by A. G. Riddle
When he reached the portal after his second trip around the beacon, the rest of the group still stood there staring out the window, mesmerized. He had to get them focused on the task at hand. They were all physically and mentally exhausted, but he wanted to grab the adults, shake them, and say, “Come on, people! Focus! Killers, chasing us, could be here any minute!”
Milo he gave a pass. David couldn’t imagine himself as a teenager standing on a space station staring out at Earth. He probably would have peed his pants.
Kate had this blank expression David recognized: she was using her implant to communicate with the Atlantean vessel. The blank expression dissolved into worry as she faced him. Now he was worried. More worried.
David pointed at the portal. “Is this the only egress?”
“Yes,” Kate said.
The words brought Sonja to life. “Barricade or ambush?”
In his mind, David riffled through the supplies he had seen. Not enough to completely block the portal. Not even close. “Ambush,” he said. He nodded in the direction of the four residential pods. “We’ll build it on that side of the portal.”
He moved to the storage room, and he and Sonja moved all the silver boxes out, stacking them perpendicular to the portal so that their bullets would fire across toward the storage room, and David hoped, into Dorian and any of his remaining men. David wasn’t sure if that was safe, but Dorian was likely to come through the door shooting straight on, so…
Kate grabbed his arm. “We need to talk.”
“I’ll take first watch,” Sonja said, settling down behind the crates.
Kate was pulling David to the closest residential pod.
“There are three other quarters; everyone take one,” David said. There were four of them and three rooms, but they would sort it out.
Paul collapsed on the narrow bed and began peeling the Atlantean suit off. The door opened, and Mary stepped in and set her pack down.
Paul had assumed Mary and the other woman would take a pod. “I can share with Milo.”
“No. It’s okay.”
“You didn’t want to…”
“Sorry. Sonja… she kind of scares me.”
Paul nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
At least there’s some good news, Dorian thought. The soldier the snake had almost killed could walk, and he wasn’t one of the regurgitators on the flight in, so maybe he was one of the better soldiers of the original six. At any rate, he was the only one left.
His name was Victor, and he wasn’t very talkative. That was the balance of the good news.
Several hours into their march into the jungle, Victor finally asked, “What’s the plan, sir?”
Dorian stopped, drank from his canteen and handed it to the man. They could see the peeled metal where David had exploded the exit door in the distance.
“Now we go down the rabbit hole and finish this thing.”
“We have a problem,” Kate said the second the door closed.
David sat at the table, weariness finally overtaking him. “Can you please never say that again, even if we’re totally screwed? The phrase makes me more nervous than actual problems.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. ‘We have an issue?’ maybe?”
“We have an issue.”
David smiled, showing Kate an exhausted look of complete surrender that softened her at once.
“Janus’ message. It’s not what we thought it was.”
David glanced around, waiting.
Kate activated the screen above the desk and played Janus’ transmission.
“That,” David said, “is a very, very big problem.”
23
David sat at the table built into the gray wall, trying to wrap his exhausted mind around Janus’ message.
“Play it again.”
From her perch on the narrow bed behind him, Kate used her neural link to play the video.
“What do you want to do?” Kate asked.
“We should share it with the group.”
They had no options that David could see, and he felt they should make their decision together.
David had made the rounds, gathering everyone into the larger lab at the back of the beacon. Kate had programmed the doors to stay open, and she now stood in the open room with Milo, Mary, Paul, and Sonja. David had relieved Sonja, reasoning that she should see the footage for herself. He sat at the makeshift outpost by the portal, his rifle pointed across the entry path toward the empty storage room.
Before the video began, Paul stepped in front of the screen and addressed Kate. “I’m sorry, but can I say something first? I’m just… not sure anyone should be shooting a gun here.” He specifically avoided eye contact with David.
“I agree,” Mary said quietly.
Sonja stiffened.
David yelled back to them. “If Dorian Sloane walks through that door, I am shooting him. End of discussion.”
Mary cleared her throat, “Well, it… seems to me that maybe we should stack the boxes against the portal. Then we would know when he comes through, and you could shoot into the portal—that way, at least the bullets would go back into the other ship.”
“You assume,” Sonja said, “that the portal would transmit bullets. If not, they would go through the portal mechanism in the center, trapping us here, which would be far worse than the quick death of decompression, which is another assumption. A craft this advanced can surely withstand impacts from outside. It’s not my area, but I believe space is filled with floating rocks large and small, some moving quickly. It would stand to reason that perhaps this beacon was also built to withstand a puncture from the inside and if not, in the event of a breach, to rapidly repair itself.”
“I, uh, hadn’t thought of that,” Mary said, her cheeks flushing.
“There’s much to think about,” Sonja said. “And all our minds are weary. Many unknowns.” She turned to Kate. “Unless of course these unknowns are known.”
