Atlantis Gate

CHAPTER 23

“Where’s the water?” Dane asked.

They were on what had been the bank of the Potomac, but the riverbed was dry, unless some thin blowing snow was considered.

“The Shadow took the water,” Ariana said. “All of the fresh water they could tap through portals. And quite a bit of the oceans also. The shore of the Atlantic is about sixty miles that way, that’s how much water the Shadow has taken. In your timeline the Shadow takes power and people, but it wants more. Once it has sucked a world dry of those two, it moves to other materials. Water. Air.”

“Who is the Shadow?” Dane asked.

“I don’t know,” Ariana replied. “An intelligent race, if doing this to planets can be considered intelligent. One that has learned to move in both time and space using the portals and gates. Who understands how to use physics we were just beginning to learn existed.”

“Slow down,” Dane said. “What do you know about the portals and gates? What’s the difference between the two? Why is there just a portal in some places—” he pointed at the black circle they had come through—“and sometimes the portal is hidden inside a gate?”

“I don’t exactly know,” Ariana admitted. “My best guess from what I’ve seen and learned, is that the Shadow can open portals. Gates are a by-product, most likely occurring when some of the Shadow’s world spills through the portal into our world. When that happens some of the creatures from the Shadow’s world come through also, such as the kraken.”

That made sense to Dane, the first thing that had in quite a while. “So the Shadow attacks various Earth timelines via portals to scavenge them?”

“Yes. There must be many parallel Earths, each a little different from each other and the Shadow has been pillaging them. I remember reading a research paper where the author postulated an almost infinite number of parallel universes, existing side by side, but separated slightly by time and space.”

Earhart’s voice cut in. “And the Ones Before? Have you met them?”

“No. I’ve received visions of what I am to do.”

“And that is?” Dane asked.

“I’ve done it — most of it by showing this world and telling you of the timelines and parallel worlds.”

“We need a map of the portals,” Dane said.

“There’s something else I need to show you first,” Ariana said. She turned toward the west and began moving, Dane and Earhart hurrying to keep up.

There were so many questions running through Dane’s head, but he didn’t know which one to ask first. There was a high ridge ahead and Dane tried to remember if there had been such a terrain feature west of Washington in his timeline world, but he couldn’t recollect one.

When Ariana reached the top of the ridge, she paused and waited for them to catch up. Dane slid to a halt next to her, bobbing in the air for a few moments before the suit came to a stop. His questions were forgotten for the moment as he took in what had caused the ridge.

The top edge of a massive black sphere was all that could be seen, but from the quarter mile high ridge he was standing on, and from his experiences, Dane knew he was looking at one of the spheres that was used to traverse the large portals and capture ships and planes. It must have struck the ground hard given how far it was driven into the ground, but it appeared to be intact.

“That’s what captured me,” Earhart said.

“It is one of the Shadow’s craft,” Ariana said.

“What happened?” Dane asked.

“I don’t know. I was given a vision of it here and I knew I needed to show this to you.”

“It looks like it crashed — hard,” Earhart added.

As far as Dane could remember, all contacts with the spheres had been in the water. “It can move in the air?”

“Obviously,” Ariana said.

“Would the map be on board?” Dane asked.

“No. The ship was stripped by the Shadow after it crashed.”

Dane felt a surge of frustration. “Where is the map?”

Ariana must have picked up his mood. “You need to know what the map is of — what the portals are. There are indeed several portals that lead to the Shadow’s world, but most are between parallel Earth time-lines.”

“OK,” Dane said. “I understand that now. But my, our timeline—” he pointed at Earhart—“is running out of time.”

“I know,” Ariana said. “When the Shadow activates the core portal via the Nazca Plain, it is the last stage of scavenging. It has happened to other Earths. They no longer exist.”

“The map,” Dane snapped.

“Come.” Ariana began moving to the south and west, crossing what had once been the Potomac.

