The helmet was the most advanced part of the outfit. It had a visor to the outside world, but when the visor was shut to block either outside light or for protection, flat screens on the inner front portrayed whatever direction · the wearer ordered. Numerous minicams were on the external armor, from the two on the side of the helmet pointing forward to give a normal front view with depth, to ones pointing straight up, down, and back. They were necessary because the helmet fit onto the body of the suit tightly, allowing no movement. The display Dot only relayed the view from the cameras but also could have an · overlay display with various tactical and technical information.
The suit was moved by the person inside moving. The suit’s special qualities were voice activated by the wearer, who gave commands out loud, which were picked up by the computer.
The only time Chamberlain had been on the surface without full battle kit was for two weeks when he had been sent out of the city naked for survival training. Hiding during the day from the fierce rays of a sun unblocked by ozone, freezing at night here at the bottom of the world, despite the ice cap having melted, the temperature still dipped below zero at times.
One out of three sent on survival training never returned. Only one of twenty who entered the agoge graduated it with the tiny flaming sword tattoo on each temple, a sign of being one of the First Earth Battalion.
Chamberlain had come back from his two weeks of surface survival training covered in dried blood from a seal carcass he stole from underneath the less than observant nose of a mutated polar bear, one of the few creatures that still walked the surface of the planet. Its white fur reflected the rays of the sun, but its eyes were blinded by the solar radiation and thus it relied on the sense of smell to hunt.
Chamberlain stood, the articulated micro motors of the full-body suit fighting the effort. He had the suit set to train, which meant instead of amplifying his movements, the suit’s inner gears worked against him, forcing his muscles to fight their action and develop. He put the suit in combat mode only during full-force training maneuvers and then only because he knew he had to keep his nerves attuned to the suit’s capabilities for the day he, and his men, would actually be in combat.
A day that many said would never come.
He leaned, looking down through the clear blast-glass · face shield built into the helmet that covered his head. It was indeed a plant. Could the seed have been brought by a bird? No one had seen a bird in over ten years, but it was possible, wasn’t it? Could life be coming back to a planet the scientists, and every observable piece of evidence, insisted was dying?
But here was life where there should be none.
A glow on the horizon warned him that the sun was coming. Reflexively he dropped the outer face shield over the blast-glass, sealing him from the outside world. Projected on the reflective layer on the inside of the shield, his external cameras relayed the various views of his external world.
“Thermal,” Chamberlain whispered and the display changed to a spectrum of colors. The plant was cold and Chamberlain frowned. He reached down with armor-plated fingers and dug, pulling out the plastic facsimile of a plant. He felt no disappointment as he had lived almost his entire life on a dying planet and hope was a concept neither taught nor encouraged.
How long had it lain here? Fallen from some resupply to a research station years ago, perhaps. Decoration for an underground base most likely.
There was no life coming back on the surface of the planet.
“Day mode,” Chamberlain ordered. The thermal imaging stopped and the screen displayed the outside view with the dangerous rays of the sun filtered out. The terrain around Chamberlain was desolate, black sand with numerous rocks tumbled about as if a giant had let loose a barrage onto the surface. Over two miles of ice had covered this land as recently as fifty years ago. The melting of both ice caps had been swift and dramatic after the Shadow sphere had stripped the planet of its ozone layer. The sea level rose over three hundred feet in less than a · year, inundating coastal areas around the world.
Between that and the radiation, over two billion people died in the first ten years after the final Shadow assault. The survivors struggled to live as crops failed and livestock died. The human race burrowed into the planet to escape the unshielded rays of the sun. Hydro farms — massive greenhouses with the most dangerous rays of the sun filtered out — were built. Deep wells to tap the fresh water the Shadow hadn’t siphoned off were dug. Still the human race dwindled, another billion dying in the second decade after the last assault from the Shadow as society spasmed with violence and despair to adjust to a raped planet.
In the face of such devastation and the battle for survival, the barriers between countries, between religions, between races, were eventually dropped. The elite of what was left of each countries’ military forces was sent to Antarctica to form the First Earth Battalion. Along with the remainder of the top scientists not involved in survival technology.
Their goal was simple. To develop weapons to fight the Shadow.
It seemed a strange task, given that they had already lost the war with the Shadow and their planet was dying. Plus. There were no more known gates. The Shadow apparently shut them down here, isolating this timeline.
Chamberlain turned to the south and ran across the terrain, fighting the suit that tried to slow him, his muscles straining with the effort. He crested a ridge and came to a halt on top. A valley covered with jumbled rocks lay ahead with no sign of life. Chamberlain scanned it on protected vision, then on low-level thermal, then on infrared. Nothing. Excellent.
Chamberlain activated the secure, frequency-jumping radio in his suit. “Alpha, Six, Five. Return to base. Over.”
