Atlantis Fallen (The Heartstrike Chronicles Book 1)

by C. E. Murphy

  Lorhen, too tall to stand comfortably in the compact tube, laughed as he stepped in. "I feel like I'm watching Titanic again," he said to Ghean.

  She grinned. "Only ours isn't a set. Since you're here, Logan, let's put you to good use. Know anything about mapping software?" She lead him through the tangle of seats and terminals, stepping over boxes on the floor.

  "I forgot to brush up," Lorhen said. "Too bad I missed the dinner party. Someone could have reminded me." Once seated, it wasn't too uncomfortable. There was a porthole behind his left shoulder that he could see through if he twisted at the proper angle, and he had head room. To make up for it, there was no leg room. Lorhen decided wisdom was the better part of valor, and didn't complain.

  Ghean shrugged deprecatingly. "I could always hope. Luckily for you, the computer does all the work. If this goes off," and she flicked a finger at an unlit light, "call him." Ghean pointed over her shoulder with her thumb as a long-haired young man, taller than Lorhen, crawled into the sub.

  "What about me?" he asked, ducking toward the duo.

  "Logan, this is Jerry. Jerry, Dr. Adams, one of our sponsors. Jerry keeps the computer systems running."

  "I'm the resident geek," Jerry agreed, and stuck out his hand. "Michelle mentioned you at the party Saturday, but said you couldn't make it. Too bad. Mary actually put on a party dress. It was worth seeing."

  Lorhen grinned. "Hi, Jerry. I'm sorry I missed it. It's been a while since I've seen her dressed up."

  Ghean leveled an icy stare at Lorhen. He widened his eyes, saved from having to defend himself by Michelle's arrival with two others. "Mary Jerry Logan," Michelle said without looking at any of the three as she took her seat. She had a video camera in one hand, a battery case in the other, and went to prod at the camera behind the pilot's seat.

  Behind him came a woman in her mid forties, her hair cut military-short. "Afternoon," she said pleasantly, offering her hand to Lorhen. "Dana Franks. I'm the pilot. Presumably you're the honored guest. This is my wife, Anne." She stepped aside to present a blonde woman in her late thirties.

  "Hi," she said, "no relation."

  Lorhen blinked, then laughed. "No, I don't imagine you are. Logan Adams. It's a pleasure." He shook hands as they were offered, then watched curiously as Anne seated herself in front of the waldo. "I gather you drive the robot?"

  Anne glanced over and nodded. "Handy. I volunteered for this job because I get to stare dreamily out the window and imagine life in Atlantis when I'm not working." She grinned. "It's quite the sight, Dr. Adams. You're in for the experience of a lifetime."

  Lorhen looked up momentarily to meet Ghean's eyes. "I'm sure I am."

  Ghean smiled, more an expression of acknowledgment than humor. She dropped into her seat, just in front of Lorhen, and turned to look at the pale water outside.

  "Finished the systems check fifteen minutes ago," Dana announced. "Unless anybody forgot to stop by the bathroom, we're ready to go." She waited ten seconds, then nodded. "Seal up the hatch, would you, Adams? Anne, check it."

  Lorhen stood to do as he was told, then found himself engaged in an awkward little dance with Anne as he tried to regain his seat while she went to check the seal. They ended up grinning broadly at one other, and Lorhen backed up with exaggerated steps to get out of her way. Fortune, more than skill, prevented him from setting his foot down on a box, and he wavered briefly, regaining his balance more solidly after Anne stepped back again. "Nice and tight," she reported. "You all right there, Logan?"

  "Fine," he answered, returning to his seat. "Just working through a life-long desire to be Charlie Chaplin. I just don't have his knack for physical schtick."

  "Charlie Chaplin never had to work under these conditions," Jerry pointed out.

  The sub broke loose from the Retribution, sinking into the Mediterranean waters. Lorhen looked out a porthole, watching bubbles rise rapidly by. "You're certainly right about that."