“Oh, they’re unknown.” Kate said. Her Atlantean memories were spotty, and she had no idea what the beacon was capable of, including whether it could withstand a firefight or not.
“You said there was a movie?” Milo asked.
“Yes. Of sorts.” Kate activated the large screen, the video began, and the five of them stepped back to form a semi-circle around the screen.
Janus stood on the bridge of the ship he and his fellow Atlantean scientist had traveled to Earth upon and hidden on the far side of the moon, burying it below thousands of feet of lunar rock and dirt.
Janus’ expression was stoic as he spoke.
“My name is Dr. Arthur Janus. I am a scientist and a citizen of a long-since fallen civilization. We made a great mistake many years ago, and we have paid dearly for it—with the lives of nearly every member of our society. The remainder of our people took refuge here, on this world, hiding, waiting. And we repeated our mistake.”
The ship shook, and the panels around the bridge behind Janus flickered, popped, and went out.
“I say to you, those who destroyed our world, those we wronged, please do not continue your vengeance on the inhabitants of this planet. They are victims too.”
Flames erupted across the bridge a second before the video ended.
“Yeah, so…” Paul began. “Not exactly a message to an ally.”
Mary bit her lip. “How do we know the response—the message I received—is a response to this message? And do you know what the incoming message is?”
“No,” Kate said. “In fact, what you received is what was in the transmission. Sometimes the beacon translates incoming signals, but it didn’t in this case.” The screen changed, showing an access log of incoming and outgoing messages. “Here’s Janus’ outgoing message, sent from the main vessel fourteen days ago. The strange part is that he routed it to a quantum comm buoy—”
“A quantum comm…”
“It’s like a relay the Atlanteans used to manage communi
cations traffic over distances. Sending information across space isn’t the issue, it’s folding the space, creating temporary wormholes and the power required to do so. The buoys establish those worm holes for an extremely small fraction of a second and transmit data. There are millions of them that form a redundant network.”
There were blank stares all around the room, except for Mary, who was nodding.
“Why is that important?” Paul asked.
“Because it means Janus was masking the origin of his signal—he bounced it off so many buoys I can’t even trace the destination from here. He clearly didn’t want the recipient to know where the message came from.”
“But somehow they traced it,” Sonja said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” Kate replied. She highlighted the next row in the communications log. “Twenty four hours after his message went out, a response comes in. It had an Atlantean access code, so the beacon let it through. What’s strange to me is that it didn’t contain a message in the Atlantean format and encoding. The message is very… ‘Earthlike’—the content is simplistic and far less advanced than what would be expected. The Atlantean computer can’t even read it.”
“As if the sender knew the Atlanteans were hiding on a less advanced world…” Paul began.
“It’s bait!” David yelled from his position by the portal.
“I agree,” Sonja said. “If this was a message to a great enemy, and they could not trace its origin, they could have sent a fake message to any suspected worlds, hoping to lure us out.”
Paul nodded. “Hoping we would respond, reveal our location or better yet, disable the beacon so they could see exactly what’s happening on Earth.”
“It had our address on it,” Mary said, but quickly added, “though, I guess they could have sent a customized message to every world.” Kate thought the realization hit the woman hard, as if some hope she had harbored had finally died.
Paul rubbed his temples and paced away. “I’m too tired to think. We obviously can’t respond, at least not yet, and we can’t disable the beacon. Janus clearly believed the Atlanteans’ enemy was still out there. What’s left? What can we do?” He glanced toward the portal.
“I agree,” Sonja said. “We’re trapped.”
24
Kate closed her eyes and massaged her eyelids. She was dead-tired and sitting at the small desk in the residential pod, staring at the screen for the last hour felt as though it were draining her even more. Yet… she couldn’t help feeling as if she was missing something. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking, her desperate desire to think that there was a way out of the trap they were in.
The door opened, and David lumbered in, his eyes half closed.
Kate smiled. “How was work, honey?”
He barely made it to the end of the bed before falling into it. “I feel like an Atlantean mall cop.”
She hovered over him.
“Pesky kids getting rowdy in the food court?”
“Supervisor relieved me for falling asleep on the job.”
She began pulling his dirty tunic off. “Well they can’t fire you,” she said in a mock sympathetic tone. “This Atlantis beacon needs you too much. But you’re getting dirt in the bed.” She collected his pants and boots and then inserted them in the garment sanitizer in the corner.
David followed her with his eyes, not moving a muscle. “How does it work? The Atlantean laundry. Actually… don’t tell me. I don’t care.”
She handed him a mushy bag, then uncapped the end and pushed it towards his lips.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner.” She squeezed some of the gel into his mouth.
David sat up and spat the orange goo on the wall. “Oh God, that’s horrible! What the—What did I ever do to you, lady?”
Kate cocked her head. “Really?” She ate some of the goo. “It’s just pre-digested amino acids, triglycerides—”
“It tastes like poop, Kate.”
