Ascendant

by Sean Ellis

  She returned her attention to the sarcophagus, now using her fingertips as well as her eyes to search for the trigger that would unlock the ancient casket. As she did so, she realized the answer was staring her in the face.

  The crown.

  Or rather, the carved likeness of the crown that adorned the face of the statue. She reached up to the hexagonal shape in the center and pressed firmly.

  There was a grating sound followed by a whoosh of air, and the entire block of carved stone began to move, sliding down into the floor. She took a step back and then directed her light into the depths within.

  “You don’t look anything like your pictures,” she muttered as the beam illuminated the mummified remains of the Atlantean king. Indeed, the handsome, athletic figure had become merely a leathery, discolored shell. His skin had dried out and was stretched taut over his skeleton. His strong nose had shrunk into his skull. And where once he had gazed out at the world with intense dark eyes, there were now only empty sockets. There was one element, however, that remained consistent: the mummy still wore the silvery circlet with its single strange jewel.

  Breathless with anticipation, Mira reached for the crown. . . .

  Time abruptly jumped forward—how far she could not say—but in that lost bubble of memory, everything changed. She was no longer standing before the remains of the king, but instead lay supine in near total darkness. An instant later, pain stabbed through her skull, and was especially intense in the area just behind her right ear. When she gingerly probed the spot, her fingers felt something damp—her own blood.

  A light flared off to one side and she reflexively turned toward it, wincing as the motion brought another throb from her wound. She fumbled for her own light, still turned on but hanging uselessly from the neck-chain, and raised it just as Curtis Lancet burst through a breach in the tomb wall. The opening had not been there before, she was certain of that. Someone had opened it from the outside, the same person that had cold-cocked her from behind. And if Lancet was only now arriving, that meant . . .

  She twisted around just in time to catch sight of Atlas’ grotesquely fat fingers closing around the mummy’s neck.

  “I promised you this day would come.” His words were for the ghost of the king alone. He was oblivious to everything else. “My hands at your throat once more, but this time, I will triumph. The Trinity is mine.”

  Through the fog of pain, something clicked in Mira’s mind, and she realized why the figure struggling with the king in the mural looked so familiar. Atlas! But that must have been thousands of years ago.

  For just a moment, Mira thought she saw the mummy’s hands start to move, as if to wrestle free from Atlas’ grasp. No, she told herself. It’s just an illusion, caused by Atlas shaking him.

  Sputtering with maniacal laughter, the obese billionaire wrenched the corpse’s head from its torso, letting the lifeless body fall back into the sarcophagus. He cradled the severed head to his chest and pried off the crown. As his fingers made contact with the metal circle, the jewel flared to life, filling the tomb with penetrating supernatural radiance.

  “What the hell?” gasped Lancet, staring in disbelief at the unfolding apotheosis. His gaze then dropped to where Mira lay, and as he spied the fresh blood streaming from the gash on the back of her head, his visage grew hard. With one hand raised to shade his eyes from the quasi-solar discharge, he wrestled his pistol from its holster and raised it toward the man he was sworn to protect. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, sir, but I think you’d better put that thing down.”

  Atlas’ eyes showed not even a whisper of fear as he regarded his bodyguard. “Mr. Lancet,” he said, barely able to enunciate through his laughter, “your services are no longer required.”

  Mira didn’t need a premonition to know what would happen next. “Curtis, run!”

  Her warning came too late.

  A spear of brilliant light burst from the crystal and sizzled through the tomb, blasting Lancet back and pinning him to the wall. His gun was knocked from his hand and clattered impotently to the floor. Though it took only an instant for him to die, his agony seemed to stretch out into eternity.

  Mira gasped in horror as her friend, her lover, the only man for whom she had ever dared to let herself feel more than just infatuation, was ripped from existence. But in that moment she felt no grief. That would come later.

  With cat-like grace, she rolled under the still crackling tongue of energy. Her fingers closed on the discarded SIG, and in a single fluid motion, she brought it up in a one-handed grip, aimed and fired.

  During the weeks they had been together, Lancet had decided to teach her how to shoot his pistol. She had smiled demurely and accepted his offer simply because it made him happy to teach her things and she had very much enjoyed pleasing him. She never let on that she already knew at least as much about firearms, weapons and unarmed combat as he did. Mira had been trained by the best, and for more years than she cared to remember, had been shaped and honed, physically, mentally and psychically into an unparalleled living weapon.

  She had given up that life, but some things you never forgot.

  A lone nine-millimeter round from the Swiss-made automatic split the air, a microsecond ahead of the thunderous report. Compared to the supernatural light-energy Atlas wielded the bullet was ponderously slow, but it moved faster than he could react.

  The six-sided crystal did not shatter as the ballistic projectile slammed into it, but the blazing fire within was instantly extinguished.

  Despite the sudden darkness, Mira remained poised to fire again, but the heavy thud of Atlas’ corpulent form hitting the stone floor told her that her first shot had done the job. Nevertheless, it was a long time before she lowered the gun.

