The sound of turmoil faded behind as Cassius led his men back north. He figured he’d gained another day with the assault, unless the barbarians were led by a particularly strong chief.
As he headed back to the rest of the legion, he prayed to the God Lupina had worshipped, asking that Falco and Kaia come back soon with a way to defeat the Shadow.
* * *
Falco put his hand on Kaia’s shoulder and pushed her down to the ground just short of the crest of the ridge they were approaching. He could sense it now also; the agony of hundreds, maybe thousands, just ahead. It was worse than the most terrible games he had ever experienced, where thousands of Christians had been sent to be slaughtered by wild beasts. At least then, there had been hope, emanating from their faith as they died; but whatever was ahead, there was no hope. Only overwhelming pain and despair.
Falco crawled up to the top of the ridge and peered over. He swallowed hard as he saw hundreds of white vertical tables on which were strapped down men and women. On many, the skin had been flayed away, and the body inside was covered with some sort of clear, shiny material. Their suffering was almost overwhelming, a tidal wave of pain that hammered against his mind.
“We cannot save them,” Falco said.
“We need information,” Kaia said. She pointed. “Him. He knows.”
Falco followed the line of the finger. The man she indicated was huge, his body covered with scars as befitted a warrior. But his hands were gone, severed at the wrist.
“All right.” Falco got up and ran down the slope toward the tables, his body hunched over in a crouch. He arrived at the man and quickly cut the bonds using the Naga staff. The man’s eyes opened. With the stump of one arm, he indicated for Falco to slit his throat.
Falco shook his head, pointed back up the slope at Kaia. The man frowned, then nodded reluctantly. He began heading in the direction, Falco following. The gladiator paused when there was a noise to his left. The man on the table that was across from the one he had just been at was saying something, but Falco didn’t understand the language. Falco hesitated, tempted to put the man out of his misery as he had done many times in the arena, but he felt it was best to disturb things as little as possible for now.
He hurried up the slope. When he arrived, the warrior was standing next to Kaia, his head bent over, her hands on either side.
“He knows where there are others here,” she said. “He will lead us there.”
* * *
General Cassius stood less than an arm’s distance from the black wall. A second day had gone by with no sign of Falco or Kaia. The barbarians were on the move again, closing on the legion’s position. He could pick up the unease among the men, the desire to leave this godforsaken place. But their discipline was holding, and there had been no outright signs of disrespect.
He’d tried entering the gate but had barely made it a few steps inside before the overwhelming pain in the head that Liberalius had described forced him to retreat.
Cassius blink, startled out of his thoughts. He could swear the wall was closer that it had been just a minute ago. He stared but could see nothing. He took a pebble and placed it right in front of the blackness and waited. After a minute, the black slid over the pebble. The wall was expanding.
Cassius looked over his shoulder. The earthen barrier his legion was arrayed behind was less than a quarter mile away. Beyond it was the swamp. And even as he watched, there were yells of alarm as the vanguard of the barbarian force appeared on the ridgeline three miles away.
It was difficult to judge, but he doubted they had a half-day before the expanding gate overtook the barrier, forcing them into the swamp and at the mercy of the barbarians.
Whatever decision he was going to make would have to be made soon.
* * *
Pytor had watched the man in armor free Ragnarok and then disappear out of sight behind him. Less than two minutes after they were gone, a Valkyrie appeared. It paused in front of the empty white slab that had held the Viking. It hovered there for several seconds, and then more Valkyries began appearing from different directions until there were over twenty as Pytor tried to keep track. More and more white forms came until Pytor lost count and the rows of Valkyries stretched beyond what he could see.
From his military training, Pytor could guess the reason for this unusual display of numbers. The Valkyries were preparing an attack.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE PRESENT AND THE PAST
“How long have you been here?” Dane asked. The shock of meeting the legendary lost explorer had been greater for Shashenka and Ahana than Dane, who and been aboard the lost Scorpion where the crew had not aged a day in over thirty years. He had also seen her plane in the graveyard.
It was apparent that Earhart was in charge of the community of lost souls, which numbered about eighty people. After the initial greetings and excitement, Earhart had led them to one of the narrow caves where they sat on old wooden boxes. A samurai stood guard at the entrance.
Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no way of telling time here. Watches don’t work, in case you haven’t noticed. I would guess I’ve been here about a year, but it’s hard to say. They” — she nodded at the group of samurai who had escorted Dane, Shashenka, and Ahana—“think they’ve been here about five years. But they come from thirteenth-century Japan. There are others here” — she indicated the people occupying the caves along the wall—“who come from all different times. From as early as two hundred B.C. to my future, like you. Some people from times earlier than mine arrived here after I did, which I don’t understand, either.
“We think time is a variable here that doesn’t flow in a linear fashion as we are used to,” Ahana tried to explain.
“I do have to say that you’re the first people who ever came here on their own,” Earhart noted. “Can you get back out?”
