Assault on Atlantis

CHAPTER THREE

Amelia Earhart’s hands wouldn’t move no matter how hard she tried. Through the cockpit windows she could see the top of the sun coming up out of the Pacific Ocean, as if the water — were giving birth to fire. A glance at the instruments told her he plane was at twelve thousand feet. Why could she move Lee eyes and not her hands? She wondered. She glanced to her ‘right. Fred Noonan sat in the navigator’s chair, staring directly ahead.

There was a smudge on the ocean ahead. Earhart felt a sense of dread. She wanted to turn the plane, but her hands wouldn’t move and they continued to head directly for the growing darkness.

Noonan had a set of binoculars and he put them to his eyes. I don’t think that’s a ship’s smoke.” They were supposed to link up with the Coast Guard cutter Itasca off Howard Island for refueling.

Why could he move and she couldn’t? Earhart wondered. Why couldn’t she speak and tell him what she knew?

“It’s like fog,” Noonan said.

It wasn’t fog or ship s smoke, Earhart knew.

“It’s getting bigger,” Noonan said.

There was a yellowish tinge to the fog, and it was billowing upward and outward at an unnatural rate.

“I’m getting something,” Noonan said. He had his hands over his headset. Listening intently.

Amelia’s gaze shifted between compass and the growing cloud on the horizon as she waited. She looked down at her hands. Frozen on the controls. She desperately wanted to turn, but the command wouldn’t go from her brain to her hands.

“I don’t know what it is,” Noonan finally said. “A lot of static, then what sounds like Morse code, but I can’t-” he fell silent once more as he focused on listening. His eyes closed. “It’s clearer now.” Noonan opened his eyes and picked up a pencil and began to record the letters in the flight log, speaking them out loud as he heard the dashes and dots. “T-U-RN-O-F-F-R-A-D-I-O-O-R-D-I-E. Turn off radio or die”

The fog was now fewer than five miles ahead and was huge, blocking their path at twelve thousand feet and continuing to climb. In all her flights she had never seen anything like it. She was sure they shouldn’t fly into it, but she couldn’t turn the controls.

“I think we should shut off the radio,” Noonan suggested. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

Earhart tried to answer, to say something, to order him to fly the plane, but no words would come. Why didn’t he notice her paralysis, she wondered.

Noonan had a knee-key on his thigh, and he tapped out a quick query in Morse. Trying to get the identity of the sender of the message.

A golden beam slashed out of the fog directly for the Electra. The gold beam hit the nose of the plane and the engine sputtered. She knew Noonan needed to stop transmitting but she couldn’t tell him. He seemed oblivious to what had just happened, still tapping on the knee-key.

The fog was now fewer than two miles away, a wall stretching as far she could see. North and south. And reaching up at least fifteen thousand feet.

Another golden bolt came out of the fog and struck the plane. Earhart felt the power ripple across her skin. The engine died, and there was only the sound of the air racing by. They were losing altitude, heading down toward the ocean and forward toward the dark wall.

Beads of sweat broke out on Earhart’s forehead as she fought to regain control of her body. She knew they absolutely had to turn away from the dark wall. The front edge of a massive sphere appeared, coming out of the mist. The top half was opening like a gaping mouth, preparing to swallow them. Why wouldn’t Noonan see that? Why didn’t he help her?

Because Noonan was dead. Earhart’s eyes flashed open, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The air coming into her lungs was unnatural, something she had grown used to in her I time in the Space Between. It felt thick. With an oily tinge, as it slid down her throat. She lay in a gully, near a black wall that curved up overhead, eventually fading out of view inward. Beneath her was coarse, sand like material.

She heard a voice speaking in Japanese and turned her seeing Taki and another samurai. They were dressed in I black tunics, having abandoned their armor when their ship was attacked by the Shadow. They were more victims’ trapped.out of time and world in the Space Between. The mime she had given to this strange place. It was a transit point for the portals between worlds and times, consisting of a black land surrounding an Inner Sea, enclosed inside what appeared to l be a massive semi-circular cavern. How large the cavern was she had no idea. The one time Earhart tried to circle the Inner: Sea. It seemed as if she moved in place, never completing the circle and being forced to return to her base camp.

Also in the Space Between was an area where white-suited creatures known as Valkyries had a cavern where they conducted grotesque experiments on humans. A slightly damaged Valkyrie suit floated in the air just a few feet from Earhart’s resting place, the front half-split open, the interior empty. It was one of two she and the Samurai had captured from the experiment cavern. They’d discovered that the creatures inside were humans, but badly warped, missing much of their skin.