  After the blinding radiance of the strange crown it took her eyes several minutes to recover to the point where she could make anything out in the comparatively dim glow of the squeeze light. Yet, even before her vision returned, she discovered that another of her senses had fully reawakened.

  Atlas was dead, a shapeless blob of flesh, soiled in his own filth. When her bullet had struck the crystal, the force had been sufficient to deflect the talisman away without significantly affecting the trajectory of the round which, as luck would have it, passed through the billionaire’s left eye. The fat bastard might have somehow survived for thousands of years after losing his confrontation with the Atlantean ruler, but evidently he wasn’t immune to lead poisoning.

  She felt no sense of victory. Curtis was dead. Only a charred, vaguely human outline remained, burned into the middle of one of the mural scenes. Lancet had been erased from existence, and when all the extraneous details were stripped away, the whole thing was her fault. Without her help, Atlas would never have found the tomb or unleashed that unholy power. And she had been so blind to his fundamental nature; how could she have missed it? Had the thrill of hunting something so completely lost to human knowledge blunted her keen intuition?

  The price for her failure felt unbearable.

  She brushed away the tears and shone her light on the newly opened passage leading back into the temple maze. A section of the wall had slid down into the floor, just like the lid of the sarcophagus, to reveal a secret exit. For all she knew, they might have opened at the same time, both triggered when she had activated the mechanism. It felt like one more accusation leveled against her.

  As she took a step toward the doorway, her foot struck something on the floor and sent it skittering ahead of her.

  It was the crown. What had Atlas has called it? The Trinity.

  She knelt and reached for it, and as she did, something indefinable whispered in her consciousness.

  The strange circlet was unquestionably the source of the power that had drawn her all the way from the tomb of Storm Jaguar in Honduras—perhaps even from that first encounter with Atlas’ codex. It was silent now, but was it truly dead?

  Would it awaken for her as it had for Atlas? As it had
for the Atlantean king? And if so, what would she become?

  Her fingers closed on the cool metal.

  Nothing. It was dead. She sensed nothing from it but the memory of a great power, lost forever, just like the ancient civilization that had brought it into being.

  Mira stuffed the Trinity into one of her cargo pockets and began the long trek back to the surface.

  PART ONE: SINGULARITY

  ONE

  New York City, Six months later

  Walter Aimes sat patiently in the spacious interior of the limousine, saying nothing until Mira was seated across from him and the chauffeur had closed the door. She was grateful for his forbearance. Climbing into the low-slung vehicle, wearing the skintight, full-length sheath dress and three-inch sling-back stiletto heels was, she discovered, more complicated than crawling around the Atlantean temple. She had discovered the hard way the danger of catching a heel in the hem of the dress, which in addition to tripping her up, posed the added threat of revealing even more of her décolletage to passers-by. The strapless gown already showed off just about all that she could legally get away with.

  She had not chosen the dress to advertise her body, but neither did she now experience any degree of self-consciousness. It simply wasn’t in her nature to worry overmuch about what sort of impression she would make with her physical appearance. The gown, bought off the rack at Bloomingdale’s that afternoon, had more or less been a random selection. She was too preoccupied to stress over her wardrobe choices.

  I do look pretty good in it though, she thought as she caught a last glimpse of her reflection in the side window.

  Once seated, she looked over at Aimes’ smiling face. If the older man was entertaining any lewd fantasies, he did not allow them to taint the humor in his eyes. “Mira,” he sighed, approvingly, “you look like a princess.”

  “I don’t think I’m cut out for royalty. All this publicity is driving me nuts. They’ve turned me into some kind of pop star.”

  The older man chuckled. “You are a star, tonight at least, and you deserve to be put on a pedestal. You’ve rewritten the history of our planet.”

  It was an odd conversation, uncharacteristic of the man she had known virtually all her life. Her earliest memory was of a much younger Dr. Aimes visiting her in a foster home, interviewing her for the program. Even then, he had always had a friendly, avuncular disposition, and she had never sensed even the slightest duplicity from him. At the same time, he had always held her at a distance; he could not be the father she never had, and he wasn’t going to permit her any illusions to that effect. For him to lavish praise on her now . . . it just didn’t seem like the Walter Aimes she knew.

  Because she had never really known the sort of life that people called “normal,” it was only in hindsight that she saw the true nature of their relationship. She had always been his lab rat, a well-tended specimen to be sure, but always a lab rat.

  Back then, Aimes had been a behavioral psychologist working under contract with the government, combing the child welfare system looking for dispossessed children who exhibited a certain range of unusual abilities. At five years of age, Mira had displayed exactly the aptitudes he’d been looking for, and within a few weeks of discovering her, she had been relocated to a farm—“The Farm,” as everyone called it—in rural Virginia, where she was subjected to a regimented and insulated, albeit pleasant, existence. Aimes was a frequent visitor to the Farm, and really the only link to her previous life, but his role in her upbringing—in her schooling and training and the endless tests she had been subjected to—was, from her perspective at least, incidental.

