Atlantis Gate

CHAPTER 27

They had crossed what used to be the Potomac, and Dane’s best guess was that they were in the vicinity of where the Pentagon had once sat. A black circle hovered a foot over the ground ten feet in front of them.

“Is the map through there?” Dane asked.

Ariana’s answer was less than reassuring. “So I have been told through a vision.”

Dane felt the urgency of their quest. Yet he paused, so many unanswered questions nagged at him. “What happened to this timeline?” he asked. “Why wasn’t the core — and the planet. This planet-destroyed”

“The Shadow was able to tap all the energy slowly and under control,” Ariana said. “I would guess that your fight against the Shadow in your timeline has caused it to act precipitously, with a certain amount of control being lost.”

“’The crystal skulls?” Dane threw out. “Are they useful?”

“I don’t know,” Ariana said. “They obviously still have some residual power and can definitely channel the larger power from the planet.”

“Can we travel back in time and save your planet?” Dane asked.

“I don’t think so,” Ariana said. “As far as I can figure out, from the visions I have been given, the Shadow can use the portals but they didn’t make them.”

“I don’t understand,” Dane said.

“The walls between parallel universes are thicker in some places and thinner in others. And, in some places there are openings-portals-through the walls. I think the Shadow searches for these and uses its power to open the portal. But what that means is that it doesn’t control where and when the portals go in those worlds. The Shadow just takes advantage of what it finds. Also, we affect portals somehow.”

“What do you mean?” Dane asked.

“Our minds just don’t channel power, they help create it. In some level we’ve never known. When enough minds are one place, pushed to the limit, I think they can affect the portals.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us,” Dane asked, “that might help?”

“I don’t think so,” Ariana said. “It is hard for me,” she added. “My world.” Her white arm lifted and slowly swept from side to side, indicating the desolation around them. "Everyone I knew, including, you” —she pointed at Dane—“are gone.”

“How did I die?” Dane asked, feeling the absurdity of the question as he asked it.

“A tsunami took out the FLIP and everyone on board,” Ariana said.

“Are you coming with us?” Dane moved toward the portal, Earhart at his side.

“No. I’m dying. I had to go through another portal to get this ‘suit’. It’s sustained me enough to meet you, but I don’t have much longer.”

“You can go to my camp in THE SPACE BETWEEN,” Earhart said.

“No. This is where I belong.”

Dane had already experienced Ariana’s-his timeline’s Ariana’sdeath. To realize it was going to happen again in this timeline was ripping the scab off a barely healed wound.

“Do you know what is through there?” Dane pointed at the portal.

“I just know enough to bring you here and tell you it is the next step.” The white figure floated a few feet away, as if there were no one inside the suit. “I am very tired.” Her right hand went to her left arm.

Dane knew what she was going to do and reached out to stop her.

“No!” her sharp rejection caused him to halt. Ariana’s fingers punched in the code, and the suit split open. Dane’s breath caught in his throat as he recognized the woman he had first met during a rescue mission in the Angkor Gate as she stepped out of the suit. She staggered and this time accepted his arm to help her from falling. Her skin was covered in red lesions and pus was crusted around her eyes. Dane now understood her desire to end it quickly.

Ariana waved toward the portal. “Go. Go now.”

“Thank you,” Earhart said, then she stepped into the portal and disappeared.

Dane hesitated, reaching with a white-armored hand toward Ariana’s face, clearing the yellow gunk away from around her eyes. He realized she was crying.

“We did it wrong,” Ariana said, looking up at him. “So far, your timeline has done it right. You need to take the next step.”

Dane couldn’t find words to say what he was feeling. He turned and went into the portal, leaving Ariana sitting alone and dying on the surface of her devastated planet.

Captain Stokes and his surviving crewmen from the Connecticut were stuffed into Deepflight. On the video monitor above the controls, Rachel was clearly visible, swimming back and forth slowly as they followed as quickly as they could. They passed between two small portals, leading farther out into the middle sea.

Stokes pushed the throttle forward and increased speed to keep up with the dolphin. After a couple of minutes, there was no doubting their destination. A large wall of black, a massive portal, was directly ahead. When they were less than fifty meters from the portal, Rachel stopped.

Stokes didn’t hesitate. He kept the throttle at full speed, and they went into the blackness, each man on board instinctively flinching as the screen went dark for a moment. When it cleared, they were on the surface of a circular body of water with a large, black portal over three-quarters of a mile taking up the center directly behind them. And on the black beach that delineated the edge of the water were thousands of craft: ships mostly, with planes, and even two dirigibles.

But Stokes was only interested in finding one craft. He threw open the hatch and climbed on top of Deepflight, the other members of his crew joining him. They scanned the shoreline, searching among the multitude of ships.

“There.” The executive officer was pointing to the left.

The Connecticut was half beached. Bow first, near a Spanish galleon.

“Let’s go,” Stokes ordered.

Dane’s suit floated six inches above the ground. A wall of fire was less than a foot away. Amelia Earhart was to his right, slowly backing away from the flames.

“Where the hell are we?” she demanded.

The wall of fire was over 200 feet high and stretched as far as he could see left and right. There was a similar wall about a quarter mile behind them. The ground beneath their feet was rocky and sandy.

“Nazca,” Dane said. The portal they had come through was shrinking, and as he watched, it snapped out of existence. He turned back to the wall of fire. He could see it was being pulled left to right. And in the distance, about two miles away, he could see a massive portal, about a half mile wide, sucking in the flame from all the lines on the plain. He knew it was doing the same thing on a much larger scale from the interior of the planet.

“What’s Nazca?” Earhart asked.

Dane pointed at the large portal. “That’s what we have to stop.”

