“A great battle was fought here,” Polynices said.
“Between who?” the man who had found the carvings asked.
“Man and beast.” Polynices noted something else. Behind the beasts were a pair of figures, almost human, but with straight lines, almost above the battle. “And these, whatever they are.”
“And who won?”
Polynices laughed and slapped the man on the back. “What does it matter? It was a great battle.”
***************
Cyra was praying over the bodies of the dead, Spartan and Antirhonian alike, when she felt such severe pain in her left eye that she wondered if she’d been shot with an arrow. She staggered back, hand reflexively going to the eye. She looked at her hand, half expecting to see blood, but there was just flesh. She went to her knees and bent over, eyes tightly shut.
She ‘saw’ a scorched plain. Wide and open, ocean on one side. Thousands and thousands of troops, all moving forward. Toward mountains. A pass. The Gates of Fire—she knew it.
She opened her eyes and staggered to her feet. She saw Leonidas issuing orders, still covered in dried blood. She pushed her way through the people around him.
“What is it?” Leonidas asked, surprised at her sudden appearance.
“The Persians are close to the Gates.”
“How close?”
“Less than a day’s march.”
“It is too soon.”
“There was no resistance to their advance,” Cyra said.
Leonidas nodded, as if he expected this bad news. “You know the path the Theran Oracle gave you?”
Cyra’s face went white as the blood drained from it. “Yes.”
“We will take it.”
“And your army?” Cyra asked.
“The three hundred are already there, if I know Polynices. Which way?”
Cyra pointed to the mountains to the north and west. “The entrance is that way.”
CHAPTER 15 PRESENT
“How many do you think there are?” Dane whispered. He was lying next to Earhart, peering down at the huge cavern full of tables holding human bodies. Underneath the clear wrap he could see muscles, bones and ligaments. He saw one woman near the edge who’d had both legs amputated and there was an open cavity in her chest where a lung had been removed.
They’d only stopped by Earhart’s camp to drop off the crystal skulls. They discovered that Noonan had succumbed to whatever was ravaging his body and that the Navy men were still unconscious, but Dane had confirmed they were from his time—part of the crew of the Connecticut.
“Thousands and thousands,” Earhart replied. “At first we would raid the cavern and put some of the people out of their misery but—” her voice trailed off and Dane knew what she meant. There were simply too many people, in too much agony. The aura that was sweeping over him was worse than even going into a gate. His stomach spasmed and he rolled to the side, heaving, but nothing came up.
When he turned back, Earhart offered him a water bottle. He took a swig of the slimy inner lake water, and then spit it out. “Why are they doing this?”
Earhart shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they’re trying to figure us out. What makes humans tick.”
“They’ve had a long time to do that,” Dane said, realizing even as he spoke the words that he couldn’t be certain how long the Valkyries had been doing this to people here in the space-between, given that time was very much a variable here.
“You know,” Dane said, “it looks like—”he searched for the vision that had just flashed through his mind, but he couldn’t draw it up. He shook his head and focused on the task ahead of them. “How do we find a Valkyrie in there?”
“We draw them to us,” Earhart said as she got up. She signaled and Taki and his men rose to their feet. Dane stood, but paused when Earhart put a hand on his arm. “Can you handle that thing?” she indicated the Naga Staff.
Dane hefted it uncertainly. “I was pretty good with an M-60 machine gun, but this—” he shook his head. “You have a suggestion?”
“Taki is a samurai,” she pointed out. “Trained in many different weapons.”
“It’s all his then,” Dane said. Earhart said something in Japanese and Taki took the staff from Dane, bowing slightly at the waist as he did so. In turn, he handed his sword to Dane. The samurai leader then spun it about in his hands so fast, Dane lost track of which end was where. Taki jabbed, sliced and shadow fought for a few seconds, getting a feel for the weapon, then he nodded and turned toward the cavern.
Dane didn’t feel very reassured with the sword in his hand. He hefted it as Earhart said something to Taki.
“I told him not to damage the suits too much,” she translated.
“Let’s hope they feel the same way about our skin,” Dane muttered.
“If you have to, go for the eyes—the red crystal,” Earhart suggested.
Dane followed Earhart and the samurai down the slope and they entered the cavern. Dane looked at the first person on a slab that he passed and was shocked to see the woman’s eyes following him, her head locked in place, a number of thin wires with small lit bulbs stemming up out of the exposed top of her brain. He started to step toward her, sword half-raised, but Earhart gave him a slight push.
“Not yet.”
Taki had reached an intersection among the slabs and paused, looking in all directions. Dane felt as if a ring of barbwire was wrapped around his head and it was being tightened. The pain was almost overwhelming as he absorbed the agony of the multitude of tortured humans around him. Writhing through the pain was the awareness that many of these people could no longer really be called human as their minds had snapped from the pain and nightmarish situation.
Taki moved along a row and summoned some Valkyries by the gruesome method of killing a dozen of the most hideously disfigured of the humans in one row. He paused, then hissed, pointing to his right. He held up two fingers and ducked behind a slab.
