Leonidas turned and slowly began walking up the path toward the pass, his feet almost slipping at times from the slick blood that coated the trail. Cyra was waiting for him as the trail opened up at the top.
“Day one is ours,” Leonidas said. “Day two will be different.”
CHAPTER 19
BEYOND THE SPACE BETWEEN
Dane had no idea how long he and Amelia Earhart had been motionless, floating above the Reflecting Pool, looking at the ruins of Washington DC. The extent of the devastation was beyond overwhelming. Without a word they floated forward toward the remains of the Washington Monument.
They passed the monument, continuing toward Capitol Hill when they both stopped and turned to the left. The White House was gone. Scorched earth was all that remained.
“Oh no. Oh no.” Earhart was repeating the phrase as if by doing so she could keep the horror of what they were seeing at bay.
Dane paused, slowly turning inside the Valkyrie suit to look at something less than ten feet away. A car. The metal twisted and scorched but the make still recognizable. He blinked. But the screen showed the same thing. His heart accelerated.
He could be wrong.
He twisted slightly. Another car. Then another. He studied each one.
“Amelia.”
She was still muttering her mantra.
“Amelia!” Dane’s voice was sharp. “Listen to me.”
She was silent for a few moments. “What?” she finally asked.
“This is—” Dane was at a loss for words. “The cars,” he finally got out.
“What about them?” Earhart turned toward him.
“They’re old,” Dane finally said.
“Old? I don’t recognize them.”
“They’re after your time,” Dane allowed, “but they’re not my time. Thirty years before my time. Late fifties. Early sixties.” It clicked then for Dane. “This was the vision. The one I saw with Frost. The Cuban missile crisis. The Russians launched. The bomb went off.” Dane spun about. Where the Lincoln Memorial had been there was a crater. There was a cab.
Dane moved forward. And there was a cab, the yellow burnt off it, but in the exact spot outside the White House where he had seen Frost stop it. Floating in the air a few feet above the ground; seeing Washington destroyed; having traveled through the space-between; all that had happened to him recently from the Angkor Gate through the Bermuda Triangle Gate to the Devil’s Sea Gate; Dane’s brain was beyond overwhelmed.
He began hyperventilating and the suit’s air processor couldn’t keep up with the demand, given that someone inside had no real physical exertion. Darkness swept over him like a tidal wave and he passed out.
THE SPACE BETWEEN
Captain Stokes blinked several times, trying to get oriented. A man was leaning over him silhouetted by a light that wasn’t the sun.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“What? Who are you?” Stokes tried to sit up and the man put a hand behind his shoulders, helping him.
“Assistant surgeon Asper, USS Cyclops.”
“Cyclops?” Stokes frowned, trying to place the ship. The Navy was down to less than three hundred ships in the post Cold War era and Stokes had served for over twenty years, but he couldn’t fix the name with a ship he knew.
“Fleet?” Stokes asked.
“Naval Auxiliary Force, Caribbean.”
“What?”
“Sir, the Cyclops was collier, a—“
“A what?”
“A coal ship.”
“Coal?”
“Sir, the Cyclops was lost in March, 1918, while returning from Brazil. We were northwest of Puerto Rico when a cloud appeared off our port bow. The captain—” Asper paused and Stokes could hear the disgust in the man’s voice—“he decided to stay on course and we went into the fog.”
“The Bermuda Triangle?”
“Aye, I hear that’s what you people call it.”
“And here?”
“The Space Between, sir.”
Stokes’ head felt clearer. He slowly got to his feet. He noted the other members of his crew who were still unconscious. His executive officer. His chief dive chief petty officer. His engineering officer. His chief sonar man.
Why those? Of all his crew.
Then he realized. If he had to run his ship with an absolute minimum of personnel, they were the five he would choose.
THE PRESENT
Foreman had a stack of reports in front of him, ranging from damage reports concerning the ‘disaster on the Mississippi’ as the press was calling it, to classified Pentagon updates on the modification of cruise missiles to go through the gates/portals.
He was startled out of his reading by Ahana sliding a single piece of paper on top of the document.
“What is this?” Foreman asked as he picked it up.
“An update on the timeline.”
The numbers were bleak. “Forty hours?”
“Yes, sir. And there will be other activity before then.”
“What exactly happens ‘then’?” Foreman asked.
“The core will explode.”
BEYOND THE SPACE BETWEEN
“God-damnit, wake up.”
The voice was insistent. Dane tried to block it out, but it was bringing him back to consciousness.
“We can’t hang around here forever,” Earhart was right next to him, hovering six inches above the street. Dully, Dane noted that the asphalt had melted and then reformed.
“I’m OK,” he murmured.
“Geez, don’t do that again,” Earhart said. “You were just hanging there.”
“How long?” Dane asked.
“Who knows how long,” Earhart said. “I haven’t had a sense of time since my plane went down.”
Dane looked up and for the first time noted that the sky was a uniform gray and he couldn’t tell where the sun was. The sight of the destroyed buildings had been so strong, that he had overlooked the other effects of the nuclear war. “God, we sure screwed things up, didn’t we?” Then another piece of reality snapped in. “This place has got to be hot.”
