the water. And we’ve got Robert Frost and the Nautilus waiting at the North Pole in a dying time line. For what?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I think there’s a portal at the North Pole.”

  Kolkov leaned forward. “So perhaps you will have both power for the sphere and a portal to send it through?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Dane said: ·’We still have to get ozone from some time line to bring back.”

  “Maybe the Frost portal is the one to do that?”

  “Then how do we get back?” Dane asked. He shook his head. “We’re being used by the Ones Before. They send us these messages telling us the next step to take, but not much beyond that.”

  “It’s worked so far,” Earhart pointed out.

  “Has it?” Dane asked in turn. “Earth is dying. My Earth. Which,” he added, looking at Earhart, “might not even be your Earth time line. We just assumed that the first time we met. The Earhart in the Valkyrie cavern could be the Earhart from my time line. God knows how many time lines-how many of each of us — there are.”

  Earhart shook her head. “You’re giving me a headache. What choice do we have? Do nothing? And then what will happen? Your time line is dying, right? It looks like we have a chance to help it. We could sit here all day and argue about the motives of the Ones Before, but maybe they’re just doing the best they can, too.”

  Dane knew she was right, but he still had his misgivings about everything. Just a month ago{) he’d been living a simple life, working search-and-rescue with Chelsea. Now he was here, in a place he couldn’t have dreamed existed, talking about parallel worlds and parallel people. His old reality was gone, and he didn’t have much grasp on this new reality.

  Earhart drew him out of his reverie as she addressed Kolkov. “You’re a scientist?”

  Kolkov nodded. “Yes. I’ve been studying the portals for all of my adult life.”

  “These crystal skulls. We know where they come from — priestesses who fight the Shadow. But how do they work?”

  Kolkov rubbed his chin. “I think they do two things. One is redirect energy. Massive amounts of energy. I also think, though, that they can store energy.” Kolkov turned to Dane. “On the way here you explained to me what Sin Fen told you about the power of your mind. I think the skulls are a higher level of that. They connect in some way with the crystalline Structure of the planet. I studied the ones we had in Russia.

  Quartz is posed primarily of silicon dioxide. It can also form huge crystals that weigh several tons. It is extremely rare in nature to find pure quartz like that in the skulls, which is colorless. Even the slightest influence of other material can greatly color quartz. Do you know there are those who try to manufacture quartz?”

  “Why?” Dane asked.

  “Because of what we are talking about-the power potential. Theoretical work up to now, but apparently a good theory. The problem is that quartz is very difficult to manufacture and work with. If one goes against the grain the crystal shatters. Do you know what is used to carve quartz? Diamond, which has a rating of ten out of ten on the hardness scale. Quartz is rated at seven. This was the dilemma when people found some of these buried at ancient sites. Those who studied them wondered how ancient people could have carved such perfect specimens given they didn’t have diamond tools.”

  “Because they weren’t carved,” Dane said.

  “Yes. We know that now. Also, the grain cut on the skulls I saw in Russia goes against the natural axis of the stone, which is impossible to achieve even with diamond tools. Quartz in crystal form has a rhombohedra structure. One of the reasons scientists have tried to manufacture pure quartz structures is because of the piezoelectric effect.”

  “What’s that?” Earhart asked.

  Kolkov put his hands on either side of his head and pressed inward. “When quartz is subjected to pressure along certain lines of axis it will produce electric voltage, which in turn can help control the frequency of radio waves. It also rotates the plane of Polarized light.”

  “Aren’t radio waves a form of power?” Dane asked.

  Kolkov nodded. “Yes. Do you want to know my theory on what the skulls are part of?”

  “Any information would help,” Dane said.

  “I believe the skulls not only can store energy, but they are also part of a directed energy weapon.”

  Dane remembered watching Sin Fen on top of the pyramid in the Bermuda Triangle as she transformed, channeling the power of the pyramid below her, pulsing out beams of blue into the blackness of the approaching portal. “How does it work?”

  “There are three principal forms of directed-energy w
eapons: the directed microwave-energy weapon, the high-energy laser and the particle-beam. I believe what we might be dealing with is the last one. Although your government and mine have done a lot of publicized work on lasers and microwave-energy weapons, the particle beam research has always been shrouded in the utmost secrecy.”

  “Why?” Dane asked.

  “Because it has the most potential for lethality.”

  “That figures,” Dane said.

  “My government’s interest in the portals hasn’t been for purely scientific reasons,” Kolkov said. “We always believed there was a great threat from the Shadow, given what is suspected to have happened to Atlantis and the losses in various gates. Over the years we lost several submarines, ships and planes trying to investigate the gates.

  “The initial event at Chernobyl validated that fear when the gate opened inside of tower three. Beyond the Shadow threat, there was, of course, also the Cold War. While both our countries signed the ABM treaty, neither country stopped doing research for weapons to destroy ICBMs, and particle-beam weapons held the most potential for targeting, speed, and effect.

  “The characteristic that distinguishes the particle-beam weapon from other directed-energy weapons is the form of energy it propagates. While we have several operating concepts for particle-beam weapons, all devices generate their destructive power by accelerating sufficient quantities of subatomic particles or atoms to velocities near the speed of light and focusing these particles into a very high-energy beam. The total energy within the beam is the aggregate energy of the rapidly moving particles, each particle having kinetic energy due to its own mass and motion,”

  Dane followed· only part of what Kolkov was saying. There was a part of him that felt the scientists were trying hard to understand the bits and pieces of the current situation but in doing so were missing the big picture. He had a feeling that they had many of the pieces that would allow them to understand both the Shadow and the Ones Before before them, but they just weren’t putting them together the right way.

  Kolkov continued. “Currently, the particles we are using to form the beam are electrons, protons or hydrogen atoms. However, as Doctor Nagoya had been researching, it appears that muons might be the particle used by the skulls.