“The Christians, obviously,” Harlan interjected. “They just got Raptured.”
“A bunch of people from a Hindu temple in India went missing, Harlan. Reports from a Chinese Buddhist temple said people just vanished into nothing. One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone—and yes, their clothing went with them. A lot of families from Israel disappeared as well. They weren’t Christians,” Frank corrected.
Diane grimaced and ignored them. “Everyone—gets attacked, Brett. The books refer to various governments as different kinds of mythical beasts with different characteristics: lions, dragons, that kind of thing. Then a final beast descends out of the darkness to consume all the others.”
“What does it look like?”
“The books don’t say. But everyone, including all of the other beasts cower in fear and worship the last one.”
“That would be the Antichrist.” Harlan posited.
The president rolled his eyes, “Harlan—”
“He’s right.” Diane interjected.
“I would have to agree,” Frank nodded at her.
“Really?” The president looked visibly annoyed. “But, all this prophecy stuff of people vanishing doesn’t just come up out of the blue, am I right?” he began. “I mean, aren’t there supposed to have been signs and wonders? Wars, rumors of wars? Fire? Pestilence. Famine. Plagues. Destruction. Nothing we’ve seen so far leads me to believe we’re heading for some kind of Armageddon.”
“Shanghai got roasted.” Harlan offered. “Big time. We still don’t know what the hell happened there. Same with Atlanta and Dallas—the buildings just crumbled.”
“Everyone thinks a big meteor hit Australia when our base went up off the bight, no thanks to the Dominion,” Frank offered.
“And that meteor shower, or whatever the hell that was, it set half of the Amazon jungle on fire. That took months to finally put out,” Harlan added. “The meteors hit so hard it caused an earthquake that brought back that big ‘ol huge new lake to form in Brazil—whatsit called—it was supposed to have never existed before, but now it’s back …”
“Lake Parima,” Diane finished.
“Yea, that.”
“The Wraith blasted to bits dozens of our ships, busting their way into Olympus, or Interra rather.” Frank added.
“What about the toxin Lucas created?” Diane suggested. “That was only supposed to take out anyone who’d been enhanced. But tens of thousands of people died in Michigan and Lyon. Were all of them enhanced? Hardly. That’s a plague in my book.”
“Jesus, people. You’re making it sound like we’re the ones bringing about the apocalypse.”
“Aren’t we?” Diane’s eyes met the president’s. “You signed the declaration order pulling the U.N. into a global conflict with the Wraith, did you not?”
“Well, yea but that was just supposed to be—” the president began.
“And now, close to fifteen thousand of our citizens are suddenly missing. Tens of thousands more missing from U.N. nations all over the world.”
The president’s eyes met hers.
“Close to a hundred and forty-four thousand people just disappeared without a trace, Brett. Right after you declared war on the gods. Do you want me to draw you a picture? I can if you like—”
35
S storm clouds had gathered in the distance turning the horizon into ugly shades of gray and black.
“Where did those come from?” Samantha asked her captain, looking out the slanted windows of the small upper deck bridge.
“It’s the Pacific, Sam,” he lamented. “The weather here can turn on a dime. We’re still twenty miles from our target coordinates, but I’m already seeing some nasty swells. I’m going to need to turn back, now.”
“Take us back in, captain.”
The door to their cabin opened. Both saw the concerned look on Samantha’s face. “We’re coming up on some rough seas, guys. I’m going to have to turn back. We’re still twenty miles away, Ty.”
“That’s close enough, Sam. We’ll be fine. Take care of our things, will you? We’ll be coming back to see you at some point.”
“Not another five years I hope?”
“No, not that long.” Ty assured.
“Good. You two be careful.” She smiled and closed the door.
“Get undressed and grab those flippers I brought down.” Ty was already slipping out of his clothes.
“Why are we undressing?”
“Our clothing will only slow us down.”
“Slow us down? Are we going for a swim?”
“We are.”
“What about the storm?”
“It won’t bother us.”
“If you say so.”
“Ethan.” Ty dropped his jeans onto the bed. “You need to trust me. Okay?”
Ethan nodded.
Both young men soon found themselves on the lower aft sun deck of the ship; a heavy rain was falling in the gloom. The yacht was speeding away from the storm clouds now. They slipped on their flippers. The swells were growing, slightly tossing the two hundred foot boat as it crashed through the waves.
Ty wove his feelings into Ethan’s. “Trust me.” Ethan felt him say.
Wearing only their skins and now flippers, both dove off the back of the deck into the rough seas.
The cold waters actually felt nice against Ethan’s skin as they drifted and bobbed together in the swells, watching the yacht move further and further away.
“I hope they’ll be okay,” Ty nodded as a large wave grew to eight feet above them, obscuring their view of the ship now well in the distance.
“They’ll be okay? What about us?”
“We can breath water, they can’t.”
Ethan suddenly became a deer in headlights. “You’re shitting me.”
“No. I’m not. I’m sorry, Ethan. Listen, I didn’t tell you this on purpose. It takes a few minutes to get used to. It freaks people out. I didn’t know if you’d come with me. So I—”
“Fuck that! I can breathe water? Seriously!?”
