Assault on Atlantis

CHAPTER THRITY FIVE

“Angels,” Custer whispered. “Come to rescue me.” He dropped the pistol he couldn’t fire and reached up with both hands toward the white figures that had just appeared in front of him.

Dane saw the massacre all around as a wave of several hundred warriors washed over the remnants of Custer’s command. But all veered away from the strange vision of he and Earhart in the Valkyrie suits and Custer nearby with a glowing skull in his lap.

Dane slowly turned and saw a handful of people approaching, glowing blue skulls held in their hands. He raised his white arms wide, welcoming them, spreading out the metal net he had taken from the sphere.

The screams of the last dying soldiers echoed in his ears. He didn’t want to believe he’d become jaded to death. He wanted to believe that this battle had been inevitable anyway and he was here to cull something good out of a futile massacre.

Sitting Bull walked up and dropped the glowing skull into the net. Then Buffalo Calf Road Woman. Walks Alone. Crazy Horse. Gall. Two Moons. And then Mitch Bouyer with two skulls.

Eight.

“Eric.”

Dane had almost forgotten Earhart was with him. He turned.

George Armstrong Custer was looking at him. His face was pale, his body wounded in several places.

“The ninth,” Earhart said. He was the only one of his command left alive. On his lap was the ninth skull.

Dane felt Custer’s shock and confusion. “Take it,” he ordered Earhart.

With a clawed hand she reached down and lifted the skull, from Custer’s lap. Dane wanted to say something to those around, but he knew the portal might not last. He turned to it, hit the blackness and disappeared.

Behind him Earhart hesitated. Her thoughts and feelings ere jumbled. She saw her lines in Bouyer’s face. Her son, but not her Son. Standing on a hillside littered with bodies. He was half of one people, half of another. What would happen to him, she wondered? He didn’t even know who she was.

The portal flickered and she entered it.

Dane went directly to the power room carrying the skulls.

Earhart took her place in the control room, entering the command pod. There was no need for them to talk, to discuss what came next.

Staying in the Valkyrie suit, Dane removed the nine skulls · and placed them in the alcoves that were on the same level as the portal map. When he was done, he went to the center and · exited the suit. The power flowing in from the skulls was intense, much stronger than what he had just experienced from e crew of the Nautilus. He let his hands flow among the portal strands, letting his own time line attract them with its draw.

His hands wrapped around a strand that felt familiar in a way he couldn’t explain. Then he realized he’d touched this one before, when he’d cut off the portal the Shadow had been using to drain power from his world and that this sphere had come through.

“I’ve got power,” Earhart said. “I see the portal. It’s big enough. You’re sure it’s the one back to your time line?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Dane said. “But, yes, this is the one.”

The sphere hit the portal, rocked, bounced, then Dane almost fell off the pedestal as the craft canted hard right.

“Whoa!’’ Earhart called out. “I’ve got it.” The floor leveled. “Deploying panels and releasing the ozone.”

Onboard the Flip, Foreman was one of the first to get the reports of the sphere reappearing. A dozen military and research aircraft from various countries were within range of the craft. And they immediately vectored in.

“What are we going to do about the radiation?” Dane asked.

“We’re heading north now,” Earhart reported. “You just keep the power coming. I’ll take care of it. We’ve discharged all the ozone we picked up. And keep that gate open.”

At McMurdo Station the Surviving scientists couldn’t believe the data their instruments were recording. It wasn’t just a reprieve for them; it was a reversal of the damage to the ozone layer that had been done for decades previously.

Moscow was a ghost town, millions having fled by the inevitable wave of radiation being borne by the winds. The front edge had passed through the suburbs and now threatened the city itself. A handful of dedicated soldiers stayed at their stations, manning the nuclear launch control center, the air defense monitoring station, and the other key facilities that had NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical protection capability. They would stay there as long as they could stay buttoned up and alive.

The air defense monitoring station was the first to pick up the image of the sphere as it approached from the south. The size of the image was so overwhelming the general in charge had no idea what to do.

Earhart brought the sphere and its miles of deployed panels down to a level where they wouldn’t hit the highest object. “How’s the power?”

Dane looked at the nine skulls. Five had already gone blank, while four still glowed. “We’re under fifty percent.”

“Damn.” Earhart “knew” the controls of this ship. It was something she hadn’t wanted to discuss with Dane because she didn’t know how she knew. Whether the Ones Before had planted the knowledge in her somehow, or more daddy, she had piloted this craft sometime in the past and didn’t remember, she had no idea.

She pushed a button to her extreme left.

The panels crackled with energy, drawing the radiation in the air toward them. The sphere and panels swept through the sky above Russia in long, fast S-turns. Cleaning the air of death, heading toward Chernobyl.

“We’re getting hot inside the cargo bay,” Earhart informed Dane.

“We don’t have much power left,” Dane replied. “How much longer?”

“I think we got it,” Earhart said, checking the displays. “Most of it at least. I’m heading back toward the portal and bringing in the panels so we can go faster.”

As the sphere accelerated, the panels began folding on themselves.

Eight of the skulls had been drained of the energy put into them at such cost. Only one still glowed. Dane was staring at it as if he could keep the power flowing from it with simply his will. Perhaps he could, he suddenly realized. He was one of the chosen. He realized he had the power if he was willing to make the sacrifice.

He had asked others to make sacrifices.

“Eric.”

He lifted one hand out of the portal map and extended it toward the line of blue power that flowed from the skull to the map.

“Damn it, Dane. We’re almost there. What are you doing?”

He put his hand into the flow. His head snapped back as if he’d been shot in the forehead. He was only kept from falling by his one hand still gripping the portal end of his Earth time line.

The sphere hit the portal with a jar that knocked Dane to the other side, pulling his hand out of the power flow. Unconscious, he let go of the portal map and collapsed to the floor.

“We made it,” Earhart’s voice echoed inside the Valkyrie suit. “Dane? Eric, are you there?”