A line of people in various colored cloaks were lined along the steep stairs on both sides. At the very top was a stone slab, surrounded by a ring of people in black robes. All were dark-skinned, with black hair.
A body was lying on the slab. A woman. She was different than those around her. Fair-skinned with very blond, almost white hair. Her blue eyes were wide open, staring straight up. She wore a red robe. She turned to one of those in the black robes who held a staff in his hand and her mouth moved.
She was saying something but Dane heard nothing. There were three men and a woman standing at one end of the platform. Not wearing robes, but rather shiny armor with leather underneath. Swords were at their waists, bows slung over their shoulders and spears in their hands. Their faces were hard- a look Dane knew well. Warriors who had seen much death. He could tell they were anxious, wanting whatever was to happen to occur. He knew, simply by seeing them, that they had accompanied the woman on the slab to this place after a long and perilous journey. The female warrior cast a nervous glance to the north. In that direction Dane now saw a dark cloud- the Shadow filling the horizon. A gate was open and growing, coming toward the pyramid.
The woman on the slab finished speaking. She looked straight up into the perfectly blue sky above. The cloaked man she had been talking to placed his hand on her forehead. She nodded very slightly. He removed his hand. He moved over and placed his staff in a small hole next to the slab she was on. It slid down a foot and then stopped.
The other priests and priestesses were chanting. A halo of blue light surrounded the woman’s head. Her body arched upward from, her mouth rigid with pain but Dane could hear nothing. The man twisted the staff. The glow around the woman’s head was growing larger. Something was happening to her head.
Dane squinted, trying to make out what exactly what-
A lance of pain ripped through Dane’s head above his left eye, knocking him backwards. In the process of doing so, he let go of Sin Fen’s head, but it didn’t bounce back on the deck as she sat up in the darkness.
The pain was gone as quickly as it had come.
“What’s the status?” Sin Fen asked.
Dane rubbed his forehead. “It’s dark, we have no power and I can’t find a light.”
“Ariana must have cut all power completely when she shut the computer down,” Sin Fen said.
“Better than have that thing get into the computer like it did her airplane in Cambodia.”
“We have no clue what happened. We don’t know if what hit us was a probe from the gate.”
Dane could hear Sin Fen moving in the dark.
“You know it was,” Dane said. “You could sense it just as I could.”
Dane shut his eyes as a beam of light cut through the darkness. Slowly he opened them. Sin Fen had turned on an emergency light above the master computer. Ariana stirred and Dane helped her sit up.
“How are you doing?” Dane asked her.
“I’m living,” Ariana replied. She squinted into the light. “The habitat seems to be intact. What the hell hit us?”
“I don’t know,” Dane said.
Ariana shivered. “It’s getting cold.”
“Can you get us powered up?” Dane asked.
Ariana nodded. She sat down in front of the computer and pressed a button. The screen glowed. “At least this is working. It will take me a little while.”
Captain Bateman had been left alone for hours. Submariners tended to stay out of areas they weren’t supposed to be in and the computer center led to no other area- a dead end- and because of that no one had tried the door. And because the computers had run efficiently for that entire time period.
Bateman closed a panel and checked his watch. He was ready. Now it was just a matter of time. He leaned back and pressed both hands against the side of his head. Pain, like the ticking of a watch, was throbbing on the right side, just behind his ear. He slid his right hand across the skin and felt a bump underneath- it seemed to his fingers to be vibrating slightly to the same beat as the pain.
He closed his eyes, then opened them, confusion showing. For the briefest of moments he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. But the moment passed and a curtain came down over his thoughts. He slumped back once more.
“The habitat seems to be fine,” Dane’s voice was like ointment on a wound for Foreman who had been convinced Deeplab IV and everyone in it was gone.
Foreman looked up at the status board. There were red lights flashing. An officer ran up. “Sir, we have confirmed the NSA’s tsunami alert for the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. Whatever came out of the gate generated a lot of power and it’s headed for the coast.”
Tsunami is Japanese for harbor wave. The mile and a half diameter projection from the Bermuda Triangle gate toward the Milwaukee Deep had generated a force that disturbed the mass of water it passed through, much as a child moving his hand through his bathwater caused a disturbance except this was billions of times more powerful.
In the deep water of the Puerto Rican Trench, the effect was negligible, even though it had almost destroyed Deeplab IV. But as the effect went southeast, the depth decreased dramatically, transforming the power of the tsunami. The generated wave, no more than twelve inches in height at the beginning and initially traveling at four hundred miles an hour, slowed as it got closer to land. The energy that had been in the velocity was reflected by the rising ocean bottom, forming an ever-higher wave. The distance between the wave crests also shortened, changing the power vectors in the wave.
There was no time for a warning. Those on the shore noticed that the water seemed to draw away, as if the tide had suddenly gone out. If it had been Hawaii, where people knew about tsunamis, this would have given those who saw it warning, but Puerto Rico had not been hit by a killer wave in over a generation. Some people even walked out onto the suddenly dry ocean bottom, picking up fish that had been left behind by the sudden disappearance of water.
The water returned with all the vengeance of a thousand runaway freight trains lined shoulder to shoulder, moving over two hundred miles an hour. Water is very heavy, a gallon weighing eight and a half pounds. A bathtub full of water weighs almost three quarters of a ton. There were millions and millions of bathtubs full of water lifted by the force of the wave that approached the northwest tip of Puerto Rico. Added to the weight, the force of moving water increases as the square of the velocity. Even though the wave slowed considerably as it grew in height, it still hit the shore at over sixty miles an hour.
The first tsunami hit the coast with a crest of sixty feet. The first to die were those who had walked out onto the beach. Thousands more died with the first wave, not so much from drowning, but by being smashed by debris picked up and carried with the wave as it thundered inland. Coastal villages that had survived the numerous hurricanes and tidal surges associated with that weather event in the region were obliterated as the wave thundered ashore.
Fishing boats were carried a quarter mile inland. Houses, the majority built of wood, were shattered and smashed, the debris becoming part of the wave still moving inland. Cars and trucks were picked up and tossed about like toy models.
The survivors of the first wave barely had time to pick themselves up before the second, slightly smaller wave crashed ashore. Eight waves in all hit the island in the space of five minutes battering the coast as if the very hand of God had come down and wreaked punishment upon the people.
The beach to a distance of a quarter mile inland was scoured clean of all building except those made of the stoutest reinforced concrete which were few and far between. Trees were knocked over, power lines ripped out of the ground, sewage systems flooded, the water table contaminated- all the space of those five minutes.