“Two Valkyries,” Earhart whispered as she edged Dane into a hiding spot. The person on the slab they hid behind had his ribs spread wide open, revealing the inner chest cavity. As he hid, Dane noted that most of the man’s intestines had been removed. The opening was covered with the same clear material, which must provide some protection from infection, he realized. A black tube was wrapped in a tight coil in place of the intestines and Dane could only assume it performed the basic functions needed to keep the man alive.
Dane forced his attention toward Taki. The Japanese warrior had the Naga Staff in his right hand and he had his back to the rear of the slab. A white figure floated past his location, then a second one. Just as the second one cleared, Taki sprang out, spinning, the Naga Staff level.
The blade struck right at the creature’s neck, slicing through cleanly, cutting through the front half of the neck. The body came to a halt, floating, the arms limp at its side, black gas issuing out of the wound. Taki was already attacking the second. He jabbed, the blade hitting the creature in the left shoulder, punching through. Black gas hissed out of the hole.
The creature swung its clawed hand at the samurai, narrowly missing. Taki ducked under its second blow and jabbed the point of the blade into the center of its chest. He twisted the haft of the staff, using the Naga heads for leverage and rotated the blade three hundred and sixty degrees inside the Valkyrie’s chest. Its arms dropped to the side and it was still like its headless companion, bobbing slightly.
Earhart was moving, gesturing for the samurai to grab the bodies. Dane ran to the one whose neck was cut. He found he could move it by himself, just pushing it. Earhart grabbed the other and they headed out of the cavern as quickly as they could, Taki bringing up the rear.
THE PRESENT
It is a common saying that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
History records that the winter of 1811-1812 was a very difficult one for the handful of settlers who braved the frontier and had settled in the Mississippi River Valley. The Shawnee
chief Tecumseh was organizing the tribes of the area to push back the whites and counting numbers it looked as if it were a very real possibility come Spring. And as if that weren’t enough, on the morning of December 16th, 1811, the Earth shook terribly numerous times and the sky filled with ash, blocking out the sun. Throughout the winter there were many more earthquakes, culminating on February 17th, 1812.
That was the day the Mississippi reversed course.
Along the New Madrid fault line, which roughly followed the line of the Mississippi between Tennessee/Kentucky and Arkansas/Missouri, the surface of the planet split. A twenty-mile section of the mightiest river in the continent simply dropped through the opening.
Crewmen on the first steamboat launched on the river, the New Orleans, which was on its inaugural voyage, woke to the amazing spectacle of the island they had anchored to having disappeared under the water, and the ship being pulled upriver as the water raced in that direction.
No one knows how many thousands of Native Americans, mainly Chickasaw, died. Where there had been forests, there were now lakes. As the Mississippi resumed its flow, there were miles and miles of it in a new channel, gouged out by the earthquakes.
Few who lived in that area in present day knew of those events in their history. The devastation of the southeast coast of Africa had stunned the world. Still, extreme as the event was, there was a tendency in the United States and Europe to feel like it had taken place far away and life went on, most people unaware of the ticking time bomb deep inside their planet as the various governments didn’t see a need to spread panic and chaos.
That changed abruptly as the Earth’s core shifted slightly and the New Madrid Fault gave way once more. Unfortunately, the area that was sparsely populated less than two hundred years before was now inhabited by several million people.
Seventy miles north of Memphis, where the Mississippi made a sharp bend opposite the town of New Madrid, a hole opened. A hole over twenty miles in diameter, that dropped almost a half-mile down. It took with it a twenty-mile section of the Mississippi River along with the countryside all around.
The mightiest river in North America flowed backwards once more as water surged upstream into the hole. Even before the water overwhelmed them, the majority of the thousands of people who lived and worked there were dead or dying from the devastation of the violent planet below them.
The rest drowned as the Mississippi filled the hole. The ripple effect from the earthquake resonated outward. In St. Louis, to the north, the Arch collapsed. Thousands died as buildings followed.
Like a punch to the solar plexus, America now knew the threat. But still the government refused to release the information that worse was to come.
THE SPACE BETWEEN
“How do they stay in the air?” Earhart asked as they circled one of the two suits.
“Something must be built into them,” Dane said. He was looking for any sort of opening. “There’s no blood,” he noted. He reached up and pulled down on the suit with the neck wound. He looked inside. “There’s a body at least,” he said as he saw flesh. And he also saw the reason for no blood—the wound was covered with the same clear material that was on the bodies in the cavern. The wound was capped off by the material but the damage to the flesh at the time of the strike had been too great. “This stuff must have snapped in place when the neck was cut. Pretty effective wound control, except not when you get half your neck cut through. Looks almost human,” he added. He wondered if the Shadow used humans inside the suits to do their bidding.
There was something strange about the body, although Dane couldn’t tell exactly what it was by the little he could see through the wound in the suit. Earhart put her hand in the wound on the other one’s chest. “Feels like the same thing; the wound was covered.”
