But Stokes was only interested in finding one craft. He threw open the hatch and climbed on top of Deepflight, the other members of his crew joining him. They scanned the shoreline, searching among the multitude of ships.
“There.” The executive officer was pointing to the left.
The Connecticut was half beached. Bow first, near a Spanish galleon.
“Let’s go,” Stokes ordered.
THE PRESENT
Dane’s suit floated six inches above the ground. A wall of fire was less than a foot away. Amelia Earhart was to his right, slowly backing away from the flames.
‘’Where the hell are we?” she demanded.
The wall of fire was over 200 feet high and stretched as far as he could see left and right. There was a similar wall about a quarter mile behind them. The ground beneath their feet was rocky and sandy.
“Nazca,” Dane said. The portal they had come through was shrinking, and as he watched, it snapped out of existence. He turned back to the wall of fire. He could see it was being pulled left to right. And in the distance, about two miles away, he could see a massive portal, about a half mile wide, sucking in the flame from all the lines on the plain. He knew it was doing the same thing on a much larger scale from the interior of the planet.
“What’s Nazca?” Earhart asked.
Dane pointed at the large portal. “That’s what we have to stop.”
“How?” Earhart asked.
Dane instinctively knew that even if he had the crystal skulls with him, they would make no difference, given the amount of power that was being drawn from the planet. This was beyond the scope of what a priestess could do. He reached with his one hand and opened the suit and stepped out on the Nazca Plain. Earhart hesitated, then followed suit. He felt relieved to see her face. The air felt good against his exposed flesh.
Dane staggered as the ground beneath his feet rumbled and shifted.
***************
The crew of Aurora watched as the end panels began folding in themselves. The flow of ozone through the trailing portal was slowing, but given that the craft was now over the Gulf of Mexico, it had stripped Earth’s atmosphere of a considerable percentage of the critical material.
***************
Fatal failure in the core in less than thirty minutes,” Ahana announced.
“And then?” Foreman asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Initially, the core will implode,” Ahana said. “Then it will explode. The end of the planet.”
Foreman looked out the portal toward the Devil’s Sea Gate. No sign of Dane. Something nudged against the back of his legs. Chelsea. The golden retriever seemed quite unperturbed about the pending end of the world. Foreman reached down and rubbed the dog’s head.
***************
“Wait,” Dane said, holding out his arm as Earhart moved back from the fire.
“What is it?” she asked.
The answer came as a portal opened in the same location it’s the one they had just come through. A woman stepped through, her red cloak spattered with blood, a golden orb in her hands. She had red hair cut tightly against her skull. Her eyes widened as she took in the walls of fire, then she shifted her gaze to Earhart, then to Dane, where it lingered. She reached out one hand, and Dane took it in his. He felt a shock race up his arm. She pulled his hand toward the golden sphere. The surface writhed and moved, each strand pulsing. But of the dozens of strands, there was one that was suffused with red, and Dane didn’t hesitate, allowing her to place his hand on it.
Pain seared into his flesh as if the strand were red hot. But he didn’t let go. The world around him, the Nazca Plain, the walls of fire, were gone. He saw worlds, many Earths, portals connecting the parallel worlds, all running through THE SPACE BETWEEN. But his focus was on the portal his hand was on: the power line from his world to the Shadow’s.
All he could make of the Shadow’s world was a black wall, as if it were protected in some manner from the various Earth timelines, but the power line plunged into it, pouring energy through. There was a portal right next to it, and Dane could tell something was getting sucked through it--not power but something else.
A voice was in his head, the voice of the woman in the red cloak. It wasn’t exactly a voice because what was coming to him wasn’t words but images. He saw what to do. With one hand on the red strand, he reached with the other, pushing into the sphere. His skin recoiled as if he were reaching into a nest of writhing vipers, but he persisted until his fingers closed around another strand. He knew it was the portal line next to the power one, leading from his time/world to the Shadow’s world.
Dane squeezed with both hands, the pain spiking so that he cried out, but still he held on, exerting power. The second line gave way, snapping.
***************
The panels had all folded in and been tucked inside the sphere. The crew of Aurora watched as the large black sphere slipped back into the portal and disappeared, the portal shrinking out of existence.
