by S. A. Beck
“Like Atlantis,” Grunt said, his voice laden with sarcasm.
Dr. Yamazaki paused, apparently thinking, and then said, “In my research, I use the term ‘Atlantis’ as one of convenience. The genetic sequence is very old, dating to before the dawn of civilization ten thousand years ago. And my research seems to show that this sequence spread around the globe, like the original inhabitants of the legendary Atlantis. According to legend, their island sank, and the refugees brought their advanced civilization to all corners of the Earth. But I just use that term for convenience and to make a catchy title for my scientific papers. I don’t believe there actually was an Atlantis.”
“You’re wrong,” Jim Running Horse said.
Dr. Yamazaki cocked her head. “Am I?”
She had obviously regained her confidence since they were talking about something she knew so well.
“We’ve known of Atlantis from ancient times. It’s one of the oldest stories of our people. And not just us but many other tribes as well. I’ve conferred with Hopi and Zuni elders and learned much from them that I didn’t know. And they learned from me.”
Dr. Yamazaki smiled and nodded. “Well, these stories are very important and need to be preserved, of course. What I mean to say is—”
Jim Running Horse held up a hand to stop her from going on.
“Don’t give me that politically correct BS,” he said. “You don’t think any of our beliefs are real, and that’s okay. If you want to treat people as equals, remember that equals disagree sometimes.”
Dr. Yamazaki nodded and sat down. “You’re right. I’ve spent too much time at universities where nobody is allowed to speak their minds. Everyone has to tiptoe around everyone else’s feelings. Please go on.”
“So you want me to entertain you with my quaint customs and charming fairy tales?” Jim Running Horse asked.
Otto couldn’t tell if he was messing with her or not. He could pull such a perfectly straight face when he was joking that it was impossible to tell.
“I want you to tell me your oral history related to the Atlanteans,” Dr. Yamazaki said. “There might be a clue as to where the Atlanteans came from.”
“Aw, damn, I thought you were going to ask me to scalp the pyro over here.” Jim Running Horse jabbed a thumb in Otto’s direction. “That would have been much more fun!”
The Tohono O’odham all laughed, as did Grunt. Otto blushed.
Jim Running Horse moved near the fire, at the center of the circle.
“Okay, enough joking. I’m speaking of serious things now.”
Everyone immediately fell silent. Otto glanced at Grunt and saw him facing his old friend with respect and deference. The expression looked strange on a face that was usually so cocky and sarcastic.
I’d love to learn more about the story between these two, Otto thought.
Jim Running Horse stood up straight and started to speak.
“We call them hekhiu kekelbad, which means ‘old ancestors.’ We say that instead of kekelbad, which means just ‘ancestors’ to distinguish them from our own forefathers. The kekelbad created our tribe, while the hekhiu kekelbad created many, many tribes. They weren’t the first people, but they are among the first, and their blood runs in many people’s veins. The legends say that they can be found in every part of the world.
“After the time of the First Man and First Woman, people spread all over the world and filled every corner of land. It’s interesting that these old stories tell of things that the Tohono O’odham could never have seen. They tell how people moved far to the north to live in a place that was so cold the rain turned solid and people made houses out of this solid rain. They tell how people moved to the south and lived in a place where it was hot and rainy all the time, and the plants grew so thickly a person couldn’t see as far as an arrow can shoot. The stories also tell how there was a big lake far to the east, and beyond this lake more land in which people lived in great houses made of stone. How could the Tohono O’odham have known of these things five hundred years ago? We have never traveled very far. These stories came to us from those who did.
“The old stories also tell of an island in the big lake, in what we now call the Atlantic Ocean. Very wise people lived on this island, some of the greatest descendants of the First Man and First Woman. Actually, the story doesn’t say it was an island, it says it was the back of a giant turtle that lived in the lake, but you can’t always take these old stories literally.” Jim Running Horse smiled at Dr. Yamazaki. “These people became superhuman. They were stronger than a bear and faster than a deer. They were harder to kill than a mountain lion. Each of them also had a special ability. Some could heal the sick or had eyes like an eagle’s. But each also had a weakness. Nothing too great but some minor flaw, as if the Creator wished to teach them to value all the gifts that He had given them.”
Otto thought of Jaxon, with her ability to make plants grow and her frustration at not being able to read a simple sentence because of her dyslexia. It was eerie, sitting in the middle of the desert, listening to a Native American tell an old legend that described his girlfriend perfectly.
Jim Running Horse went on. “The story goes that the people of this island grew arrogant in their power and forgot that the Creator had tried to make them humble by giving each of them some flaw. Their society, once so pure and just, began to decay. Noble rulers were replaced with tyrannical despots, and their peaceful relations with their neighbors were replaced with conquest and bloodshed.”
Otto nodded. Ever since he’d joined the Atlantis Allegiance, he’d been reading up on the old legends. Edward had a pile of books on Atlantis. A lot of the ridiculous claims sounded as if they had been made up by the authors in order to sell more copies, but there was a core of old stories from ancient Greece that sounded almost exactly like what he was hearing.
