Assault on Atlantis a-5 Page 3

  One of the men, who had a silver eagle pinned to his parka indicating he was the captain of the submarine, put a pair of binoculars to his eyes and looked about for a few moments at the desolate ice before lowering the glasses. “This is it. The North Pole.”

  “We can’t run anymore,” the poet said. “There is nowhere else to go.”

  Captain Anderson fingered his binoculars, twisting the focus. “Some of the men-” he paused.

  The poet slowly unwrapped his muffler, revealing blistered and burned skin. His deep blue eyes contrasted starkly with the destruction on his face. A crop of thinning white hair crowned his head. “They want to go quickly,” he said, his breath producing puffs of warm moisture in the cold dry air.

  The captain nodded. “Yes, Mister Frost.”

  Robert Frost, poet laureate of what had once been the United States, absentmindedly rubbed a gloved hand across his cheek. He didn’t appear to notice as a section of skin peeled loose and blood slowly oozed out, freezing within seconds. “It isn’t time yet.”

  “‘Isn’t time’?”

  “For us to die … Frost said. “ We’ve heard the last broadcasts from the northern towns. There’s been nothing for three days now. They’re all dead or dying. We’re all that’s left.” He thought for a moment. “Here stands man … Frost said. his voice changing, “for the last time.”

  “Is there no hope?” Anderson asked.

  “Not for us,” Frost said. “We were too late. Too late. I was too late. I didn’t interpret the visions, the words, until it was too late.”

  “Then why did you come with us?” the captain asked.

  Frost looked over the desolate, wind-swept ice. “We were too late for us. I said there is no hope for us. But maybe there is hope for others, which is why you and your men must wait.”

  “’Others’” What others?” Captain Anderson was confused. “Everyone else on the planet is dead or dying. You just said so yourself.”

  “There are others,” Frost said. “Not here and now, but there and then. We must be prepared to take what they need to get rid of.”

  The captain’s mouth opened as if he were going to ask a question but then shut as he realized he didn’t even know what to ask in light of what Frost had just said. The poet had not spoken much on the journey north. And when he did, his words were like these, making little sense.

  “I have heard the voices,” Frost continued. “They directed me here. We must wait to see what is revealed. Something will happen. Then it will be time for sacrifice to help others.” Frost continued to look with the binoculars. Scanning around in a complete circle.

  “What are you looking for?” Anderson asked.

  “A gate.”

  * * *

  Eric Dane lay still, keeping his eyes closed, trying to continue the vision and hear more of Frost’s words, but it faded with his growing consciousness of his surroundings. He could feel a very slight sway, indicating he was onboard a ship-the Flip, he knew, a special U.S. Navy research vessel. He was horizontal, lying down, with a thin blanket covering his chest. He heard a low canine whine and felt a hairy muzzle press against his shoulder, and he knew what had awoken him.

  “Easy girl,” Dane whispered as he opened his eyes. A gray steel bulkhead was overhead. He turned to the left, saw a Golden Retriever’s white snout less than four inches away, and smelled her hot breath as she panted in the warm cabin. He reached out and ran his fingers through Chelsea’s fur, feeling comforted by her presence.

  Too late.

  The words remained with him. He swung his feet to the deck and sat up. A volume of Robert Frost’s poetry was on the desk next to the bunk.

  Waiting Sacrifice.

  Dane didn’t bother to pick up the book. He knew what he had just seen was most likely a true vision of another Earth ne line where Robert Frost had ended up on the Nautilus. After all, his previous “vision” of Frost meeting with President Kennedy just before the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded in nuclear destruction had been an accurate one of another time line-verified when Dane had traveled through a gate into the Space Between and then through another gate to that devastated world.

  He now knew there were many parallel Earths, connected via portals/gates through the Space Between. The portal was De actual connection between points, while the gate was the spillover from one world into the other, usually in the form of dark mist. And there was a malevolent force, the Shadow, raping various Earth time lines for water, air, power and even people. This, his Earth and his time line, had barely survived. The most recent assault by the Shadow. The first assault had occurred more than ten thousand years earlier with the destruction of Atlantis by the Shadow.