THE SPACE BETWEEN
The three-quarter-mile-wide column of black snapped out of existence, causing a shock to reverberate throughout THE SPACE BETWEEN. And momentarily caught in the air, a quarter mile above the inner sea, the black sphere was revealed. Then it free-fell, slamming into the water with a huge splash, causing a forty-foot-high tidal wave to race outward toward the surrounding shorelines.
The sphere went underwater briefly, then bobbed to the surface, floating aimlessly.
A mile away, the prow of the Connecticut appeared out of a portal, the rest of the submarine sliding through.
THE PRESENT
Dane’s right hand was on fire, the pain unbearable. On his own, he would have let go, but he felt power coming from the strange woman, enough to keep the pressure on the strand. His fingers closed in, tightening on it. He felt heat all around him now, but he dared not open his eyes and lose his concentration.
The strand snapped, and Dane was thrown backward, away from the map. He lay on his back, staring up at stars in a night sky. Then he realized he could see the stars because the walls of fire were gone. The Nazca Plain was as it had been, marked but inactive.
Dane leaned up on his elbow. The priestess was still into the map with one hand, and a portal opened behind her. She pointed, indicating for Dane and Earhart to enter it.
Earhart went through, followed by Dane. He wasn’t surprised to find himself on the shore of the Inner Sea. He turned as the woman came through. The portal map in her hands. The portal disappeared.
A clicking noise caught Dane’s attention. Rachel lifted out of the water forty meters offshore and landed on her back with a splash. Dane could pick up the dolphin’s happiness. He blinked as farther out in the sea, the conning tower of a nuclear submarine appeared as the craft surfaced. And behind that, he could just make out, among the various portal columns, the top part of a black sphere, the majority of it submerged. He blinked, then looked once more. It made sense to him, each piece, part of a whole that was to come.
He turned back to the two women standing next to him.
Amelia Earhart’s face was pale, a thin sheen of sweat covering her skin.
“What just happened?” she asked.
“We saved the world. My world,” he amended, glancing at the strange woman.
She was reaching into the portal map again, her eyes closed as her hands searched. She paused, nodded to herself, then removed her hand from inside the map. She tapped her chest and then pointed to the right along the beach.
“What’s she trying to say?” Earhart asked.
Dane had no doubt what the gesture meant as he picked up the emotions/thoughts of the woman. “She’s going home.”
Dane nodded and spread his hands wide in a gesture of thanks. The Woman smiled briefly, then began walking away.
“Shouldn’t we keep the map?” Earhart asked.
“Others need it,” Dane said. “We’re not the only world that the Shadow threatens.” He faced the Inner Sea a
nd waved at the man in the conning tower of the submarine.
EPILOGUE THE PRESENT
The Earth was still.
In eastern Africa, the central United States along the devastated Mississippi region, around Lake Tahoe, the survivors struggled to stay alive.
In capitals around the world, scientists met with world leaders, but there were many more questions than answers.
On board the FLIP. Ahana studied the data her computers were spitting out while Foreman hovered over her shoulder.
“Well?” the CIA agent asked.
“Good news. And bad news.”
“The good?”
“The core is stable; the Nazca portal is closed.”
“The bad?”
“The Shadow sphere took so much ozone out of the atmosphere, the surface of the planet will become unfit for human life.”
“How long?”
“Two years.”
Foreman slumped down in a chair, rubbing Chelsea’s head. He seemed relieved. “Two years is a long time.”
“And there is also the radioactivity from Chernobyl,” Ahana added. “It will reach Moscow in less than a week.”
A sailor stuck his head in the door of the control center ‘The Connecticut has emerged from the gate.”
Foreman ran onto the bridge wing. He could see the conning tower of the submarine coming toward them. His hands ripped the railing, waiting for torpedoes and missiles to strike out as he remembered the Wyoming’s assault when it came out of the Bermuda Triangle gate. His body sagged with relief as an American flag unfurled from the periscope.
The Connecticut slowly came alongside the FLIP, and lines were thrown, connecting the two. A gangplank was next and Foreman was the first to greet Dane as he came across.
“Welcome back!”
“Nazca’s shut down,” Dane said.
“We know,” Foreman said. “All muonic activity is stable and low.”