The valley exploded with over two hundred black, human-shaped forms, bursting upward from their hide positions in the sand. Weapons at the ready, the soldiers of the First Earth Battalion made huge hundred-meter bounds using their suits on combat power as they headed back to their home base. They moved tactically, squads leap-frogging and providing cover for each other. Heavy weapons set up fife spots, ranging their weapons out until the forward scouts passed their limits, then moving forward. Flankers raced along the high ground on either side, protecting the main axis of advance.
Chamberlain watched his men and women with pride. Their world was dying, but they were prepared for one last battle with the Shadow. And according to the Oracles, they would be given the opportunity for it. How, when, and where, the Oracles couldn’t say, but one thing they all agreed on: There was to be one final assault.
One thing the Oracles didn’t say, and no one talked about, was whether the assault would be in the form of the Shadow coming back to this timeline or whether they would take the battle to the Shadow’s timeline or some other timeline.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night usually, Chamberlain would lay awake on his bunk and wonder if the prophecy was real or had just been a way to unite people and give some hope to their doomed existence. Always he ended up back at the same conclusion-it didn’t matter. Only time would tell if the prophecy was true.
EARTH TIMELINE — THE PRESENT
The Devil’s Sea Gate
The sphere map rested on the column in the center of · the room, the surface dull and void of power. There were faint markings etched in the gold, the outlines of the · strands that marked portals between worlds and times. Dane and Earhart had entered the large black sphere that the Shadow used to travel through portals and descended to the map room.
“Can you activate it?” Amelia Earhart asked Dane as he approached the sphere.
In response, Dane placed his hands on the sphere. The material was cold to the touch at first. He closed his eyes and focused his mind. The events of the past several months had left no doubt that he was different from other humans and that the core of that difference rested in his brain.
Sin Fen, Foreman’s agent who had worked with him during the mission into Cambodia, had explained as much s she knew to him. She herself
was descended from a long line of priestesses who traced their lineage back to Atlantis. A civilization had thrived there ten thousand years ago, one that was far advanced in technology because the humans there were different from those in the rest of the world.
Sin Fen had told Dane he too was descended from the Atlanteans and his brain bore the same differences. The normal human brain is bicameral, consisting of two distinct hemispheres that are largely redundant. For most people, the speech center is present in both hemispheres but active only in the left side and dormant in the right. Dane’s right side speech center was active but not tied to normal speech. It was the place where he received his visions and heard voices. Some of those came from the Ones Before, the mysterious group that was trying to aid them in the war against the Shadow. Some came from sources he couldn’t identify. He also had had a telepathic link to Sin Fen who’d told him she suspected the original Atlanteans had an even more pure connection between the hemispheres of the brain, allowing them to be fully telepathic and also to develop a written and verbal language. The Atlanteans could use their telepathy to get concepts across without the limitation of the spoken or written word, but then they could use the latter to work on the details of what they were doing, the specifics.
As Dane stared at the sphere map. He considered what Sin Fen had learned about the Atlantis civilization and its development thanks to an ancient computer they discovered on an Atlantean boat trapped in one of the graveyards of vessels caught by the gates. Unlike our civilization, the Atlanteans had focused inward, rather than outward. They had harnessed the basic powers of the brain and its connection to the outside world.
That is until they came into contact with the Shadow, which first appeared out of the Bermuda Triangle Gate. To battle the Shadow, they developed a kind of shield that tapped into both the power of the mind and the planet itself. Unfortunately, the best the shield could do was stop the Shadow’s encroachments, not attack and defeat it. In the war, the continent of Atlantis was destroyed, and the few survivors were scattered around the world.
Although the legends of the gates — the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea, and others — had been with humankind for millennia, Dane didn’t know why the Shadow had decided recently to step up its assault against our Earth timeline. He had helped the planet avert disaster several times, but he knew they were about out of time and chances. The most recent assault, which had stripped the ozone layer and destroyed Chernobyl, had come very close to fatally crippling the planet.
Dane opened his eyes and glanced at Earhart. She was I watching him, waiting. He reached out toward her with his mind and saw the surprise in her eyes as his mental probe touched her.
“What are you doing?”
“Give me your strength,” Dane said.
“What strength?”
Dane looked back down at the sphere. “The feeling you had when you were flying, free of the Earth, at the controls of your plane. The power.”
It had been so long for Earhart since she’d flown, having been captured by the Shadow during her attempt to fly around the world and then freed by the Ones Before to survive in the Space Between. She had no idea how long she’d existed in the Space Between as there had been no way to tell time there. She searched her memory, bringing back images of being in her Electra, taking off, climbing into the sky at full throttle.
Dane felt the mental connection with Earhart grow more vivid, and a slight surge of power came from her to him. The sphere under his hands became to grow warm. The strands began to become distinct from each other. His fingers slipped between them, delving into the map, as if he had pressed his hands into a ball of warm, writhing snakes.
Visions flashed into Dane’s mind as he touched different strands. An image of a desolate Washington, DC, the buildings smashed and deserted. The Eiffel Tower with two flags flying from it — a Nazi swastika and the rising sun of Japan, but with several modem skyscrapers in the background. The ill feeling from that vision caused him to let go of that particular strand immediately. He saw a planet, he had to assume it was Earth, that was endless ocean, with no sign of land.