“The decay of the island people went on for some time, until the Creator at last lost his patience and decided to punish them. There was a terrible earthquake, and the island sank into the sea. Well, that’s my interpretation. The story says the Creator painted some stones to look like lizard eggs, the turtle ate them, got a sore stomach, and swam down to the bottom of the lake to rest. Whatever happened, the island sank, and most of the people died. Some managed to get off and sail away on their boats. Then the Creator decided to punish them even more. He did not want them to establish a new kingdom somewhere else and repeat their evil, so he made all the Four Winds to blow at the same time. The boats were scattered to the four corners of the Earth. Ever since, small groups of Atlanteans could be found in every land, most of them unaware of their own heritage as they live as strangers in a foreign land they think is their own.
“Now you’ve probably heard much of this in your own stories. Most nations have stories like this that are only different in some details. But here’s where it gets interesting. According to the Tohono O’odham history, and the histories I’ve heard from the Hopi and Zuni, the people of the island, who you call the Atlanteans, will come together again when the world is in danger. There will be signs in the sky and in the earth, signs in the water and signs of fire. The whole of humanity will face a grave danger, and the Atlanteans will have to come out of hiding and return to the noble ways they followed before the loss of their island. It will be the only hope for humanity.”
Jim Running Horse sat down. There was silence around the circle for a time, and then everyone started talking quietly to their neighbors. Otto sat deep in thought. He wasn’t sure how much of the old legend to believe. He’d seen and heard so many strange things since meeting Jaxon that he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
Except for the fact that he desperately needed some sleep.
The meeting broke up. Some people went off to bed, while others hung out around the fire and finished their dinner. Otto’s head hung low with fatigue. There had been too much excitement over the past couple of days and too little rest.
Suddenly, something caught his eye that m
ade him perk up. One of the Tohono O’odham who had been sitting near him and smoking cigarettes got up and walked off, forgetting his lighter. Otto stared at it, sitting there on a log, just begging to be picked up. It never even occurred to him to tell the guy he had forgotten it.
Otto licked his lips and looked around. No one was paying any attention to him. No, he should leave it where it was.
Even as he was thinking that, he eased over and picked it up. He curled his fingers around it so no one could see what he was holding. The lighter felt new and full. Otto was an expert on lighters.
He slipped it in his pocket and felt a twinge of guilt. That was what his therapist called “slipping,” when he’d fought off an addiction for a while and then went back to his old ways.
Otto sat back in his place and looked around. No, nobody had seen him. Weariness overcame him. He had to get some rest. With that lighter under his pillow, there would be some fine dreams tonight.
But he still had one thing left to do. He got a paper plate from the stack near the fire and loaded it up with a freshly cooked steak and a couple of potatoes. After grabbing a can of soda, he took the food over to Edward’s trailer and knocked on the door.
No answer came. Otto put his ear to the door and could hear Edward furiously tapping away on the keyboard so loudly it almost sounded as if he were punching the keys. In the background, that strange shortwave radio station with the Slavic woman droned on.
“Eighty-nine…seven…twenty-three…five…”
Otto called out, “Edward, I have some dinner for you!”
The typing stopped for a moment, then resumed, faster and harder than before.
“I’ll just leave it outside the door. Good night!”
Otto set the soda and food down in front of the door and stumbled away, looking for a place he could sleep.
Chapter 9
JUNE 20, 2016, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
3:15 PM
General Meade couldn’t believe his eyes. He was reading the recently digitized report that his assistant, Major Jefferson, had downloaded for him from the top secret Pentagon server, and it had been the most shocking thing he had ever seen.
The report was an addendum to the main report on the Roswell Incident, when the military had recovered a crashed UFO in New Mexico in 1947. The main report had been available in Pentagon circles for years and made absorbing reading. If the public saw it, they would have to accept the truth that aliens existed and were visiting the Earth.
Of course they would never see the report. It was classified top secret. Even he hadn’t been given high enough clearance to read it or even know it existed until a couple of years ago. He would love to see the crashed flying saucer himself, but he’d have to be appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or get elected president for that to happen.
So he had to content himself with reading about it in the old report.
And what a report. The main report, the one he had read years ago, detailed the vehicle and the alien bodies, plus some of the scientific research the team had performed at the time. No doubt there had been more recent tests with more advanced equipment since then, but Meade didn’t get to know about that. It was frustrating to be one of the few high officers in the military to be serious about fending off the alien menace and not be allowed to know everything about it. It was like fighting blind.
But the new report added so much. It had been written a week after the first one, when a recovery team made a big sweep of the desert around the crash site. The alien craft had come in at a high velocity and low angle, and the front part of it had shattered on impact. Large amounts of debris were scattered for a good half mile around the site.
The recovery team had discovered some interesting bits of debris the first team had missed.
