Finally, they had settled on the lowest-tech, no-bullet, no-grenade, no-noise way to get the explosives up to the arc doors.
David stood at the base. On his shoulders, Sonja stood, balancing as best she could, her arms extended upward, one of Milo’s feet in each hand. She shook slightly as Milo reached, attaching the explosive to the thick door and hitting the button to activate it.
Sonja let Milo fall into her cupped arms, the impact eliciting a sharp grunt from David. Then she handed him down and jumped to the floor. They all took refuge and waited, nervous about the looming result of the blast.
When the dust cleared, they saw the dim emergency lights of the corridor beyond, and a cheer went up and hugs went around. David hugged Kate, then Milo when he rushed into them. Mary found herself in Paul’s arms, and David nodded sharply to Sonja, who allowed a slight smile to curl at her lips.
They reformed their human pyramid, this time hoisting the team out: Milo first, then Mary, Kate, Paul, and Sonja, who instructed the others to hold her while she gripped the straps of three backpacks and reached them down to David. He made a running go, leapt, caught the straps and pushed his feet into the wall, walking up close enough to the top to reach Sonja’s hand. She pulled him close, and the others pulled them in.
The blast woke Dorian. Fear consumed him—he hadn’t intended to fall asleep. The soldier’s head rolled into him. “Sir?” the man whispered, his voice scratchy.
“Stay here.”
Dorian raced to the edge of the rock cliff and followed the noise with the scope of his rifle.
A door. An exit—David’s team had blown it open. Dorian watched that team, which actually numbered six people—none of whom Dorian had ever seen except Kate, crawl up and out.
He exhaled and surveyed the arc. It was quiet, and in the far corner, where the rainforest met the entrance, a sun peeked out. On the opposite rock face, two of the muddy birds spread out, sunning themselves.
Dorian wondered if they would stay there while the sun was out. If so, he would have a clear path to follow Kate and David.
Kate and the team raced down the corridor, away from the arc opening and the danger beyond.
In the portal room, Kate worked the green cloud of light, and then moved to the arched door. “We’re ready.”
“Can you close it? Prevent Dorian from following?” David asked.
“No. The ship’s in emergency protocol. This is the last evacuation route. It can’t be disabled.”
David nodded. One by one, Milo, the two soldiers, and the three scientists walked through the white, shimmering archway of light and onto the Atlantis beacon.
PART II:
THE ATLANTIS BEACON
CHAPTER 22
When Mary Caldwell cleared the portal, her heart almost stopped. The floor was pearl white, the walls matte gray, but it was the wide picture window spreading out dead ahead that captivated her like nothing ever had before. Earth hung there, a blue, white, and green marble against a black canvas.
This was a view only a select few humans had ever witnessed: astronauts. They were the heroes who dared to risk it all to see this, to expand human knowledge while laying their lives on the line. As a child, Mary had dreamed of this moment, of traveling into space and the great unknown, but it had always been too much risk for her. She had settled for a career in astronomy, hoping to contribute what she could while her feet were firmly planted on the ground. But this was the view and the mission she had always aspired to.
Here and now, she knew, no matter what happened next, she would die happy.
A single thought ran through Paul Brenner’s mind: we’re screwed. He had pretty much felt that way every day since the Atlantis Plague had first broken out, but this was different. He now felt himself coming a bit unhinged. His confrontation with Terrance North, killing the man, had almost pushed him over the edge. The race to escape the flood in Morocco, whatever just happened in that bizarre arena in the Atlantean ship, and now this: orbiting Earth, looking down on it.
He was used to trying to contain and control the uncontrollable: viruses. He knew the rules of that game: pathogens, biology, politics.
Here, he had no idea where he stood.
Almost involuntarily, he looked around, to Mary standing beside him. He hadn’t seen her like that… in a very long time.
What Milo saw confirmed his belief that he was here for a reason, that he had a role to play. Seeing the world that, as a child, he had once thought so unimaginably vast, nearly limitless in size, reduced to a tiny ball, floating there, swallowed by the immensity of the universe, reminded Milo of how small he was, how minute a single life was—just a single drop in the human bucket, gone in the blink of an eye, its temporary, fading ripples the only legacy it would leave.
He believed that a person’s drop could be the poison or the cure for the ails of the age—that age simply being the thin layer of water on the surface for a brief instant. Milo wasn’t a fighter, a leader, or a genius. He looked around at his companions, seeing all of those qualities. But he could help them. He had a role to play. He was sure of it.
David scanned the small holding area onto which the portal opened, and then ran the length of the single round corridor, his gun raised, jerking back and forth as he searched. Empty.
The beacon’s habitable area seemed to be a single level shaped like a saucer.
The portal they had just exited occupied the entire interior section, like a round elevator bank in the center of a high-rise building.