“We’re working on that,” Dane said. “We have a submarine on the water, but we lost power when we entered the portal. We think we can get out to the portal, and then we hope our people are still keeping our hole in the portal open.”
Earhart nodded. “Nothing works here.” She pointed at Shashenka’s rifle. “Go ahead. Try it. It won’t fire.”
Shashenka frowned and aimed into the air. He pulled the trigger and, as predicted, nothing happened other than the click of the trigger and the firing pin clicking uselessly on the cartridge in the chamber.
“That’s why we use these,” Earhart had a sword in her hand. “The only good thing is that the Valkyries can only use blades also. Our weapons can’t penetrate their armor, but we’ve learned hitting them in the eyes disables them. They pretty much leave us alone as long as we aren’t a nuisance. They do have another weapon that can turn people into stone, but they rarely use it.”
“Where is here?” Ahana asked.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out since I got here,” Earhart said. She described what had happened on her last flight, and Dane realized her experience was similar to what had happened to the Reveille.
“After the large sphere engulfed my plane,” she continued, “I was in darkness. Then there was a blue glow and—”
“Blue?” Dane interrupted her. “Are you sure it was blue?”
“You don’t forget something like that,” Earhart said.
Dane remembered the two different color beams he had seen inside the Angkor gate. Gold seemed to be that used by the Shadow, but blue was that used by the Ones Before.
“I think the craft was automated,” Earhart continued, “because I saw no one. The blue light seemed to point a direction, and I left my plane and followed it. I walked along the inside of the sphere along a flat surface until I reached the outer wall. There was a hatch. I opened it and went inside. There was another hatch in front of me, and I shut the one behind and opened the other one. I didn’t’ know why I was doing this, but felt compelled to.
“When I opened the outer hatch, I was surrounded by the blue light, w
hich was fortunate, because water poured in. The light kept me in a small circle of air, though, and pulled me out of the craft. And then I was here,” she finished simply. “On the beach, half dead. That’s when they found me.” She indicated the people on our side. They all had similar experiences. Entering a fog, being taken by the sphere, being rescued by the blue light.
“We’ve made the best we can of this place. We divert water here. And the soil was gathered before I arrived from smaller deposits into sections large enough for us to grow food. Sometimes an animal from our side comes through, sometimes it’s one of the strange creatures from the other side.”
“Wait a second,” Dane said. “You just said the other side. Isn’t this the other side?”
Earhart shook her head. “You asked me where this was, and I couldn’t tell you, but if you asked me what this place was, I would call it the space in the wall between our world and their world. We’re like rats trapped in the wall. We can see the sphere come through every so often. Sometimes the blue light brings us people. Sometimes the sphere drops people off at the Valkyrie camp, which is about four miles that way,” she pointed. “They work on the people they get there. Experiment on them.”
“How many people?” Shashenka asked.
“Hundreds, maybe thousands. We raided it not long ago and put some of them out of their misery, but the Valkyries droves us off.”
Dane could pick up the small flicker of hope in Shashenka that his brother might still be alive. From the agony he could sense in the direction that Earhart had pointed, he hoped that wasn’t the case.
“So there is another portal inside the water?” Ahana asked. “One that leads to the Shadow’s side?”
“I would assume so,” Earhart said. “There are several portals here. We’ve tried to explore as much as we can, but it’s huge and sometimes seems to even shift shape. I followed the wall that way” — she pointed in the opposite direction from the Valkyrie camp—“for a long time. Probably several days. It curves slightly, but I never completed the circle. I had to return the way I came, as I was running low on food. There might even be other free people over here.”
He thought of his teammate Flaherty and wondered where he was. “Do you have contact with the Ones Before? The ones who use the blue power light?”
Earhart shook her head. “No.”
“Have you tried any of the portals?” Dane asked.
“Some have, they either don’t come back, or they come back with a strange sickness that kills them quickly.”
Dane was tired. All this effort, and all they had done was to get halfway to where they wanted to go.
“This would be a good area to stage an assault,” Shashenka said.
“It is most fascinating,” Ahana said. “This area is most likely a buffer between the laws of physics and the environment on both sides.”
“Can you get us out of here?” Earhart asked Dane.
‘We can take about a dozen people,” he said. ”Then when the rest of our forces come through, they can take out the rest. But first, we have to figure out what good it would do to bring our people here. Since we can’t use modern weapons, and this really isn’t the other side like we had hoped…” He trailed off, confused.
“We’re one step closer to the Shadow’s home,” Ahana said, trying to put a positive spin on things.
“I don’t think—” Dane began, but there was a commotion among the samurai. One came running up to Earhart and rattled off something quickly.
She stood, slipping the sword in its sheath. “More visitors are coming. A man in armor and a woman in robes. They had Ragnarok with them.”
“Ragnarok?” The name sounded familiar to Dane.
“A Viking. He was captured by the Valkyries during our raid on their torture chambers. Come.” She strode toward the gully, Dane and the others right behind.
As they turned the corner into a cross-gully, three people appeared. As Earhart had described, a man and woman were accompanied by a hulking warrior whose hand had been amputated.
