Battle for Atlantis

CHAPTHER THIRTEEN

Coming back to reality was as painful as leaving it had · been, Dane decided. The first sensation was one of intense cold starting from his chest and then spreading throughout his body.

Then came Talbot’s voice: “ — about two minutes to get the fluid out of your lungs and clear them for air. It will take about two minutes to get the fluid out of your lungs · and clear them for air. You should be able to hear me now. Hang in there. You’ll be warm and breathing air in just a couple of minutes.”

It felt as if his lungs were being ripped out of his chest as the flow on the pump was reversed, and the special breathing mixture was pulled out of them. The pain was so intense he almost passed out, sliding back into the cocoon of unconsciousness, but he held on.

Light blinded him as the helmet was lifted off. The woman who had taken the helmet off, grabbed the tube and with one smooth movement, pulled it out of his lungs, · throat, and mouth. Dane gasped for air. He felt straps tighten around his shoulders as he was lifted. The embryonic fluid let go of him reluctantly and with a sucking noise, he was dangling in the air. He was swung over and lowered.

His knees buckled as his feet hit the ground. Earhart was there, throwing a blanket over his shoulders and putting an arm around him to steady him. Ahana was on his other side. Also assisting.

“What happened?” Earhart asked as Dane slowly straightened and got his feet under him.

“1 saw them,” Dane said. “The Ones Before. They have a plan that they’ve been working toward for a very long time, using several timelines.”

“Who are they?” Ahana asked.

Surprisingly Dane laughed. “It’s been there in front of us all the time.” He pointed to the other tank where Rachel still floated. “Dolphins. From the Shadow’s timeline. The first timeline.”

“What?” Earhart echoed the confusion they all felt on bearing this.

“let’s go to the conference room,” Dane suggested. “And we need to link with Foreman so he can hear this. Because we’ve got things to do.”

It took fifteen minutes to set up a satellite link with Foreman who was still on board the FLIP. Gathered round the conference room table were Dane, Earhart, Ahana and Commander Talbot. Foreman had suggested doing two Commander Talbot. Foreman had suggested doing two more links to the Pentagon’s War Room and the White House, but Dane had vetoed the idea, saying that they could accomplish what was needed and bringing in others would only slow everything down.

“Slow what down?” Foreman demanded, once everyone was ready. His voice echoed out of the small speaker set on the table and Dane was glad the CIA man was over a thousand miles away. He could not deny that Foreman hated the Shadow, but he had also found him to be duplicitous, unable to shake decades of operating in the covert world in his battle against a threat no one had taken seriously.

“All right,” Dane said. “Let me tell you what I saw as best I can. First, the Shadow. As we feared, it is a human timeline, not aliens or some strange malevolent force. You might call them Earth Timeline I. The oldest — well. Not the oldest, but the first if that makes sense, given that the portals can cut across time.

“Also, as we suspected, it’s a timeline that is severely damaged. They raid other timelines for raw materials, power. And people for spare parts-as we saw in the Valkyrie cave in the Space Between.” Dane pressed a hand against his head, trying to sort it all out in his own mind so he could tell them. While he had been imparted with a great deal of information in one fell swoop, his brain could process it only bit by bit, trying to put together the big picture of a very complex puzzle that they had been fighting.

“In Timeline I, Atlantis never got destroyed. That’s why the first thing they — the Shadow — did when they were able to use portals was destroy all the other Atlantis’s in every timeline they attacked. They destroyed ours. Because they believed — believe — only a timeline as technically advanced as theirs can mount a threat to them.”

Dan tapped the side of his head. ‘’Those of us with the Sight, who can hear the voices, we are descendants of survivors from Atlantis. Because all Atlanteans had this ability. They were able, the original Atlanteans, to develop equally in both the physical and mental fields. They learned to harness the power of the mind, which led them to harness the power of the planet itself. Which also brought them to disaster.”

Dane paused and was greeted with silence. Earhart, Talbot and Ahana were just staring at him, waiting for him to continue. Even Foreman was silent.

“They tapped into the core of the planet itself for power. But they did it before they were ready to harness it one hundred percent. They made mistakes. They damaged their ecosystem terribly. So badly that they need to constantly replenish their water, air, and other basic elements.”

The first question finally came. Foreman’s voice came out of the speaker. “Why don’t they just go to another timeline? Ask for help?”

“Because, initially, there were no other timelines,” Dane said. “Only a handful of humans survived this disaster in Timeline I. They had access to tremendous power and had a much deeper understanding of physics than we do. Someone. One of their best scientists. Realized the possibility of parallel worlds.” Dane shrugged. “Remember. I got all this from the Ones Before. Even they don’t completely understand what the Shadow did. Which came first — the chicken or the egg? In trying to access parallel earths, did the Shadow in essence give birth to the other timelines? Or were the timelines there already and they · were able to reach across to them? The Ones Before don’t think the Shadow even knows what happened when they pushed the power they had into the Space Between and beyond.

“But they were able to reach other timelines via the portals and connecting gates. Timelines that, if left alone, might not make the mistakes the Shadow bad made. Despite their advances, the Shadow were human. They were scared. Afraid that they would be denied what they needed. Afraid of a timeline more powerful than theirs. So they acted like scared humans.