  The light change was gradual as the submarine sank into the sea. Fifty feet down, Lorhen noticed the sub's internal lights for the first time; by fifty meters the light from the water outside was of a peculiar, ethereal quality. Aside from the occasional school of startled fish, the outside scenery was not particularly captivating. The others bantered back and forth lightly, and Lorhen listened with half an ear for a few moments, watching as the submarine descended into darkness. Within minutes it was too dark to make out more than vague shapes. Lorhen took his gaze from the porthole, glancing instead at Ghean, wondering suddenly how well she handled the submersions, considering her history.

  She stared fixedly out a porthole. Lorhen could see tiny tense muscles along her jaw, though her shoulders appeared relaxed. Her breathing was deliberately even, long slow breaths through her nostrils. Her posture was rigid, but for her shoulders; Lorhen imagined the stiff muscles along her spine, and for a moment considered reaching out to comfort her. Probably not a good idea, all things considered.

  He was nearly certain he hadn't spoken aloud, but Ghean turned her head to look at him as if she'd heard him. Her eyes were black, expressionless in the off-colored lighting of the submarine. She watched him for several seconds, silent and stony-faced, before returning her attention to the growing darkness outside the porthole.

  Michelle finally succeeded in the arcane adjustments she was making to her cameras, and sat back, satisfied. She caught Lorhen's intent study of Ghean, and grinned broadly, gesturing at the pair with a tilt of his head as she murmuring to Anne. The blonde woman looked over her shoulder to smile as well, and Lorhen lifted his eyebrows quizzically at the two. Anne pulled an innocent moue, and Michelle averted her eyes, chuckling.

  I'm surrounded by matchmakers. Lorhen, knowing it would add fuel to the fire, still couldn't help grinning. He leaned forward, murmuring, "Didn't you tell them we were just friends?" to Ghean.

  Her gaze snapped back to him. "Yes," she replied, "I said we were very g…" Color drained from her face. "Very good friends," she repeated, barely more than a breath. Her chin moved fractionally, as if a blow had been taken and almost entirely absorbed. "Just like you said you and my mother were."

  Oh, shit, Lorhen thought with perfect clarity.

  "You utter bastard," Ghean said precisely, out loud, and in a tongue dead for forty-five hundred years. Every head in the submarine snapped around to stare in open interest at the petite woman.

  Briefly, unpleasantly, Lorhen wondered what happened if there was a Blending under water, but shut the thought down as hard as he could. They couldn't fight there, even if they'd brought their weapons on board: there just wasn't enough room, and it would certainly end badly for the mortals. "Ghean," he said, in the softest, most reasonable tone he could command, and in the same language she'd spoken in, "you'd been dead for a thousand years. I thought she'd been dead that long, for gods' sake."

  "She was my mother!"

  Lorhen winced. "Ghean, after that long, what difference does that sort of relationship make? We were both at hard places in our lives and we found an old friend when we needed one. It's not unusual for Timeless to become lovers—"

  Ghean erupted out of her seat, an explosion of movement startling and effective despite her diminutive size. "My mother, Lorhen! She was my mother! You were about to be my husband! 'You were at hard places'. Don't try that, you son of a bitch. She was my mother. You slept with my mother!"

  Lorhen grimaced. "Dammit, Ghean. That relationship, Minyah being your mother, was a thousand years dead. She was a friend when I needed one. Old friends become lovers—"

  "Oh, clearly. I was your lover, Lorhen, and I don't see you trying that tact with me!"

  Astonishment slammed through Lorhen, half powered by disbelief and half by relief. Her offense offered a way to handle the situation, at least, and if he chose not to think too deeply about whether his words were true, he was all right with that. "When have I had time?" he demanded. "Do you think you're not still beautiful? Do you think I don't want you? Gods above, Ghean, I lov
ed you. I mourned for a thousand years. I became someone else someone else entirely to walk away from the pain. It took that long to put away the grief. And then you show up out of the deep blue sea," Lorhen flinched mentally at the unfortunately accurate phrase, "and I find out that loving you didn't go away with the pain. What do you think I'm doing here?"

  Ghean's eyes and mouth vied for a winning position in roundness. Lorhen didn't dare look at the rest of the sub's crew to see their expressions. The absolute silence was more than enough to suggests what was on their faces, and it was only broken by Ghean's faltering, "The…Book…?"