Dane knew he was seeing parallel Earths, where history had taken different forms. Ahana had speculated that there might be an infinite number of such timelines, but Dane didn’t agree with her. After all, there were a finite number of strands in the sphere. Perhaps there were an infinite number of parallel worlds but only a certain number were connected by portals.
There were gates on either end of each portal line. Most gates went from a world and time to the Space Between, which seemed to be a transit area. Some went from one time and world directly to another, but there were not many of these.
Dane frowned, never having really thought about what exactly the portals where — did all the parallel timelines exist in the same space, with only some slight variable that current physics didn’t yet understand separating them?
He tried to focus on the Ones Before, on the messages they had sent him. His fingers flitted over strands as he searched. Energy was still coming in from Earhart, standing close by his side. His left hand brushed a strand and he heard a faint clicking noise, something that was familiar in some way, but be couldn’t place it. He wrapped his fingers around the strand.
The clicking noise grew louder. One end of the strand Was a portal, here on this planet and now in this time, Dane realized. He tried to pinpoint the location. There was something very strange about the portal for the Ones Before, though. Its space on one end was somehow different from all the other portals in some manner that Dane could not understand. The clicking increased, then abruptly surged, sending a spike of pain through Dane’s brain and causing him to release the strand. He staggered back, the connections with both the map and Earhart broken.
“What’s wrong?” Earhart asked as she placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
“It’s been there right in front of us the whole time,” Dane said.
“What has?”
“The way the Ones Before send messages. The relay on our planet.” He headed for the exit. He said nothing to her about the strangeness of the other end of the portal, the one whose space felt different, because he wanted to have time to think about it. “Let’s get back to the FLIP.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later they were on board the research vessel. Dane had Foreman call Dr. Martsen, Rachel’s handler, from her cabin. She came into the control room with her laptop computer, as Dane had requested.
“What’s going on?” Martsen asked.
Dane indicated the computer. “Can you play the clicking, the echo noise that Rachel makes?”
Martsen accessed her database, then pushed enter. Dane had to listen for only a few seconds to realize this was the same noise he’d heard when he grabbed the last strand.
“They’re using the dolphins to send the visions and the voices.”
“Who?”
“The Ones Before,” Dane said as he pointed to the laptop. “I touched the portal they channel through and that’s what I heard.”
Martsen frowned. “That noise is Rachel’s sonar. She · uses that ability to echo-locate, to navigate, and to find prey, not to communicate. The language I’ve been working on is her squeals and whistles, which are different. She makes the clicks with her blow hole and emits them through her forehead. She then gets the bounce-back in her jaw bone. Her brain analyzes the information and forms a picture of her surroundings, much like a submarine uses sonar to get an idea of what’s around it in the water. We’ve even run studies where dolphins have used the emitter to send high-frequency bursts to stun prey.”
Dane turned to Foreman. “When you sent my team into Cambodia so many years ago to recover that black box, you were running an experiment using high-frequency transmissions through the gates, weren’t you?”
Foreman nodded. “I had a U-2 spy plane fly into the Angkor Kol Ker Gate at the same time the submarine Scorpion went into the Bermuda Triangle Gate on the other side of
the world. Then I had them transmit on HF. They were able to communicate with each other, even though there was no way the signal could travel around the planet, so I had to assume the signal was being relayed through the gates.”
Ahana had been listening from her workstation. “High frequency bursts would be an efficient way to send a piggy-backed message through a portal. I can scan the gates to see if any of them are emitting high frequency.”
“Do it,” Foreman ordered.
“You need to scan high up,” Martsen said. “Rachel can emit and hear up to one hundred and fifty kilohertz, beyond even what a bat can pick up.”
Earhart was by the hatchway, looking out at the dark · wall of the Devil’s Sea Gate, which lay two miles away. She caught a glimpse of Rachel about fifty yards off the bow, swimming smoothly through the water. “How smart is Rachel?”
Martsen ran a hand across her chin. “That’s a hard question to answer because Rachel’s environment is so different from ours. First, she lives in water, while we live on land. Second, she doesn’t have hands so she really can’t manipulate her environment. Dolphins live in harmony with their world, unlike humans.”
Something about what Martsen had just said struck · Dane as significant but before he could analyze it, Martsen continued.
“The strange thing I’ve always wondered about dolphins is that they went in the opposite direction evolution-wise than we did. We came out of the water and stayed on land. Dolphins are mammals also, but sometime during their evolution they went back into the water.”
Martsen had mentioned that before, Dane remembered. “Maybe, as you said, they did it to get away from us.”
“It’s possible,” Martsen said.
“Who is ‘we’?” Dane asked Martsen.
“Excuse me?”
“You said ‘we’ earlier,” Dane said. “I assume you don’t work alone.”
“1 work at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center outside San Diego,” Martsen said.
Battle For Atlantis a-6 Page 5
