“Not if the Persians arm them,” Leonidas said, his voice cutting through the noise. “There is no purpose to going off to war if there is nothing for us to return to after our victory.”
Polynices turned toward the knights, raising his old gnarled hands, quieting them. “The King is right. We have piled the tinder high underneath our own homes and any spark will have dire consequences.” He turned back toward Leonidas. “If I might make a suggestion my Lord?”
Leonidas nodded.
Polynices hooked his thumbs in folds on his tunic. “Any campaign is fraught with uncertainties. The pace of the Persians’ march can be calculated, but your assault on Antirhon is a different matter. If the city stands alone, then there are two issues—will they issue forth to fight you or make you lay siege to their city? If it is the former, then things should proceed quickly.”
This brought a chorus of laughter from the warriors.
“But if it is the latter, it might take more time. Then there is the factor that they may gain allies from other jackal states who see the Persian invasion as an opportunity.”
Leonidas waited, beginning to get an idea of what Polynices was leading to.
“Because of these uncertainties,” the old man continued, “I recommend that the best knights of the six lochoi who remain to guard our homes be culled from the ranks and sent directly to Thermopylae to prepare the defense. As our King has noted,” he nodded his head toward Leonidas, “the pass is narrow. A small contingent of brave men, allied with those forces from other cities along the way, could hold the pass for a while. This would allow for any unexpected delay in the Antirhon campaign.” Polynices smiled, revealing a black gap where several teeth had been smashed by an enemy sword years ago. “And it would allow those selected knights of the six remaining lochoi their opportunity for honor.”
The old man had cut the heart of the matter as usual, Leonidas realized. The knights cared more for glory in battle than all the issues that had been raised. He raised his hand. “A force of three hundred of the best from the remaining lochoi will march at the same time my force marches to the west. They will go to the Gates of Fire and they will prepare the defense.”
CHAPTER 9 PRESENT
Dane and Reizer were seated side by side at a computer console in the forward half of the cargo bay of the Combat Talon. The interior of the plane pulsated with the sound of the four turbo-prop engines as they headed north toward Lima to link up with the SR-71. Dane knew he had the length of the flight to decide on his next move. On the computer screen he showed Reizer the imagery Ahana had forwarded to the Combat Talon of the Nazca Plain.
“What does it mean?” Reizer asked as she examined the photos.
Dane had already read Ahana’s initial estimate. “We believe it’s draining power from all the tectonic lines. The black sphere you saw is a gate. The power is going into it. When enough power has been taken, the fault lines between the plates will become unstable.”
Reizer ran her fingers along the lines of power on the screen. “Why now? The Nazca lines have been there for millennia. Even among the native people I have never heard of them being on fire like this.”
Dane had been thinking about that. “The Shadow destroyed Chernobyl from which it has been drawing power for quite a while. The rods in tower four were about out of power anyway. We thought they were tapping the tectonic lines, but maybe they were just checking them out, preparing for this as a replacement for what they were taking from Chernobyl.”
“But the scale—“ Reizer shook her head. “While I am not a nuclear engineer, I am a geologist and I doubt that whatever power level they were taking from Chernobyl comes close to what we are seeing now.”
“Why the Nazca Plain?” Dane asked.
Reizer tore her attention from the lines of fire on the screen. “There has always been a strange force at work on the plain,”
“What kind of force?”
Reizer held up her aged hands. “How old do you think I am?”
In other situations it was a question no man would want to be asked by a woman. “Seventy?”
“I celebrated my hundredth birthday a few years back.” She pulled her sleeves back, revealing her wrists. “Notice I do not wear a watch. They don’t work on the plain, something most people don’t know.”
Dane glanced at his watch, then at a time display on the console. His watch was off by over forty minutes. The amount of time he had spent in the vicinity of the plain.
“I’ve gone onto the plain,” Reizer continued, “and stayed for what I thought was three days—at least I saw three sunsets-- but when I came off I found a month had passed in the world around the plain and people thought I was dead. So few people travel there, and none other than me spend the night, so most don’t notice the time anomalies.”
“It might be over a hundred years since you were born,” Dane said, “but you have not lived for over a hundred years.”
Reizer frowned. “What?”
“We know time is a variable inside the space-between.” Dane quickly explained the concepts of gates, portals and the space-between. “I think that time variable has extended onto the Nazca Plain somehow. Which means there is something different about it if you’ve never seen a gate active before.”
Reizer nodded. “While I was walking, trying to find my way out, I thought about it. And about what Davon told me.” She had filled Dane in on the ill-fated Englishman who had showed up just before the lines came alive. Dane remembered Ariana talking about meeting him in England.
She pointed down. “He talked about people seeing things from different times inside of places where lines of power crossed. And that there were usually standing stones at such junctures.”
“He also said the power for the lines went deep inside the planet. What if at Nazca it is closer to the surface than any place else? And that is why the lines were dug by the ancients? Like those who divine for water, maybe their priests or shamans or whatever, could sense that. And they drew the geoglyphs in an attempt to channel it?”