  Dane turned to the computer next to the book and moved the mouse, then clicked. A current intelligence summary appeared.

  The Rift Valley had split, and most of Africa east of the valley was now underwater. Millions were dead.

  The New Madrid Fault in the central United States had been active, devastating the land on both sides of the Mississippi from New Madrid to St. Louis. Hundreds of thousands dead.

  Both were a result of the Shadow trying to tap into power from the core of the planet via one of the gates.

  Many were dead and the face of the planet had been changed. But now the planet was still. Dane looked down at is hand, almost expecting to see scars from where he had cut Ile Shadow’s portal through which this devastation had been brought. Others, from other time lines, had sacrificed to get a nap/control sphere of the portals to him, and he had cut the link between his time line and the Shadow’s source just before the core of the plane had become unstable.

  Apparently it was a Pyrrhic victory, he now saw as more data came up on the screen.

  While he was doing that, a craft of the Shadow had swept through the southern hemisphere, scooping up most of the Ozone, before disappearing itself into the gate. The summary indicated the depletion had started a chain reaction that was irreversible and the world’s protective layer of ozone would be gone inside of two years. Dane was nodding to himself as he read the vision he just had. It must have been of an earth line where the same thing had happened. Except earlier, when Frost was still alive and the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear power submarine, was still sailing.

  It had been too late for that time line. Was it too late for his? Dane wondered.

  There was more in the intelligence summary. More bad news. The Shadow had destroyed all four reactors at Chernobyl, breaking the containment building and spewing massive quantities of deadly radioactive gas into the atmosphere. The cloud was spreading, promising death and destruction in the northern hemisphere to Russia and Europe. Death was coming from the sky in both hemispheres.

  Frost was waiting for something, Dane knew. What? To take what orders need to get rid of, Dane remembered. Dane knew his world needed to get rid of the radioactive cloud, and it also need to reclaim the ozone. Two tasks apparently impossible but absolutely necessary if the world was to be saved.

  Dane closed his eyes and cleared his mind as he had been taught, and concentrated on the inner eye. He “saw” Washington as it had been in the Frost/Cuban missile time line, devastated by nuclear weapons as the Shadow had caused one of the Russian freighters en route to Cuba to disappear in the Bermuda Triangle gate, and event the Russians blamed on the Americans, launching their missiles. Frost’s warning to Kennedy was ignored as the Americans retaliated, resulting in a dead world, a dead time line. But near the capital, on the other side of the Potomac, had been one of the Shadow’s spheres. Derelict. Crashed. He knew he’d been shown that for a reason. Frost was waiting in that time line. Were there others, also waiting or taking asking, trying to help his world?

  The Ones Before. Dane knew they were influencing 19S, trying to guide him in the right direction. Why didn’t they take more direct action? Why did they always use others to represent them?

  Too many questions, he realized. He had to trust that there Was more in place than just what
he knew or had seen in visions, as there had been in the past.

  He closed his eyes, trying to focus, to get another vision or to at least hear the voice of the gods, but nothing would come.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SPACE BETWEEN

  Amelia Earhart’s hands wouldn’t move no matter how hard she tried. Through the cockpit windows she could see the top of the sun coming up out of the Pacific Ocean, as if the water — were giving birth to fire. A glance at the instruments told her he plane was at twelve thousand feet. Why could she move Lee eyes and not her hands? She wondered. She glanced to her ‘right. Fred Noonan sat in the navigator’s chair, staring directly ahead.

  There was a smudge on the ocean ahead. Earhart felt a sense of dread. She wanted to turn the plane, but her hands wouldn’t move and they continued to head directly for the growing darkness.

  Noonan had a set of binoculars and he put them to his eyes. I don’t think that’s a ship’s smoke.” They were supposed to link up with the Coast Guard cutter Itasca off Howard Island for refueling.

