Assault on Atlantis

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The steady roar of jet engines throbbed in Dane’s ears. The backseat of the F-14 wasn’t the most spacious place, but Dane had managed to open the laptop Ahana had given him and he had it in front of him as he studied the information she had compiled. He had been inside the gate while much had happened and had not had a chance to be fully brought up to speed.

First he checked Ahana’ s displays from both the Flip and Super-Kamiokande in Japan, showing the current muonic field patterns for the planet. The activity around the Devil’s Sea and Baikal was obvious. Otherwise, the planet seemed calm. But for the radiation out of Chernobyl and the growing ozone hole, they might be celebrating a victory over the Shadow-a very big but.

Ahana had summarized the information quite well-some of the material Dane already knew. Other of it was new, but put together in a way that he was beginning to get a better grasp on the war against the Shadow.

Ahana had gone back to something Foreman had told Dane-which the Russians had been one of the leaders in investigating the gates, initially calling them Vile Vortices. They had also been the first to propose the concept of the interior of the planet holding a giant crystalline object. The Russian scientists who proposed this claimed that a matrix of cosmic energy was built into the planet at the time of its formation and that it punched through to the surface at the Vile Vortices. When it was first published, the theory was met with scorn and ridicule, and over the years, the scientists who had proposed it became the laughing stock of their fields.

If they had lived another forty years they would have seen their theory come to life.

Ahana had laid out her adjustment to their theory based on what she had gathered from the recent attempt by the Shadow to tap the core. She had recorded her summary to complement what came up on the screen. Dane smiled as he put on a headset and hit the play button on the computer. Ahana’s words gave evidence to a more artistic side to the usually serious scientist:

“Mr. Dane. Please bear with me as I try to explain things. We learned much while you were inside the gate, some of which you might be aware of, much of which is still conjecture, but what I am telling you are my best guesses as to what has happened and is happening.

“1 must start at the beginning, of course. The birth of our planet, that is. In the very beginning, Earth was only a gathering of fragments of solid rock revolving around the sun. Over the course of approximately two billion years, these fragments coalesced into a planet, a very rudimentary one. Then asteroids and meteors bombarded this rudimentary planet for millions of years. The energy from these impacts melted the entire planet to the extent that it is still cooling off as I say this and will be far into the future. The densest material sank to the center, while lighter materials, the basis from which life could develop. Such as oxygen compounds, water, and silicates, rose. By the time the first humans walked the planet, the interior of the planet settled into four basic layers: the inner core, outer core, mantle and crust.”

On the screen a cross-section of the planet appeared, complementing what Ahana was saying.

“The inner core is solid, while the outer core and mantle Ire still molten, with the crust forming a surface on which life has evolved. Despite a radius of only thirty-five hundred kilometers, the inner core contains a large percentage of the planet’s mass. And despite the high temperature, it is solid. There is only one material that could be solid under such tremendous pressure and heat: diamond. Unlike the small diamonds closer to the surface that you are familiar with, this inner diamond field has to exist on an unimaginable scale; a massive crystalline structure of diamonds that could not only absorb the energy but also deal with the electrical field around it.

“What is important to note is that diamond is an excellent conductor of heat but not of electricity. Because a slowly circulating molten outer core that produces electricity and heat surrounds the inner diamond core, a tremendous amount of energy is generated inside the planet with the heat conducted but the electricity circulating, forming a powerful magnetic field.

“While life went from single to multicellular organisms, the single continent of Pangea, surrounded by a worldwide ocean, did the opposite, slowly breaking apart due to the tectonic stresses from below.”

The image of one mass splitting into forms that roughly approximated the current seven continents appeared on the screen.

“The Earth’s crust is only a thin skin that constitutes less than point two percent of the planet’s mass. The crust under water averages about five times less thickness than that beneath the land, which is why I believe most of the large gates have occurred over water.

“Several million years ago, between several of the continents in the center of what we know as the Atlantic Ocean, a long line of magma boiled up from the inner Earth, met the cool water and, in that fiery intersection, built a ridge higher and higher. The mid-Atlantic Ridge grew because the tectonic plates that intersected beneath it were pulling away from each other. More and more molten rock boiled forth, the wider the split between the North/South American plates and the Eurasian/African plates grew.

“In the center of the Atlantic, about twenty degrees north latitude, the split was even more pronounced because there was an intersection of four plates pulling away from each other, both east/west and north/south. This widening process-no more than a couple inches a year but multiplied over millennia-pushed so much magma through that the hardening lava actually rose above the surface of the water, producing islands, which over more time rose high enough to possibly connect to each other and produce a land mass worthy of being a continent itself-a continent we call Atlantis. It might not have been a continent, but rather a collection of islands, but either way. there was definitely land in the middle of the Atlantic.

“Remember, though, that it was a land built over a crack in the Earth’s crust with no firm attachment to the planet other than the line of magma that still boiled though many miles under the surface. This made it very different from the other continents, which were anchored on top of one hundred kilometers of cold rock that made up the tectonic plates and the thickest part of the crust.