“How?” Earhart asked.

Dane instinctively knew that even if he had the crystal skulls with him, they would make no difference, given the amount of power that was being drawn from the planet. This was beyond the scope of what a priestess could do. He reached with his one hand and opened the suit and stepped out on the Nazca Plain. Earhart hesitated, then followed suit. He felt relieved to see her face. The air felt good against his exposed flesh.

Dane staggered as the ground beneath his feet rumbled and shifted.

The crew of Aurora watched as the end panels began folding in themselves. The flow of ozone through the trailing portal was slowing, but given that the craft was now over the Gulf of Mexico, it had stripped Earth’s atmosphere of a considerable percentage of the critical material.

Fatal failure in the core in less than thirty minutes,” Ahana announced.

“And then?” Foreman asked, even though he knew the answer.

“Initially, the core will implode,” Ahana said. “Then it will explode. The end of the planet.”

Foreman looked out the portal toward the Devil’s Sea Gate. No sign of Dane. Something nudged against the back of his legs. Chelsea. The golden retriever seemed quite unperturbed about the pending end of the world. Foreman reached down and rubbed the dog’s head.

“Wait,” Dane said, holding out his arm as Earhart moved back from the fire.

“What is it?” she asked.

The answer came as a portal opened in the same location it’s the one they had just come through. A woman stepped through, her red cloak spattered with blood, a golden orb in her hands. She had red hair cut tightly against her skull. Her eyes widened as she took in the walls of fire, then she shifted her gaze to Earhart, then to Dane, where it lingered. She reached out one hand, and Dane took it in his. He felt a shock race up his arm. She pulled his hand toward the golden sphere. The surface writhed and moved, each strand pulsing. But of the dozens of strands, there was one that was suffused with red, and Dane didn’t hesitate, allowing her to place his hand on it.

Pain seared into his flesh as if the strand were red hot. But he didn’t let go. The world around him, the Nazca Plain, the walls of fire, were gone. He saw worlds, many Earths, portals connecting the parallel worlds, all running through THE SPACE BETWEEN. But his focus was on the portal his hand was on: the power line from his world to the Shadow’s.

All he could make of the Shadow’s world was a black wall, as if it were protected in some manner from the various Earth timelines, but the power line plunged into it, pouring energy through. There was a portal right next to it, and Dane could tell something was getting sucked through it-not power but something else.

A voice was in his head, the voice of the woman in the red cloak. It wasn’t exactly a voice because what was coming to him wasn’t words but images. He saw what to do. With one hand on the red strand, he reached with the other, pushing into the sphere. His skin recoiled as if he were reaching into a nest of writhing vipers, but he persisted until his fingers closed around another strand. He knew it was the portal line next to the power one, leading from his time/world to the Shadow’s world.

Dane squeezed with both hands, the pain spiking so that he cried out, but still he held on, exerting power. The second line gave way, snapping.

The panels had all folded in and been tucked inside the sphere. The crew of Aurora watched as the large black sphere slipped back into the portal and disappeared, the portal shrinking out of existence.

The three-quarter-mile-wide column of black snapped out of existence, causing a shock to reverberate throughout THE SPACE BETWEEN. And momentarily caught in the air, a quarter mile above the inner sea, the black sphere was revealed. Then it free-fell, slamming into the water with a huge splash, causing a forty-foot-high tidal wave to race outward toward the surrounding shorelines.

The sphere went underwater briefly, then bobbed to the surface, floating aimlessly.

A mile away, the prow of the Connecticut appeared out of a portal, the rest of the submarine sliding through.

Dane’s right hand was on fire, the pain unbearable. On his own, he would have let go, but he felt power coming from the strange woman, enough to keep the pressure on the strand. His fingers closed in, tightening on it. He felt heat all around him now, but he dared not open his eyes and lose his concentration.

The strand snapped, and Dane was thrown backward, away from the map. He lay on his back, staring up at stars in a night sky. Then he realized he could see the stars because the walls of fire were gone. The Nazca Plain was as it had been, marked but inactive.

Dane leaned up on his elbow. The priestess was still into the map with one hand, and a portal opened behind her. She pointed, indicating for Dane and Earhart to enter it.

Earhart went through, followed by Dane. He wasn’t surprised to find himself on the shore of the Inner Sea. He turned as the woman came through. The portal map in her hands. The portal disappeared.

A clicking noise caught Dane’s attention. Rachel lifted out of the water forty meters offshore and landed on her back with a splash. Dane could pick up the dolphin’s happiness. He blinked as farther out in the sea, the conning tower of a nuclear submarine appeared as the craft surfaced. And behind that, he could just make out, among the various portal columns, the top part of a black sphere, the majority of it submerged. He blinked, then looked once more. It made sense to him, each piece, part of a whole that was to come.

He turned back to the two women standing next to him.

Amelia Earhart’s face was pale, a thin sheen of sweat covering her skin.

“What just happened?” she asked.

“We saved the world. My world,” he amended, glancing at the strange woman.

She was reaching into the portal map again, her eyes closed as her hands searched. She paused, nodded to herself, then removed her hand from inside the map. She tapped her chest and then pointed to the right along the beach.

“What’s she trying to say?” Earhart asked.

Dane had no doubt what the gesture meant as he picked up the emotions/thoughts of the woman. “She’s going home.”

Dane nodded and spread his hands wide in a gesture of thanks. The Woman smiled briefly, then began walking away.

“Shouldn’t we keep the map?” Earhart asked.

“Others need it,” Dane said. “We’re not the only world that the Shadow threatens.” He faced the Inner Sea and waved at the man in the conning tower of the submarine.