She handed him a mushy bag, then uncapped the end and pushed it towards his lips.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner.” She squeezed some of the gel into his mouth.
David sat up and spat the orange goo on the wall. “Oh God, that’s horrible! What the—What did I ever do to you, lady?”
Kate cocked her head. “Really?” She ate some of the goo. “It’s just pre-digested amino acids, triglycerides—”
“It tastes like poop, Kate.”
“You’ve never tasted—”
“I have now. It’s horrid. How can you eat that?”
Kate wondered the same thing. To her, it had almost no taste. She wondered if it was because she was changing, becoming more… Atlantean. She pushed the thought from her mind.
“Well, I’m not eating that for my last meal. I’ll starve first.”
“So dramatic.”
David reached for the pack. “What do we have left?”
Kate opened it and rifled through the MREs. “Beef stew, barbecue chicken with black beans and potatoes, chili mac…”
David fell back into the bed. “Oh, talk dirty to me now.”
Kate punched him in the chest. “You’re a lunatic.”
He smiled. “You love it.”
“I do. And that makes me a lunatic.”
“I’ll take whatever you don’t want,” he said.
“Don’t think I can tell much difference anymore.”
David’s eyebrows knitted together for a moment, then his smile faded as he seemed to realize what she meant.
He grabbed a pack at random, tore it open, and began wolfing it down.
Kate wished he would eat slower, which would allow more digestive enzymes to release, breaking the food down better and giving him more usable calories from the meal. That had been her goal in feeding him the more nutrient-dense Atlantean pack. But… human needs.
He pinched her nose playfully, trying to lighten the mood. “No more nose bleeds.”
“Nope.”
He was about finished with the pack but stopped. “It was the experiments, wasn’t it? The simulations.”
“Yeah.”
David finished the last few bites. “When Alpha said you had four to seven days… left. It wasn’t unsure of your health—the diagnosis. It was unsure how many experiments you would do on yourself. None means seven days, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” David said. “Seven days is better than four.”
“I agree,” Kate said quietly.
“Okay, let’s talk about the… issue.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “Issue?”
“Throwing the long ball.”
Kate hated sports analogies. “We have a long ball?”
He pushed up on his elbow. “You know, the Hail Mary pass in the fourth quarter. That’s where we are, Kate. We both know it. You said this beacon is connected to countless quantum buoys. To me, we only have one play: we send our SOS. Say… I don’t know, ‘our world is under attack from a superior alien occupying force.’” He paused. “Wow. I was trying to make it sound overly urgent and dramatic, but it’s actually one hundred percent accurate.”
Kate’s mind lit up. That was it. David was still talking, losing steam with every word, the exhaustion and binge eating catching up to him fast.
“I mean, yeah, some bad guys will read it. Maybe they’ll show up, but maybe some galactic good guys will give a crap, and anyway, we’re screwed if we do, screwed if we don’t…”
Kate pushed him into the bed. “Rest. You just gave me an idea.”
“What idea?”
“I’ll be back.”
“Wake me up in an hour,” David called to her as she left. There was no way she would wake him up in an hour. He needed rest. If Kate was right, he would need to be at the very top of his game.
Outside their room, she found Sonja and Milo manning the make-shift fortress adjacent to the glowing white portal. For perhaps the first time in her life, Milo didn’t smile at Kate. He nodded solemnly, a look that said, This is serious. We’re on guard duty here.
Kate nodded back as she passed and almost ran to the communications bay at the back of the beacon. She pulled up the transmission log she had shown the group before. This time, she entered a new date range: about thirteen thousand years ago.
The data scrolled across the screen, and Kate could hardly believe her eyes.
Dorian reached his hand down to Victor. “I’ll pull you up. We have to hurry.”
The soldier had climbed the tree leaning against the arc exit about half as fast as Dorian. The dimwit would never make the Olympics.
He jerked the man into the dark corridor, and they set out again. Dorian was glad to be out of the humid, freakish place with the snakes and flying invisible birds, and who knew what else.
He wanted to barricade the entrance, ensuring that nothing made it out, but there was no time.
The two men moved slowly through the corridor, again barefoot as they had been on the way to the arc, careful not to make a sound that might reveal their position.
Dorian had no problem facing facts: David was strong and clever. It would be just like him to send Kate to the beacon while he remained here, guarding, waiting to spring a trap.
If Kate had already sent a message or disabled the beacon, Dorian would be too late. The thought weighed on him, the proverbial weight of the world, but he couldn’t rush his assault. If there was still a chance, it was up to him to stop them. If he failed, so would the world he was fighting for, had sacrificed so much for.
Ares had been right about one thing: Dorian did have a role to play.
He was adjusting to the darkness now, seeing more and more of the corridor despite the faint emergency lights.
Up ahead, the portal room loomed, waiting.
At the threshold, he and Victor paused, signaled each other, and then rushed in, sweeping the room with their rifles. Empty.
