Atlantis: Gate (4 page)

Reizer was frozen, not by Davon’s wound, but by the sight of every line and wedge on the plain ablaze.

*************

In Japan, three miles below the surface of the planet, in an abandoned mine, was a much larger version of the muonic transceiver mounted on the FLIP. The super-kamiokande was a 50,000-ton ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. The tank holding the detector was forty meters in diameter by forty meters high. It was filled with purified water and the walls were lined with over thirteen thousand photo multiplier tubes that were sensitive lights detectors.

It worked under the principle that any charged particle traveling through water produced Cerenkov light, which was light generated by a particle moving faster than the speed of light in water, which was slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The particle of light produced a shock wave, similar to the sound wave set off by a supersonic aircraft. The wave hit the tubes and formed a ring, which when analyzed, could tell the type of wave, the strength, and to a certain extent the location.

The super-kamiokande had been Professor Nagoya’s brain-child, funded by both the Japanese and American governments ostensibly to do pure research in physics, but in reality to try to find a way to track the actions of the gates. The public had been told it was located this far underground to prevent interference from human sources on the surface, but while that was true, it was also oriented into the planet.

The control center for the S-K was linked to Ahana on board the FLIP via real-time satellite feed. Thus those in Japan only had about half-a-second to consider the data that exploded across their screens before Professor Nagoya saw it aboard the FLIP.

**************

“What is it?” Foreman was hovering over Professor Nagoya’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the information being forwarded from the super-kamiokande.

Nagoya turned to Ahana. “Put it on the main screen.”

The young woman quickly typed the command into her keyboard. The western hemisphere appeared in outline form. And along the meeting lines of tectonic plates, which they had all grown so familiar with in the past year, were lines of extreme muonic activity, flowing, moving toward a spot in South America as if a vortex had opened on the surface of the planet and was drawing all into it.

“What does it mean?” Foreman asked.

Ahana answered. “The Shadow is drawing power from all the tectonic lines. There must be a gate in South America that it’s being funneled into.” She tapped the screen where there was a crimson red dot. “There.”

“I’ll get us satellite imagery of that spot,” Foreman said. He pulled out his SATPhone to dial the National Reconnaissance Office when he paused. “How much power is being drawn?”

“Off the scale.”

“And?”

Nagoya knew what Foreman meant. “At this rate, the tectonic plates will become unstable soon.”

Foreman seemed to have aged a decade in just a few seconds. “How much time do we have?”

“We’ll have to run the numbers.”

“Do it.”

**************

The top edge of the sun creased above the horizon, sending horizontal rays just above the blue Pacific cutting toward Dane. He looked to the west from the deck of the FLIP, at the black wall that delineated the edge of the Devil’s Sea gate. It absorbed the rays of the sun as if eating them. He felt a chill ripple across his skin, the smell of death and destruction in his nostrils, although whether the odor was real or a figment of his sensitive brain, he couldn’t really tell. He knew that smell was the strongest of the five senses and any time he was near a gate the odor was sickening.

He could sense something was happening in the control center, but he had no desire to go in there and find out. He knew bad news would be brought to him soon enough. And regardless of what it was, he would be going back into the Devils Sea gate at least once more.

His first foray into a gate, had been done out of ignorance at the command of Foreman. Dane had been a member of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam- Studies and Observation Group) a rather innocent sounding name for teams of elite Special Forces soldiers and their indigenous counterparts that conducted clandestine missions into Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and even into China during the Vietnam War.

Foreman had sent Dane’s team—Recon Team Kansas-- on a mission far into Cambodia to recover the black box of a downed U-2 spy plane. What Dane hadn’t known was the U-2 was part of an experiment Foreman had run to check if there was a connection between the Angkor gate and the Bermuda Triangle gate on the other side of the world where he sent the submarine
Scorpion.
The two had managed to make communication with each other before the
Scorpion
disappeared and the U-2 went down. They had proved there was a connection that defied conventional physics, but at a high cost.