Ty watched Ethan dive below the surface. He followed, still keeping his emotions tightly entwined with Ethan’s.
Ty watched as Ethan’s normal reflexes went off with the new feeling of water filling his lungs, but within a minute his body had adjusted to the new sensations as his lungs began pumping, extracting oxygen from the seawater.
“Well?” Ty asked empathically. But he could already feel what Ethan was feeling. Ethan’s excitement was brimming!
Ethan swam to him just beneath the surface. He firmly embraced Ty and then kissed him as both sank deeper into the depths and below the swells of the storm.
While the storm raged above them, below the waves, all was calm and peaceful. All around them they could feel the sea life, schools of different fish, and several larger undersea mammals not far from them.
Their vision unhindered by the lack of light, they continued to descend, flipping their way casually toward an undersea mountain range in the distance.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Ethan spun around like a kid dolphin frolicking in the water. “It’s like a dream. Tell me I’m not dreaming.”
“You’re not dreaming. I honestly thought you’d be more freaked out about this.”
“No way. I feel like a merman. Hey, I wonder if—”
“I’m sure those legends came from our people,” Ty agreed.
“How deep are we?”
“Not very at the moment, maybe two-hundred feet. Once we reach the peak of that mountain we’ll be at about two-fifty.”
“How deep can we go?”
“As deep as we want. We’ll equalize to the pressure. You just don’t want to come up too fast if you go too deep. We won’t be getting anywhere near those depths. Only about fifteen hundred.”
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe. I want to introduce you to someone.”
“You mentioned her before, to Sam, someone named T
hea? Is she a relative?”
“She is, Ethan. She’s my sister.”
Once they reached the top of the mountain, they stood on the peak and looked around at shorter and taller peaks in the distance. The two then descended a steep cliff face deeper into a kind of undersea basin valley. Under an outcropping of rock Ethan followed Ty into a huge underwater cave with walls so smooth it was clearly not something natural, but something that had been carved out of the solid thalassic rock. Soft lights soon illuminated the open cavern-like space. Ethan could already see what was toward the back of the large carved cavern.
“Is—is that what I think that is?”
“It’s a vessel, Ethan. We hollowed out this part of the mountain all the way down here to hide her. She’s small, but she’s Sixth Era all the way. We named her Atlantica.”
“Sixth Era? What does that mean?”
“The gods marked different time periods of their history. Humans have basically two, B.C. and A.D. We have five, six now actually. Our Pre First Era marked the time when the gods were kind of like Humans, building farms and stone cities. There’s not a lot of history for us that survived during that time. It was kind of our Stone Age if you will.
“Our First Era really began about two-hundred thousand years ago. It was our age of enlightenment, Humans had their Renaissance, then their Industrial Revolution, with the Ra it was our own version of that, we called it our Knowledge Revolution. It was our era of discovering and perfecting a number of different kinds of advanced energy sources. Fusion. Ion. Gravatic. That kind of thing.”
“What was the Second Era?” Ethan asked, as both continued swimming toward the large vessel. Ty had called the vessel small, but it didn’t look all that small to Ethan. It looked something more like a thick crustacean the size of a forty-story building, and that was just what he could see of it from the front.
“Our Second Era marked the discovery of the substrates, dark matter, dark energy, it’s what the entire Universe exists within. It allowed us to use the very fabric of the Universe itself to transmit—well, anything. It’s how we built the continuums and it gave us the foundations of transporting matter from one place to another.”
“You mean like teleporting?”
“Exactly. And creating things on a subatomic level.”
“We studied that in theoretical physics, creating things from nothing; evidently, that takes a lot of energy.”
“Ty nodded. You have no idea. We needed new ways of generating power, lots of power. That’s what happened within our Third Era. By that time we’d discovered a new way to produce energy, Reflex.”
“You keep mentioning that; is it like the fusion and ion tools you keep telling me about?”
“Beyond fusion, beyond ion. It’s the power of the Ra; the basis of everything we do. Every atom in the Universe is made up of various smaller and smaller sub atomic structures. Exciting certain parts of those structures at different levels allows us to generate different resonance fields that exist within each atomic structure. Manipulate the fields in precise sequences and you can generate matter, energy, just about anything. The manipulation causes a subatomic ‘reflex’, hence the name.
“The Third Era was like our Golden Age. Ethan, we could build anything we wanted, do anything we wanted. Nothing it seemed was beyond our grasp. We were unlocking the very secrets of the Universe itself.”
“So what happened?”
“Culture happened. Disagreement happened. The peace and tranquility of tens of thousands of years came crashing down around us about a hundred-thousand years ago, when the war between the Sentinels and the Seven began.”
Both of them swam to the hull of the vessel that extended back into the smooth-walled cave for some distance. Ethan watched as Ty swam to a place that looked like a circular area where he simply disappeared into the side of the hull. Ethan followed.
Ethan found himself floating in a cylindrical room about twelve feet across that was lit from below. Bubbles began rising up from the solid illuminated floor. The bubbles soon became more and more intense, quickly replacing the water with air. Both were soon expelling the water from their lungs and coughing as if they’d just drank something that had gone down the wrong way.