  As she grew to maturity, her future path in life became clear. She would have the privilege of using her unique abilities in the defense of her country against the evils of communism. From her trainers and instructors she sensed only an absolute certainty of purpose, and there had never been any cause to doubt the fundamental rightness of the cause in which she had been enlisted. But when she went into the field, exposed for the first time to the complexities of the real world, seeing the human struggle not as a Manichean battle between good and evil, light and darkness, but in all its varying shades of gray, she had proved to be a spectacular failure.

  Aimes, ever her guardian, had managed to convince the Agency that she could be salvaged, so they shunted her to the research and development section, where people with similar endowments were being trained for long-distance psychic surveillance—“remote viewing” they called it. But soon thereafter the Cold War had ended, and the Agency, under intense political scrutiny, disbanded the entire department. Virtually turned out onto the street, Mira had once more looked to her protector, Walter Aimes.

  Even then, he had not allowed her to make him a father figure. He did not take her into his home—though in a weak, tearful moment, she had all but begged him to—did not give her money or a place to live or help her find suitable employment. But in a way, he had given her exactly what she needed when he had calmly suggested that she could use her precognitive talents to make a very comfortable life for herself. And she had done exactly that, first in Atlantic City, and then in Vegas. It wasn’t a special, exciting, or even particularly meaningful life, but it was her own. There was no agency claiming ownership of her, no constant supervision or endless testing and training; she was her own person. And, ultimately, it had led to this, arguably the most important discovery in human history.

  When she had crawled out of the temple, still bloodied from Atlas’ betrayal, she had instinctively known to call on her former benefactor.

  With Aimes both coaching and shielding her, she took the discovery public. The trustees of Atlas’ estate were eager to keep the scandalous nature of his demise forever buried—she had told no one of the possibility that he might have been a centuries-old survivor of Atlantis—and they had provided the legal and logistical means to launch a more professional exploration of the ruin. In the months that followed, the academic world had been turned on its ear as the site yielded an endless trove of treasure and knowledge about a period previously relegated to prehistory.

  For her part, Mira finally felt that she had discovered her niche. Though she was not classically trained as an archaeologist, her intuition, and perhaps more importantly, her dogged determination, kept her always in the forefront of the ongoing exploration.

  Meanwhile, back in the civilized world, Walter Aimes had also found a new purpose in life.

  The limousine slowed as traffic around Central Park grew thick. A banner hung from the stone battlements of the museum, draping the entire distance from the roof over the fourth story to just above the windows of the ground level. In gilt letters, against a scarlet background, it announced the exhibit’s opening.

  “‘Treasures of Lost Atlantis’?” Mira shook her head disparagingly.

  Aimes gave a guilty smile. “I know it’s a bit over the top, but it’s not completely inaccurate. Some of the pieces in the collection really do seem to have been carried away from Atlantis after its untimely demise. And then of course there’s the Trinity. . . .”

  “Don’t remind me,” she replied, unable to hide a scowl.

  “Mira, I know that you are worried about the Trinity, but I swear to you, there is no cause for alarm.”

  “Marquand Atlas tried to use the thing to turn himself into a god. And he very nearly succeeded. What makes you so certain that somebody won’t try to follow in his footsteps?”

  “I know you believe that the Trinity is a talisman of great power, but it’s dead now. The damage to the crystal cannot be repaired by any technology known to man. There is simply no way for anyone to unleash its power as Atlas tried to do.”

  “But what’s to stop someone from trying? Museum security? That’s a joke. The Trinity is a very tempting target. I wish you’d taken my warning more seriously.” She felt a twinge of excitement at having the temerity to reprove Aimes, but it was just as quickly extinguished by a childish guilt at having talked back to a pare
nt.

  The limousine pulled to a stop and the driver hopped out. Aimes waited for Mira to get out before answering from the shelter of the car. “The Trinity is the highlight of the collection.” His voice was the soothing tone of a politician. “It is what will bring the crowds; the most precious artifact of the prehistoric world. The power of the god-kings of Atlantis, and it’s right here in the Big Apple.”

  She didn’t answer. It was already an old argument. Months of negotiations between the American Museum of Natural History, Aimes, the Atlas Trust, represented by Mira herself, and even the United Nations Global Heritage Commission, the de facto custodians of the treasure inasmuch as no single modern government could rightfully claim ownership thereof, had ironed out every point of contention but one. Mira knew that her account of the crown relic’s supernatural nature would be regarded with amusement and even contempt, but she had nevertheless implored Aimes, the one man who she knew would not be put off by her tale, to find some pretext for removing the Trinity from the collection. But as Aimes had reminded her, the relic had been quiescent, even to her own psychically endowed senses, and there was no real basis for her concern. In the end, the UN, bowing to financial need and political pressure, had agreed to allow the Trinity to tour with the exhibit.

  Aimes offered his arm and together they ascended the steps of the museum. The gathering of paparazzi quickly shifted to greet the darling of the exhibit, momentarily mimicking a lightning storm with their camera strobes. Mira kept her displeasure hidden, showing only a wry smile. She didn’t like being on display, and she certainly didn’t think of herself as a celebrity, but resisted the urge to quicken her steps, knowing that the eighty-one-year-old Aimes would have difficulty keeping up.