In the end, Dane was the only member of his team who made it back. Several members of the team had been killed outright, and his team leader Flaherty had disappeared. Dane had gone into other gates since, including a return into the Angkor gate thirty years later where he briefly met Flaherty once more, the man appearing not to have aged at all since his disappearance and telling Dane of the battle between the Shadow and the Ones Before, the latter indirectly helping mankind against the darkness. Dane shivered as he felt the lurking presence of death and terror close by.

He looked down at the water as a dorsal fin cut the water forty feet away. Dane stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes and dove into the warm water. He swam forward, the Pacific water cleansing him of the oppressiveness given off by the gate.

He felt warm skin against his and rolled as Rachel swam by. The dolphin rose halfway out of the water, and then flipped over, splashing Dane’s face. He reached out and rested his right hand on the lower front edge of the dorsal fin. He felt a wave of emotion and thoughts flow over him from the dolphin. There was so much, he couldn’t make sense of anything. He focused on the vision he had had the previous night, and ‘sent’ that to Rachel in return.

He felt it come back to him like an echo, which confused him. Kennedy, Frost, Cuba, the freighter, Washington destroyed, jumbled and confused as if it had been taped by a faulty machine and was being played back.

Dane let go of the images and focused on the feel of Rachel’s skin, her warmth, and the water sliding over his body. Rachel pushed him up, above the surface and he took a deep breath, then she dived, pulling him down with her. Dane remembered Rachel’s handler, Dr. Marsten saying a dolphin could dive to six hundred meters and stay down for over fifteen minutes, but he felt no panic, no worry as they descended. He swallowed, equalizing pressure on his ears as they went down, then relaxed as Rachel leveled off at about fifty feet.

Dane began to feel faint as the oxygen in his lungs was absorbed. Still there was no feeling of panic. He realized he’d almost welcome the oblivion of death. It was all he had known. From his time in Special Forces in Vietnam, through battling the Shadow in the past year. The list of those who had gone before into darkness was long. His recon team in Cambodia in the Angkor Gate; Sin Fen in the Bermuda Triangle Gate; the Viking warrior he’d met inside the ‘wall’ between Earth and the Shadow’s world, along with the Romans and Amelia Earhart; Ariana Michelet killed while trying to stop the detonation of Mount Erebus in Antarctica and the destruction of the Pacific Rim by the Shadow. All gone. And the Shadow only halted once more, paused, not defeated. And the riddle of what was on the other side of the gates, beyond the wall, in the unknown place where the Shadow came from, still as great. They’d only discovered that the portals led to a strange space—inside the wall-- a staging area between Earth and the Shadow’s world, where some humans who had disappeared into the gates, such as Amelia Earhart, eked out a timeless existence. There were also two graveyards deep under the Atlantic and Pacific at each ocean’s deepest trench.

Starved for oxygen, stars flickered in his eyes as the blood vessels constricted. His mind was fluttering between conscious and subconscious. Then he ‘saw’ an object, a sphere, glittering as if made of gold and other precious metals, the surface uneven, covered with twisted cords that seemed to be moving and pulsing with power. The image was too faint for him to make out more detail. A man in armor was stepping up to the sphere, a staff in his hand. Dane recognized the weapon—a Naga staff. Sharp blade on one end, the only thing that could cut the white skin of a Valkyrie—and seven headed snake figure on the other. The man lifted the Naga staff above the sphere, prepared to bring it down. Dane felt a terrible sense of dread and he tried to call out through the vision, but he knew it was another place, another time and there was nothing he could do. But floating on the edge of his consciousness was an awareness that he knew what he was seeing, that he had heard or read of it, but he couldn’t pin down exactly when or where.

Then he saw Ariana Michelet. She was standing on a white surface, ice covered with drifting snow, and she was looking right at Dane. She was yelling something but he could hear nothing, only see her mouth moving, trying to get a message to him. She moved her arms in a gesture, but Dane couldn’t figure out what it was. Then behind her the ice began buckling, cracking, a tidal wave of hard white death. Dane reached forward, letting go of Rachel, trying to get to Ariana but she faded as his brain slipped further into darkness.