“Where do the ships go?” Captain Stokes asked Asper. The rest of the survivors of his crew were gathered behind him in Earhart’s camp. They were all battered and bruised but functional, and that was all that Stokes was concerned with. Several of the samurai, including Taki, were also standing close by.

“There’s a graveyard, a couple of them as far as we know, on Earth,” Asper said. “Deep under the ocean. A big cavern.”

“How do we get there?” Stokes asked.

“I imagine through a portal,” Asper said. “The problem with that is that there is a good chance the portal is hot and you’ll get fried and die like—” he pointed at Noonan’s body—“that poor fellow.”

Stokes turned to Taki. “This Dane fellow — he came through on a ship, didn’t he?”

Taki stared at him blankly and Stokes cursed. He knelt down and drew a rough outline of a submersible in the black sand. He pointed at it. Taki nodded and pointed toward the inner sea.

“But you still won’t know which portal to go through,” Asper pointed out.

Taki was kneeling and drawing something next to Stokes sketch. Stokes frowned. “A shark?” he asked as he noted the fin on top of the form that was drawn.

“No, a dolphin,” Asper said. “Last time they came through they had a dolphin leading them.”

“Is it still in the water with the submersible?” Stokes asked.

“Only one way to find out,” Asper said as he gestured to Taki, then pointed toward the inner sea.

Deep underneath Lake Tahoe straddling the California-Nevada border, the Earth cracked and then belched. A rude term for the hundreds of thousands of tons of molten lava that surged up through the sudden crack and met the cold water at the bottom of the lake. As the front edge of the lava solidified, the mass behind it continued to press forward cracking through, solidifying then being cracked in turn.

Hundreds of miles and the width of California away from the nearest ocean, people living on the banks of Lake Tahoe, had never considered the possibility of a tsunami. Their first warning was when a sixty foot wave of water, displaced by the crack and surging lava, came sweeping across the normally placid surface of the lake, heading both east and west.

Thousands died staring at the water in shock and amazement. The survivors were treated to a rather unique event, one unknown to those who had survived ocean tsunamis. Trapped in the borders of the relatively small lake, the tsunami waves recoiled off the shorelines and both oscillated. As they went back and forth, sometimes they canceled each other out, sometimes they hit the shore at the same time and doubled the strength.

This was to continue for almost twenty-four hours, the dual waves gradually losing power, but long enough to completely desolate all living things around the lake.

The Russians had known there was a gate inside Lake Baikal ever since they’d become aware of the existence of what their early scientists termed Vile Vortices in the late forties. The discovery had been shocking, both for the fact there was a gate, and the location.

Baikal was a place that was held close to the heart of Russians; even the vast majority in the East who had never seen its waters. It was as if the people knew what scientists had discovered about it — that it was the world’s oldest and deepest lake. It also held a fifth of the world’s fresh water within its seven hundred kilometer length in southern Siberia. That was more water than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined.

The lake drew its extreme depth from the unusual fact that it was at the joining of three tectonic plates. Plates that were spreading apart from each other, producing a fissure in the planet. This had been going on for over thirty million years and the fissure was estimated to be over forty kilometers deep, although the lake, at its deepest, was only just over a kilometer and a half deep. The rest of the fissure was filled with sediment brought into the lake from the over three hundred rivers and streams that fed it. This was the planet’s deepest land depression, far deeper than that of the Rift Valley although not as long.

The entire area, because of the moving plates, was rocked by mild earthquakes almost daily. In 1861 a large quake had caused over three hundred and ten square kilometers of land on a peninsula to simply disappear into the dark water.

The lake even had species of life in it that were found nowhere else in the world. How these life forms came about had been a mystery until Professor Kolkov arrived in the area in the early fifties to try to pinpoint the location of the Vile Vortice he believed to reside somewhere within the shores of the lake. After locating the Gate, Kolkov had postulated — in classified papers read only at the highest levels in the Soviet Union — that some of the unique creatures had come through the Gate from the Shadow’s world.

