Assault on Atlantis Page 4

  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 less, 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.

  Earhart had stayed with her group, barely eking a survival by raising food in a few patches of Earth soil they’d managed to scavenge near the occasional portal that opened on the shore. Occasionally they supplemented their diet with either Earth or Shadow-side creatures that wandered through an open portal. Even that was strange, as once a small dinosaur had appeared before wandering back through another gate.

  It was a quirk of the portals that these creatures could survive travel through them. Not long after she had arrived in the Space Between, one of the groups had tried going into one of the portals in an attempt to get back to Earth. The man swam out to the dark. Cylinder while the rest of the band lined the shoreline. He disappeared into the blackness, only to reappear seconds later, screaming in agony, his skin red and blistered. He died within an hour, and no one had attempted to enter a portal since. The portals, cylinders of black, usually opened in the large circular lake in the center of the Space Between, but sometimes they opened on land.

  Earhart glanced up at the captured Valkyrie suit. One had to be shielded to go through most portals, especially because there was no telling where the portal would lead or what would be on the other side. The key question was which one led to the Shadow’s home? If they could figure that out, they could take the war to their enemy rather than constantly reacting to assaults.

  Earhart thought back to her dream. She’d been powerless in the cockpit, which she knew was significant. Power was important, very important in this war. It was one of the things the Shadow sought from Earth time lines it scavenged. It was also what was needed to fight the Shadow.

  Earhart glanced at a metal case next to the Valkyrie suit. She got up and walked over to it. She flipped up the lid and stared at the contents-crystal skulls, each set in thick foam padding. Nine of them.

  Earhart reached into her Pocket and pulled out a small metal cylinder with runic writing on it. She unscrewed the top and pulled out a piece of parchment. A design was drawn on It-twelve small skulls, m a pattern around a center, higher point where there was a thirteenth skull. Earhart couldn’t read. He writing, but she knew what she was seeing. A formation of power using the skulls. What surrounded the skulls, though, was what was most interesting. Intricate drawings of warriors in battle against an encroaching darkness. There was also writing. Names.

  Humans are at their best and most powerful when things are the worst and most desperate. Earhart had heard that not once, but several times. The voice of the gods. And that wasn’t all. She’d been directed via a vision to a portal, which she· d traversed in the protective Valkyrie suit. She’d come out t a graveyard -- boats, planes, and other craft, all captured m a gate. She’d gone directly to the ship she’d “seen,” a long black ship with a single mast and a black cube in the rear made of black metal, the likes of which she had never seen. She’d found this cylinder there. A piece of the puzzle.

  Not long after that, she’d also had a vision that had directed her to lead another raid on the Valkyrie people’s farm. She’d stolen a piece of equipment, a long thin needle with a loving red bulb on one end. She’d taken it through a portal and injected it into the womb of a woman. She’d gone back again to that time line for the birth of the woman’s children and had taken one of the children from the woman.

  Earhart shook her head. She was doing as she saw in her visions, but she didn�
��t know exactly why she was doing all this. She had to trust that the Ones Before had a plan and she was one piece of making it happen.

  And now it was time for her to implement another step in the plan. But there were twelve skulls in the drawing and she only had nine. Would it be enough? Earhart reached into the case and retrieved one of the skulls. She placed it in a pouch, which she tossed over her shoulder.

  “You go?” Taki asked.

  Earhart had learned the basics of Japanese prior to her flight--after all. George had arranged for her to spy on Japanese facilities during the trip-and had added to what she knew in her time here with the samurai. “Yes.”

  “No?” Taki indicated the Valkyrie suit.

  Earhart closed her eyes. The words had come the previous day, echoing in her mind. “This portal should be safe.”

  “None are safe,” Taki said.

  “I must go.” She handed him the cylinder. “It is not time for this yet.”

  Taki took the cylinder. “Be safe.”

  Earhart nodded and walked out of the camp, feeling the eyes of the others on her back. They knew if she wasn’t wearing the suit, she was going to a portal that was “safe.” A way out. However, what neither they nor she knew was what was on the other side of the portal. And because she was on a mission dictated by the ‘’voices,’’ they had to assume it was dangerous.

  Earhart had been given the opportunity by Dane to travel back to his world and time with him, and she’d turned him down. She wasn’t quite sure how many of those in her camp would feel the same way.

  The Inner Sea came into view. There were a half-dozen portals in sight, black columns rising from the surface upward toward the ceiling. They varied in width from three meters to one more than a thousand meters wide. Earhart paused as she noted something floating between two of the portals--a massive sphere more than four hundred meters wide. It was one l the Shadow’s craft used in traversing the portals. It had dropped here when Dane shut the portal from his world to wherever the Shadow had drained the ozone, and it was still here. Which indicated that the crew might not have survived. She felt a tingle as she stared at the sphere. And she knew immediately the sphere was important.

  But not at the moment. She turned to her left as if drawn in that direction. A three-meter-wide black column was about fifty meters away. Earhart walked along the shoreline until she was opposite the column. It was just off the shoreline, and she waded out to it. When she was right next to it she paused. What if the gate was deadly? What if she went to a dead world, toxic to humans? The voice had told her she would revisit a place and near time she’d already been to, but what if it were wrong?

  Amelia Earhart. Who had crossed oceans and nearly circled the world at the controls of her plane, cursed, then stepped forward into the gate.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE PAST: 1861

  The old mountain man with the .54 caliber Hawkins rifle in the crook of his arm towered over the dark-haired teenager at his side. They were deep in the Rocky Mountains, near the continental divide in the northern part of the land; those far to the east in Washington had labeled the Colorado Territory. Jim Bridger was a legend from the west coast to the east, the most well known mountain man in the land. He wore fine buckskin. With half the fringes gone. Used as expedient string for one thing or another during this trip.