“Damn them,” Earhart hissed when she saw Ragnarok’s condition. “They must have probed him and learned it is the greatest insult a Viking can receive before death to not be able to defend himself in Valhalla.”
“How do they know that.” Ahana asked.
“They have ways to getting into people’s heads,” Earhart answered enigmatically.
Earhart greeted the Viking in his language, and he said something to her. Dane could see the other man’s armor dated and placed him to sometime in the middle of the Roman Empire. The woman was less easily placed, but he picked up the same aura from her as he had with Sin Fen. She was a priestess, of that he was certain. He noted the Naga staff in the soldier’s hand.
Earhart said something to the Roman in what Dane recognized as Latin. They conversed, the priestess joining in for several minutes. The Viking had slumped down and was being attended to by one of Earhart’s group.
“Centurion Falco of the XXV Legion and Priestess Kaia from Delphi,” Earhart introduced them. Then she gave their names to the others. “They came through a gate in what I think is southern Russia,” Earhart finally said to Dane, Shashenka, and Ahana.” It caused the eruption at Vesuvius and is threatening the Roman Empire.”
Dane frowned. “But we know our history. We know that gate couldn’t have—”
“No,” Ahana’s voice was sharp. “You cannot think like that. What we are facing may be an attack that spans time. Because we are here, and they are here” — she indicated Falco and Kaia — “there is a connection between their time and ours.”
Dane held his hands up, trying to think. “All right, all right. Hold on for a minute here. They came through a portal inside a gate, right?” he asked Earhart, indicating Falco and Kaia.”
“Yes.”
“And they can go back out that way?”
“They think so, but it will probably take them back to their time. And things are not so good there and then, apparently the legion they came with is surrounded by barbarian forces.”
“Can we stop the power that the Shadow is using to affect the Ring of Fire?” Dane asked Ahana.
“We have to find the portal the power from Chernobyl is being channeled through,” Ahana answered. “It’s the one that we have to destroy.”
‘How do you propose to do that?” Dane asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Ahana answered. “Perhaps Rachel can help you find it?”
Dane could still sense the dolphin’s presence, even though she was a distance away. He closed his eyes.
‘What is he doing?” Earhart asked. “Who is Rachel?”
Dane tuned out Ahana as she explained. Rachel was nervous, he could tell that immediately. She sensed danger closing in all around. The Crab with Loomis was still just offshore, she also had the location of their portal still firmly in mind, and to his relief, it appeared that Nagoya’s plug was still in place. He asked her to see if she could find the portal that was channeling the Shadow’s power.
Dane was completely unaware of the people around him as he immersed himself in Rachel. He had never felt such an experience. It was as if he were inside her head, swimming with her as she dashed through the water, sending out clicks to echo sound.
“She’s found it,” Dane said, slowly opening his eyes. “Not far from our portal.”
“Then we—” Ahana began but she stopped as another samurai came running up, rattling off something.
Earhart cursed. “An army of Valkyries is massing. They are moving to surround us.”
“We need time,” Ahana said. “We have to go back to Nagoya, figure out how to cut the power. Then come back through and do it.”
* * *
Falco understood nothing of what was being said except for what the brown-haired woman called Earhart had translated for him. That the people here were from different times he found confusing but not important. He could see the darkness in the man — Dane’s — soul: almost as black as his own.
Their time was threatened by the same enemy as his: that was the important thing.
He turned to Kaia, who was also observing auras since she didn’t understand the languages either. “Can you get my men in here?”
Kaia frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You protected us at Thera. Can you protect General Cassius and the men long enough for them to come here?”
She slowly nodded. “Yes, I have seen it. The skull can protect them long enough.”
Falco knew what she meant by long enough. He turned to Earhart and got her attention, quickly explaining his plan to her in Latin. When he was done, she interrupted the others and spoke to them.
* * *
The B-1 Bomber did one pass low over the flat plain of snow and ice that served as the landing strip for McMurdo. It had made the flight from the United States at supersonic speed.
Ariana, Miles, and Professor Jordan stood off to the side and watched as the large plane did a long, curving turn and headed back toward them, losing altitude as it came.
“This will be interesting,” Jordan said.
“You must have some pull with the Pentagon,” Miles said as the plane came in long and sleek, it was the model of aerodynamic forms, from an age of warplane construction where speed was considered more important than stealth. Two massive engines were under the body of the plane, just behind the swept wings.
“The Pentagon finally appreciates the threat,” Ariana said.
The B-1 was just fifty feet above the ice, two miles away, and the landing gear had not been lowered. It crept downward toward the surface, and when it was a half-mile away, the bottom of the engines touched down, sending up spume of ice and snow. The plane bounced, was airborne, then was down again.
The sound of metal tearing echoes across the frozen space as the engine intakes scooped into the ice. The plane slowed, then the right engine gave way, and the nose of the bomber turned. Fortunately, the left engine ripped off a scant second later, and the belly of the plane grounded.
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