The aborigine people who had lived around the lake before the arrival of the Russians from the East were called the Buryat. They believed that gods dwelled in the depths of the lake. The most feared of those was Doshkin-noyon who stole ships and the men who crewed them from the surface of the lake during times of storm and fog. Buryat fisherman still made a toast of vodka to the demon god, a cupped handful tossed into the water, before venturing onto the lake.

While it has many feeders, the lake has only one outlet, the Angara River. It was estimated that there was so much fresh water in the lake that even if all the inlets stopped, the lake would still take over four hundred years to drain out via the Angara.

A second feeder was opening up at the very bottom of the lake. Inside the Baikal Gate, a massive portal, over a mile wide, opened. And into it poured the water. The opening of the portal was noted by the Super-kamiokande in Japan and the information was forward to Kolkov. He accessed his monitoring stations at Baikal and it only took a minute before the change was noted — the water level had dropped over a foot in that short amount of time, an astonishing amount given the size of the lake.

All along the shoreline the Buryat and others who lived there could see the water level dropping.

Ignoring the quiet hum of activity in the FLIP control center, Foreman glanced at the clock, noting that only thirty-two hours remained before the planet’s core went critical. The reports of disaster were flowing in — the Mississippi, Lake Tahoe, Southeast Africa and now the news that Lake Baikal was being drained. There was no sign of Dane and the power flow through the Nazca fault continued unabated. For almost fifty years Foreman had studied the gates and he sat, impotent, as they were active all over the world, draining his planet of power and water.

“Another portal has opened,” Ahana announced.

“A new one?” Foreman had mapped out sixteen gates over the years, but in recent days new ones were popping up all over the place.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Ahana was looking at a piece of paper she had just pulled out of the printer. “The stratosphere just above the Antarctic.”

Foreman didn’t understand at first. “The what?”

Ahana pointed up. “The stratosphere. Just south of Argentina.”

“How high is that?” Foreman asked.

“Over fifteen kilometers up.”

“What the hell is it doing there?” Foreman wondered as he pulled out his SATPhone. “There’s only one thing I can think of that can get there quickly and go that high. I’m going to scramble Aurora to check it out.”

The remote location in Nevada was known by many names: Area 51; Dreamland; Groom Lake; S-4; the Ranch and a half-dozen others. The Air Force insisted it didn’t exist even though satellite imagery of its runway, the longest in the world at seven miles, were posted on the Internet.

It was where the SR-71, the B-1 and B-2 bombers, and the Stealth fighter had been test-bedded and first flown. Located northwest of Las Vegas, it was in one of the most desolate and isolated parts of the United States. The base was set alongside of Groom Mountain and the long runway stretched along a dry lake bed.

Responding to Foreman’s call a strange looking craft rolled out of a hanger cut into the side of the mountain. The shape of the ‘plane’ if it could be called that was un-traditional, as there were no wings. The body was a solid V, long and sleek. It was over two hundred and fifty feet long and a hundred feet at its widest. It’s official, classified Air Force designation was the SR-75 Penetrator, but it was more commonly called Aurora. There was even a testor model on the market that was a very good approximation of the craft.

The skin of the aircraft was dull black and consisted of a special composite that could handle extreme temperatures, both cold and hot, and was radar absorptive. There were two small windows up front, more of a solace to the human pilots than necessary for flying the craft as its velocity at top speed was so great that by the time a pilot saw something with his eyes, it would be too late to maneuver.

The SR-75 had a crew of three, a pilot, navigator and systems officer. All were tightly strapped into form-fitting crash seats with a plethora of displays and controls within easy reach. Each man wore a suit similar to an astronauts and breathed oxygen from an on-board supply.

The pilot, Colonel Richards, received a go from the Area 51 tower, and gradually began accelerating the aircraft using the plane’s conventional turbo-jet engine. It took over three miles of runway before the unique shape of the plane produced enough lift for the plane to separate from the ground.

