Battle for Atlantis

CHAPTER THREE

“How do we do that?” Foreman asked Dane. The elderly CIA agent was seated in a swivel chair in the control room of the FLIP, a research vessel two hundred meters long with the capability of submerging its bulbous bow, which contained a muonic probe. To keep track of gate activity. The ship was currently holding position two miles · from the Devil’s Sea Gate, out of which Dane had just brought the Shadow sphere, which now bobbed in the water just off the bow of the FLIP. The Devil’s Sea Gate Was a triangular area off the coast of Japan, which like the Bermuda Triangle, had been the scene of numerous unexplained disappearances over the centuries. Disappearances they now knew were the work of the Shadow. Dane had just repeated to Foreman what he had told Earhart in the sphere about finishing the war and the Shadow.

Foreman had been in the CIA over fifty years, from the very beginning of the organization. He had tanned, rough skin. With a sharp nose like an eagle’s beak. His hair was pure white, some of which Dane attributed to his experiences around the gates, His fascination — more obsession — with the gates had begun during World War II when his brother’s aircraft had disappeared into the Devil’s Sea Gate that lay nearby. Foreman had also watched on radar as Flight 19 disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle Gate in 1946, one of many famous disappearances over the centuries in that region.

Dane was seated across from Foreman, with Earhart to one side and Ahana, the Japanese scientist who was now in charge of the FLIP to the other. Once more Dane had managed to stave off disaster, but he knew the assaults would not end as long as the Shadow, the unknown · malevolent force that attacked through the gates, existed. Dane had first encountered the Shadow when he entered the gate at Angkor Kol Ker in Cambodia during a mission while assigned to Special Forces in the Vietnam War. He’d been sent by Foreman to recover the black box of a U-2 spy plane that Foreman had sent into the gate to gather data as he struggled to figure out what the gates were.

Who or what the Shadow was remained a mystery, although they now knew that the Shadow used human minds for fuel and the bodies inside the Valkyrie suits were maimed humans. The thing that preyed on Dane’s · mind ever since making the discovery of the humans inside the Valkyrie suits was whether the Shadow was a group of humans from another Earth timeline, one that was pillaging and destroying other timelines. Dane had already traveled to several other Earth timelines, some where the human race had been wiped out by the Shadow in its quest for power, air, bodies, and water.

“I believe 1 can find a portal to the Shadow’s world using the map inside the sphere,” Dane said.

“And then?” Foreman pressed.

Dane, leaned back in the seat, exhausted from recent · events. “We have the sphere. We can travel through portals safely.”

“But you have no power for the sphere,” Earhart noted.

Dane bad no desire to use humans as power again, the way they had just used the crew of a doomed USS Nautilus from another dying timeline. The nine crystal skulls · were lined up in a cabinet in the control room, a macabre audience to this meeting. They were clear, drained of power. He nodded toward the cabinet. “We have the crystal skulls. They’re drained, but maybe there is a way we can power them back up. They were powered up when we recovered them from Little Bighorn.”

“So We need another massacre?” Earhart said.

Dane couldn’t judge her tone, whether there was disapproval in it or resignation. There had been so much death already.

“There are many massacres throughout history.” Dane said. “Little Bighorn was Just one of them. And not necessarily a massacre, either, but rather an intense battle where the minds of the men involved generate the power evoked by dire straits.”

“The skulls drained pretty quickly when we came back,” Earhart noted.

“Maybe they weren’t charged with as much power as they are capable of,” Dane said.

“Even if you had power,” Foreman said, “what would you do when you got to the Shadow’s world?”

Dane had been thinking about that while returning to the FLIP via the Devil’s Sea Gate. Given the ability of the Shadow to manipulate power at a level beyond that of scientists in Dane’s Earth timeline he doubted there was anything he could bring from his own timeline, even nuclear weapons, that would be able to defeat the Shadow. For all he knew any power source he brought to the Shadow as a weapon could be appropriated and used by it.

“We’re getting too far ahead,” Earhart interjected.

“Where should we be?” Dane asked, grateful for the reprieve from focusing on a problem for which there was no immediate solution.

Earhart lifted a single finger. “We know that what are inside the Valkyrie suits are people, humans, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Maimed people, damaged people, but humans nonetheless. Much as we don’t want to admit it, I think we have to assume that the Shadow is an Earth timeline; a timeline raping and destroying other timelines to keep itself going. Most likely an Earth timeline from what would be the future, even for you people, and most definitely for me.”

Ahana broke in. “Not necessarily the future. Perhaps a timeline that simply developed more quickly than we did.”

Dane rubbed a hand across his forehead. He didn’t want to hear what Earhart was saying but he knew, could sense, that it was the truth. It had all been more palatable when he had considered the Shadow to be some alien force bent on destroying Earth. We have met the enemy and they are us, he thought.