Dorian worked the green cloud of light at the panel, and the silver arched portal came to life.
Victor stepped toward it.
“Wait,” Dorian commanded. “We need to be careful.”
Mary and Paul were lying in the narrow bed, both staring at the ceiling.
“I’m too nervous to sleep,” Paul said.
“Me too.”
“For some reason, I don’t want to shower either.”
“Same here,” Mary replied.
“Why is that? I have to think it’s the fear of being in the shower the moment the invasion happens, when the shooting starts. Maybe it’s the being naked part. Like you don’t want to get shot when you’re naked.”
“Yep. Definitely the naked part.”
“And the guilt. You know, after it’s all over, if aliens get here, you don’t want them entering it in the log:” Paul changed his voice to sound more like a computer, “this little human was butt-naked when his world fell. He was scrubbing his left thigh when the other evil human invaded and killed his team, leading to the end. He also failed to clean his back properly.”
Mary laughed. “We’re officially delirious.” She rolled into him, tucking her face under his arm. “I can’t stop thinking about the code.”
“What about it?”
“Why send two parts? If it is bait, why not something straightforward? Just the binary code.”
Paul smiled.
“The complex, cryptic message just doesn’t make sense as a lure.”
“It’s like it’s a test. To see if we can solve it.”
“Or encryption to make sure no one else can read it. Or can solve it.”
“Interesting…” Paul said.
The door opened, revealing Milo. He grinned and raised his eyebrows. “Dr. Kate has an important update!”
When the group was assembled in the large communications room at the back of the beacon, Kate said, “I may have a solution.”
“Solution for what?” Sonja asked.
“Getting of
f this beacon.”
CHAPTER 25
Kate pulled up the transmission logs on the large screen in the communications bay. Around the room, the reactions were as diverse as the group. Milo smiled. Sonja’s face was unreadable. Mary squinted, focusing. Paul just looked nervous, as if the results would tell him how long he had to live.
David was guarding the portal, craning his neck around the central cylinder, trying to see the screen.
“This is the transmission log from around thirteen thousand years ago,” Kate said. “This is the exact time of the fall of Atlantis—just after Ares’ attack on the Alpha Lander off the coast of Gibraltar. During that attack, the ship was split in half, and Janus was trapped in the half closest to Morocco.”
“The part we were just in,” Mary said.
“Yes. We know Janus’ partner was killed in the attack thirteen thousand years ago. He tried desperately to resurrect her in one of the tubes in the other half, closest to Gibraltar. In the final days of the Atlantis Plague, I learned that his attempt to resurrect his partner had partially succeeded: I have her memories. But only select memories. Janus longed to bring her back without certain memories. For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to access those memories… in hopes that I could…” Kate caught David’s eye.
She turned to the screen and continued. “I’ve been trying to access the memories, but they were erased from the Alpha Lander data core. That’s not supposed to be possible—resurrection, especially the storage of memory data, must adhere to strict Atlantean guidelines. What I learned a few moments ago is that Janus didn’t actually delete the memories. The resurrection system wouldn’t let him. So he took the memories he wanted to hide from his partner and transferred them to this beacon. Then he split them in three parts and transmitted them to three other beacons, deleting them from this beacon. Copies remained on the lander, but since there were other active copies in the beacon network, he could move them to archived storage. Once there, he physically damaged the storage array, corrupting them. He also disabled the active data link with this beacon—that’s why we couldn’t see the message he sent and the signal Mary received from the lander: with the beacon link disabled, Janus was ensuring that copies of the memories couldn’t be restored from the beacon network.”
“Sonja!” David called around the hall. “Switch with me.”
She walked out of the communications bay without a word, and when David rounded the curve, he focused on Kate. “No way.”
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“I do. The answer is no.”
Paul and Mary got very interested in what was happening on the floor around their feet. Milo’s almost ever-present smiled faded.
“Will you let me finish?”
David crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame.
Kate pulled up a map of the beacon network on the large screen, displaying what looked like a thousand overlapping spider webs.
“The Atlanteans deployed these shrouding beacons throughout the galaxy—at emerging human worlds, research locations, and military quarantine zones—wherever there was anything they didn’t want others to see or where they didn’t want anyone within the beacon’s range to see the outside galaxy.”
“Incredible,” Mary said, drifting toward the screen.
Paul looked from Kate to David. “Where’s this going?”
“We can use the portal to go to any of these beacons.”
Milo lit up.
Paul moved behind Mary, perhaps to catch her if she fell. “That seems…” he said, “rather uncertain.”
David snorted. “It’s Atlantis beacon roulette.”
“It’s our only option,” Kate shot back.
“Do we know anything about the beacon destinations? You said this beacon’s memory core was wiped, right? So these beacons could be damaged or even open to space. They could be in the middle of a war zone. Or they could be monitored by this great enemy. The second we step out, they take us and find Earth’s location. Game over. There’s a million ways this could go wrong. I can probably name a hundred right now, and my imagination sucks.”
