“What are we?” Dane asked.
Sin Fen shook her head. “I don’t know. I told you before about the two hemispheres of the brain and how we might be genetic throwbacks to the days when humans had a telepathic capability. That is what Foreman believes. That the speech capability on the right side of our brain is fully developed and functional, unlike normal humans, and that is how we are able to do what we do.”
“What do you believe?” Dane asked.
“I agree with him that we are genetically different. But I think the reason is more than just a piece of the brain working. I believe we hear the voice of the gods’. Throughout history there have always been those who could hear something others couldn’t. Priests and priestesses, the Oracle at Delphi, various saints and messiahs, the world’s religions are full of such accounts. They cannot all be false. I think we are modern prophets.”
“‘Modern prophets’?” Dane repeated. “Of what?”
“It appears to be of doom,” Sin Fen said, “since we are connected somehow to the gates.”
“A lot of prophets who heard voices have been burned at the stake,” Dane noted.
“And locked in mental institutions in more modern times,” Sin Fen said.
“What is on the other side?” Dane asked. “We’ve seen some of the creatures that come through, but never whoever or whatever is behind the intelligence- just the gold beam.”
“Don’t forget the blue beam that helped you,” Sin Fen said. “I think there is a war being fought on the other side and it’s spilling over into our world. Our scientists are still trying to figure what exactly the gates are.”
“So are the good guys on the other side the gods we hear?” Dane asked. “And maybe the bad guys are the devil?”
“That I don’t know,” Sin Fen said. “Maybe there are voices from the other side. Maybe it is our own subconscious picking up something that our conscious brains can’t.”
Dane wasn’t quite sure he believed her. “It has to be connected to these gates somehow. I was able to go into and come out of the Angkor gate when others were killed. I could sense more than others could- hell, I can sense things here in our world that others can’t. Have you ever been inside a gate?”
“Yes.”
“Angkor?”
Sin Fen nodded. “When I was young I accompanied a group of scavengers- people who raid ancient sites for the artifacts. They had heard the legend of Angkor Kol Ker and wanted to loot it. Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t coincidence that I ended up with that group. They searched me out. And I know now that Foreman was the one that gave them the information about Kol Ker- and me.
“The lure of treasure overcame our fear of monsters of legend.
“We went north where the stories had Kol Ker located. To the place where people feared to go. We crossed into what I now know is a gate area. Into the fog.” Her eyes had unfocused, staring at a point somewhere over Dane’s left shoulder. “All in my party were dead within five minutes. Monsters. Like you met. Beasts I had heard of only in legend and whispered stories late at night attacked us. And the gold beam of light. That too. And the blue. I barely escaped. I ran back the way I had come. Within a week of returning to PhnomPenh Foreman had contacted me.”
“He set your party up,” Dane said.
Sin Fen’s eyes refocused. “Yes. I know that now. I didn’t know that then.”
“He uses people to test his theories. To probe the gates. He used you. He used me and my special forces team. He used the Scorpion. How many people has he killed probing the gates?”
“I don’t know,” Sin Fen said.
Dane shook his head. “And we’re here, still doing what he wants.”
“It is war,” Sin Fen said. “In war there are casualties.”
“Do you really believe that?” Dane asked.
“You’re the ex-soldier,” Sin Fen said. “You must have believed it once.”
“I went to Vietnam because-” Dane stopped in mid-sentence. He had no desire to explain himself to Sin Fen.
“Foreman has his own demons,” Sin Fen said. “His parents died in Germany, in the camps. They sent the boys to live with relatives in the States in the late 30s but stayed in Germany to keep their business open, hoping that the country would go back to the way it had been. A foolish hope seen through the eye of history.”
“Foreman must have sensed the danger,” Dane said. “He must have felt guilty because they wouldn’t listen to him.”
Sin Fen shrugged. “He does not talk about it much. I only found this out when I checked his classified file at Langley.”
“You did not trust him either then,” Dane noted.
“No, I didn’t.”
