Area 51: The Legend (12 page)

Surprisingly, the mothership did not dock with the temple spire, but slid to the side, coming down over a large field outside the city walls. A cargo door opened and a gangplank extended to the ground. From his vantage point halfway up the ship’s mast, Gwalcmai could see this and he relayed these happenings to Donnchadh.

“What is happening now?” Donnchadh asked. “Is anyone coming out?”

“No,” Gwalcmai said. “There is no activity. Some people are gathering round the field, but no activity on the mothership.”

Donnchadh frowned. She turned to the ship’s captain. “It is time for us to go. The sun is up.”

The captain merely nodded at her, then issued orders to his men. The lines were untied from the dock and oars were manned. To the slow, steady beat of the ship’s master’s drum, they moved away from the dock.

“Two men are going up the gangplank,” Gwalcmai reported. “They’ve gone inside.”

Once they were clear of the dock and shore, the captain issued orders and the sail was unfurled. Gwalcmai swungaside as the boom came down the mast, narrowly missing him. He put his free hand over his eyes.

“They’ve come back out,” he said. “They’re gesturing for others to come on board.”

“I would go faster,” Donnchadh said to the captain.

“The people are rushing the ship,” Gwalcmai reported. “Thousands of them.” He looked down. “What is happening?”

“One of the Airlia is gathering his crop,” Donnchadh said.

Aspasia had returned to Atlantis during the night on the saucer. He’d gathered the last of the Airlia under his command in a hangar underneath the palace, where they boarded the seven Talons he had recalled to Earth. In the command center of his Talon, Aspasia could see, via monitors in the spire, Artad’s mothership loading humans on board. That was not part of the truce, but Aspasia knew that Artad had watched his dispersal and was countering it in his own way. Move—countermove. Even as he watched, the gangplank suddenly began to withdraw into the ship and the cargo door abruptly shut, cutting in half a few desperate souls clinging to the ship.

“
Lift
,” Aspasia ordered.

The roof of the hangar slid open and the Talons shot up, away from Earth.

Donnchadh could see the departing Talons as easily as Gwalcmai. They could also see the mothership gaining altitude.

“Come down,” she called out to her husband.

The ship was now about five kilometers away from the outer ring of Atlantis. On the land, people looked up at the massive mothership above them in fear, all sensing that something was going to happen. Supplicant priests who had not been converted or taken by Aspasia led crowds in desperate prayers. Warriors held up spears, swords, and shields in fruitless displays of defiance. The few remaining ships rapidly put to sea, their decks crowded with those who had realized too late their plight.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai stood side by side near the stern of the ship, watching and waiting. They could feel in the air the same thing the people on Atlantis did—an electric charge as if a large thunderstorm were coming.

Donnchadh drew a sharp breath as a bright golden light raced along the black surface of the mothership from rear to front. She had seen this before and knew what was coming.

“Faster,” she called out to the captain.

The golden light seemed to gather at the nose of the mothership, then pulsed downward in a half-mile-wide beam, passing through the city and into the ground below with no apparent effect.

Once more the light ran along the outside of the mothership, gathered, then pulsed down. And again. Donnchadh found herself counting, the scientist in her taking notes. Ten times.

Then there was absolute stillness for several seconds.

Donnchadh’s hand found Gwalcmai’s. She squeezed tight.

The earth beneath Atlantis exploded.

Aspasia had a view of what was happening on the front screen of the control room of his Talon. He’d watched Artad’s mothership fire ten times, knowing exactly what was coming. The Airlia had extensively studied the evolution of planetary structure. The weapon Artad was using against Atlantis had been designed to tap into the power that resided deep inside the planet and bring it upward.

The shock wave from the explosion killed almost everyone on the island instantly. The handful who survived the initial blast died horrible deaths as a wave of magma sprayed forth in a fiery froth. The entire landmass that had been Atlantis initially lifted upward almost two hundred meters from the explosion, then imploded. The ocean absorbed both the explosion and implosion, giving birth to a tsunami of unbelievable scale.