He made another circuit, beginning again at the portal opening and picture window, working clockwise. In order, the beacon contained four residential quarters similar to the crew pods on the lander (a single narrow bed, desk, and enclosed sonic sanitation bay—what he simply called “the shower” but was technically more like a waterless shower with multi-colored strobe lights); on the backside, opposite the portal, two large rooms David assumed were labs; and, in the last enclosed section, on the left-hand side of the picture window, a storage room full of silver crates and a few EVA suits.
When he reached the portal after his second trip around the beacon, the rest of the group still stood there staring out the window, mesmerized. He had to get them focused on the task at hand. They were all physically and mentally exhausted, but he wanted to grab the adults, shake them, and say, “Come on, people! Focus! Killers, chasing us, could be here any minute!”
Milo he gave a pass. David couldn’t imagine himself as a teenager standing on a space station staring out at Earth. He probably would have peed his pants.
Kate had this blank expression David recognized: she was using her implant to communicate with the Atlantean vessel. The blank expression dissolved into worry as she faced him. Now he was worried. More worried.
David pointed at the portal. “Is this the only egress?”
“Yes,” Kate said.
The words brought Sonja to life. “Barricade or ambush?”
In his mind, David riffled through the supplies he had seen. Not enough to completely block the portal. Not even close. “Ambush,” he said. He nodded in the direction of the four residential pods. “We’ll build it on that side of the portal.”
He moved to the storage room, and he and Sonja moved all the silver boxes out, stacking them perpendicular to the portal so that their bullets would fire across toward the storage room, and David hoped, into Dorian and any of his remaining men. David wasn’t sure if that was safe, but Dorian was likely to come through the door shooting straight on, so…
Kate grabbed his arm. “We need to talk.”
“I’ll take first watch,” Sonja said, settling down behind the crates.
Kate was pulling David to the closest residential pod.
“There are three other quarters; everyone take one,” David said. There were four of them and three rooms, but they would sort it out.
Paul collapsed on the narrow bed and began peeling the Atlantean suit off. The door opened, and Mary stepped in and set her
pack down.
Paul had assumed Mary and the other woman would take a pod. “I can share with Milo.”
“No. It’s okay.”
“You didn’t want to…”
“Sorry. Sonja… she kind of scares me.”
Paul nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
At least there’s some good news, Dorian thought. The soldier the snake had almost killed could walk, and he wasn’t one of the regurgitators on the flight in, so maybe he was one of the better soldiers of the original six. At any rate, he was the only one left.
His name was Victor, and he wasn’t very talkative. That was the balance of the good news.
Several hours into their march into the jungle, Victor finally asked, “What’s the plan, sir?”
Dorian stopped, drank from his canteen and handed it to the man. They could see the peeled metal where David had exploded the exit door in the distance.
“Now we go down the rabbit hole and finish this thing.”
“We have a problem,” Kate said the second the door closed.
David sat at the table, weariness finally overtaking him. “Can you please never say that again, even if we’re totally screwed? The phrase makes me more nervous than actual problems.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. ‘We have an issue?’ maybe?”
“We have an issue.”
David smiled, showing Kate an exhausted look of complete surrender that softened her at once.
“Janus’ message. It’s not what we thought it was.”
David glanced around, waiting.
Kate activated the screen above the desk and played Janus’ transmission.
“That,” David said, “is a very, very big problem.”
CHAPTER 23
David sat at the table built into the gray wall, trying to wrap his exhausted mind around Janus’ message.
“Play it again.”
From her perch on the narrow bed behind him, Kate used her neural link to play the video.
“What do you want to do?” Kate asked.
“We should share it with the group.”
They had no options that David could see, and he felt they should make their decision together.
David had made the rounds, gathering everyone into the larger lab at the back of the beacon. Kate had programmed the doors to stay open, and she now stood in the open room with Milo, Mary, Paul, and Sonja. David had relieved Sonja, reasoning that she should see the footage for herself. He sat at the makeshift outpost by the portal, his rifle pointed across the entry path toward the empty storage room.
Before the video began, Paul stepped in front of the screen and addressed Kate. “I’m sorry, but can I say something first? I’m just… not sure anyone should be shooting a gun here.” He specifically avoided eye contact with David.
“I agree,” Mary said quietly.
Sonja stiffened.
David yelled back to them. “If Dorian Sloane walks through that door, I am shooting him. End of discussion.”
Mary cleared her throat, “Well, it… seems to me that maybe we should stack the boxes against the portal. Then we would know when he comes through, and you could shoot into the portal—that way, at least the bullets would go back into the other ship.”
“You assume,” Sonja said, “that the portal would transmit bullets. If not, they would go through the portal mechanism in the center, trapping us here, which would be far worse than the quick death of decompression, which is another assumption. A craft this advanced can surely withstand impacts from outside. It’s not my area, but I believe space is filled with floating rocks large and small, some moving quickly. It would stand to reason that perhaps this beacon was also built to withstand a puncture from the inside and if not, in the event of a breach, to rapidly repair itself.”