Dane looked out the portal and he could see the real version of the picture on her laptop rapidly approaching. The derrick centered over the deck of the Global Explorer towered three hundred feet over the smooth ocean and ship. Over two football fields long and 116 feet wide at the beam, the ship dwarfed the two navy destroyers that slowly circled it.
“Do you trust Foreman now?” Dane asked.
“I trust that he will do all he can to battle the gates,” Sin Fen said.
“That doesn’t bode well for the footsoldiers in the trenches,” Dane said.
Chapter 4
THE PAST
999 AD
The cold wind howled down from the rocky crags overlooking the fjord and cut into the flesh like a hundred spear-points hurled by screaming warriors. It chilled to the bone, no matter how many blankets and furs Ragnarok Bloodhand tucked around his body. It was not as bad as the wind of a thousand spear-points’ that he had experienced on the northern seas when the winds took the sea spray and froze it as it smashed over the bow of the longship, cutting into exposed skin as if the sea-god Aegir himself was telling them to go back.
But it was not the cold or the wind that had woken Ragnarok. He had slept through much worse. Indeed, he was known as something of an oddity among his crew because he slept not under one of the dozen large wooden benches that stretched across the width of the longship, but rather on top of the forward most bench, exposed to the elements. The ship was drawn up on the pebbled beach along the narrow strip of land that gave them access to the fjord and the sea beyond.
They had pulled in here before dark, not so much because of the coming night, but rather due to a dense fog that had suddenly appeared, enveloping the ship. Ragnarok and his men had traveled through fog before, but this one was unlike any they had ever encountered. It was very thick, allowing them to see barely twenty feet past the carved dragon prow. And it felt sickly on their skin, leaving a wetness unlike that of the ocean or fresh water. Even the color wasn’t right, not quite gray, but rather a yellowish haze with streaks of black in it.
This followed sighting a burning mountain earlier in the day to the east, a most bizarre occurrence that had rattled the crew. The volcano was atop a dark cloud that clung to the shore and mountain in a most unnatural way. The earth was unquiet, that had been clear for the past year as earthquakes and volcanoes all over the area of the world Ragnarok and his men traveled rumbled and burned.
At Ragnorak’s order they had carefully worked their way along the shore making constant soundings even though the ship drew less than three feet and finally turning into this fjord. The fog had faded slightly inside the fjord, but another very strange aspect was that it was not affected much by the fierce wind, something that had the crew muttering among themselves as they settled in for the night. It was unnatural and Ragnarok had posted a guard and had the boat pulled onto the shore to wait out the strange weather.
Awake now, Ragnarok didn’t jump up, rather he opened his eyes to tiny slits and peered about the boat, as his ears strained to hear something beyond the wind. It was dark, but he could still see a certain distance and there was no one on board other than his crew. He knew every piece of wood on the ship and he knew no one could move without him hearing the wood react. The rumble of assorted snores reac
hed him, carried by the wind.
Satisfied he wasn’t in immediate danger, Ragnarok stood up, furs and blankets dropping from his body. He was an imposing figure, six and a half feet tall with broad shoulders upon which long black hair fell in dirty, uncombed curls. His face was square, with a formidable jaw. A thick red scar ran down the left side, from the temple, just in front of the ear, to end at the jaw. His eyes were startlingly blue, an inheritance from his mother. Unlike most Vikings, he did not have a beard, the hair on his face cut every week or so with a sharp knife, leaving a coarse black stubble peppering his face.
He wore leather trousers, the color of which meandered somewhere between the original brown leather and the black grime encrusted by years of wear. A tunic covered his barrel chest, this garment in much better shape with a red piping in the symbol of an eagle sown into the back. His arms were bare and the muscles rippled as he picked up his ax- Skullcrusher- from where it had rested next to his head.
