Atlantis: Devil's Sea (11 page)

Pytor screamed as the tips went in between his ribs and split them open, shattering bone, exposing one of his diseased lungs. They seemed to find the cancer most interesting as both hovered there, probing and poking. Blood was flowing out of his chest, he could feel it seeping down over his legs, but one of the tubes that they had put in him was replacing it as quickly as it left.

Then they both disappeared. One—which one he had no idea—reappeared, with a tube. It jabbed it into his chest, right into his heart. Pytor finally passed out.

How long he was unconscious he didn’t know, but when he awoke, one of the creatures was still in front of him. Pytor forced himself to look down. The creature with the blade was cutting, slicing his lung out of this chest. The other lung was already gone. Through his pain, Pytor was amazed. How was he alive? Or was this hell, he suddenly thought, and these were demons tormenting him?

And why was he able to tolerate the pain? It was bad but not what he would have imagined for the damage that had been done to his body. The tube that went into his chest pulsed, and he had to assume that it was supplying his blood with oxygen, although how, he had no idea.

The second creature floated into view, something lumpy and grayish red in its claws. A lung. Pytor had to look away as he felt them working on his chest. He passed out once more.

When he woke once more, the creature was simply there in front of him, not moving, unblinking red eyes staring at him. Pytor looked down. The same transparent wrap was over his chest, covering the muscle and bones. The tube was still stuck in his chest, and he realized he wasn’t breathing: although not painful, this was the most disconcerting experience so far.

Seeing he was awake, the creature reached forward and ripped the tube from his chest with one abrupt jerk. Pytor gasped, air streaming into his mouth, down his throat and to the new lungs. He screamed, the sound echoing through the cavern.

*****

Dane stood on the beach, staring out at Chelsea playing in the Pacific Ocean. The golden retriever would dash out with the surf, then retreat as each wave approached, then repeat it each time as if it were a new experience and she was surprised at the water coming in.

“You’re not very bright,” Dane said.

Chelsea turned and gave him a disapproving look, only to get soaked as the next wave hit her in the side. Dane was also startled as a voice suddenly caught his attention to his left.

“My brother disappeared out there in 1945.” Foreman nodded toward the ocean off the coast of Japan. They were waiting for a helicopter to meet them and fly them north to meet with Nagoya. The runway was adjacent to the beach, and Dane had taken the opportunity to walk Chelsea. He had been surprised when Foreman accompanied him.

“You believe he went into the Devil’s Sea gate?” Dane asked.

“The entire flight, minus my plane, simply disappeared,” Foreman said. “I was spared because I had engine trouble and had to ditch. The weather was fine, visibility to the horizon. They were all experienced pilots on their way back to the carrier. We had the Japanese licked to the point where there was practically no opposition in the air. What else could have caused all those planes to vanish?”

Dane saw no reason to argue with Foreman’s reasoning. The old man had his own crosses to bear with regard to the gates. “You recruited Sin Fen, didn’t you?” Dane asked instead.

Foreman nodded. “She was living on the streets of Phnom Penh. Barely surviving. I sensed something about her, that she had some connection with the gates. Just as I sensed it about you.”

“Are you sure you recruited her,” Dane said, “and it wasn’t the other way around?”

“What do you mean?”

“What she did to stop the Bermuda Triangle gate,” Dane said, “was not normal, to say the least. She was special. It seems strange that you would be so lucky to simply find her on the streets of Phnom Penh. It seems more logical that she sought you out.”

“What difference does it make?” Foreman asked.

“The difference,” Dane said, “is that if she sought you out, then you’re not running things like you want to believe.” He let the silence after that statement last for several seconds before he spoke again. “You had no idea she was part of the pyramid system or the role she was to play. The problem, as I see it, is that Sin Fen is gone now, and we’re on our own.”

“And?” Foreman finally asked.

“And,” Dane said, “I suggest you start being honest with me. Stop making plans behind my back and informing me of them after the fact. We might have been able to get that information about the gate without losing the
Reveille
or the
Deepflight
and all those people.”

“I do what I have to do,” Foreman said.

“One of these days
you’re
going to be the point man,” Dane said.