“Hot?”
“Radioactivity. This is the result of a nuclear war,” Dane said. “The bombs leave behind an effect that is deadly.”
“I know what radioactivity is,” Earhart said.
“The suits—” Dane nodded, once more realizing it couldn’t be seen. “They must protect against it somehow.”
“What do we do now?” Earhart asked.
“Why did Rachel send us here?” Dane wondered out loud, not responding to her question. “This didn’t happen.”
“Then what are we seeing?” Earhart asked.
Dane was completely confused. He pushed aside the questions hammering at his mind and concentrated on the first question she had asked — what to do now?
“Let’s go back to the portal in the Reflecting Pool.” He turned and moved back toward the Mall. His sense of dread grew as he got closer and when the Reflecting Pool came into sight he knew that his fear was well grounded — the portal was gone.
“Oh, this is good,” Earhart said.
“Shh.” Dane closed his eyes. Rachel had to have sent them here for a reason. Was it just to see this or- “There’s got to be another portal nearby.”
“Where?”
“Let me listen.”
“’Listen’?” but Earhart fell silent, waiting.
Dane remembered the vision of Frost. The meeting with Kennedy. Leaving. Getting in the cab. Getting out of the cab. Dane felt a pang of excitement — Frost had forgotten something! Dane turned to the south. Looking across the Tidal Basin. A dome stood, the marble scorched and blackened.
“There,” Dane said.
“The Jefferson Memorial?”
Dane was already moving, forcing the suit forward, floating across the mall. He went in a straight line, right over the Tidal Basin. He noted that the Cherry trees that had graced the way were nothing but stumps.
He floated
up the stairs and into the center where the statue of Jefferson loomed over him. And at the base was a black circle. It was their way out, they both knew, but both halted, looking up at the statue for several moments.
Then they went through.
CHAPTER 20
480 BC
“You can never fight the same way against the same enemy,” Leonidas said. “You can never take the same path back from the fight that you took going toward it — it’s setting yourself up for ambush. These are basic rules of warfare.”
“So what will be different today?” Cyra asked. They were behind the Middle Gate, Leonidas’s squire, Xarxon, helping him put his armor on.
“They will be ready for us on the path. I imagine Xerxes will have his best troops — his Immortals — leading the way in battle formation. The good news about that is that they will take the path slowly, expecting us to come charging down. So they will waste most of the morning getting up here.”
“You will not meet them on the path?”
Leonidas shook his head. “No. That would be playing into their plan. We want them to play into our plan.”
“And we have one?”
“Of course.”
“When did you brief your officers?” Cyra wondered.
“They don’t need to be briefed on this,” Leonidas checked the blade of his xiphos, then slid it into the scabbard. “It will be straight-forward today. Nothing fancy — at least not for us. Standard battle tactics.”
* * *
As he sat down in his throne set on the side of the mountain, Xerxes reached out a hand whose fingers glistened with rings. A slave handed him a goblet of wine and he drank deeply, trying to sooth his sore throat. He had spent many hours screaming at his generals the previous evening and in the end his voice had given out. The head of the commander of the Egyptian contingent decorated a pole outside his Imperial tent.
He had brooked no arguments or sought any advice from his generals. His order was simple. The Immortals would lead and they would take the pass. Today.
Xerxes relaxed for the first time in many hours as he saw the line of his best troops making its way slowly up the trail. There was no sign of the Spartans, either waiting on the trail or even at the Middle Gate. For a moment, Xerxes wondered if they had retreated and given up the pass. But then he saw a scarlet cloaked figure climb up onto the stone wall, a Naga Staff in his hand. The Spartan king. Xerxes eyes narrowed as Leonidas dipped the staff in salute toward him. He could swear the Greek was smiling. Xerxes spit out his wine. He hoped the smile was still on the man’s face when his head also adorned a stake.
“My Lord.”
Xerxes turned slightly. Pandora was to his right, the cursed map in her hands.
“What?”
“I have been studying the map. I know it is wrong about the pass for some reason, but—” she paused, waiting, trying to gauge his reaction.
“But what?”
“It indicates a path over the mountain to the west of the pass. A very small path and apparently a treacherous one, but still a path.”
“And I am to believe this?” Xerxes asked. His voice hurt even speaking at a normal tone. He took another deep drink of the wine.
Pandora began to unravel the map, but he stopped her with a wave of her hand. “The pass will be ours today. I do not need your map. Out of my sight, priestess.
Pandora moved back into the ranks that surrounded the King.
* * *
Leonidas sat on the stone wall, his feet dangling. The sun felt nice on the little skin he had exposed and he enjoyed the feeling. He’d always found it fascinating that pending battle made the smallest things seem so significant. Given there was a chance that today was the last time he could enjoy such a simple pleasure all his senses were heightened. He wondered what it would be like to live every day as if there were a pending battle, but to not have the battle.
A skiritai came running up to him from the northern trail. “A quarter mile away, Lord.”