The Danish ax was a weapon not many men, even few Vikings, could wield effectively in combat. Skullcrusher had a haft over four feet long of three inch thick oak. The base of the ax ended in a metal point, much like a spear, so it could be wielded either way. The head- the normal business end of the ax- was huge, with a single edge that Ragnarok honed every day as conscientiously as many fair-haired Viking women combed out their long hair. Opposite the cutting edge the head ended in four inch thick blunt surface, the part of the weapon that gave it it’s name. Ragnarok had smashed many a head with a mighty swing, knocking shield and sword out the way to find its target.
Ax in hand he remained perfectly still. His eyes looked toward the beach. There was nothing moving. He looked past the beach. A high wall of rock angled up disappearing into the fog. Ragnarok had climbed many such ridges surrounding fjords and he knew that the likelihood of an enemy doing that was slim. Then he turned in the direction Vikings always looked- to the water.
The black surface was ruffled by the wind in an almost hypnotic pattern. To the left, the fjord narrowed, eventually running into a glacier coming from the inner mountains. To the right, the fjord led to the sea, a narrow fifty foot opening between two high outcropping of rock the only was in and out. They had rowed in through that opening shortly before nightfall seeking landfall. No ship’s wake disturbed the surface of the water, no oars dipped into the water. All was still.
Ragnarok tensed. All was still now, the wind dying down, the water becoming mirror flat. The winds of the north were fickle, with a mind of their own to betray and confuse even the most experienced sailor, but to suddenly cease like that- Ragnarok shook his shoulders, pushing away a chill.
The fjord was on the west coast of Norway, north of even the most northernmost Viking settlements, where during Winter the sun was little more than a glow on the horizon for a few hours each day and the rest of the twenty-four hour cycle was spent in darkness. It was early Spring and while the beach was free of snow, patches of white still clung to the elevations just above.
There was nothing moving he could see. Nothing to indicate what might have woken him. There was also no warrior standing guard on the small wooden ledge six feet up on the main mast that served as the look-out post for the ship.
Ragnarok strode down his boat, stepping over sleeping bodies, pausing at the large rudder. He gently kicked one of the forms under the last bench.
“Eh?” a deep voice grumbled.
Ragnarok bent over and kept his voice low. “Hrolf, get up.”
Hrolf the Slayer pushed aside his blankets and sat up, head twisting to and fro.
“Who is supposed to be on guard?” Ragnarok asked.
Hrolf cursed as he looked down the boat and saw the empty post. “Duartr. I will whip him like a dog for-”
Ragnarok held up a hand, head cocked as he heard something, almost the same pitch as the howling wind that was now gone, but deeper, more threatening, coming from a single point in the distance. “He is not in his sleeping place.”
Hrolf stood, grabbing his sword and drawing it out of the scabbard. He was a foot and a half shorter than his leader, but broader, a keg of a man, with muscle layered on muscle and a tremendous belly under his leather tunic. The sword was as long as half Hrolf’s height, and very thick. The end was blunt as a Viking fought not by jabbing but by slashing. The edges on both sides were razor sharp and with the weight of the sword and the muscle Hrolf could put behind each stroke, the sword was capable of beheading a large bull with one slice.
“What was that?” Hrolf’s head turned toward the landward side.
“I don’t know,” Ragnarok said. “Get the crew awake- quietly- and the boat afloat.”
Ragnarok climbed onto the gunwale and jumped onto the beach, the pebbles making a very slight noise giving way under his leather boots and weight.
The distant howling set the hair on Ragnarok’s neck to rise. Not wolves, he did not fear them. Some of the blankets he slept under were made from the fur of wolves he had killed with ax or spear. Something different, something he had never heard before. Ragnarok had sailed the north sea to Eire Land, Iceland and even beyond to the land Eric the Red had so deceitfully christened Greenland. He thought he had seen all there was to viewed in the great white North. The unique sound told him there was something more he had not yet met, and his heart leapt at the thought, but he had given the order to Hrolf to float the ship as a Viking always protected his ship and his village before any other pursuit.