Dane closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. There had to be a way the armor came off the bodies. Dane opened his eyes and checked the claw hands on the closest one. He noted that the claws could retract back, leaving the armored fingers free to work. The white armor was cool to the touch and judging from where it had been penetrated extremely thin. Yet Dane had seen it resist all blows except those from a Naga Staff.
He noted something on the inside of the left forearm—a small series of slight indentations. Two rows of five. Each indent about the size of a dime. He pointed them out to Earhart.
“What do you think they are?” she asked.
“I think this is an external control pad for the suit,” Dane said. “Ten, one for each number, one through ten.”
“So there’s a code?”
Dane nodded. “Most likely.”
“That doesn’t do us much good.”
Dane rubbed his chin, noting that he had a stubble of beard. He tried to remember the last time he’d taken a warm shower or shaved. “Let’s step back from things for a second and consider what’s going on,” he suggested.
“What do you mean?” Earhart asked.
“You saw Noonan die when your plane went down, yet he shows up here alive—mortally wounded from passage through a portal—but alive. He tells you that you’ll need to get some Valkyrie suits. But that you’ll need to get a Naga Staff in order to do that. So I show up with the Naga Staff. I don’t know why exactly I took it from the Bermuda Triangle Gate other than that I sensed it was the next thing to do.”
“And?” Earhart wasn’t following his thoughts.
“It seems to me—” Dane tried to figure out exactly what it was that was troubling him— “as if there’s a plan to all this. As if we’re being nudged in the right direction, to take the next right steps. Or maybe the wrong steps. I don’t know,” he ended in frustration.
“The Ones Before?” Earhart asked.
“Most likely,” Dane agreed. “They sent my team sergeant to me in the Angkor Gate and helped me there. I’d say they sent Noonan to you the same way.”
“But I saw him die,” Earhart insisted. She turned and looked at the body of her navigator, the face covered with a shirt. “And now he’s died again. How can that be?”
“I saw Robert Frost die and Washington DC destroyed in an atomic war,” Dane said, almost to himself. He felt a tingling along his spine, as if he was very close to something, but it was still just beyond his grasp. The feeling extended to his fingers. He held his hands out as if seeing them for the first time.
He turned to the Valkyrie suit. He ran the fingers of his left hand lightly over the indent keys. He paused, then did it once more. Then he pressed a half-dozen keys in rapid succession. There was a click, then with a hiss, the suit split open, hinged on the right side. A body tumbled out, the head rolling back unnaturally.
“God,” Earhart whispered as she saw the condition of the body. It was like one of those on the slabs—skin gone, covered with the clear material. She looked up at Dane. “How did you do that?”
“I just let my fingers do it,” Dane said, as if that explained it. He was examining the inside of the suit.
“They’re human,” Earhart nudged the body with the toe of her boot. The body was that of a human without its skin, but the muscles were atrophied and it probably weighed no more than a hundred pounds. There were no genitals that they could see.
“Or they use humans,” Dane said.
“Look at this,” Earhart pushed the flopping head slightly with her boot, exposing the right side of the face. There was skin underneath the clear wrap. Unblemished, almost pink skin running from just below the ear to just shy of the nose. “That’s strange, don’t you think?”
Dane went over to the other suit and punched in the same combination. It split open and another body spilled out. This one had unblemished skin on the upper half of its body and Dane knew what he was seeing.
“They’re grafting skin they take off people in the cavern,” he said. He looked at the interior of the helmet. A slightly curved flat surface was on the inside of the ruby eyes. He went back to the first suit.
He backed into the rear half of t
he suit, stepping up backwards and placing his feet in the heel, six inches above the ground. As soon as he was pressed against the rear, the suit swung close. He felt it press against his skin, conforming. Dane blinked as everything went dark for a second, then the screen came alive with an outside view. He knew he was in technology that was far advanced of what was even on the drawing boards on Earth.
He looked down. He flexed his fingers. When his fingers went back as far as they could go, the claws snapped forward. He bent the tips forward and the claws flipped back. He felt strange, floating above the ground. He tried to swing one leg forward and the entire suit moved him a couple of feet ahead. He did the other leg and it moved forward the same distance.
“Interesting.” He tapped the open code and the suit released him.
“We have the suits,” Earhart said. “Now what?”
“Now we get the map.”
“Which is where?”
“Why do you think we need to suits?”
“To go into a portal,” Earhart said, “but which one?”
“Whichever one Rachel leads us to.”
CHAPTER 16 480 BC
Leonidas left his army with orders to march northeast toward the Gates as soon as they consolidated after the victory at Antirhon. Then he and Cyra headed in that direction, both mounted on the fastest steeds they could cull from the city. When they reached where the road went over a mountain pass beyond the city, Leonidas halted briefly and looked back. He could see his army the red cloaks easily visible at this distance. The sun was low in the western sky.
He jerked the reins and followed Cyra, who had not halted. The track she was following headed into mountains, the peaks of which were shrouded in low-lying clouds. A cold wind was blowing steadily into their faces as they wound their way upwards.
“A great victory,” Cyra said, the words whipped away by the wind so quickly that Leonidas barely heard her.
“You fight well with words,” the Spartan King said.
Atlantis: Gate Page 18