“Ohh,” Ty finally began speaking again, drawing in a deep breath. “Haah. That’s the only bad part about diving.”
Ethan coughed heavily several times, pushing the water from his lungs and nodding in agreement. Still, the experience he’d just had getting here was like a fantastic dream. He’d do it again in a heartbeat.
While they slipped off their flippers, a soft golden light began flowing up from the floor. Ethan watched as Ty appeared to be taking a shower within the flowing light, smoothing his hands over his skin as if lathering with a soap that wasn’t there. The light made their hair flow like they were still underwater. The light seemed to clean and refresh their skin.
After a minute, the light faded and the door of the chamber opened into a tall, oval-like corridor that reminded Ethan of a fine comfortable luxury car.
“So what happened after the third era?” Ethan continued their conversation vocally now as the two walked a hallway deeper into the vessel.
“The fourth era was like our Dark Ages, Ethan. The gods were at war. For a while it looked as if the Sentinels would finally end it and bring peace, but then the Kir entered the conflict.”
“Who are they?”
“The Mages.” Ty scowled.
“Mages? Like magicians?”
“No. More like demons.”
“Huh?”
“The Kir were a small sect of the Ra, a kind of clan actually. They—studied Reflex, in very different ways than we did. Some say they understood it better than even the Masters themselves. They tipped the balance of power in favor of the Seven. Millions of Ra died as a result of the Kir.”
“What happened to them?”
“It was strange. The Sentinels had won a major battle against the Kir legions at the Battle of Atlantica; but at a terrible cost. The Sentinel forces had won, but were now defenseless. When the leaders of the Kir saw what they were doing to our people, how much they had decimated our populations, they just suddenly pulled out of the conflict and left the Seven. They just left, and disappeared.
“Where did they go?”
“No one really knows. The story is that their own people destroyed them.”
“Why?”
“Some say the Kir were too powerful. That they would eventually destroy the Universe if they continued to live. Another story is that there was a kind of civil war within the Kir themselves that destroyed them. Who knows? They’re not around anymore. Thank God.”
Ty and Ethan emerged from the corridor into a large central chamber many stories tall. The center of the ornately decorated room held a huge crystalline chandelier of sorts that lit the central chamber with a soft scintillating glow. Ethan’s eyes grew wide as his empathic senses felt the light within the crystalline structure.
“Thea?” Ty began, looking up at the huge chandelier and speaking in a normal voice. “I’m home. I want you to meet Ethan.”
Ethan watched as someone just as unclothed as the two of them shimmered into existence in front of them. She wasn’t just beautiful—she was stunning. With long thick white hair that flowed and moved in cascading waves around her tall, curved slender body and then draping elegantly around her long legs all the way to the floor, falling around her feet. There was a faint shimmering glow to her very fair skin and deeply pale ice-blue pupil-less eyes. Ethan had honestly never seen anyone so beautiful.
Although Ethan could feel her standing in front of him, he could also feel her from the glow above them, like the glow and the person standing in front of them were the same.
She immediately went to Ty and hugged him.
Ty wrapped his arms around her. “It’s okay, Thea, I’m fine. I’m home.” For long moments she hugged him and he her. When they pulled back from their embrace, Ethan could see her face h
ad streaked wet with tears that she began wiping elegantly away from her face. Ethan felt her sadness and her happiness that Ty was now here. No one this beautiful should ever be sad, he thought to himself.
“I’m sorry, Ethan, that you have to see me this way,” she said, wiping her tears away. “I had thought that no one would be returning. I’m very happy to meet you, but, sad for the loss of our family at the same time. Welcome.”
Ethan nodded. He was speechless; just looking at her. It was like he was looking at a goddess.
She moved to him and hugged him and then gave him a sweet kiss on the cheek that was just a little too close his lips. Feeling Thea unclothed against him gave Ethan an unwelcomed sensuous feeling he immediately tried to crush. Thea felt it as well and she smiled pulling away with an almost musical giggle.
“How is Sam doing?” Ty asked Thea. “Did they make it back yet?”
“They will. The storm is moving away from them now.”
“Good.”
“You two must be hungry after such a long dive. Let me get you something to eat,” Thea offered.
Ty nodded. “I’ll show Ethan our room and then we’ll meet you in the dining hall in a few minutes.”
“Let me know if you need anything.” She smiled at Ethan again and then walked beautifully away into a grand archway with Ethan’s eyes completely fixated on her as she elegantly left.
Ty half pulled Ethan through another tall corridor.
“Wow. That’s your sister?” he asked, completely beguiled. “She’s beautiful.”
Ty chuckled. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“She’s not exactly, well, Human, I mean Ra—what is she?”
Ethan followed Ty until he stepped into a small circular shaft with nothing above or below him. Ty just seemed to hover there.
“It’s okay,” Ty saw Ethan’s apprehension.
Ethan carefully stepped into the open shaft. Something seemed to be supporting him, keeping him from falling. The two rose quickly through the shaft for several decks and then Ty led him to a large open room that was like a large studio apartment, definitely decorated Ty-style.
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