Richards pointed the nose upward at a sixty degree angle, while turning the plane to the south. The acceleration pressed all three crew-members deep into their seats. As the SR-75 passed through ten kilometers it also broke the sound barrier. Richards kept the craft angled up, gaining altitude as it accelerated. When they reached twenty kilometers, he began to level them out. His display indicated they were moving at Mach Two. The conventional turbo-jet engine was beginning to struggle to get enough oxygen at this altitude.

“Switching to PDWE,” Richards announced over the intercom.

He moved his finger over the stick and pressed a red button. The entire plane shuddered as the high speed engine kicked in. PDWE stood for pulsed-detonation-wave-engine. Underneath the conventional engines, the PDWE consisted of a series of high-strength compression chambers. A special fuel mixture, including oxygen, was being pumped into them. An explosion occurred in each chamber in sequence, which formed the high pressure pulse they had just felt. The pulse was sent out of specially designed vents on the rear of the aircraft providing propulsion.

As the explosions occurred faster and faster, the shuddering almost settled into a steady rumble. Aurora passed through Mach 3, then 4 and was still accelerating. The plane was already over Mexico and only eight minutes out from Area 51.

Richards kept a tight eye on the controls and when a display indicated relative speed at Mach 7—over five thousand miles an hour, he finally locked down the throttle. They were covering a mile and a third every second.

“Nav, give me a fix,” Richards asked. His screen flickered for a second, then a green line indicating their planned route appeared. A moment later a red line indicating the craft’s true position updated every five seconds via ground positioning satellites appeared on his main screen. The red was right on top of the green from Nevada through their current location.

“Right on track,” his navigator confirmed what the screen displayed.

“What are we heading toward?” Richards asked his systems officer, Major Rodriguez.

“Target is located one hundred and twenty miles east of the Falklands,” Rodriguez reported. “It is moving on a northward course at a speed of two hundred miles an hour. Target information is originating from muon transmissions being tracked by the super-kamiokande in Japan.”

Richards frowned. He’d read the classified reports on the Gates and they’d been told upon alert that this had something to do with that, but he preferred hard targeting data. “Anything from satellites?” he asked.

“No current coverage of that area,” Rodriguez reported.

Other than the British during the Falkland War, Richards knew, no one much cared about what happened in that part of the world, so it made sense there would be no spy satellites covering the area.

“Nav, ETA at target?” he asked.

“Twelve minutes, thirty-six seconds and counting.”

“What the hell is down there?” Richards wondered out loud.

The water level had dropped over fifty feet already in Lake Baikal. Stunned Russians lined the shore, watching.

Stunned Americans looked out over a massive lake eighty miles long by twenty miles wide, stretching from New Madrid up and downstream. The current of the Mississippi ran through the center of the lake. Corpses continued to surface.

“Let’s take this slow,” Richards said as he throttled back Aurora from Mach 7. They were over Bolivia with the Paraguay/Argentinean border rapidly approaching. Piloting Aurora was vastly different than even a jet fighter. When Richards thought of turning, he had to consider entire countries to be crossed. He wasn’t worried about violating sovereign airspace — they were so high no radar would pick them up as no one would think of ‘painting’ their altitude. By the time Richards had them ‘slowed’ to Mach 3, they were over Buenos Aires and then over the South Atlantic.

“Range?” Richards called out. Technically he could glance at his display and see the read-out, but he was old-school. He believed they were a crew and each man had to be responsible for his specific area. It was also good for morale if the other two crew members felt like they were pulling their weight. He continued to slow the plane below Mach 2.

“Two hundred clicks,” the navigator announced. “ETA in two minutes.”

“Paint me something,” Richards told Rodriguez.

“Extending imaging pod,” Rodriguez announced.

From the belly of the SR-75, a small door slid back. A hydraulic arm extended downward holding a cluster of sophisticated cameras that could pick up from infrared through ultraviolet and thermal images. If they were traveling any faster the entire array would be ripped off, another reason for Richard’s throttle back.

