Earhart and her craft had been captured by a large sphere, and when she awoke, she was here. She’d found others trapped around the Inner Sea, and most told the same story of being caught by a blue glow. Currently there were fifty people at this small camp. All from various time lines. No one could clearly say how long they’d been here, as there was no night or day, just constant light from a source high over the Inner Sea.
Strange things had happened, and strange things continued to happen. She thumbed ahead in the diary, to entries made after arriving. A man named Dane, who claimed he was from the beginning of the twenty-first century. Had come through, Followed by a Roman legion from the first century A.D. who had been battling the Valkyries. The legion had been destroyed and the men turned into stone by a weapon of the Valkyries, but not before one of Dane’s companions had shut one of the portals that ran through the Space Between. Dane had returned inside a strange watercraft from his time, this time trying to destroy another portal that he said was draining power from the very center of his Earth and making the world o unstable it would soon be destroyed. Again he had succeeded, and again he had gone back to his time.
Earhart had stayed with her group, barely eking a survival by raising food in a few patches of Earth soil they’d managed to scavenge near the occasional portal that opened on the shore. Occasionally they supplemented their diet with either Earth or Shadow-side creatures that wandered through an open portal. Even that was strange, as once a small dinosaur had appeared before wandering back through another gate.
It was a quirk of the portals that these creatures could survive travel through them. Not long after she had arrived in the Space Between, one of the groups had tried going into one of the portals in an attempt to get back to Earth. The man swam out to the dark. Cylinder while the rest of the band lined the shoreline. He disappeared into the blackness, only to reappear seconds later, screaming in agony, his skin red and blistered. He died within an hour, and no one had attempted to enter a portal since. The portals, cylinders of black, usually opened in the large circular lake in the center of the Space Between, but sometimes they opened on land.
Earhart glanced up at the captured Valkyrie suit. One had to be shielded to go through most portals, especially because there was no telling where the portal would lead or what would be on the other side. The key question was which one led to the Shadow’s home? If they could figure that out, they could take the war to their enemy rather than constantly reacting to assaults.
Earhart thought back to her dream. She’d been powerless in the cockpit, which she knew was significant. Power was important, very important in this war. It was one of the things the Shadow sought from Earth time lines it scavenged. It was also what was needed to fight the Shadow.
Earhart glanced at a metal case next to the Valkyrie suit. She got up and walked over to it. She flipped up the lid and stared at the contents-crystal skulls, each set in thick foam padding. Nine of them.
Earhart reached into her Pocket and pulled out a small metal cylinder with runic writing on it. She unscrewed the top and pulled out a piece of parchment. A design was drawn on It-twelve small skulls, m a pattern around a center, higher point where there was a thirteenth skull. Earhart couldn’t read. He writing, but she knew what she was seeing. A formation of power using the skulls. What surrounded the skulls, though, was what was most interesting. Intricate drawings of warriors in battle against an encroaching darkness. There was also writing. Names.
Humans are at their best and most powerful when things are the worst and most desperate. Earhart had heard that not once, but several times. The voice of the gods. And that wasn’t all. She’d been directed via a vision to a portal, which she· d traversed in the protective Valkyrie suit. She’d come out t a graveyard — boats, planes, and other craft, all captured m a gate. She’d gone directly to the ship she’d “seen,” a long black ship with a single mast and a black cube in the rear made of black metal, the likes of which she had never seen. She’d found this cylinder there. A piece of the puzzle.
Not long after that, she’d also had a vision that had directed her to lead another raid on the Valkyrie people’s farm. She’d stolen a piece of equipment, a long thin needle with a loving red bulb on one end. She’d taken it through a portal and injected it into the womb of a woman. She’d gone back again to that time line for the birth of the woman’s children and had taken one of the children from the woman.
Earhart shook her head. She was doing as she saw in her visions, but she didn’t know exactly why she was doing all this. She had to trust that the Ones Before had a plan and she was one piece of making it happen.
And now it was time for her to implement another step in the plan. But there were twelve skulls in the drawing and she only had nine. Would it be enough? Earhart reached into the case and retrieved one of the skulls. She placed it in a pouch, which she tossed over her shoulder.
“You go?” Taki asked.
Earhart had learned the basics of Japanese prior to her flight-after all. George had arranged for her to spy on Japanese facilities during the trip-and had added to what she knew in her time here with the samurai. “Yes.”
“No?” Taki indicated the Valkyrie suit.
Earhart closed her eyes. The words had come the previous day, echoing in her mind. “This portal should be safe.”
“None are safe,” Taki said.
“I must go.” She handed him the cylinder. “It is not time for this yet.”
Taki took the cylinder. “Be safe.”
Earhart nodded and walked out of the camp, feeling the eyes of the others on her back. They knew if she wasn’t wearing the suit, she was going to a portal that was “safe.” A way out. However, what neither they nor she knew was what was on the other side of the portal. And because she was on a mission dictated by the ‘’voices,’’ they had to assume it was dangerous.
Earhart had been given the opportunity by Dane to travel back to his world and time with him, and she’d turned him down. She wasn’t quite sure how many of those in her camp would feel the same way.
The Inner Sea came into view. There were a half-dozen portals in sight, black columns rising from the surface upward toward the ceiling. They varied in width from three meters to one more than a thousand meters wide. Earhart paused as she noted something floating between two of the portals-a massive sphere more than four hundred meters wide. It was one l the Shadow’s craft used in traversing the portals. It had dropped here when Dane shut the portal from his world to wherever the Shadow had drained the ozone, and it was still here. Which indicated that the crew might not have survived. She felt a tingle as she stared at the sphere. And she knew immediately the sphere was important.
But not at the moment. She turned to her left as if drawn in that direction. A three-meter-wide black column was about fifty meters away. Earhart walked along the shoreline until she was opposite the column. It was just off the shoreline, and she waded out to it. When she was right next to it she paused. What if the gate was deadly? What if she went to a dead world, toxic to humans? The voice had told her she would revisit a place and near time she’d already been to, but what if it were wrong?
Amelia Earhart. Who had crossed oceans and nearly circled the world at the controls of her plane, cursed, then stepped forward into the gate.
CHAPTER FOUR
The old mountain man with the.54 caliber Hawkins rifle in the crook of his arm towered over the dark-haired teenager at his side. They were deep in the Rocky Mountains, near the continental divide in the northern part of the land; those far to the east in Washington had labeled the Colorado Territory. Jim Bridger was a legend from the west coast to the east, the most well known mountain man in the land. He wore fine buckskin. With half the fringes gone. Used as expedient string for one thing or another during this trip.