  Lorhen's shoulders dropped and he looked away a moment. "What was I supposed to say? Especially after the story you told us about your captivity. Why would you forgive me, why would you even look at me? But a book isn't worth five million dollars, Ghean. I want to know you again. Who you've become."

  Ghean dropped back into her seat, still staring at Lorhen. "You said…you said you weren't sorry."

  Lorhen spread his hands helplessly. "I'm not sorry I've survived. I can't be sorry for the choices that have kept me alive, Ghean. They're what make me who I am. I can regret the consequences of those choices." A sad smile pulled at his mouth. "You're the only Timeless woman I ever wanted to marry."

  "Oh." Ghean turned away abruptly to resume staring out the porthole. Lorhen let out a long, slow breath, eyes closing. When he opened them again a moment later, it was to find the four other crew members gaping at him.

  "What," Michelle, the first to regain her voice, "the hell was that?"

  "An old quarrel," Lorhen answered softly. "I apologize for subjecting you to that." He closed his eyes against the audibly restrained silence. After several seconds, he heard Dana turn her chair back around to being piloting again. A few minutes later, conversation picked up, giving Lorhen the privacy he needed to sort through what he'd said. Enough of what he'd said had been true, or true enough, to lend credence to the rest. At the least, that his relationship with Minyah had grown out of friendship, and that he had indeed become someone else for a thousand years after Ghean's death was true. Riding with the Unending hadn't been a time for healing, though. The pain of Ghean's death had faded in time, as it always did, but the Unending had been about reveling in blood lust and power, not mourning loss. Only the first choice, to join Yama, had been spurred by bitterness at death—and, Lorhen reminded himself, the desire to keep his head. He shouldn't flatter himself, lest he grow too fond of a more noble self-image than belonged to him.

  Still, a thousand years of mourning made a good dramatic statement, and Ghean seemed to have been taken by it. It was unlikely that mere seduction would be enough to calm her fury, but it had obviously been a step in the right direction. And technically he hadn't had the time or opportunity to try resuming an ancient romance; the fact that he hadn't wanted or planned to, either, was—at the moment—beside the point. And the Book was worth millions, was priceless, but Ghean clearly didn't need to hear him say that right now.

  Mostly, though, he couldn't pretend that he didn't still have strong feelings for the Atlantean woman. Perhaps not the feelings Ghean herself wanted him to have, although she certainly still stirred passion in him, albeit tempered with disbelief and distrust. Nor was he so old as to be inured to curiosity about whether they might have some kind of relationship. That had nothing to do with his decision to bribe the University into allowing him passage on the ship to Atlantis, but apparently the idea could be used to appeal to Ghean's more romantic nature.

  Ghean's a romantic. Lorhen's eyes popped open suddenly, and he caught Anne staring frankly across the sub at him. Caught, she blushed and looked away, and Lorhen closed his eyes again. It was foolish to judge Ghean by his own standards. She wasn't as old as his memory told him she had to be, and she had been—effectively—the princess locked in the tower, for eons. Maybe an almost-insane clinging to hope was the only way to deal with eternal captivity.

  He would, he concluded, make a lousy prince in a tower. Hope was rarely his stock in trade; betting on human nature served him more reliably, but that cynical attitude probably wouldn't see him through four and a half thousand years of captivity.

  Ghean had been the only Timeless woman he'd ever wanted to marry. The disaster surrounding that was more than enough to put him off the idea permanently. Lorhen noticed he was holding his breath, and let it out in a long exhalation. The goal, ultimately, was possession of the Book, preferably to hide it away somewhere as inaccessible as it had been for the last several millennia. If romance was the easiest way to reach that goal, so be it. Lorhen twisted half a smile. He'd had more unpleasant tasks. Just as long as he didn't get carried away.

  Ghean stared at the blackness beyond the porthole, barely hearing Lorhen as he explained the outburst to the other crew members. His words were still ringing in her ears. It was just barely possible she had misjudged his motives. She struggled with the idea, caught between worried suspicion and wanting to believe.