Ragnarok’s right hand tightened on the haft of the ax. The sound had come from over the ridge behind the beach. He kept his eyes focused on the steep walls as he crossed the beach to the scree pile of large stones deposited at the base of the steep rock wall.
Something was lying where the ground rose precipitously. A body. The top half jammed between two boulders. Ragnarok knelt next to the corpse. Ragnarok frowned. The man’s sword was gripped by both dead hands. He recognized the engraved cross-guard- it was Duartr’s. A good Viking death to have one’s sword in hand but who could have killed him before he gave an alarm? Ragnarok reached down and pulled the body back from between the boulders.
The head was gone. Even in the darkness, Ragnarok could see the white of the spine poking up above a bloody hole. Whatever had taken the head off had not done so cleanly. And the chest and stomach had been ripped open, as if a beast had feasted on Duartr’s innards.
Ragnarok let go of the body and stood. He could hear the boat being pushed out, wood scraping against pebbles and into water, hushed voices hissing orders. He looked up, scanning in short arcs, trying to see through the clinging fog.
His efforts were rewarded when he saw something moving, about two hundred feet above and to the right. Someone was climbing down. The strange screaming came again, closer this time, from near the top of the ridge, not from the climber.
Ragnarok growled, the sound coming from deep in his chest and not very loud. He felt the blood pounding in his head, the battle-fury rising with each accelerated heartbeat.
The figure was lower now, less than a hundred feet above his head, climbing with skill and speed. The body was covered with a black robe that dangled below it. Ragnarok climbed higher on the scree pile, closing the distance.
He reached a large slab, about eight feet wide and long, that had broken off the ridge and was now lying almost horizontal. Putting his feet wide apart, Ragnarok lifted up his ax and rested it on his left shoulder.
The figure was less than fifty feet away now, but Ragnarok’s focus was higher, searching for the source of the chilling screams, which were coming more often now, every few seconds. Ragnarok stepped back slightly as two screams, one right after another whipped by him. They had come from slightly different directions. And there was still the matter of what had happened to Duartr’s head and body- whoever or whatever had done that was already in the area.
The figure had altered direction slightly and was now climbing down directly toward Ragnarok. The black cloak swirled as the figure reached the sl
ab and turned about, facing him, a deep hood covering the face, two hands upturned, empty of any weapon.
“Who are you?” Ragnarok asked.
The screams were getting closer and Ragnarok could feel the threat in them.
He was surprised at the voice that answered him- a woman’s! “Perhaps you would be better to worry about what is making that noise?” The woman spoke Norse with an accent the Viking had never heard before.
“They sound like dogs from hell,” Ragnarok slipped the ax off his shoulder and held it in front of him with both hands.
“They are,” the woman said. “Valkyries and their creatures of the night.”
All Vikings knew of the Valkyrie- the demon-goddess of the lord of the underworld, who did his bidding on Earth. Who feasted on the corpses of those killed in battle.
“Then I will die bravely fighting the demon bitches,” Ragnarok said, the moonlight glint off the edge of his ax.
“It would be better to flee quickly,” the woman said.
“A warrior does not flee battle.”
“You cannot stop them,” the woman stepped forward and placed a hand on his heavily muscled forearm. “They have killed many brave warriors like you.”
The howls were getting closer. Ragnarok had heard stories of the Valkyries and many other strange and frightening creatures from his mother, but he had never seen any of them. He had no doubt that such creatures existed though- or else his mother would not have told him of them. And he had seen Duartr’s body. To fight an emissary of a God- even a demon God- would be quite a challenge. If he won there would be glorious stories to tell. If he lost, the gate to Valhalla would surely be open to such a warrior.
“I cannot run,” Ragnarok said.
“I am a Disir,” the woman pulled her hood back. Her hair was pure white even though her face was young and unlined. Ragnarok had never met someone with skin so dark. And the eyes! They were angled as if the skin on the side had been pulled back, unlike any he had ever seen. “My name is Tam Nok. I demand your assistance in escaping my enemies.”
Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle a-2 Page 4