“And if I am, I’ll do my duty,” Foreman said.

Dane realized that Foreman meant what he said. He was willing to give up his life if it meant defeating the Shadow.

“There’s another problem,” Dane said.

“Which is?”

“We don’t have another Sin Fen handy,” Dane said.

“And?”

“And that means we don’t’ have and important piece that’s needed to shut a gate,” Dane said. “She came from a long line of priestesses. Do you have any information on that?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Dane said.

“There’ve been many cults that promoted priestesses,” Foreman said. “And, yes, I’ve looked into them. I’ll have a copy of the file forwarded for you. But I don’t have a line on a
current
group.

“Sin Fen was current,” Dane noted.

“I’m not an idiot,” Foreman said. “I checked Sin Fen out as much as I could. She was an orphan on the streets of Phnom Penh. I think she was descended from the priestesses of Angkor, but the line has been scattered, and it was the power of the gate and my investigating it that drew her to me, not a deliberate plan on her part.”

“How did she know her role in the pyramid?” Dane asked.

“That I don’t know. I would assume some sort of genetic memory. Or the voices of the gods you two were babbling about.”

Dane wasn’t sure how much he agreed with Foreman. It could have been genetic memory, or it could have been the voices of the gods that he himself heard: where that came from or what exactly it was, he didn’t know, but he was learning to trust that inner voice more and more.

“How would—” Foreman began, but Dane held up a hand, hushing him.

Chelsea was absolutely still in knee-deep water, her head cocked, ears erect, looking out to sea. Dane almost mimicked her pose, intense, still, except his eyes were closed as he tried to see with his special sense.

There was a strong presence in the water not far away. Dane didn’t feel any danger, but the presence was something he had never experienced before, very foreign and alien. He picked up thoughts but could make no sense of them. Correction. There were several presences, highly intelligent, very close by, studying Foreman, Chelsea, and him on the beach from the security of the water.

“What is it?” Foreman finally asked.

Dane held his hand up once more. Foreman’s voice an irritating insect’s buzz in his ear. He took a step into the water toward Chelsea. The fact that the dog showed no sign of fear he took as encouraging. He knelt in the surf next to Chelsea, putting a hand on her neck. For some strange reason, he knew that the dog was actually picking up the strange presence better than he was.

Dane scanned the surface of the water. He saw a spray of water in the air, then a dorsal fin cutting the blue surface, curving around, coming toward him and Chelsea. He stood.

“Dane!” Foreman’s voice was alarmed.

But Dane could see the fin change course once more and head to his right. He turned, then was startled as Chelsea leapt through the surf in the same direction. Dane splashed after her.

Fifty meters down the beach, something was caught on the beach in the area between water and land, struggling in the outgoing tide. It was about two feet long and bluish gray and also sported a small dorsal fin. Dane relaxed when he realized he was looking at a baby dolphin. Chelsea ran right up to it and pushed it with her nose, helping it out toward the ocean.

In a few seconds, the small dolphin was in deep enough water to swim. It shot away from Chelsea, who gave a triumphant bark, then galloped back to Dane.

“Good girl,” Dane said, as he turned back toward Foreman, but then he picked up something from Chelsea. Together, they looked out to sea. A row of dolphins, at least a dozen, were coming toward them, fins cutting the surface. Then they all stopped about twenty meters away and rose up on their tails, half out of the water, dark eyes staring at Dane and Chelsea.

One of them, a magnificent specimen almost fifteen feet long, moved slightly forward. Chelsea barked. Dane knew that the dolphin was communicating in some way with his dog, but he couldn’t pick up anything directly. Then he saw it, relayed from Chelsea: a darkness in the ocean, danger.

Just as quickly as they had come, the dolphins turned and disappeared beneath the waves. Dane was startled as the sound of helicopter blades slicing through air cut into his conscious mind. A Japanese military chopper came in low over the water, circled, and set down. The side door slid open, and a crew member waved for them to get on board.

“What the hell was that all about?” Foreman demanded as Dane helped Chelsea on board.

“We’re not in this alone,” Dane said.

