Atlantis Endgame (6 page)

Both of them were waiting beside the beautifully crafted little boat that would be their trading vessel. Its simple lines concealed an amazing concentration of equipment, including, fastened along the bottom, a small undersea sled for scuba exploration.

"Everyone in," Ashe said, waving his hand.

They climbed in, Stavros and Konstantin going down into the hold where the electronics that would synchronize them with the time-gate were hidden.

Linnea Edel looked around, ran her hands up her arms. With a pang of compassion, Eveleen saw that the skin along her arms was rough with goose bumps. She was frightened; that was easy enough to see.

"I think I'll ride this one out below," Linnea said with a faint smile.

Ashe nodded once, and the older woman vanished below as well, to seat herself among the carefully aged wooden barrels that would, if the mission were extraordinarily lucky, return full of volcanic test materials and various Theran goods—

Kallistan goods,
Eveleen thought, correcting herself.
The island is now Kalliste.

Kallistan goods for the scientific brains back home to happily pore over.

"You two going below?" Ashe asked. Eveleen couldn't quite get used to his gaze, suddenly so dark. Even though she knew that the effect was just caused by lenses, they still gave him a faintly sinister air.

Ross shook his head once. "Want to see."

There was no enjoyment in his tone. Eveleen knew that Ross, in fact, hated the translation between one time and another as much as she did. It was too easy, when one saw that glaring light, and smelled the energy-tortured air, to believe that humans were never meant to endure that wrench.

But endure it they would. The Russians had lost an entire base in the Baltic through a misunderstanding of how the big portals worked. They insisted they had mastered it, and supposedly here was the proof.

Eveleen thought, as the cargo bay doors began to widen, that if anything went awry, hopefully they would never know what hit them.

"Sit toward the center," Stavros said in heavily accented English.

"Speak Ancient Greek," Ashe corrected, using the Greek of Linear B, so painfully decoded just within the past twenty-five years.

Why is he being dogmatic?
Eveleen thought, looking Gordon's way. Then she thought back to the hasty training, the many sessions prefaced with "As you've already learned," and "As you well know ..."

They did know. That is, all of them except Linnea. Just the day before Kelgarries had taken Ross and Eveleen aside and said, "Your archaeological expert is a first-class academic, and you can rely on her for information. But she only sat through training tapes. There wasn't time for anything else. Watch out for her."

Eveleen sighed. Of course they would watch out for one another. And, so Linnea Edel hadn't had the full course of training? Neither had Ross, once upon a time. And Linnea seemed a lot more sensible than a very young Ross probably had been.

At the inward image of a very young, and impetuous, Ross, she grinned. Stavros flashed her a smile, raised a hand, and then restated in the language they'd all been drilling as hard as they could, day and night: "Sit along the keel."

Ashe, Eveleen and Ross settled along the benches running down the middle of the narrow deck, under a very plain awning. The great engines of the cargo ship thrummed through the wood of the boat, making Eveleen's bones thrum in vibration.

The boat slid, at first slowly, then faster and faster down a ramp, until it shot out onto the choppy waters of the Aegean, reflecting lights from the three ships now steaming in an exact parallel.

Water sprayed up, cooling their faces with shocking suddenness. The boat shuddered and wallowed, and Eveleen clasped her hands tightly together, determined to show no nervousness. She so much preferred to be taking action herself, but this was not part of her job: she could do nothing.

As she forced herself into the steady breathing she'd made second nature during her long studies in martial arts, the boat settled into the rhythm of the waves. Stavros and Konstantin efficiently deployed the single sail, and then sheeted it home.

Now the little boat came alive, lifting the prow up and over the waves. The wind was little more than a gentle breeze, but these shallow craft had been designed for the trickish zephyrs of the Mediterranean climate, and the cargo ship fell away with surprising speed behind them, until it was just running lights against the black horizon.

Eveleen tipped her head back and looked up at the full moon, the Pleiades stretched across the sky like a broken necklace.

The two Russian ships ahead on either side were black silhouettes against a sky barely lit by a gibbous moon. Then a sheath of blue light flickered over their hulls. The air seemed to tighten, and Eveleen thought she heard, deep below the range of human hearing, a vast bell toll, rolling like an irresistible tide through her body. Ahead the sea glowed, a line of bluish light drawn through the chop between the two ships. She heard the slap of flying fish on either side of their small craft as sea life fled the sudden tension in the fabric of the world. Now light billowed up from the sea, diaphanous waves of mist, like a sea-level aurora.

The ship surged forward as a wind began to blow toward the gates, and as the glowing mist surrounded them, Eveleen's skin prickled, but not from the power being deployed around them to wrench a 3,600-year-deep hole in the universe. There were shapes in the mist, wraiths moving, reaching, supplicating, fleeing her direct glance and seen only in the corner of her vision. No one spoke, but everyone was alert and scarcely breathing.

Stavros reached down, pushing on something in one of the storage chests on either side of the keel. The water around their craft suddenly boiled without heat as the series of portal rods carefully spaced along both sides of the ship pulled power from the field now building between the Russian ships. A faint, keening note of power leashed to an extreme degree made Eveleen grit her teeth as the mist began to flow inward toward a bright point of light. It was not a vortex, but straight lines converging on an infinity that flowed hungrily forward to engulf the boat, as though her blind spot was expanding to fill her vision. She saw the prow vanish, wrenched away in a direction her eyes couldn't follow; then nothingness slid forward toward the group huddled in the middle of the boat. There was now no sense of motion, only a sense of a physical violation so great it made nausea seem pleasure by comparison. It seemed endless—

But only for a moment. Her blind spot filled the world and dwindled behind her, giving her for a moment the feeling of eyes in the back of her head, and they were through, sailing into ancient waters.