“I, uh, hadn’t thought of that,” Mary said, her cheeks flushing.
“There’s much to think about,” Sonja said. “And all our minds are weary. Many unknowns.” She turned to Kate. “Unless of course these unknowns are known.”
“Oh, they’re unknown.” Kate said. Her Atlantean memories were spotty, and she had no idea what the beacon was capable of, including whether it could withstand a firefight or not.
“You said there was a movie?” Milo asked.
“Yes. Of sorts.” Kate activated the large screen, the video began, and the five of them stepped back to form a semi-circle around the screen.
Janus stood on the bridge of the ship he and his fellow Atlantean scientist had traveled to Earth upon and hidden on the far side of the moon, burying it below thousands of feet of lunar rock and dirt.
Janus’ expression was stoic as he spoke.
“My name is Dr. Arthur Janus. I am a scientist and a citizen of a long-since fallen civilization. We made a great mistake many years ago, and we have paid dearly for it—with the lives of nearly every member of our society. The remainder of our people took refuge here, on this world, hiding, waiting. And we repeated our mistake.”
The ship shook, and the panels around the bridge behind Janus flickered, popped, and went out.
“I say to you, those who destroyed our world, those we wronged, please do not continue your vengeance on the inhabitants of this planet. They are victims too.”
Flames erupted across the bridge a second before the video ended.
“Yeah, so…” Paul began. “Not exactly a message to an ally.”
Mary bit her lip. “How do we know the response—the message I received—is a response to this message? And do you know what the incoming message is?”
“No,” Kate said. “In fact, what you received is what was in the transmission. Sometimes the beacon translates incoming signals, but it didn’t in this case.” The screen changed, showing an access log of incoming and outgoing messages. “Here’s Janus’ outgoing message, sent from the main vessel fourteen days ago. The strange part is that he routed it to a quantum comm buoy—”
“A quantum comm…”
“It’s like a relay the Atlanteans used to manage communications traffic over distances. Sending information across space isn’t the issue, it’s folding the space, creating temporary wormholes and the power required to do so. The buoys establish those worm holes for an extremely small fraction of a second and transmit data. There are millions of them that form a redundant network.”
There were blank stares all around the room, except for Mary, who was nodding.
“Why is that important?” Paul asked.
“Because it means Janus was masking the origin of his signal—he bounced it off so many buoys I can’t even trace the destination from here. He clearly didn’t want the recipient to know where the message came from.”
“But somehow they traced it,” Sonja said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” Kate replied. She highlighted the next row in the communications log. “Twenty four hours after his message went out, a response comes in. It had an Atlantean access code, so the beacon let it through. What’s strange to me is that it didn’t contain a message in the Atlantean format and encoding. The message is very… ‘Earthlike’—the content is simplistic and far less advanced than what would be expected. The Atlantean computer can’t even read it.”
“As if the sender knew the Atlanteans were hiding on a less advanced world…” Paul began.
“It’s bait!” David yelled from his position by the portal.
“I agree,” Sonja said. “If this was a message to a great enemy, and they could not trace its origin, they could have sent a fake message to any suspected worlds, hoping to lure us out.”
Paul nodded. “Hoping we would respond, reveal our location or better yet, disable the beacon so they could see exactly what’s happening on Earth.”
“It had our address on it,” Mary said, but quickly added, “though, I guess they could have sent a customized message to every world.” Kate thought the realization hit the woman hard, as if some hope she had harbored had finally died.
&nb
sp; Paul rubbed his temples and paced away. “I’m too tired to think. We obviously can’t respond, at least not yet, and we can’t disable the beacon. Janus clearly believed the Atlanteans’ enemy was still out there. What’s left? What can we do?” He glanced toward the portal.
“I agree,” Sonja said. “We’re trapped.”
CHAPTER 24
Kate closed her eyes and massaged her eyelids. She was dead-tired and sitting at the small desk in the residential pod, staring at the screen for the last hour felt as though it were draining her even more. Yet… she couldn’t help feeling as if she was missing something. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking, her desperate desire to think that there was a way out of the trap they were in.
The door opened, and David lumbered in, his eyes half closed.
Kate smiled. “How was work, honey?”
He barely made it to the end of the bed before falling into it. “I feel like an Atlantean mall cop.”
She hovered over him.
“Pesky kids getting rowdy in the food court?”
“Supervisor relieved me for falling asleep on the job.”
She began pulling his dirty tunic off. “Well they can’t fire you,” she said in a mock sympathetic tone. “This Atlantis beacon needs you too much. But you’re getting dirt in the bed.” She collected his pants and boots and then inserted them in the garment sanitizer in the corner.
David followed her with his eyes, not moving a muscle. “How does it work? The Atlantean laundry. Actually… don’t tell me. I don’t care.”