*****

Ariana Michelet got out of the Lincoln Town Car on Central Park West and stared up at the large sphere enclosed in a glass cube: the Frederick Phineas & Sandra Priest Rose Center for the Earth and Space. The glass cube was ninety-five feet on each side, and the sphere inside housed the Hayden Planetarium. Lit by colored searchlights, the sphere, inside the glass, was a magnificent sight.

She stood still for a few moments looking at it. The sphere, the interior upper half of which was the most sophisticated virtual reality machine in the world, had always seemed large to her. It was eighty-seven feet in diameter and weighed over two thousand tons. Impressive it was, but she knew that it was dwarfed by the sphere that had come out of the gate.

Shrugging off the disturbing image, she turned and headed for the front steps of the American Museum of Natural History. Since her father was one of the largest contributors to the building of the new planetarium, her phone call to the museum’s curator asking for assistance had been greeted with quick acquiescence.

The person waiting at the top of the stairs, Jaka Van Liten, had agreed to meet Ariana here because of the nature of the subject matter of the meeting: crystal skulls. As Ariana got closer, she could see that Van Liten was a small, wizened old woman, clutching a leather briefcase in her gnarled hands. Ariana had found the woman’s name on the Internet, constantly mentioned as the number one expert in the world on crystal skulls and purported to own quite a few in her personal collection. Ariana’s invitation to join her at the museum to see its crystal skull had been greeted with enthusiasm by Van Liten, who lived in Manhattan and was only a short cab ride from the museum.

“Good evening, Ms. Van Liten,” Ariana greeted her as she arrived at the top of the stairs. “I’m Ariana Michelet. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

“Michelet,” Van Liten said. “I knew your father many years ago.”

Ariana had not known that. “Where did you meet him?”

“My family is like yours. The same circles. I’ve been a recluse for the past ten years, but before that, I was quite… how shall we say… a party girl.”

Ariana smiled at the thought of this little old lady with his father. The smiled disappeared though when Van Liten asked a question.

“Are the skulls connected to these gates that are causing so much trouble?”

“We’re checking into that,” Ariana hedged. She noted that a guard was waiting for them, holding a door to the now-closed museum open for them. “Shall we go inside?”

She escorted the old woman through the door. The click of their heels echoed in the massive Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. A middle-aged man in a white coat and sporting a most serious manner was waiting for them in the center of the hall.

“Good evening,” Ariana said as they approached.

“I’m
Dr
. Fleidman,” he said, emphasizing his title.

Ariana introduced herself and Van Liten, picking up the doctor’s disdain for both her and the old woman. Ariana held back telling him of her own two PhD’s having run into this type of person before.

“This way,” Fleidman said and began walking away, causing them to hurry to keep up. As they passed through the hall, Ariana Michelet remembered her first visit to the museum as a child and her predominant memories were of the model of the huge squid that hung in one hallway and the squid fighting a large blue whale in another. She had found that place wondrous and returned many times over the years. The museum was located right across from Central Park, where Central Park West and West Seventy-ninth Street intersected, taking up an entire city block.

They exited the Roosevelt entrance hall and turned left, going into the Hall of Biodiversity, where the arms of the squid cast strange shadows on the walls. As they passed under the squid, Fleidman caught Ariana looking up at it.

“It’s the oldest model on display in the museum,” he said. “Purchased in 1895. Made of papier-mâché and forty-two feet long. We actually have a real giant squid body, twenty-five feet long, that was brought here in 1998.”

Ariana nodded. They’d recovered videos from the
Glomar
of the attack by the strange, squid like creatures—krakens, Dane had called them—with tentacles that ended in mouths. She knew there would be no model of that bizarre creature, because it wasn’t part of this world’s natural history.

They reached the Hall of Gems and Minerals, Fleidman’s domain. He stopped at a box just outside the entrance and punched in a code. “The hall is very secure. Laser detectors, pressure sensors, and constant live video feed.” He waved up at an unseen camera. “There is, of course, ample need for such security. We have over one hundred fourteen thousand specimens. Ninety thousand minerals, twenty thousand rocks and four thousand gems. Of note, we have the Star of India, which is the world’s largest blue star sapphire.” He pointed to his right as they passed a glass case, and Ariana could see the sapphire, highlighted by a single light above it.