On the view screen there was nothing left of Atlantis.

Gwalcmai saw what was coming. “Put your stern directly into the wave,” he yelled to the two men holding the tiller. A ship behind them was hit on an angle and flipped over, disappearing into the wall of water. The rear of their ship lifted as the base of the front of the tsunami reached them. Hit square on, it rode up the front, the angle growing steeper and steeper. Gwalcmai wrapped an arm around Donnchadh’s waist while he grabbed the railing with the other to prevent them from sliding overboard.

Donnchadh watched helplessly as a screaming sailor tumbled past and disappeared overboard. She felt Gwalcmai’s grip get even tighter around her waist as she held on to the railing with her own hands. They seemed to be rising forever. Donnchadh looked up—the crest was still over a hundred meters above them and they had already gone up, as best she could tell, about seven hundred meters.

“I love you,” she yelled to Gwalcmai.

He nodded, then swung his head from side to side to clear the wet hair from his eyes. “We’ll make it.”

And they did, slowly going from almost vertical to horizontal, riding the top of the massive wave.

“Hold on,” Gwalcmai yelled, not only to Donnchadh but to the sailors clinging to whatever protection they had managed to find.

The ship began to slide down the less steep side of the wave. It took well over a minute before they were finally off the wave. It was moving away from them, a wall of water that took up the entire horizon. All around the ship, the ocean was littered with bodies and debris. Gwalcmai slowly let go of Donnchadh’s waist. They both looked over the stern of the ship. Where Atlantis had been there was nothing but debris-filled water.

Donnchadh turned to Gwalcmai and spoke to him in their native tongue. “A truce, Gwalcmai.”

Gwalcmai nodded. “They are neutralized here. They are no longer Gods.”

“For the time being.”

“Time is a valuable commodity, Donnchadh. We didn’t have it, but maybe things will be different here. We have helped accomplish the first stage of our mission. The Airlia have fought among themselves and both sides, in essence, have lost.”

Donnchadh frowned. “But neither side has been defeated. And you know this truce is a farce. Both will try to use Guides and Shadows to—”

Gwalcmai held a hand up. “We’ve done what we can. Which is more than we could have hoped for. We have gained time for the people on this world. And we will be around to help in the final war when it does come.”

Donnchadh realized he was right. They had accomplished much for only being two against those who ruled as Gods. Gwalcmai went to the ship’s captain and issued him instructions, directing that they head toward the northeast.

When he returned to Donnchadh he saw that she was looking up and he knew what was on her mind. “He has long since died.”

“I know,” Donnchadh acknowledged, “but I can still mourn.”

“Mourning is all that seems to come of this.”

Donnchadh nodded. “There will be more grief before it is all over.”

Aspasia had the Talon’s visual sensors zoom in on the planet that was receding behind them. He could see Artad’s mothership passing over the massive wave that was moving out in a perfect circle from where Atlantis had been. The wave was moving at almost six hundred kilometers an hour.

The first land it hit was the western tip of Africa. As the water grew shallower the wave slowed, but that energy was translated in water displacement and the tsunami grew taller, doubling in height by the time it hit the shoreline.

For those onshore, the first indication of something amiss was the water actually withdrawing from the land, baring the sea bottom to the sun. Fish were caught by the sudden disappearance of the water and lay flopping in the mud. Some humans went out to gather this unexpected bounty, not knowing their doom was racing toward them.

The air was filled with the sound of a thousand thunder-storms. Then the wall of water appeared. It swept ashore first in western Africa, then all around the Atlantic coastline as the circle expanded. It surged inland, in some places penetrating over 150 kilometers before finally coming to rest. Some of the wave even passed through what would be called the Pillars of Hercules into the Mediterranean, causing devastation throughout that basin.

The tsunami, greatly diminished, even made it around the capes on the southern tips of America and Africa and into the other oceans, circling the globe. So worldwide was the effect that the legend of the Great Flood would pass into legend among all peoples of the world.