“And the lines and wedges?” Dane asked.
“I think they were made by someone else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but maybe they were preparation.”
“For?”
“For what’s happening now.”
He had hoped Reizer would be more informative. The information about the time disruptions on the Nazca Plain was interesting but didn’t say anything definitive about what was happening. Dane was still uncertain yet what the next step would be. The crystal skulls that Ariana had collected were en-route from Antarctica. He had ordered that they be sent toward the Bermuda Triangle Gate as that had been his best guess as to a next stop in order to recover Sin Fen’s skull and the Naga Staff.
“Davon also said that the core of the planet was important,” Reizer added.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Dane leaned back in the hard seat and closed his eyes. The roar of the engines reminded him of Airborne school so many years previously at Fort Benning, Georgia. The major purpose of the school had not particularly been to train men to jump out of airplanes, although if they were going to an airborne unit that was indeed important, but to teach them to conquer their fear. To stand in the open doorway of a plane traveling at one hundred and forty miles an hour, twelve hundred feet above a Georgia field and step out.
At the moment, Dane felt as if he were free falling. He thought back to when he’d been in the Angkor Gate and the solution to destroying the deadly ray of power there had just come to him, whispered by the ‘voices of the gods’ as Sin Fen had called them. Dane took a deep breath and mentally stood in the door of the plane. He stepped out, spreading his arms and legs. Floating.
He ‘saw’ the same man in armor with the Naga Staff in his hand. Swinging it at the sphere whose surface appeared to be made of writhing golden snakes. Dane felt fear and knew what he was saying couldn’t be allowed to happen. Just as q
uickly the vision shifted and he saw a portal inside the space-between. Then another portal and another and another, until they were flashing by his mind’s eye at a dizzying speed, an infinite number.
Dane sat upright and opened his eyes, overwhelmed by the vision. He was saved from his inner eye by the computer screen changing from imagery to Ahana’s face. For a moment Dane was confused to see her face on the screen and hear her words coming out of the speakers.
“I do not mean to interrupt but more has happened.” She quickly related the loss of the Connecticut and the furthering disaster at Chernobyl.
“So we’ve given the Shadow a Seawolf class submarine,” was Dane’s summation when she was done.
Ahana ignored the comment. “What has happened there?”
Before she went any further, Dane introduced Reizer and summarized what had happened on the Nazca Plain as far as they knew.
Foreman appeared behind Ahana when he was done. “So there is definitely a gate there?”
“Yes, but there’s so much power going through it, I don’t think anyone would survive going into it.”
“We are linked live via satellite,” Ahana said. She nodded over her left shoulder. “As you can see, Mister Foreman is here and we are also connected to Professor Kolkov in Russia.”
Ahana looked down and typed something, then Dane’s screen split and an old man with pale skin and thinning white hair appeared. “Professor Kolkov, meet Eric Dane.”
Kolkov nodded. “I thank you for your efforts so far in our cause.”
Ahana didn’t wait on the exchange of pleasantries. “This theory of Mister Davon’s regarding the interior of the planet is interesting. It is in line with what I believe the Shadow has been—and is-- doing to our planet. Some of what I am going to discuss may sound very basic, but I think we all need to understand this.”
Ahana’s face disappeared and a diagram replaced it.
“This is the basic make-up of our planet,” Ahana said. “While most think the planet is solid, it is far from that. Originally, our planet was simply an accretion of small fragments of solid rock that came together about four point six billion years ago. Long after that, around four billion years in the past, this fledgling planet was subjected to an intense asteroid and meteorite bombardment lasting millions of years. The immense amount of heat energy released by this bombardment melted the entire planet and it is still cooling off today, four billion years later.
“Denser material from the bombardment, such as iron from the meteors, sank to the center, while lighter elements such as silicates and oxygen compounds and water rose to the surface. This was the beginning of the formation of Earth as we know it now.”
Dane felt a pang of loss and realized Ahana’s lecture on the formation of the planet was something that Ariana Michelet would have done. Ariana had been a geologist and her expertise on tectonic plates had set the framework for whatever it was Ahana had come up with.
The Japanese scientist continued. “As you can see from the diagram, the interior of the Earth is divided into four major layers. The inner core, outer core, mantle and crust. These have many subdivisions in them, but for our purposes those four will do for now. As we travel from the outside in, we come across a strange phenomenon.” Ahana paused in thought, then resumed. “Let me back up a little bit. It is important that you understand something and that is that most of what I am talking about concerning the interior of the planet has been determined indirectly. After all, the deepest any shaft has even been drilled is barely a scratch on the surface.
“Geologists use recordings of seismic waves from earthquakes to try to determine what the interior of the Earth consists of. There are two different types of seismic waves. P waves and S waves. P waves will travel through both fluids and solids. S waves, on the other hand, cannot travel through water.”