Paul interrupted Kate and David’s back and forth. “Is it possible that the destination beacon is off? That the portal would take us into space? Or nothingness?”
“No,” Kate replied. “If the portals establish a link, there is a viable beacon on the other end.”
“Can we send some kind of probe?” Mary asked. “To get a peek at what’s happening on the other end?”
Kate shook her head. “We don’t have that kind of equipment here, and I think it’s too risky to go back to the lander for it.”
“One of us could peek our heads through,” David said, “see if it gets shot off. Actually, beacon roulette is definitely the right term for this idea.”
Kate ignored him. “There’s reason to believe that the three beacons Janus transmitted the memories to are safe.”
“Reason?” David asked, skepticism in his voice.
“Janus was a genius. Everything he did was deliberate.” Kate looked at David. “You know that.”
“Maybe, but he also deliberately tried to roll back seventy thousand years of human evolution. He wasn’t the biggest fan of modern humanity.”
“True, but we don’t know why he wanted to do that. The answers are out there.”
“And that’s what this is about. Reducing seven days to four, maybe less, for a few answers.”
“David, we have nowhere to go. If Janus chose these three beacons for a reason, they could be part of a backup plan—his last attempt to save us.”
“Or he could have selected three beacons on the verge of being destroyed—he was trying to destroy these memories.”
“I don’t think he would do that.”
“The bottom line is this: if we step through that beacon, it could be the end of our lives, and if we reveal Earth’s location, the end of humanity. That’s a lot to risk, Kate.”
Dorian had considered several options for storming the portal: throwing a flare through, sending Victor through first, and finally, a more stealth approach.
He drew his knife from his belt, knelt at the portal and slowly inserted it into the light where the arched, glowing dome met the dark metallic floor. He ran the knife along the bottom, the entire four feet width of the portal, careful not to touch the floor or sides, aware the sound could alert his enemy.
The knife met no resistance. They hadn’t barricaded the door. At least not at the bottom. He quickly continued outlining the portal, moving the knife along the sides, and stretching to reach the top, which was just over eight feet tall.
“They haven’t blocked it,” he said to Victor.
A few minutes later, Dorian leaned against the wall, Victor balanced on his shoulders. Victor wavered, then steadied himself with a single palm pressed into the wall.
“Careful,” Dorian snapped. “Remember. Be quick.”
Victor leaned his face into the light only a few inches, right at the top of the dome, and jerked it out. His eyes were wide. “They’re all standing around, arguing.”
“All six?”
“Yeah.”
“Armed?”
“The man and the African woman.”
“Perfect.” This was a break—Dorian couldn’t have hoped for any better. There would be no searching the beacon, no one hiding out, waiting to ambush them. He raced to his gun, which lay on the floor at the center of the room. “Hurry, Victor.”
Paul thought they were getting nowhere. The group had moved the discussion—now, shouting match—to the portal area, conceivably so that David could have an ally in Sonja, who had indeed taken his side, the anti-Atlantis beacon roulette side.
“Give me a better option,” Kate said. “Any option.”
“The SOS,” David countered.
“Is guaranteed to give away Earth’s location. Guaranteed.”
“And we’re guaranteed to live another day.”
 
; “Not necessarily,” Kate shot back. “Same-day-arrival bad guys could be listening.”
“I think we’re getting nowhere,” Paul said.
Mary leaned closer to him. “I think I saw something.”
“What?”
“In the portal.”
The portal flickered at that moment.
David eyed Kate. “Did you program it?”
“Janus’ first destination. I’ll go and come—”
“No. If anyone is going—”
David whipped his head around. Milo was gone.
Then things happened quickly, faster than Paul could follow.
David stepped to the portal, but Kate caught his arm. He turned to her.
Sonja ran through the portal, then David threw Kate’s arm off, stepped through, and Kate rushed after him, leaving Mary and Paul standing there, staring, both their mouths hanging open.
The portal’s light dissolved a split second before Dorian reached it.
“What happened?” Victor asked.
The emergency protocols on the Alpha Lander should have kept the portal connection open, ensuring the only emergency exit remained viable. Dorian worked the control panel, which flashed the words:
Destination portal connection broken.
Dorian tried to connect again.
Destination portal in use.
In use? The enemy could be invading the beacon. Or… Dorian worked the panel, desperate, trying continuously to connect to the beacon’s portal.
Mary took a step toward the portal.
A face broke the surface of the glowing archway, extending only a few inches.
Milo.
His eyes were closed, a look of pain across his face. “Save yourselves!”
Mary grabbed Paul’s forearm, her nails digging in.
Milo opened his eyes and broke into a grin. “I’m just kidding. Come on. It’s okay.”
The instant the portal connection re-established, Dorian ran through and searched the small space station. Empty.