CHAPTER 5

THE FIRST THING to hit Ross was the acrid odor. No smoggy New York day smelled as bad as this. His hindbrain gibbered with warning at that invidious, pervasive whiff of smoke and the stench of brimstone.

There was no fire, of course. But on previous missions, when Ross transferred into human prehistory, one of the first things he noted was how the stars in the night sky were astonishingly bright: clearer, much clearer, than the clearest night in his own time. This time they were just as faint as the stars over New York City, but there was no kilowattage of civilization to blame.

The haze was volcanic ash.

When are we, exactly?
he thought. And then shrugged. Useless to think in terms of exact correlation between dates. When they returned up-time, they'd emerge from the gates whenever they were next energized—probably only moments after they'd entered, no matter how long they spent here. What mattered was when they were in relation to the day of the eruption. That had been the computer jockeys' job. If they hadn't done it right, if there wasn't enough time to make sure the volcanic explosion happened, there'd be no second chance, for a kind of exclusion principle governed time travel: their presence here excluded their earlier presence. Research, and bitter experience, had shown that only inanimate objects could bilocate, like Eveleen's earring. Sentient beings could not. If they tried to jump up-time and then back here again to gain more time to figure things out, the boat would arrive intact but empty of life, like the
Marie Celeste,
the famous half-brig that'd run afoul of the natural time-fold in the Bermuda Triangle. Seventy years later, that story, and others like it, had inspired the research that led to time travel. Had led to Ross and Eveleen, and the other agents, being here, days? weeks? away from an explosion of unimaginable magnitude. He wondered briefly what happened to that crew, then dismissed the thought. If they didn't succeed here, there'd never be a
Marie Celeste,
and . . . No time for that. He wrenched his thoughts away before he got a headache, feeling a grin twitch at his lips at the inadvertent double meaning of "time."

Almost at once Ross turned his head from the silent stars to the hatch to the below-deck area, where golden light glowed.

Stavros had jumped down as soon as they were through. He popped up now. "We came through fine," he said, in the Ancient Greek they must all speak now.

Ross felt Eveleen relax beside him. He said nothing, of course. She'd hate him noticing. He also saw Ashe's grim profile ease slightly.

"Good," Ashe said, as though aware of attention turning his way. "It is night in both worlds. Much to do on the morrow. Let's get some sleep while we can."

They nodded, and trooped below, ducking under the narrow roof. Hammocks woven of net had been provided, and they had all practiced sleeping in them. Ross climbed into his, aware of the breathing of the others, and the balmy air that was just this side of being stuffy and too warm. The day would be blistering, unfortunately. No help for that. Air conditioning was now three thousand years in the future.

The steady lap-lap of the water along the sides, and the gentle rocking, sent him into a deep sleep that only broke when he heard voices.

It wasn't just the voices of his team, either, he realized. Bright sunlight shafted down into the crowded hold, golden rays that fired thousands of dust motes.

On deck was comparative silence; the voices came from beyond the ship. Ross looked around, realized he was alone.

He tumbled out of his hammock and ran up the short ladder to find Eveleen, Ashe, and Linnea gathered under the awning, eating some bread from the stores Stavros and Konstantin had stashed below. Stavros worked as helmsman with a great paddled tiller; Konstantin tended the sail.

The air was hot, still, and hazy with faint smoke. It made the brightness into a fierce glare. Ross squinted against the fierce light, shading his hand against the splashes of fiery sun on the harbor waters.

They had reached Akrotiri, he realized. They were in the midst of what seemed to be hundreds of craft, all more or less like theirs: high of prow, low aft, narrow, and built for speed over relatively mild waters. The main characteristic of one set of boats was the single square sail on a mast. Some of those sails were made of what looked like rough-woven linen, others of matting; the masts varied from single pieces rough-cawed from trees to poles lashed together. These little boats would never last an hour in an Atlantic storm, but they were fast to make and easy to sail in the Mediterranean and Aegean waters.

Most of those with the masts were hauling their wind, drifting southward and away.

Eveleen gasped. "Have we arrived just at the departure of the fleet?" she murmured, staring.

Ross heard Linnea respond in a low voice, "Departure of
a
fleet, perhaps. I do not believe the entire island vacated overnight."

The other boats, the ones remaining in the harbor, were an astonishing variety. Some were long and narrow, with twenty and more rowers on each side. A few were so low that the rowers sat, visible, working with the sun broiling their dark heads and bronzed necks. Others had the galley slaves hidden below, in decks probably hot and noisome but at least out of the sun.

Most of the craft had no sails; they were local transportation. And a great many of them were spectacularly painted along the sides, with figures of birds, dolphins, even lions, and the awnings above the passengers were decorated with crocuses and lilies.

At first no one from these bravely decorated boats gave their own plain, modest craft a second glance.

The crowd of voices resolved into individuals. Ross, listening closely, was somewhat relieved to hear a mix of languages: there was Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek as well as one that was incomprehensible. People seemed to switch back and forth between tongues, calling greetings, complaining about the heat, demanding space to unload goods, starting in on trade negotiations. Requesting news of friends and relations since the "rock rain." Exchanging gossip. Human relations, in short, exactly like those of their unknown descendants thousands of years up the time-line.

"Rock rain," Linnea Edel repeated, staring out intently. Ross watched the woman continually turning her head, scanning, listening, and figured she probably would give an arm or a leg for a tape recorder, if not a video cam.

Rock rain: one of the falls of pumice that the scientists had talked about, resulting from a preliminary eruption. Ross felt a pang of trepidation inside. The science brains had guessed pretty close, then.

Eveleen sat on the railing, earrings swinging, as she watched a low-lying fishing smack ease up to the beach. No one looked her way as she observed the crew splash overboard, anchoring the ship with net-bound rocks on either side and then beginning unloading.