A photo of one piece had caught General Meade’s eye. It was a thin strip of that unusual metal the aliens used for their craft, some alloy no one could identify. On it were printed some strange symbols. He immediately saw they weren’t like the writing found on some other parts of the UFO, so he brought it over to his lead scientist in the Poseidon Project, Dr. Jones, to see what he thought. Of course he couldn’t show Jones the full report, just that one photograph, but Jones was smart enough to know he was looking at something special.
Jones had stared at it for a moment, and his eyes bugged out. He had gone over to his computer, brought up the Atlantis genome, and showed General Meade how the symbols were actually codes for the building blocks of DNA and matched up with part of the Atlantis gene sequence.
The revelation almost made General Meade fall out of his chair. It took all of his self-restraint not to share what he knew with Dr. Jones. Instead, he staggered out of the lab and back to his office in a mental haze.
Part of the Atlantis gene was written on the wreckage of a UFO. What could it mean?
It couldn’t be a fake, because nobody knew the structure of genes in 1947.
No one on Earth, anyway.
So were the Atlanteans alien? Dr. Jones, and Dr. Yamazaki before him, had insisted that the Atlanteans were human, that they shared virtually all the same genes as humans, only with a few additional ones. The reason he had tracked down Dr. Yamazaki in the first place was that she was using the Atlantean genes to trace the history of humanity. She had proven that there was a hidden branch of humanity that dated back unknown thousands of years and had spread throughout the world.
It would have been nice if she hadn’t turned traitor. Then he wouldn’t have had to dispose of her. She could have told him so much more than Dr. Jones.
So if the Atlanteans weren’t alien, why was part of their genetic sequence depicted on an alien craft that had contained two Greys, those big-headed aliens with the giant eyes that the average member of the public thought were the only alien race visiting the Earth? Had the Atlanteans been some sort of alien genetic experiment?
General Meade sighed with frustration. So many questions and no answers. Dr. Jones wasn’t the man to provide them either. He was half the scientist Dr. Yamazaki was.
Is, General Meade reminded himself. She’s back in the land of the living, and after what you did to her, she’s twice as determined to take you down now. You have to get rid of her before she causes any more trouble.
But he also needed to figure out what was going on with the Roswell report. He had been in the military too long to think that its appearance was simply a coincidence. Sure, new documents were being posted to the server all the time, but that one was too timely to be just random chance. It gave an important piece of the puzzle just when he was flailing around for answers.
General Meade logged onto his own computer, passed through the elaborate security protocol to get into the top secret server, and looked up the report. Each report on the server was digitally signed by the archivist who had uploaded it, any translators or other experts who had worked on it, and the commanding officer who had cleared it for release. The name of the commanding officer practically leaped off the screen at him—General Arnold Corbin of the United States Air Force.
Corbin had been his commanding officer when he had been stationed at Holloman Air Force Base near White Sands, New Mexico, back when Meade still thought extraterrestrials were fairy tales, and he and his military buddies laughed every time the experimental stealth bomber flew out of base and caused a wave of UFO sightings.
If he remembered correctly, General Corbin had been based in Roswell before that.
Intrigued, he looked up General Corbin’s details of service, or at least those that were on the server. Meade’s own resume omitted several things he’d been involved in. He suspected General Corbin’s would be similarly incomplete.
It was complete enough. Before Roswell, General Corbin had been posted at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, in 1989 and 1990, and before that, he had done a stint at the base in Rendlesham, England, through much of the 1980s. Both locations had stuck in General Meade’s memory, even though he hadn’t personally been t
o either of them. There had been a wave of sightings of huge triangular UFOs all over Belgium that was unprecedented in the number of witnesses and confirmed Air Force radar contacts. As for Rendlesham, that was the site of one of the most important UFO sightings in England, when United States Air Force personnel investigated some strange lights in the woods near the base and saw a glowing, multicolored object passing between the trees. Both Belgium and Rendlesham counted as two of the most convincing UFO cases in recent decades.
And General Corbin had been there for both of them.
General Meade leaned back in his chair and let out a long, slow breath.
This is a signal, he thought. He wants me to get in touch.
In his early days as a UFO believer, General Meade had made a bit of a fool of himself. He had pestered his colleagues about any clues they might have and raved to anyone who would listen about how aliens were real. Several sarcastic remarks and a quiet word from one of his superior officers made him realize that some beliefs shouldn’t be broadcast too loudly. He learned to keep them to himself, searching out those who might have information or a sympathetic ear and approaching them only if he was sure it wouldn’t hurt his career. As in any other line of work, a person’s chances at promotion in the military relied just as much on their image as their ability.
So had General Corbin heard about his interest in UFOs, somehow heard about the Poseidon Project, and decided it was time to put the document on the top secret server where he knew General Meade was sure to see it?
“Only one way to find out,” General Meade said to himself, reaching for the phone.
When he got through, he found General Corbin friendly, eager to talk, and completely unsurprised to receive his call. That only confirmed Meade’s suspicions that the report’s release was a signal to anyone who might be interested in the UFO menace. Meade was careful not to speak too much on the phone, however. He’d been judged for his interests too many times before.