‘But?” Dane asked. Earhart had decided to stay in THE SPACE BETWEEN, and Dane hadn’t bothered to try to dissuade her. This wasn’t her time. And her people, the refugees, needed her.
Foreman’s summary was succinct. “The Shadow has avenged a high amount of ozone with a black sphere, and the radiation from Chernobyl is spreading.”
Dane nodded as if this was expected. “There is more work to be done. I think I know a way we can fix both those problems.”
“How do you know?”
Dane smiled. “I’ve seen it in a vision.”
480BC
Cyra held up the portal map and placed it in the leather sling held by one of the rower/warriors on the Theran Oracle’s ship. She was standing waist deep in water, and the Oracle was just barely visible as a hooded figure in her cave in the rear of the ship. After the map was secure, she passed up the Naga Staff to a second man.
The men carried the portal map and Naga Staff to the Oracle, and Cyra briefly saw her face in the golden glow as she lifted the cloth Cyra had wrapped it in, then once more she faded into darkness.
“Why do you need it?” Cyra called out.
The Oracle’s voice was low but carried easily over the water. “I don’t. Others do. Other places. Other times.”
“Where did it come from?” Cyra asked, unwilling to let the Oracle fade away so quickly.
Surprisingly, the Oracle laughed. “I don’t know. And not just where; when is important. In fact, I think … well, it is beyond me.” The Oracle waved in farewell and stepped back into the shadows of her cave.
The ship was moving, and Cyra waited until it disappeared into the darkness. Then she waded back to shore. There was a track from the Gulf of Corinth that led south, and she wearily walked along it, into the high country.
***************
King Xerxes, son of Darius, grandson of Cyrus, king of Medea and Persia, ruler of Libya, Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, Ethiopia. Elam. Syria. Assyria. Cyprus. Babylonia. Chaldea. Cilicia, Thrace, and Cappadocia, and most blessed of god Ahura Mazda, held a perfumed kerchief over his nose as he stood atop the ruins of the Middle Gate and looked out over the ground strewn with bodies. It was almost impossible to walk without stepping on a corpse.
“Where is the Spartan King?” he asked Pandora. The priestess was splattered with blood, the Naga Staff held tightly in her hands.
She pointed at a mound of bodies-most of them Immortals-just south of the Middle Gate. ‘’The Spartans made their last stand there. I killed him myself.” She didn’t add that she had accomplished this only after he’d been severely wounded several times by Immortals.
“Did you succeed in your quest?” Xerxes asked.
Pandora wearily leaned on the Naga Staff. “No.”
“Then whoever sent you will be displeased,” Xerxes said.
Pandora stiffened as a blade entered her back. She saw a figure slip away--Xerxes’s Dagger--even as she knew he had delivered a fatal blow. “You are nothing,” she said to the Persian King. “You will fail in this. The Greeks will defeat you.”
“Is that a prophecy or a wish?” Xerxes asked.
Pandora collapsed on the Middle Gate, adding her body to the multitude.
***************
The women of Sparta mourned their dead men in much the same manner in which they had sent them off to war. The sound of the mournful hymn they sang rose above the city-state and echoed into the surrounding forests and mountains.
Cyra heard the song as she sat in the shade of a tree near the parade field where Spartan boys sparred, preparing for the next battle. She got to her feet as Thetis approached. The King’s wife wore a thin strip of black cloth around her forehead to mark her “loss. To her right was Briseis.
Thetis bowed her head slightly. “Greetings, Priestess.”
“Your husband asked me to come here,” Cyra said.
“For what reason?” Thetis asked.
Cyra looked at the young girl. “To teach your daughter.”
Thetis smiled through her grief. “He asked that? A Spartan King concerned about his daughter’s future? Perhaps things can change.” She reached out and took Cyra’s hand and placed it in Briseis’s small hand. “Teach her well.”
THE PRESENT
Alluvial waters have widened the pass at Thermopylae over the centuries since the battle between Spartans and Persians. It is now over a mile wide, as represented on Pandora’s map. It was indeed an epic battle, as Xerxes turned back to Persia the following year, never completing his conquest, and the forces he left behind were routed by the Greeks. The entire history of the western world was changed as a result.
Near the mountain, where the pass was tight in days of old, etched on a monument are two lines in memory of the battle:
Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws we lie.
The End
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