“What was noted was that as one got further away from the epicenter of an earthquake, there was a drastic change in readings of these waves at a certain distance, at an angle of approximately one hundred and five degrees between the earthquake and seismograph. At this angle S waves disappeared, while P waves eventually made their way around the surface. What this meant was that the direct S waves must have hit liquid and been stopped. Thus, extending this angle through the planet—” on the screen a line appeared—“one has to deduce that there is a molten layer of material inside the planet and beneath the mantle. This is the outer core.”
“On top of this, the fact that the planet has a magnetic field also indicates there is a molten layer inside that is in flux. The Moon and Mars have no magnetic field because both are cold planets and solid inside. And the Earth cannot be magnetic in stasis because magnetic minerals lose their magnetism once they are heated above five hundred degrees Celsius. The only way to explain the Earth’s magnetic field is if there is a circulating electric current inside of the planet. Thus convection of molten iron in the Earth’s outer core must be the source for our planet’s magnetic field.” Ahana’s voice sharpened. “Please keep this associated electric field in mind as I continue.”
“Few people know that the magnetic field to which our compasses point is not a constant. Indeed, it is strongly believed that it has switched directions many times over the course of time.
As recently as twenty thousand years ago compasses probably would have pointed to the South Pole rather than North. Think of the immense changes in power given off by such a planet-wide switch.”
“The convection in the outer core affects the mantle, which in turn affects the crust and causes the movement of the crustal or tectonic plates. You all remember learning about Pangea and how the seven continents started out as one and how they rest on plates that have been moving for a very long time. The Earth’s crust is only a thin skin that constitutes less than point two percent of the planet’s mass. And there is a difference between the crust underneath the continents and that under the ocean. The crust under land averages about five times more thickness than that beneath the ocean.”
“Except—” the word hung in the air for several seconds—“at Nazca. The crust is less than two kilometers in thickness at that point and below it there appears to be lines of conductivity that lead deep into the Earth.”
“That is Doctor Reizer’s suspicion,” Dane said.
Reizer leaned forward and spoke at the computer screen. “How have you confirmed this?”
Ahana was in her lecture mode, which Dane had seen before. “Geologists can use P and S wave scans of the planet to map it much like a CAT scan of the brain does a similar thing. The boundary between the crust and the mantle is called the Mohorovicic Discontinuity or Moho for short. At Nazca, the Moho has a hole in it and extending down from that hole is a channel that leads to the molten outer core.”
“How come no one has noticed this before?” Dane asked.
“It has been noticed,” Ahana said. “No one thought it was important before.”
“I’m confused,” Dane said. “If the crust is so thin and there is a channel to the outer core, wouldn’t that be like a perfect set-up for a volcano?”
Ahana nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Except there aren’t any.”
“Why not?” Dane asked.
“I am not certain,” Ahana said. “Looking at the data from satellite over flights and various imaging, it appears as if the crust at Nazca is thin but very dense, almost like a cap placed on top of this channel. I do have a theory on how this cap was formed, but please wait while I explain something else.”
“Moving to the center of the planet, beneath the molten outer core, we come to the inner core. The inner core has a radius of only thirty-five hundred kilometers, but it contains a good percentage of the planet’s mass given its small size. And unlike the outer core, the inner is solid.”
That didn’t make sense to Dane. “Shouldn’t it be even hotter at the inner core?”
“Yes, and it is,” Ahana said. “The temperature of the inner core is estimated to be around four thousand degree
s Celsius.”
“Then shouldn’t the rock be melted?” Dane pressed.
“It should be except for the fact that it is under such extreme pressure that the rock remains solid.”
Something was bothering Dane, something Ariana had said. “What kind of rock is there in the inner core?”
“Good question,” Ahana said. “That is exactly what I have been researching. Because while it appears that the lines of power are flowing along the lines of convection and plate boundaries, we have discovered that the strongest line, the most powerful thread of power, so to speak, is going into the inner core of the planet itself.”
“It has been speculated, based on the available data, that the core consists of iron, but I think that is only an outer surface. I believe that the densest and hardest material on Earth has been collected at the very center of the planet under extreme temperature and pressure.”
“Diamonds,” Dane said.
Ahana nodded. “Yes. Diamonds are a mineral form of carbon and the hardest material known to man, rating a ten on the Mohs hardness scale. There are four known types of diamonds: a diamond proper, bort, ballas and carbanado. A diamond proper is one that is a crystallized gemstone. Bort is an imperfectly crystallized diamond that is dark in color. Ballas is a cluster of tiny diamond crystals of great hardness. Carbanado, which some call a black diamond, has no cleavage, which means it can’t split along a definite plane. What if there were a fifth form of diamond, one that humans have never seen?”
“I think there is a crystalline object at the center of the Earth. A diamond or cluster of diamonds on an unimaginable scale. And crystallized in a structure we have never seen or even postulated.”
Dane was beginning to see a connection: the crystal skulls that were used to channel power from the pyramids to stop the gates. Did the pyramids draw power from deep inside the Earth? But how could living tissue turn into crystal, he wondered?
Foreman’s voice cut into his thoughts. “If there is something like this in the center of the planet, what does it mean?”
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