“They attacked first. And they’ve been doing it ever since.”

“The Ones Before?” Earhart asked.

Dane smiled. He looked at Talbot. ‘’This program. The Atlanteans of Timeline I did it too. One man. One true · human. Maybe it was you. Another you. They went beyond the International Space Station. They established a base on the moon. They sent dolphins there. For instant communication back to Earth via what you do here.

“When the disaster struck — apparently, something similar to what they almost did here when they tried to tap · the core of our planet via the Nazca Plain. They unleashed too much power, power they couldn’t control.” Dane closed his eyes for a few seconds. “South America was gone. Which then spread to the Ring of Fire. The entire Pacific Rim was gone. All coastal areas were hit with massive tsunamis. Then the Mid-Atlantic Ridge gave way. Iceland, Greenland, gone. The climate changed.” He opened his eyes. “They totally screwed their planet up. But they had an unbelievable amount of power. And with it, they developed the ability to travel to other timelines.

“But the moon was cut off. The dolphins did it. With the help of the few humans there. They closed themselves off, totally against what the Shadow began to do. And · they’ve tried to help the other timelines.”

“The Ones Before are dolphins?” Foreman didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Yes,” Dane said. “They send the messages to other timelines through small portals, ones too small for the Shadow to use. And on a mental wavelength that the Shadow can’t intercept or block. And the messages go to other dolphins in those timelines who resend them to humans. Humans like me, the descendants of the original Atlanteans.”

“So in a way,’ Earhart said, “you really are fighting yourself.”

“Yes.”

Foreman’s voice cut into the short silence that followed this. “Okay: So how do we go to Timeline I and defeat them?”

“We don’t,” Dane said. ‘That’s for others. We have to help them get there.”

“Who?” Foreman demanded. “What others?”

“There’s a force in another timeline. A dying timeline that the Shadow has cut off from all the portals and abandoned. They fought the Shadow and lost. But they learned a lot fighting them. They’ve got a unit that can fight the Valkyries.”

“But if they don’t have portals — ” Ahana left the rest of the statement unsaid.

“That’s where we come in,” Dane said. “And others.” He held up a single finger. “First. The Ones Before don’t know exactly where on Timeline I Earth the Shadow is holed up. They think there are only a few thousand of them left. So — ”

“A few thousand?” Foreman cursed. “They’re destroying entire timelines? Killing billions to keep just a few thousand alive?”

Dane knew Foreman had lost his brother in a gate. He himself had lost his Special Forces team in Cambodia through the Angkor Kol Ker Gate more than thirty years ago. Millions more had died since then in the war against the Shadow in this timeline alone. He sympathized with Foreman but he knew they had to accept the reality of the situation.

“The Ones Before have helped Atlanteans in our timeline in their battle against the Shadow. I’ve seen how the minds of special people, people like me, can redirect power, although the cost is high, resulting in transformation into a pure crystalline skull.

“Our timeline Atlanteans fought a war that spread around the globe until the very existence of life was threatened. And in the climactic battle, the Atlantean priestesses and warriors with the aid of the Ones Before stopped the Shadow, but the price was high. Their home of Atlantis was destroyed. The resulting tsunamis touched every shore on the planet with such devastation that the legend of the Great Flood was written both in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in the scriptures of the Jewish people on the other side of the world.

“There were survivors in a handful of ships, which scattered and planted the seeds for future civilizations to arise thousands years later. What we call the modem world. The Atlanteans stopped the Shadow but lost their civilization and their home in the process.

“We know that since the destruction of Atlantis, the Shadow has kept a presence on our planet via the gates. Sometimes these gates expand, such as when the capital city of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia was swallowed up by such a gate-the one at Kol Ker which you” — he glanced at Foreman — “sent me into. Sometimes the gates grew larger.”

Dane turned to Ahana. “You said something once about the multiverse?”

Ahana nodded. “There are scientists who theorize that there are an infinite number of parallel universes, existing side by side, so to speak. What is called the multiverse. The problem with trying to understand the universe is that we don’t really 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 may rely on cosmological evolution that is outside the scope of even the deepest theory we can come up with.”

“We have to recon the Shadow timeline,” Dane said. “and pinpoint where their base is. Second, we need to power up the sphere. Which means powering up the crystal skulls. Third, we need to get the sphere to the timeline where this force is. Fourth, we then need to get the sphere to the Shadow’s world. And, five, at the same time, we need to cut the current power source that the Shadow is tapping.”

“Is that it?” Earhart asked. “Just five things?”

Dane had to laugh at the tone of her voice. “Yeah. And even those aren’t straightforward. The Shadow guards the portal to their world very closely. So we have to get there in a way they won’t expect. That’s the bad news. The good news is we’ve got help out there” — Dane gestured vaguely — “in other timelines.”

Dane pointed at Earhart: “You’re in charge of getting the skulls powered up.” At Ahana: “You’re in charge of the power flowing to the Shadow’s world.” Then at himself: “I’m going to do the recon.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Earhart asked.

“I’m going to the Shadow world the same way I went to the Ones Before. Via Dream Land.”

“And how am I going to charge the skulls?” Earhart pressed.

“At a place called Gettysburg,” Dane said.