“You’ve never tasted—”
“I have now. It’s horrid. How can you eat that?”
Kate wondered the same thing. To her, it had almost no taste. She wondered if it was because she was changing, becoming more… Atlantean. She pushed the thought from her mind.
“Well, I’m not eating that for my last meal. I’ll starve first.”
“So dramatic.”
David reached for the pack. “What do we have left?”
Kate opened it and rifled through the MREs. “Beef stew, barbecue chicken with black beans and potatoes, chili mac…”
David fell back into the bed. “Oh, talk dirty to me now.”
Kate punched him in the chest. “You’re a lunatic.”
He smiled. “You love it.”
“I do. And that makes me a lunatic.”
“I’ll take whatever you don’t want,” he said.
“Don’t think I can tell much difference anymore.”
David’s eyebrows knitted together for a moment, then his smile faded as he seemed to realize what she meant.
He grabbed a pack at random, tore it open, and began wolfing it down.
Kate wished he would eat slower, which would allow more digestive enzymes to release, breaking the food down better and giving him more usable calories from the meal. That had been her goal in feeding him the more nutrient-dense Atlantean pack. But… human needs.
He pinched her nose playfully, trying to lighten the mood. “No more nose bleeds.”
“Nope.”
He was about finished with the pack but stopped. “It was the experiments, wasn’t it? The simulations.”
“Yeah.”
David finished the last few bites. “When Alpha said you had four to seven days… left. It wasn’t unsure of your health—the diagnosis. It was unsure how many experiments you would do on yourself. None means seven days, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” David said. “Seven days is better than four.”
“I agree,” Kate said quietly.
“Okay, let’s talk about the… issue.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “Issue?”
“Throwing the long ball.”
Kate hated sports analogies. “We have a long ball?”
He pushed up on his elbow. “You know, the Hail Mary pass in the fourth quarter. That’s where we are, Kate. We both know it. You said this beacon is connected to countless quantum buoys. To me, we only have one play: we send our SOS. Say… I don’t know, ‘our world is under attack from a superior alien occupying force.’” He paused. “Wow. I was trying to make it sound overly urgent and dramatic, but it’s actually one hundred percent accurate.”
Kate’s mind lit up. That was it. David was still talking, losing steam with every word, the exhaustion and binge eating catching up to him fast.
“I mean, yeah, some bad guys will read it. Maybe they’ll show up, but maybe some galactic good guys will give a crap, and anyway, we’re screwed if we do, screwed if we don’t…”
Kate pushed him into the bed. “Rest. You just gave me an idea.”
“What idea?”
“I’ll be back.”
“Wake me up in an hour,” David called to her as she left. There was no way she would wake him up in an hour. He needed rest. If Kate was right, he would need to be at the very top of his game.
Outside their room, she found Sonja and Milo manning the make-shift fortress adjacent to the glowing white portal. For perhaps the first time in her life, Milo didn’t smile at Kate. He nodded solemnly, a look that said, This is serious. We’re on guard duty here.
Kate nodded back as she passed and almost ran to the communications bay at the back of the beacon. She pulled up the transmission log she had shown the group before. This time, she entered a new date range: about thirteen thousand years ago.
The data scrolled across the screen, and Kate could hardly believe her eyes.
Dorian reached his hand down to Victor. “I’ll pull you up. We have to hurry.”
The so
ldier had climbed the tree leaning against the arc exit about half as fast as Dorian. The dimwit would never make the Olympics.
He jerked the man into the dark corridor, and they set out again. Dorian was glad to be out of the humid, freakish place with the snakes and flying invisible birds, and who knew what else.
He wanted to barricade the entrance, ensuring that nothing made it out, but there was no time.
The two men moved slowly through the corridor, again barefoot as they had been on the way to the arc, careful not to make a sound that might reveal their position.
Dorian had no problem facing facts: David was strong and clever. It would be just like him to send Kate to the beacon while he remained here, guarding, waiting to spring a trap.
If Kate had already sent a message or disabled the beacon, Dorian would be too late. The thought weighed on him, the proverbial weight of the world, but he couldn’t rush his assault. If there was still a chance, it was up to him to stop them. If he failed, so would the world he was fighting for, had sacrificed so much for.
Ares had been right about one thing: Dorian did have a role to play.
He was adjusting to the darkness now, seeing more and more of the corridor despite the faint emergency lights.
Up ahead, the portal room loomed, waiting.
At the threshold, he and Victor paused, signaled each other, and then rushed in, sweeping the room with their rifles. Empty.
Dorian worked the green cloud of light at the panel, and the silver arched portal came to life.
Victor stepped toward it.
“Wait,” Dorian commanded. “We need to be careful.”
Mary and Paul were lying in the narrow bed, both staring at the ceiling.