“I’ve heard what happened after I was kidnapped by the Shadow on my around-the-world flight in 1937,” Earhart continued. “World War II. I’ve heard what the Germans did in their camps. The Japanese in the places they conquered. Even what we Americans did in the name of ending the war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think we cannot underestimate the power of mankind’s inhumanity to itself. I have no doubt that an advanced timeline of humans — and we know that not only do the portals lead to parallel Earths but that they can also move one forward or back in time — would not hesitate to destroy other Earth timelines to sustain itself. We live on the same planet and we do it to each other. It would be even easier to do it to another planet.

“They take the basics. Power. Air. Water. And people. I think they use people from other timelines for spare parts.” Earhart looked at Dane. “We know what they do in the Space Between in their Valkyrie cavern. Removing hearts, lungs, skin — whatever they need from those the Valkyrie suits, the people who make up the Shadow are damaged. They’re willing to do whatever it takes to get what they need. That means they’re ruthless,” Earhart summarized. She held up a second finger. “The thing that intrigues me, though, is the group we’re not talking about.”

“The Ones Before,” Dane said.

Earhart nodded. “Yes. They’ve tried to help us. And we definitely need more help now. Who are they? Why can’t they do more?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Before we go after the Shadow, I think we need to find the Ones Before. We need to learn exactly what we’re up against. Also, and this is just my feeling, I think there might be a larger plan that we are part of. After all, there are more timelines than ours being affected, or will be affected, by the Shadow. It would be helpful if we knew what our part is and What the overall plan is.”

Dane tapped the side of his head. “The Ones Before send the messages I hear and the visions I see. But I don’t control when I receive them. And I’ve gotten nothing to show me the path we should take now or, if there is a plan, what it is. All I know is that I think I can find the portal to the Shadow’s timeline using the sphere map.”

“It’s doubtful,” Foreman said, “that the gate in the Shadow’s timeline will be unguarded.”

Dane didn’t respond, knowing what Foreman had said was true.

Earhart turned to Dane. “Do you think the Ones Before have a plan or are just reacting as we are?”

Dane didn’t stop to think. He felt the answer, and it, surprised him that he had not felt this so strongly before. “I think we’re part of something larger. There are others — have been others as we just saw at the Battle of Little Bighorn — who have roles to play.”

Ahana spoke up. “You’ve acted as if there were some · mystical power behind these visions and the voices you near — and that others like you, such as Robert Frost, also heard. But I think we need to look at it in tens of science. If these visions and voices are real then we should be able to do something just as we use this boat to track the activity of the Shadow.”

“What do you mean?” Dane asked.

“What happens in your head, what you get from the Ones Before, is real, isn’t it?” Ahana asked.

Dane nodded. There was no doubting the visions and voices now.

“Then it’s something we should be able to track down,” Ahana said. “Like we did with the muonic emissions from the gates and the Shadow’s lines of power.”

“Do you have any theories about how we can do that?” Dane asked.

“It took us years to track down the correct frequency for the Shadow’s muonic emissions that come through the gates,” Ahana said. “We learned quite a bit doing that. I suspect that the Ones Before are sending on a very similar frequency and in a similar manner.”

“Why haven’t you uncovered it then?” Dane asked.

“Because we haven’t looked,” Ahana replied. “We’ve been so focused on the threat posed by the Shadow and the gates, we never put any effort into looking at the Ones Before.”

“Then do it,” Foreman ordered.

Dane held up a hand. “Wait. We — you — ” he amended looking at Ahana — “zeroed in on the muonic frequencies by focusing on the gates the Shadow was using. Wouldn’t it be easier to figure out how the Ones Before are transmitting if you found what gate they use to send their messages through?”

“Certainly,” Ahana agreed.

Dane stood. “I think I might be able to find the portal line they use.”

“The sphere map?” Earhart asked as she also stood.

Dane’s response was to head for the door, then along the deck to the launch that could take him over to the Shadow’s massive sphere floating nearby. As the launch took them over, they failed to notice the sleek gray form swimming off the port bow, slicing through the water with ease and watching them with one dark eye rotated in their direction.

Manhattan Island was part of a massive slab of granite that encompassed parts of nearby Connecticut and New Jersey. Its top surface had been scoured by water, particularly cut through by the Hudson River flowing to the ocean, but the slab was many miles thick and very stable.

Deep underneath the southern tip of Manhattan, though, was something very strange. Approximately six miles down, just below the slab, was a large cavern, cut out of the planet. Over three miles Wide, the walls of the cavern were perfectly smooth, and the slab had been used as the roof, given some support from long black metal buttresses and beams.

In the exact center of the cavern there was a tall derrick with drilling equipment. A start had been made on the floor, with a hole excavated about fifty meters down, but it appeared as if the work had been interrupted and never resumed.

There was one opening in the wall of the cavern — a tunnel one hundred meters in diameter that went off to the east straight as an arrow. If a light were shone in that tunnel, it would show no immediate end as it ran for over a thousand miles to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where it ended at a metal door. On the other side of that door there was another large chamber, but that one was full of debris and had been flooded by the ocean long ago.

The tunnel and chamber were all that remained in our Earth timeline of the civilization of Atlantis other than the myth that had been passed down through the ages. And · the few people who had survived its destruction by the Shadow.