It was just before noon. Leonidas smiled as he stood. The Persians had wasted half their daylight simply getting here. And he knew their column must be hot and tired. The latter not so much from the climb, although it wasn’t easy, but from the stress of moving forward, not knowing if their enemy waited behind every turn. For most of the morning he had had his Spartans rest in the shade of the wall and mountain, helmets off, armor half un-buckled. He’d given the order to gear up when a skiritai reported the Persians were a half mile away.
“Form up,” Leonidas ordered. The three hundred, minus two dead and three seriously wounded in the previous day’s battle, formed two long, perpendicular lines behind the stone wall.
Leonidas looked to the north, waiting. The first rank of Immortals appeared around the turn in the pass, entering the narrow, hundred yard long space in front of the Middle Gate.
“Two ranks in front of the wall!” Leonidas cried out.
Through two low places in the stone wall, the two lines of Spartans quickly poured through, forming into shoulder to shoulder ranks as they deployed. Leonidas was watching the Persians. Their commander appeared disconcerted by the lack of space and the column was halted, the first two dozen ranks of four in the open area.
The Persians were still trying to decide what to do when the two lines of Spartans were in place. Leonidas glanced to the northwest once more, noting that Xerxes was still in his throne, watching. Then the Spartan king jumped down and moved through his lines to the forefront.
“Count off,” Leonidas ordered. From left to right, each man counted until it reached the last man on the end of the line above the sea.
The Persian commander was quickly beginning to deploy his men, spreading his line. It was obvious to Leonidas that the Immortals were much better trained than the Egyptians as they swiftly formed up.
Leonidas held the Naga Staff straight up in the air. The Spartans snapped to attention. With his free hand, Leonidas held up one finger. He was in the immediate center of the Spartan line.
Slowly, Leonidas brought the spear down toward the horizontal. The left leg of every Spartan in the front rank lifted at the same rate then spear lowered. The rear rank kept their feet still, but their spears moved forward into the quarter down position, above the heads of their comrades in front of them.
Leonidas’s arm locked horizontal and the front Spartan rank took a step forward. Then another and another behind their King. The Immortal commander noted the movement and screamed commands. Leonidas wasn’t going to give him time to complete his deployment. The Spartan King pumped his left hand once and the rank broke into quick march. Leonidas then poked one finger into the sky, pulled his hand down, then poked it up into the air a second time holding up two fingers.
Every odd man in the advanced line paused for two steps then continued, effectively doubling the single rank into two and narrowing it as the open space grew tighter toward the path the Persians were on.
The lead Immortals were quickly forming, leveling their short spears, locking their wicker shields in place. The two forces were less than twenty meters apart when Leonidas held up one finger, pumped his left hand twice, held up two fingers and spread the hand open. The front rank of advancing Spartans broke into a charge, a split second later snapping their spears into the horizontal, slapping the haft against their chest armor, the sound an ominous one. The second rank froze in place, weapons also at the ready.
The heavily armored front rank smashed into the Persian line. Screams of pain and anger rent the air. The Immortal line, not quite ready, quivered, held, wavered, then staggered back several paces under the onslaught. Leonidas was in the center, the Naga Staff slicing through shields as if they weren’t even there, cutting flesh and bone. Inside his head he was counting, as was every Spartan in the rank, even as they fought for their lives and to take the lives of their enemy.
When the mental count reached ten, Leonidas jabbed at the nearest Persian, the Naga blade piercing deep into the man’s chest, then
he disengaged, rapidly walking backwards twenty paces, as did every other Spartan who had been fighting. Then they dropped to the ground, prone.
The second rank charged forward, right over the backs of their comrades, sandaled feet hitting the armor and then crashed into the dazed Persians. The front rank stood up, reforming. Leonidas took several deep breaths, scanning the line. They had lost a few men and squires were scurrying about the fighting in front, trying to drag away the downed Spartans even as the second rank pushed the Immortals further back, narrowing the field, leaving their enemy only about ten meters of space.
The Persians’ bodies were piling on top of each other. Wounded who were passed by the rank of Spartans were killed by Spartan squires who slit their throats, the blood adding to the gore covering the ground. Through this, Leonidas had been counting once more, the rhythm of the count beaten into him for years on the plains of Sparta. When he reached fifteen, the rank that had passed them began disengaging. Leonidas counted five more beats, then he charged forward along with the rest of his line, passing over the prone bodies of the second rank, stepping on the armor of one of his comrades and sprinting into the enemy line.
The Immortals who faced them were disoriented, not used to the maneuver. They were trapped between the charging Spartans and the thousands of Immortals crowding the pass behind them. They couldn’t retreat and they couldn’t hold their ground. The result was murder.
* * *
“Pull them back,” Xerxes ordered. “Now!”
His lead general issued the orders and flag bearers gave the appropriate signals, the order then being translated to sound as trumpets blasted the call for retreat. Slowly, much too slowly for those Immortals engaged with the Spartans, the rear of the column began backing out of the pass. The King’s face was flushed with anger as he watched his Immortals try to extract themselves.
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