  Why could he move and she couldn’t? Earhart wondered. Why couldn’t she speak and tell him what she knew?

  “It’s like fog,” Noonan said.

  It wasn’t fog or ship s smoke, Earhart knew.

  “It’s getting bigger,” Noonan said.

  There was a yellowish tinge to the fog, and it was billowing upward and outward at an unnatural rate.

  “I’m getting something,” Noonan said. He had his hands over his headset. Listening intently.

  Amelia’s gaze shifted between compass and the growing cloud on the horizon as she waited. She looked down at her hands. Frozen on the controls. She desperately wanted to turn, but the command wouldn’t go from her brain to her hands.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Noonan finally said. “A lot of static, then what sounds like Morse code, but I can’t-” he fell silent once more as he focused on listening. His eyes closed. “It’s clearer now.” Noonan opened his eyes and picked up a pencil and began to record the letters in the flight log, speaking them out loud as he heard the dashes and dots. “T-U-RN-O-F-F-R-A-D-I-O-O-R-D-I-E. Turn off radio or die”

  The fog was now fewer than five miles ahead and was huge, blocking their path at twelve thousand feet and continuing to climb. In all her flights she had never seen anything like it. She was sure they shouldn’t fly into it, but she couldn’t turn the controls.

  “I think we should shut off the radio,” Noonan suggested. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

  Earhart tried to answer, to say something, to order him to fly the plane, but no words would come. Why didn’t he notice her paralysis, she wondered.

  Noonan had a knee-key on his thigh, and he tapped out a quick query in Morse. Trying to get the identity of the sender of the message.

  A golden beam slashed out of the fog directly for the Electra. The gold beam hit the nose of the plane and the engine sputtered. She knew Noonan needed to stop transmitting but she couldn’t tell him. He seemed oblivious to what had just happened, still tapping on the knee-key.

  The fog was now fewer than two miles away, a wall stretching as far she could see. North and south. And reaching up at least fifteen thousand feet.

  Another golden bolt came out of the fog and struck the plane. Earhart felt the power ripple across her skin. The engine died, and there was only the sound of the air racing by. They were losing altitude, heading down toward the ocean and forward toward the dark wall.

  Beads of sweat broke out on Earhart’s forehead as she fought to regain control of her body. She knew they absolutely had to turn away from the dark wall. The front edge of a massive sphere appeared, coming out of the mist. The top half was opening like a gaping mouth, preparing to swallow them. Why wouldn’t Noonan see that? Why didn’t he help her?

  Because Noonan was dead. Earhart’s eyes flashed open, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The air coming into her lungs was unnatural, something she had grown used to in her I time in the Space Between. It felt thick. With an oily tinge, as it slid down her throat. She lay in a gully, near a black wall that curved up overhead, eventually fading out of view inward. Beneath her was coarse, sand like material.

  She heard a voice speaking in Japanese and turned her seeing Taki and another samurai. They were dressed in I black tunics, having abandoned their armor when their ship was attacked by the Shadow. They were more victims’ trapped.out of time and world in the Space Between. The mime she had given to this strange place. It was a transit point for the portals between worlds and times, consisting of a black land surrounding an Inner Sea, enclosed inside what appeared to l be a massive semi-circular cavern. How large the cavern was she had no idea. The one time Earhart tried to circle the Inner: Sea. It seemed as if she moved in place, never completing the circle and being forced to return to her base camp.

  Also in the Space Between was an area where white-suited creatures known as Valkyries had a cavern where they conducted grotesque experiments on humans. A slightly damaged Valkyrie suit floated in the air just a few feet from Earhart’s resting place, the front half-split open, the interior empty. It was one of two she and the Samurai had captured from the experiment cavern. They’d discovered that the creatures inside were humans, but badly warped, missing much of their skin.

  The discovery that humans manned the Valkyrie suits troubled Earhart as much as her recent dream did. Were they servants of the Shadow? Or was the Shadow a human force? If so, from where and when? And why was it so bent on destroying Earth time lines?