“One minute, thirty seconds,” the navigator reported.

Richards glanced down. Next to his forward looking display a smaller screen showed the imaging. “What the hell?” Richards muttered. A black rectangle filled the screen, almost filling from top to bottom and extending beyond the left and right limits. “Wide angle,” he ordered.

“That is wide angle,” Rodriguez said.

“Geez.” The word came out of Richards’s mouth without conscious thought even as he automatically pulled back on the throttle. “How big is that?” he asked, even though he had no idea what ‘that’ was.

“Radar indicates over two hundred miles wide by twenty high,” Rodriguez reported.

“What is it?” Richards asked as he checked his speed. Almost down to Mach 1.

“Thirty seconds,” the navigator announced.

Richards pushed his stick hard left, beginning a turn. He ignored his screens and looked out the small, thick windows in front of him, twisting his head to the right as the plane turned.

He saw it.

He would have been blind not to see it.

Stretching from horizon to horizon, left to right, a lattice work of black struts supported panels of gray material. The scale was beyond what Richards or his two crewmembers could comprehend. And in the very center was a black sphere a half mile in diameter. Even as they watched, more panels were unfolding at the ends, extending it further and further.

Lightning crackled around the panels and even forty kilometers away, the men aboard Aurora could feel the hair on the back of their necks tingle and raise.

“What the hell is that thing doing?” Richards wondered as he completed the turn.

On board the FLIP, Foreman echoed Richards’ question. And he received an answer. “Water and air,” Ahana whispered, staring at the image relayed from Aurora.

“What?” Foreman demanded.

“The Shadow is draining Baikal, getting fresh water.” Ahana pointed up. “We have a better idea of the layers of the atmosphere surrounding the planet than the layers inside the planet given the simple fact that man has traveled through all those layers on their way into space. That doesn’t necessarily mean that any intelligence has been attached to the knowledge gained.” She tapped the imagery. “From the surface of the planet reaching up to fifteen kilometers is the troposphere. The next five kilometers — where this thing is- is the transition between troposphere and stratosphere, which extends outward from twenty to fifty kilometers. A relatively small constituent element of the stratosphere is made of three oxygen molecules bonded together. It is called ozone.”

“Oxygen came into the Earth’s atmosphere approximately two billion years ago as a by-product of photosynthesis of early forms of plant life. Enough by-product was produced over time to make oxygen a large component of air, which extends upward almost three hundred kilometers from the surface. At the top, in the rarified upper atmosphere, high energy ultraviolet radiation from the sun hits circulating O2 molecules, splitting them into their constituent atoms. The single atoms swirl together to form O3, or ozone, which in time breaks down to oxygen, which in a perpetual dance circulates up and is split down to individual atoms and then back into ozone.”

“There isn’t much ozone in the stratosphere. If it were at surface level, the layer would be no more than a tenth of an inch thick. But it is a very important tenth of an inch because it screens out long wave ultraviolet-C light and most ultraviolet-B radiation. Both of these are extremely harmful to living organisms.”

“It was only in 1974 that we began to realize both how important this layer of ozone was and how damaged something that had taken a billion years to develop became in less than a century. It started in the 1930s when man invented chlorine, fluorine and carbon compounds, known as CFCs for industrial applications. CFCs react with practically nothing and thus once used, float into the atmosphere, rise up to the ozone layer and above where the UV radiation finally breaks them down, releasing chlorine or bromine, which does react with ozone, destroying it. It isn’t just man that affects the ozone. Erupting volcanoes spew ash that also interacts with ozone, depleting it.”

“It appears to me that the Shadow is using this thing to take in both oxygen and ozone. Notice the discharges. Hell, that thing could be breaking the O-2 and O-3 down to single molecules for transport back, then reconstitute them when it goes through the Gate.”

Ahana sat down wearily, rubbing her fingers against her temples. “The Shadow is stripping us of our most precious resources. Even if we stop the core destruction, there might not be anything to save.”