“We have to assume that because of the extremely fertile volcanic soil that covered Atlantis and the bountiful ocean that surrounded it, the pieces were in place for humans who could reap the food supplied by both sources to develop quickly. It also benefited from the warming effect of the Gulf Stream, making it temperate year round. I believe the first civilization of mankind arose on Atlantis.

“It did not last long before the Shadow appeared. I think the Shadow attacked Atlantis because it sat on top of this crack, almost a direct pathway to the power inside the planet. The thing that made the land so bountiful also doomed it.”

Dane thought about that. He thought the explanation was off in some way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

‘’The Ones Before helped the Atlanteans in their battle against the Shadow. We’ve seen how the minds of special people, people like you, can re-direct power, although the cost is high, resulting in transformation ill a pure crystalline skull.

“The ancient ones of mankind fought a war that spread around the globe until the very existence of life was threatened. And in the climactic battle, the ancient ones, with the aid of the Ones Before, stopped the Shadow-but at a high price. Their home of Atlantis was destroyed in a cataclysm of fire and earthquake. The resulting tsunamis touched every shore on the planet with such devastation that the legend of the Great Flood was written of both in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Old Testament of the Jewish people on the other side of the world.

“The survivors, in a handful of ships, scattered to the four winds and planted the seeds for future civilizations to arise thousands of years later, what we call the modem world. The Atlanteans stopped the Shadow but lost their civilization and their home in the process. This is something we would like to avoid.

“Since the destruction of Atlantis, the Shadow has kept a presence on our planet via gates. Sometimes these gates expanded, such as in A.D. 800 when the capital city of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia was swallowed up by such a gate-the one at Kol Ker which you entered. But always the gates shrunk back in size or even disappeared for years on end. So infrequent were the Shadow’s actions that man knew so little of it, that places where gates sometimes opened were viewed more as mystical places, such as the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan or the Bermuda Triangle. Even Atlantis faded into the fog of myth.”

There was a pause in the recording. Dane glanced out of the cockpit. They were still over the Pacific, heading to the West at supersonic speed.

“A major problem is that we are not sure exactly who the Shadow is or where they — or it-come from. We know you found human bodies inside the Valkyrie suits, but that could simply mean the Shadow has recruited humans to do their dirty work. If the Shadow is human, another Earth time line attacking our time line, the issue is how did they attain such a mastery of nature? It is obvious that the Shadow is an enemy that has a grasp of the true nature of physics that is far ahead of ours.”

Dane rubbed his forehead as he scrolled down the screen, looking at formulas and data Ahana had placed in the computer. He knew he needed to understand as much as possible, but he was finding some of this hard to absorb. Especially as Ahana now tried to give him a primer on the cutting edge of physics.

“Muons are part of the second family of fundamental particles which we know little about. Most of what we deal with in our world is in the first family, consisting of electrons, up-quarks and down-quarks. The second family consists of muons, charm quarks and strange quarks. And all these things are not single dots, according to string theory, but there a tiny, one-dimensional loop that is vibrating, which gives it several characteristics, which allows us to merge relativity and quantum mechanics.”

There was another short pause, then Ahana’s voice came through again.

“Let me explain this to you more simply. We have a problem with our theories of physics. Relativity explains things ell for large matter but doesn’t work at the smallest levels. Quantum physics works well at the smallest levels, but not at Quantum physics works well at the smallest levels. But not at what we call a unified-field theory that explains everything. We think string theory is it.

“Power is the key to all of this. We know the Shadow likes to draw power from this side, whether it is in the form of radioactivity as they did at Chernobyl, or from the planet itself along the tectonic plates, one of the greatest, if slowest, powers on the planet, as they recently tried to do through the Nazca Plain.

“There are four base forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetic power, strong, and weak. For electromagnetic power the force particle is the photon. For gravity it’s postulated that ere is a particle called the graviton, but,again, only because of effect, not that we’ve ever seen one. For strong the particle is the gluon. And for weak we have weak gauge bosons.

“Professor Nagoya believed the Shadow could manipulate the strong and weak forces. We can do so, too, but only crudely. A nuclear weapon explodes when we split atoms and the strong forces are released. When uranium decays in a reactor we are using weak forces. Professor Nagoya believed the Shadow could manipulate strong and weak forces like we use electricity and that is how they were able to a certain extent extend portals across parallel worlds and times.”

If the Shadow could control such forces, Dane wondered, why did it need to attack other time lines for power, water, and people?

“There have been scientists who’ve theorized that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, existing side by side, to speak, in what is called the multiverse.” Dane heard Ahana sigh before she continued. “The fundamental problem with trying to understand the universe is that we don’t really I know how it started. If you view time as a line, and we are currently at the right-hand end of it, the universe began at the left-hand end, and that formation might rely on cosmological evolution that is outside the scope of even the deepest theory we can come up with.”

In other words, Dane thought, we don’t know much of anything about what was going on. That brought up the issue Ahana had mentioned earlier-if the Shadow was human, how had it gained this knowledge? Or was the Shadow some alien life force far advanced of mankind?

Did it matter, though? Dane wondered. Nagoya and Ahana’s theories and research had so far yielded little practical information.

Dane took the headphones off and closed the laptop. Science didn’t have the answers. He was going to have to trust the visions and the words he heard. So far they had steered him correctly.