  Earhart sat up. She tried to remember all the details of the dream. Some of it was exactly what had happened when she’d disappeared inside the Devil’s Sea gate while on her around-the-world flight in 1937, trying to become the first woman to accomplish this feat. She’d already been acknowledged as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in 1928. But that accomplishment had been soured by the fact that she had not piloted the plane.

  Earhart and her navigator. Frank Noonan. Had been on one of the last legs of the epic Journey, having covered twenty-two thousand miles over the course of several months. Earhart reached into the box she had rescued from the Lockheed Electra and pulled out her leather journal. Tucked into the pages were photos. She pulled one out-of her husband, George Putnam. The Journey had been his idea, a chance for more publicity and to sell more books and magazines. She wondered if he was alive and then realized such a thought was worthless, as there appeared to be no time here and connections via the portals to many Earths and many times.

  He thumbed through the journal, noting a picture of herself standing on the wing of the Electra in Miami, Florida, the starting point of her long journey that had ended in a most unexpected place. She was smiling in the photo. She had originally planned on starting from Hawaii and heading west. She wondered now if things would have turned out differently if she hadn’t clipped the wing of the heavily laden plane on the edge of the runway during takeoff and damaged it. Instead of going west, she’d had the plane repaired and shipped back to the States, eventually to Miami, where she’d taken off June 1, 1937, and flown east.

  Earhart turned the pages of her journal, noting the entries and remembering the journey. Along the east coast of South America, across the South Atlantic and then Africa. What a beautiful continent, Africa!

  She turned the page. She’d been the first to fly across desolate Arabia. Desolate? Nothing compared to this forsaken place or to India. She grimaced as she remembered. It was a horrible place where she’d become sick. She’d wanted to quit then. She’d sent a telegraph to George, begging him to let her stop, but he’d been firm. She must go on Glory and fame awaited. That had been the first time Earhart had questioned the price she was paying for something that no longer seemed so important Perhaps it was the teeming millions she saw in the streets of Calcutta. Living lives where their fate seemed so bleak yet many seemed so happy.

  Then Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore and Bangkok, where no one knew who she was and cared l
ess, although they marveled over the plane and the fact that a woman flew it. She looked at a picture-Darwin, Australia, where people knew her name and the reporters flocked to the airport. She had not felt the same jolt from seeing the area in front of the control tower crowded with them. She just remembered feeling so utterly exhausted.

  Had she had a vision before the last flight? She now wondered. One that she had dismissed as a dream? Had she heard the voices of the gods as she slept? She scanned the words printed in her fine block lettering, but there was no mention of such, but that meant little, as back then she would have dismissed either.

  From Australia she’d flown to New Guinea and then they’d taken off on the final leg-and run into the gate. It had not occurred as in the dream she’d just had. They had not been blasted out of the sky by golden bolts. Earhart had turned the plane and managed to land on the ocean. As she and Noonan tried to escape, he’d been killed by a kraken, one of the sea creatures that inhabited water inside a gate, a creature that must have slid through a portal.

  Earhart and her craft had been captured by a large sphere, and when she awoke, she was here. She’d found others trapped around the Inner Sea, and most told the same story of being caught by a blue glow. Currently there were fifty people at this small camp. All from various time lines. No one could clearly say how long they’d been here, as there was no night or day, just constant light from a source high over the Inner Sea.

  Strange things had happened, and strange things continued to happen. She thumbed ahead in the diary, to entries made after arriving. A man named Dane, who claimed he was from the beginning of the twenty-first century. Had come through, Followed by a Roman legion from the first century A.D. who had been battling the Valkyries. The legion had been destroyed and the men turned into stone by a weapon of the Valkyries, but not before one of Dane’s companions had shut one of the portals that ran through the Space Between. Dane had returned inside a strange watercraft from his time, this time trying to destroy another portal that he said was draining power from the very center of his Earth and making the world o unstable it would soon be destroyed. Again he had succeeded, and again he had gone back to his time.