Between that and the radiation, over two billion people died in the first ten years after the final Shadow assault. The survivors struggled to live as crops failed and livestock died. The human race burrowed into the planet to escape the unshielded rays of the sun. Hydro farms — massive greenhouses with the most dangerous rays of the sun filtered out — were built. Deep wells to tap the fresh water the Shadow hadn’t siphoned off were dug. Still the human race dwindled, another billion dying in the second decade after the last assault from the Shadow as society spasmed with violence and despair to adjust to a raped planet.
In the face of such devastation and the battle for survival, the barriers between countries, between religions, between races, were eventually dropped. The elite of what was left of each countries’ military forces was sent to Antarctica to form the First Earth Battalion. Along with the remainder of the top scientists not involved in survival technology.
Their goal was simple. To develop weapons to fight the Shadow.
It seemed a strange task, given that they had already lost the war with the Shadow and their planet was dying. Plus. There were no more known gates. The Shadow apparently shut them down here, isolating this timeline.
Chamberlain turned to the south and ran across the terrain, fighting the suit that tried to slow him, his muscles straining with the effort. He crested a ridge and came to a halt on top. A valley covered with jumbled rocks lay ahead with no sign of life. Chamberlain scanned it on protected vision, then on low-level thermal, then on infrared. Nothing. Excellent.
Chamberlain activated the secure, frequency-jumping radio in his suit. “Alpha, Six, Five. Return to base. Over.”
The valley exploded with over two hundred black, human-shaped forms, bursting upward from their hide positions in the sand. Weapons at the ready, the soldiers of the First Earth Battalion made huge hundred-meter bounds using their suits on combat power as they headed back to their home base. They moved tactically, squads leap-frogging and providing cover for each other. Heavy weapons set up fife spots, ranging their weapons out until the forward scouts passed their limits, then moving forward. Flankers raced along the high ground on either side, protecting the main axis of advance.
Chamberlain watched his men and women with pride. Their world was dying, but they were prepared for one last battle with the Shadow. And according to the Oracles, they would be given the opportunity for it. How, when, and where, the Oracles couldn’t say, but one thing they all agreed on: There was to be one final assault.
One thing the Oracles didn’t say, and no one talked about, was whether the assault would be in the form of the Shadow coming back to this timeline or whether they would take the battle to the Shadow’s timeline or some other timeline.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night usually, Chamberlain would lay awake on his bunk and wonder if the prophecy was real or had just been a way to unite people and give some hope to their doomed existence. Always he ended up back at the same conclusion-it didn’t matter. Only time would tell if the prophecy was true.
The sphere map rested on the column in the center of · the room, the surface dull and void of power. There were faint markings etched in the gold, the outlines of the · strands that marked portals between worlds and times. Dane and Earhart had entered the large black sphere that the Shadow used to travel through portals and descended to the map room.
“Can you activate it?” Amelia Earhart asked Dane as he approached the sphere.
In response, Dane placed his hands on the sphere. The material was cold to the touch at first. He closed his eyes and focused his mind. The events of the past several months had left no doubt that he was different from other humans and that the core of that difference rested in his brain.
Sin Fen, Foreman’s agent who had worked with him during the mission into Cambodia, had explained as much s she knew to him. She herself was descended from a long line of priestesses who traced their lineage back to Atlantis. A civilization had thrived there ten thousand years ago, one that was far advanced in technology because the humans there were different from those in the rest of the world.
Sin Fen had told Dane he too was descended from the Atlanteans and his brain bore the same differences. The normal human brain is bicameral, consisting of two distinct hemispheres that are largely redundant. For most people, the speech center is present in both hemispheres but active only in the left side and dormant in the right. Dane’s right side speech center was active but not tied to normal speech. It was the place where he received his visions and heard voices. Some of those came from the Ones Before, the mysterious group that was trying to aid them in the war against the Shadow. Some came from sources he couldn’t identify. He also had had a telepathic link to Sin Fen who’d told him she suspected the original Atlanteans had an even more pure connection between the hemispheres of the brain, allowing them to be fully telepathic and also to develop a written and verbal language. The Atlanteans could use their telepathy to get concepts across without the limitation of the spoken or written word, but then they could use the latter to work on the details of what they were doing, the specifics.
As Dane stared at the sphere map. He considered what Sin Fen had learned about the Atlantis civilization and its development thanks to an ancient computer they discovered on an Atlantean boat trapped in one of the graveyards of vessels caught by the gates. Unlike our civilization, the Atlanteans had focused inward, rather than outward. They had harnessed the basic powers of the brain and its connection to the outside world.
That is until they came into contact with the Shadow, which first appeared out of the Bermuda Triangle Gate. To battle the Shadow, they developed a kind of shield that tapped into both the power of the mind and the planet itself. Unfortunately, the best the shield could do was stop the Shadow’s encroachments, not attack and defeat it. In the war, the continent of Atlantis was destroyed, and the few survivors were scattered around the world.
Although the legends of the gates — the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea, and others — had been with humankind for millennia, Dane didn’t know why the Shadow had decided recently to step up its assault against our Earth timeline. He had helped the planet avert disaster several times, but he knew they were about out of time and chances. The most recent assault, which had stripped the ozone layer and destroyed Chernobyl, had come very close to fatally crippling the planet.
Dane opened his eyes and glanced at Earhart. She was I watching him, waiting. He reached out toward her with his mind and saw the surprise in her eyes as his mental probe touched her.
“What are you doing?”
“Give me your strength,” Dane said.
“What strength?”
Dane looked back down at the sphere. “The feeling you had when you were flying, free of the Earth, at the controls of your plane. The power.”
It had been so long for Earhart since she’d flown, having been captured by the Shadow during her attempt to fly around the world and then freed by the Ones Before to survive in the Space Between. She had no idea how long she’d existed in the Space Between as there had been no way to tell time there. She searched her memory, bringing back images of being in her Electra, taking off, climbing into the sky at full throttle.
Dane felt the mental connection with Earhart grow more vivid, and a slight surge of power came from her to him. The sphere under his hands became to grow warm. The strands began to become distinct from each other. His fingers slipped between them, delving into the map, as if he had pressed his hands into a ball of warm, writhing snakes.