The discovery that humans manned the Valkyrie suits troubled Earhart as much as her recent dream did. Were they servants of the Shadow? Or was the Shadow a human force? If so, from where and when? And why was it so bent on destroying Earth time lines?

Earhart sat up. She tried to remember all the details of the dream. Some of it was exactly what had happened when she’d disappeared inside the Devil’s Sea gate while on her around-the-world flight in 1937, trying to become the first woman to accomplish this feat. She’d already been acknowledged as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in 1928. But that accomplishment had been soured by the fact that she had not piloted the plane.

Earhart and her navigator. Frank Noonan. Had been on one of the last legs of the epic Journey, having covered twenty-two thousand miles over the course of several months. Earhart reached into the box she had rescued from the Lockheed Electra and pulled out her leather journal. Tucked into the pages were photos. She pulled one out-of her husband, George Putnam. The Journey had been his idea, a chance for more publicity and to sell more books and magazines. She wondered if he was alive and then realized such a thought was worthless, as there appeared to be no time here and connections via the portals to many Earths and many times.

He thumbed through the journal, noting a picture of herself standing on the wing of the Electra in Miami, Florida, the starting point of her long journey that had ended in a most unexpected place. She was smiling in the photo. She had originally planned on starting from Hawaii and heading west. She wondered now if things would have turned out differently if she hadn’t clipped the wing of the heavily laden plane on the edge of the runway during takeoff and damaged it. Instead of going west, she’d had the plane repaired and shipped back to the States, eventually to Miami, where she’d taken off June 1, 1937, and flown east.

Earhart turned the pages of her journal, noting the entries and remembering the journey. Along the east coast of South America, across the South Atlantic and then Africa. What a beautiful continent, Africa!

She turned the page. She’d been the first to fly across desolate Arabia. Desolate? Nothing compared to this forsaken place or to India. She grimaced as she remembered. It was a horrible place where she’d become sick. She’d wanted to quit then. She’d sent a telegraph to George, begging him to let her stop, but he’d been firm. She must go on Glory and fame awaited. That had been the first time Earhart had questioned the price she was paying for something that no longer seemed so important Perhaps it was the teeming millions she saw in the streets of Calcutta. Living lives where their fate seemed so bleak yet many seemed so happy.

Then Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore and Bangkok, where no one knew who she was and cared less, although they marveled over the plane and the fact that a woman flew it. She looked at a picture-Darwin, Australia, where people knew her name and the reporters flocked to the airport. She had not felt the same jolt from seeing the area in front of the control tower crowded with them. She just remembered feeling so utterly exhausted.

Had she had a vision before the last flight? She now wondered. One that she had dismissed as a dream? Had she heard the voices of the gods as she slept? She scanned the words printed in her fine block lettering, but there was no mention of such, but that meant little, as back then she would have dismissed either.

From Australia she’d flown to New Guinea and then they’d taken off on the final leg-and run into the gate. It had not occurred as in the dream she’d just had. They had not been blasted out of the sky by golden bolts. Earhart had turned the plane and managed to land on the ocean. As she and Noonan tried to escape, he’d been killed by a kraken, one of the sea creatures that inhabited water inside a gate, a creature that must have slid through a portal.

Earhart and her craft had been captured by a large sphere, and when she awoke, she was here. She’d found others trapped around the Inner Sea, and most told the same story of being caught by a blue glow. Currently there were fifty people at this small camp. All from various time lines. No one could clearly say how long they’d been here, as there was no night or day, just constant light from a source high over the Inner Sea.

Strange things had happened, and strange things continued to happen. She thumbed ahead in the diary, to entries made after arriving. A man named Dane, who claimed he was from the beginning of the twenty-first century. Had come through, Followed by a Roman legion from the first century A.D. who had been battling the Valkyries. The legion had been destroyed and the men turned into stone by a weapon of the Valkyries, but not before one of Dane’s companions had shut one of the portals that ran through the Space Between. Dane had returned inside a strange watercraft from his time, this time trying to destroy another portal that he said was draining power from the very center of his Earth and making the world o unstable it would soon be destroyed. Again he had succeeded, and again he had gone back to his time.

Earhart had stayed with her group, barely eking a survival by raising food in a few patches of Earth soil they’d managed to scavenge near the occasional portal that opened on the shore. Occasionally they supplemented their diet with either Earth or Shadow-side creatures that wandered through an open portal. Even that was strange, as once a small dinosaur had appeared before wandering back through another gate.

It was a quirk of the portals that these creatures could survive travel through them. Not long after she had arrived in the Space Between, one of the groups had tried going into one of the portals in an attempt to get back to Earth. The man swam out to the dark. Cylinder while the rest of the band lined the shoreline. He disappeared into the blackness, only to reappear seconds later, screaming in agony, his skin red and blistered. He died within an hour, and no one had attempted to enter a portal since. The portals, cylinders of black, usually opened in the large circular lake in the center of the Space Between, but sometimes they opened on land.