Aspasia cared little about what the water had done. His sensors tracked Artad’s mothership as it crossed Europe. It came to a halt above a tall peak in the land that was located between Asia, Europe, and Africa, where it off-loaded the thousands on board. After the people had dispersed, the pilot of the vessel did as Aspasia had done in North America— hollowing out a cavern inside the mountain and caching the massive ship inside.

Even though his Talon was drawing farther and farther away from the planet, the sensors were able to pick up a half dozen golden saucers zooming off to the east, disappearing around the edge of the planet. Aspasia had no doubt he was witnessing some plan Artad had set in motion to keep his own side in play through the truce. It was the Airlia way.

Many people must have died.” Donnchadh was lying next to Gwalcmai, his arm around her, near the stern of the boat. The sail flapped in the light breeze, propelling the ship to the northwest.

“Yes.” Gwalcmai said no more and they were quiet for a while, both looking up at the stars.

“Do you think—” Donnchadh began, but Gwalcmai gently put a hand over her mouth.

“Shhh,” he whispered. “This is what we came here to do. Some dead now versus many dead later. This is going to be a very long war. Very long. And it’s just begun.”

THE
PAST
, 10,000 B.C.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai passed other ships on their way to the northeast, most of the craft hav-ing been badly battered by the wave. Twice they stopped and took on board survivors of vessels that were foundering, also off-loading whatever supplies they found. One of those vessels had two dozen high priest supplicants on board. They had run away from the temple when the door was slammed in their face by the Guides during the loading of the first mothership. Seeing the Ark and Sphinx being lifted out had convinced them that the end was near and they needed to leave.

In Donnchadh’s view this meeting was a fortuitous opportunity and she spent most of the journey with the twenty-four supplicants, telling them the truth about the Airlia—up to a point. She did not tell them where she and Gwalcmai were from or of the other planets. Simply that the Airlia were not Gods, but rather creatures that used humans for their own ends. The supplicants had no difficulty believing her, given recent events. By the time they landed on the southwest coast of England, Donnchadh and Gwalcmai had come up with a plan for these men.

They led them inland. During their time on the island, the two had prepared for various contingencies and were using one of those strategies now. After several days of hardmarching, the group arrived at a lake. In the very center, a hill rose precipitously up out of the water to a cone-shaped top. It was a great tor, towering over five hundred feet above the lake. Donnchadh and Gwalcmai had come across this strange geological structure several lifetimes ago. There was a small village on the south side of the lake. Seeing the strangely dressed party approach, the inhabitants fled and the group appropriated several boats to cross the lake to the island. Before they departed, Donnchadh had the supplicants gather several torches.

A thin trail wound its way back and forth up the tor to the top. They wove their way upward in silence. When they reached the top, the view was magnificent. A large plain surrounded the lake and tor in all directions. A small circle of blackened stones indicated where the locals had set a fire. Next to it was a larger stone, about a foot high by six long and three wide. Donnchadh and Gwalcmai had placed it there with great effort. They noticed that there were objects of worship on the stone—dried flowers; mummified corpses of small animals; smaller, carved rocks.

With one arm Gwalcmai reached out to sweep the objects off the stone, but Donnchadh stopped him. “Myth is valuable,” she said, and she carefully removed them and placed them at the base of the stone as the supplicants waited.

Once the stone was clear, Donnchadh used the medallion around her neck. She pressed it against a spot near the top of the stone. The supplicants were not overly surprised when the stone slid down two feet and moved sideways, revealing steps descending into darkness. They had seen such and more while on Atlantis.

Donnchadh led the way down the stairs, the supplicants following, Gwalcmai bringing up the rear, closing the stone behind them. The flames from the torches flickered off the stone walls as they descended.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai had taken a chance years previously, using a stone-cutting tool appropriated from the Airlia supplies on their planet to carve out this passageway. They’d done it because, by using sensors, they had been able to determine there were several large voids deep underneath the tor and they had cut their way down to reach and connect those voids, making their own version of the Roads of Rostau. The air inside was damp and chilly. The stone walls were perfectly cut, the steps smooth and unmarked.