Atlantis Gate

CHAPTER 19

Dane had no idea how long he and Amelia Earhart had been motionless, floating above the Reflecting Pool, looking at the ruins of Washington DC. The extent of the devastation was beyond overwhelming. Without a word they floated forward toward the remains of the Washington Monument.

They passed the monument, continuing toward Capitol Hill when they both stopped and turned to the left. The White House was gone. Scorched earth was all that remained.

“Oh no. Oh no.” Earhart was repeating the phrase as if by doing so she could keep the horror of what they were seeing at bay.

Dane paused, slowly turning inside the Valkyrie suit to look at something less than ten feet away. A car. The metal twisted and scorched but the make still recognizable. He blinked. But the screen showed the same thing. His heart accelerated.

He could be wrong.

He twisted slightly. Another car. Then another. He studied each one.

“Amelia.”

She was still muttering her mantra.

“Amelia!” Dane’s voice was sharp. “Listen to me.”

She was silent for a few moments. “What?” she finally asked.

“This is—” Dane was at a loss for words. “The cars,” he finally got out.

“What about them?” Earhart turned toward him.

“They’re old,” Dane finally said.

“Old? I don’t recognize them.”

“They’re after your time,” Dane allowed, “but they’re not my time. Thirty years before my time. Late fifties. Early sixties.” It clicked then for Dane. “This was the vision. The one I saw with Frost. The Cuban missile crisis. The Russians launched. The bomb went off.” Dane spun about. Where the Lincoln Memorial had been there was a crater. There was a cab.

Dane moved forward. And there was a cab, the yellow burnt off it, but in the exact spot outside the White House where he had seen Frost stop it. Floating in the air a few feet above the ground; seeing Washington destroyed; having traveled through the space-between; all that had happened to him recently from the Angkor Gate through the Bermuda Triangle Gate to the Devil’s Sea Gate; Dane’s brain was beyond overwhelmed.

He began hyperventilating and the suit’s air processor couldn’t keep up with the demand, given that someone inside had no real physical exertion. Darkness swept over him like a tidal wave and he passed out.

Captain Stokes blinked several times, trying to get oriented. A man was leaning over him silhouetted by a light that wasn’t the sun.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“What? Who are you?” Stokes tried to sit up and the man put a hand behind his shoulders, helping him.

“Assistant surgeon Asper, USS Cyclops.”

“Cyclops?” Stokes frowned, trying to place the ship. The Navy was down to less than three hundred ships in the post Cold War era and Stokes had served for over twenty years, but he couldn’t fix the name with a ship he knew.

“Fleet?” Stokes asked.

“Naval Auxiliary Force, Caribbean.”

“What?”

“Sir, the Cyclops was collier, a—“

“A what?”

“A coal ship.”

“Coal?”

“Sir, the Cyclops was lost in March, 1918, while returning from Brazil. We were northwest of Puerto Rico when a cloud appeared off our port bow. The captain—” Asper paused and Stokes could hear the disgust in the man’s voice—“he decided to stay on course and we went into the fog.”

“The Bermuda Triangle?”

“Aye, I hear that’s what you people call it.”

“And here?”

“The Space Between, sir.”

Stokes’ head felt clearer. He slowly got to his feet. He noted the other members of his crew who were still unconscious. His executive officer. His chief dive chief petty officer. His engineering officer. His chief sonar man.

Why those? Of all his crew.

Then he realized. If he had to run his ship with an absolute minimum of personnel, they were the five he would choose.

Foreman had a stack of reports in front of him, ranging from damage reports concerning the ‘disaster on the Mississippi’ as the press was calling it, to classified Pentagon updates on the modification of cruise missiles to go through the gates/portals.

He was startled out of his reading by Ahana sliding a single piece of paper on top of the document.

“What is this?” Foreman asked as he picked it up.

“An update on the timeline.”

The numbers were bleak. “Forty hours?”

“Yes, sir. And there will be other activity before then.”

“What exactly happens ‘then’?” Foreman asked.

“The core will explode.”

“God-damnit, wake up.”

The voice was insistent. Dane tried to block it out, but it was bringing him back to consciousness.

“We can’t hang around here forever,” Earhart was right next to him, hovering six inches above the street. Dully, Dane noted that the asphalt had melted and then reformed.

“I’m OK,” he murmured.

“Geez, don’t do that again,” Earhart said. “You were just hanging there.”

“How long?” Dane asked.

“Who knows how long,” Earhart said. “I haven’t had a sense of time since my plane went down.”

Dane looked up and for the first time noted that the sky was a uniform gray and he couldn’t tell where the sun was. The sight of the destroyed buildings had been so strong, that he had overlooked the other effects of the nuclear war. “God, we sure screwed things up, didn’t we?” Then another piece of reality snapped in. “This place has got to be hot.”

“Hot?”

“Radioactivity. This is the result of a nuclear war,” Dane said. “The bombs leave behind an effect that is deadly.”

“I know what radioactivity is,” Earhart said.

“The suits—” Dane nodded, once more realizing it couldn’t be seen. “They must protect against it somehow.”

“What do we do now?” Earhart asked.

“Why did Rachel send us here?” Dane wondered out loud, not responding to her question. “This didn’t happen.”

“Then what are we seeing?” Earhart asked.

Dane was completely confused. He pushed aside the questions hammering at his mind and concentrated on the first question she had asked — what to do now?

“Let’s go back to the portal in the Reflecting Pool.” He turned and moved back toward the Mall. His sense of dread grew as he got closer and when the Reflecting Pool came into sight he knew that his fear was well grounded — the portal was gone.

“Oh, this is good,” Earhart said.

“Shh.” Dane closed his eyes. Rachel had to have sent them here for a reason. Was it just to see this or- “There’s got to be another portal nearby.”

“Where?”

“Let me listen.”

“’Listen’?” but Earhart fell silent, waiting.

Dane remembered the vision of Frost. The meeting with Kennedy. Leaving. Getting in the cab. Getting out of the cab. Dane felt a pang of excitement — Frost had forgotten something! Dane turned to the south. Looking across the Tidal Basin. A dome stood, the marble scorched and blackened.

“There,” Dane said.

“The Jefferson Memorial?”

Dane was already moving, forcing the suit forward, floating across the mall. He went in a straight line, right over the Tidal Basin. He noted that the Cherry trees that had graced the way were nothing but stumps.

He floated up the stairs and into the center where the statue of Jefferson loomed over him. And at the base was a black circle. It was their way out, they both knew, but both halted, looking up at the statue for several moments.

Then they went through.