Earhart glanced up at the captured Valkyrie suit. One had to be shielded to go through most portals, especially because there was no telling where the portal would lead or what would be on the other side. The key question was which one led to the Shadow’s home? If they could figure that out, they could take the war to their enemy rather than constantly reacting to assaults.

Earhart thought back to her dream. She’d been powerless in the cockpit, which she knew was significant. Power was important, very important in this war. It was one of the things the Shadow sought from Earth time lines it scavenged. It was also what was needed to fight the Shadow.

Earhart glanced at a metal case next to the Valkyrie suit. She got up and walked over to it. She flipped up the lid and stared at the contents-crystal skulls, each set in thick foam padding. Nine of them.

Earhart reached into her Pocket and pulled out a small metal cylinder with runic writing on it. She unscrewed the top and pulled out a piece of parchment. A design was drawn on It-twelve small skulls, m a pattern around a center, higher point where there was a thirteenth skull. Earhart couldn’t read. He writing, but she knew what she was seeing. A formation of power using the skulls. What surrounded the skulls, though, was what was most interesting. Intricate drawings of warriors in battle against an encroaching darkness. There was also writing. Names.

Humans are at their best and most powerful when things are the worst and most desperate. Earhart had heard that not once, but several times. The voice of the gods. And that wasn’t all. She’d been directed via a vision to a portal, which she· d traversed in the protective Valkyrie suit. She’d come out t a graveyard — boats, planes, and other craft, all captured m a gate. She’d gone directly to the ship she’d “seen,” a long black ship with a single mast and a black cube in the rear made of black metal, the likes of which she had never seen. She’d found this cylinder there. A piece of the puzzle.

Not long after that, she’d also had a vision that had directed her to lead another raid on the Valkyrie people’s farm. She’d stolen a piece of equipment, a long thin needle with a loving red bulb on one end. She’d taken it through a portal and injected it into the womb of a woman. She’d gone back again to that time line for the birth of the woman’s children and had taken one of the children from the woman.

Earhart shook her head. She was doing as she saw in her visions, but she didn’t know exactly why she was doing all this. She had to trust that the Ones Before had a plan and she was one piece of making it happen.

And now it was time for her to implement another step in the plan. But there were twelve skulls in the drawing and she only had nine. Would it be enough? Earhart reached into the case and retrieved one of the skulls. She placed it in a pouch, which she tossed over her shoulder.

“You go?” Taki asked.

Earhart had learned the basics of Japanese prior to her flight-after all. George had arranged for her to spy on Japanese facilities during the trip-and had added to what she knew in her time here with the samurai. “Yes.”

“No?” Taki indicated the Valkyrie suit.

Earhart closed her eyes. The words had come the previous day, echoing in her mind. “This portal should be safe.”

“None are safe,” Taki said.

“I must go.” She handed him the cylinder. “It is not time for this yet.”

Taki took the cylinder. “Be safe.”

Earhart nodded and walked out of the camp, feeling the eyes of the others on her back. They knew if she wasn’t wearing the suit, she was going to a portal that was “safe.” A way out. However, what neither they nor she knew was what was on the other side of the portal. And because she was on a mission dictated by the ‘’voices,’’ they had to assume it was dangerous.

Earhart had been given the opportunity by Dane to travel back to his world and time with him, and she’d turned him down. She wasn’t quite sure how many of those in her camp would feel the same way.

The Inner Sea came into view. There were a half-dozen portals in sight, black columns rising from the surface upward toward the ceiling. They varied in width from three meters to one more than a thousand meters wide. Earhart paused as she noted something floating between two of the portals-a massive sphere more than four hundred meters wide. It was one l the Shadow’s craft used in traversing the portals. It had dropped here when Dane shut the portal from his world to wherever the Shadow had drained the ozone, and it was still here. Which indicated that the crew might not have survived. She felt a tingle as she stared at the sphere. And she knew immediately the sphere was important.

But not at the moment. She turned to her left as if drawn in that direction. A three-meter-wide black column was about fifty meters away. Earhart walked along the shoreline until she was opposite the column. It was just off the shoreline, and she waded out to it. When she was right next to it she paused. What if the gate was deadly? What if she went to a dead world, toxic to humans? The voice had told her she would revisit a place and near time she’d already been to, but what if it were wrong?

Amelia Earhart. Who had crossed oceans and nearly circled the world at the controls of her plane, cursed, then stepped forward into the gate.