  “Tunes are changing,” Bridger said. His voice was rough unused to speaking much. He had never had a companion—until the boy came into his life.

  The boy made no reply. His blue eyes scanned the land ahead, searching for a way up to the divide, which was about ahead. Searching for a way up to the divide. Which was about two miles to the west and five thousand feet above. He’d been with Bridger ever since he could walk. Gaining experience by his side, and he’d learned that when the mountain man spoke. Which was rare. He was imparting something of importance. They’d left St. Louis four months ago, heading west. On a trip the purpose of which Bridger had kept to himself. The boy’s name was Mitch Bouyer. A name given to him by Bridger. Mitch, because, as the old man said, it sounded like a man’s name, and Bouyer, because it sounded kind of French and deflected the rumor that the boy was half-Indian. Bouyer had no idea who his parents had been, nor had Bridger ever spoken about how he had come to take the youngster in.

  Bouyer wore buckskin, too, but with a black-and-white calfskin vest over the shirt. The vest was a gift from the foster family he’d lived with in St. Louis for several years, and he took great care of it.

  “It’s time for you to know your part in those changes,” Bouyer said.

  “What do you meant Bouyer asked. Feeling a stir of excitement. He had learned the patience of a hunter and trapper from Bridger over the years, so be had never questioned the older man, accepting that if and when he chose to reveal things, he would, and not a minute sooner.

  “I been out here for thirty-eight years,” Bridger said. “I found the Great Salt Lake in ’24. South Pass in ’27. The hot geysers on the Yellowstone in 730. I’ve crossed the mountains--” Bridger nodded toward the peaks ahead-“twenty-six times. Some say I’m lucky. Some say I’m good at what I do. I am both.” The words were simple, no sign of a boast ‘’But there’s more.” He turned toward Bouyer and tapped the side of his own head with a long, leathery finger. “I got the sight. That’s why you were brought to me. You got it, too.”

  “Who brought me to you?’ Bridger had never spoken of bow be came to bringing up a boy not his own, and Bouyer had never raised the subject, simply happy to be in the company of a man who knew so much and wandered in wondrous places.

  “Another with the sight. A woman.” Bridger laughed. “A ‘Very strange woman. She brung you to me when you was just out of the womb. I was on the Yellowstone, camped in for the winter with the Crow. You were still covered in your birth blood. I had to get a squaw who’d just given birth to feed you along with her own. Cost me quite a few pelts to keep you alive that winter.”

  Bouyer put the stock of his own Hawkins rifle--a .50-caliber, but a genuine Hawkins nonetheless on the ground and leaned on it. “Who was this woman? My mother?”

  “Don’t know. She wouldn’t say who your mother was. Nor your father, for that matter. She said you were special, but I saw that as soon as I set eyes on you. Felt it.” Bridger shrugged. “Can’t quite explain it. You know. You got the sight, t~. You hear the voices, the spirit voices, as the Crow call ‘em. I think you got it better than me, much stronger. Powerful medicine, as the Crow say. In touch with the Great Spirit, whatever that might be.”

  Bouyer did know what the old man was talking about. Sometimes he had visions of things, visions that most would call dreams, but some of his came to be true. He’d learned to trust those visions and the feelings he got. He also heard things. Once, when recovering traps high up a mountain stream away from the old man, he’d heard a voice whisper “danger” and he’d stopped what he was doing and hid ridden by. Bouyer knew they’d have had his scalp if they’d seen him. He knew Bridger had managed to stay alive on the seen him. He knew Bridger had managed to stay alive on the voices.

  Lately, he’d been having strange visions. Of many soldiers. Led by a man with golden hair. Soldiers falling into an Indian village. A village of many tribes, Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow, others. It was a strange vision because Bouyer knew those tribes would never camp together.

  “What’s my part in these changes?” Bouyer asked. Bridger had brought him back to St. Louis as a baby and put him in a foster home for several years. He had been homeschooled to read and write and do math. Then, when Bouyer could carry a pack. Bridger had shown up one fall, wintered In the city, and then took him west. That was SIX years ago, and they’d covered many miles together, every spring heading west. Sometimes wintering out there, twice going back to St. Louis.

  They worked well together on the frontier. Bouyer spoke little and Bridger even less. It was as if each knew what the little and Bridger even less. It was as if each knew what the words.


  Bridger shook his head. “If I’d a known, I’d have told you long before now.”

  Bouyer frowned. ‘’Then--” he paused as Bridger pointed.

  “She who knows is up there.”

  “Who? My mother? The woman who brought me to you?”

  “One who has the sight better than us. Word’s been sent for us to meet. For her to meet with you.”

  Bouyer picked up his flintlock. ‘’Then let’s be going.”

  Bridger shook his head once more. “It will be dark soon. Best we rest. Go at first light.” His eyes narrowed as he looked to the north. “Besides, I see a storm coming.”

  Bouyer looked in that direction but saw only blue sky and white peaks reflecting the setting sun. He had learned to trust the old man on such things, so he shrugged off his pack and set about making camp.

  Gathering wood, Bouyer paused, feeling a warm breeze across his face, but he noted that the leaves on the nearest bush didn’t move at all. Strange. He picked up the Hawkins as he slowly turned, searching for the source of the strange feeling.