Then Rachel turned her nose up and put her wide forehead under his back, pushing him upward. Dane broke the surface and gulped in a deep breath, letting go of Rachel and rolling onto his back, hacking and coughing to get water out of his lungs. The blue sky was cloudless, unmarked. Dane floated, rising and falling with the slight swell, regaining his breath and consciousness.

He’d ‘drowned’ before. It had been a part of the training at the Special Forces scuba school at Key West, which he had gone to over three decades previously. The instructors kept students in the water, pushing them hard, until inevitably the body broke down and the student passed out. The instructors would haul the student out and resuscitate him and then tell them to get back in the water. It was brutal but effective training—as all the training Dane had experienced in the Special Forces had been. He had truly only understood that when he was in his first firefight in Vietnam and he had reacted, his body and mind honed by the brutal repetition, keeping him alive while others with lesser training died. The bonds he had forged with those he had served with had been greater than anything he’d experienced before or since.

But his experience in the Angkor Gate had broken him. Upon his return to Vietnam, after months of barely surviving the long trek through the jungle, his account of what had happened to his team had been met by disbelief. And he had had no desire to ever again be in the situation where the orders of another man would put him in a life-threatening situation. He had let his hitch run out and then come back to the States.

He’d bought a Harley and rode. For five years. All over the country. Working when he needed money. Many times making his living playing poker, his special sense of emotions and thoughts allowing him a definite advantage over the others he played.

Then he’d found a puppy, a stray eating out of a dumpster, and picked it up. He stayed in that town for two months, feeding and taking care of the puppy, a mixed breed—mostly German Shepherd with something else mixed in-- until it had its strength back. Then he realized he didn’t want to ride any more. He sold the Harley and took the puppy to a training academy where they both learned search and rescue. Twenty-five years of doing that, and three dogs—Chelsea being the most recent—later, here he was. Drawn back into a role he didn’t want, in a situation he hated. He was no longer a rescuer, but back to being a warrior.

Gradually, Dane became aware someone was calling him. He looked to the right and saw Foreman on the deck of the FLIP, indicating for him to come over. Reluctantly, Dane began kicking with his legs until he reached the side of the ship. He climbed up a rope onto the deck. He knew it was bad news time.

“Enjoy yourself?” Foreman asked, the tone indicating his disapproval.

“I had another vision,” Dane said.

“Of?”

Dane quickly explained the sphere and the man in armor holding the Naga staff.

“These visions aren’t very useful,” Foreman said.

“A vision saved the world when I was in the Angkor Gate,” Dane reminded the CIA agent. “It showed me how to stop the Shadow’s propagation. I think they’re sent by the Ones Before to help us. And what I saw—“ Dane paused, not sure how to continue. “I’ve seen that image of the man in armor before or something very much like it. Maybe in a book or a movie. I don’t know.”

“Maybe it was a vision of something that didn’t happen,” Foreman said, “like your vision of Robert Frost and Kennedy.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” Dane said.

“And?” Foreman prompted.

“In the vision Frost was saying that his poetry wasn’t his, but rather the voices of the gods, which Sin Fen first told me about. The same voice I heard in Angkor that showed me how to destroy the Shadow’s power propagation.”

Foreman’s patience was running thin. “And?” he repeated.

“Maybe there’s more messages in Frost’s poetry,” Dane said.

Foreman’s face was tight. “Good. Real good. You go read some poetry.” He slapped his hand on the railing. “In the meanwhile, would you mind sitting in on something that might actually be worthwhile?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Professor Nagoya has picked up high levels of muonic activity along the edges of all the tectonic plates terminating in South America.”

“And?”

“The Shadow is attacking us once more. He and Ahana are crunching the numbers right now but it doesn’t look good.”

Foreman led the way and Dane followed. They entered the control center where Professor Nagoya and Ahana were seated in front of their computers. The elderly Japanese scientist turned in his seat and scooted over to a small conference table, Ahana following, her hands full of reports.