  The belief was beginning to win out. It was the question of control that brought Ghean down that path. Lorhen had been careful with his description of his relationship with her mother. Had she not used the same phrase to characterize her own relationship with him, she wouldn't have hit on the truth. Lorhen couldn't have anticipated the random chain of events to prepare the lie in advance. It gave credence to his words.

  So did the language. Unlike Ghean, who still thought in Atlantean at times, Lorhen would have had no reason to speak the language in at least three thousand years. Translating lies into a tongue long put out of mind on an instant's notice wouldn't be an easy undertaking. It was possible, perhaps even likely, that he had been telling the truth. He was still in love with her.

  For a moment, Ghean tried to examine her own feelings toward Lorhen. Prominent was betrayal, and that wound made even deeper by her new knowledge. The union between her mother and Lorhen made a certain sense, though, once Ghean thought on it. Lorhen would have believed that Minyah was his only access to the girl he'd loved, to Ghean herself. Being with Minyah was not so much seeking comfort in the arms of an old friend, but searching desperately for what he had lost, in the person who had been closest to Ghean. Ghean shivered lightly. To have used Minyah in that way was not only reprehensible, but pathetic. Ghean could almost feel sorry for Lorhen.

  Pity, then, was another aspect. Anger, though, was greater, and bound up irrevocably with betrayal. She could still see him as attractive, however, and he obviously still loved her. Ghean would allow him in her bed, if that was what he desired. There would be physical pleasure, at the least, and in the end the treachery of taking his head would be that much more satisfying.

  Ghean glanced over her shoulder quickly, to half smile at Lorhen. His eyes were closed, a small smile on his own lips. Imagining them together, Ghean guessed, and her smile widened. The elaborate plans of revenge she'd built over the years to occupy herself were crumbling beneath the vastly more satisfying reality that was playing out. She hadn't imagined she'd have so much power over the ancient Timeless. With one hand, she would give him the world, and with the other, take it away when he least expected it.

  Everything will be ours, the patient one crowed. His power, our revenge, and the memories that he made over thousands of years. Years that should have been ours to live. Everything will finally be ours.

  And then we'll go home to Atlantis, Ghean promised the frightened voice, and closed her eyes, sleeping as the submarine continued its way to the ocean bottom.

  29

  Half an hour later, the sea lit up in a sudden flood of light. "Water's nice and clear down here, long as there haven't been any quakes," Dana said. "We're about fifty meters from the bottom. Take a peek, Logan. You'll be able to see the city any minute now."

  Lorhen, instead, leaned his head against the porthole's rim and closed his eyes, a queer thrill of anticipation running through him. Forty-five hundred years ago his first look at Atlantis had been from above, looking down the mounta
in slope to the glistening metropolis. Today, the water still hid the vista, but Lorhen rebuilt the image in his mind.

  It wouldn't be the same, of course; nothing was ever the same. You can't go home again, the saying went, although it wasn't true. Lorhen had long since learned to recognize the changes taking place around him, or to ignore them without finding them a betrayal when he looked back to see they'd taken root. And Atlantis had been drowned for millennia; it was surprising there was anything left to return to. In the frantic minutes while he and Minyah ran from the epicenter at the temple, he'd seen buildings crumble and be swallowed whole into the crust. The old city must have been well built indeed, for anything to have survived.

  "There we go," Michelle breathed, "Atlantis."

  Lorhen opened his eyes to look through the light-stained water. "Jesus," he said inadvertently, and clamped his teeth together to prevent further commentary.

  Even in the light's rapidly fading radius, it was obvious far more of the city had survived than he could have imagined. Streets were still visible, only a few feet below the submarine. Loosely collected sediment stirred into a fine film as the sub's engines disturbed the water. Shattered buildings lined the streets, walls crumpled in, leaving enough foundation to make vivid the separation of boulevards and buildings. Lorhen leaned forward, not quite pressing his nose against the glass to look as far to the sides as he could. They were too far from the city's center for the temple to be visible, and from the width of the street below, he suspected they were on one of the narrow cross-streets that sliced through the major roads.