Eddings went to one knee in front of her superior. “Colonel Chamberlain is here.”
The Oracles had a very different system than the military and Chamberlain had long ago learned the truism of when in Rome do as the Romans. He also went to one knee in front of the old lady occupying the throne. “High Priestess,” he said, bowing his head.
“Colonel. Captain. Please stand. Are your warriors ready?”
Chamberlain pulled off his helmet, tucking it under one arm as Eddings did the same. “Yes, ma’am. Always.”
The old lady fingered a crystal charm that hung around her neck. “The time we have waited for is coming.”
So they had said yean ago, Chamberlain thought. He glanced around the chamber. “What has happened?”
The old woman raised a hand and pointed a bony finger past him, just over his shoulder. “Look. Sentinels.”
Chamberlain turned. Two orcas — killer whales — swam into view and came to a stop just inches from the glass, their black eyes peering in. When the Shadow had conducted its final assault, the Valkyries had not been the only force coming through the gates. Strange, mythical creatures had come through the gates on land. And kraken had poured into the oceans from the sea gates, killing all they encountered. Similar to giant squids, but possessing mouths on the end of each tentacle, they were horrible creatures, who had homed in on killing dolphins for some strange reason that none of the scientists had been able to figure out.
The sentinels had been the answer. Orcas, trained by the U.S. Navy to do recovery work, had been unleashed to fight the kraken. The most amazing thing was that only a half-dozen orcas had been in the Navy program, but those six had spread out and immediately swam to their fellow whales and gathered them. In the dark depths of the world’s ocean, terrible battles were fought. Kraken versus dolphin and orca. The carcasses of the dead washed up on shores all over the planet, most of the bodies being dolphin.
The orcas were the vicious cousin of the dolphins. The largest member of the dolphin family, they were more widespread in the world’s oceans than dolphins. Males could grow to over thirty feet in length. They ate pretty much anything they ran into and could catch including blue whales and squid.
Like dolphins, they also used echo-location to check out their surroundings and locate prey. They also could communicate among themselves with high-speed clicks that sounded like rasps and screams. However, when they needed to be quiet to draw in prey, they could remain silent for days on end.
The strange thing about orcas though, was that once mated, male and females stayed together for life. A remarkable display of fidelity for a species with the moniker “killer.” Mothers bore their young for over sixteen months and then nursed them for another year and a half. They were a strange combination of lethality and love.
By the time the Shadow closed the gates, all of the world’s dolphins were dead, but the orcas finished off the last of the kraken left behind. And then the Oracles found something most fascinating. Even though all gates were closed, the orcas were picking something up, something from beyond this timeline.
It was the Sentinels, through the Oracles, who delivered the message to form the First Earth Battalion from the Ones Before. And to be ready. That they would be needed and have one last chance to avenge the slow death of their planet.
“What are the Sentinels sending?” Chamberlain asked.
It was Eddings who answered. ‘’Nothing specific. Just a sense of”- she searched for the word-“anticipation.”
Chamberlain found that an odd choice of words. “What do you mean?”
The High Priestess Oracle answered. “For years we have sat here and listened. And all we have heard are whispers. Of a great battle to come. To be ready for a final assault. But now. It’s not a specific message from the Sentinels as Captain Eddings noted. It’s a feeling.”
“Captain Eddings said ‘anticipation,’’’ Chamberlain noted. “ Is that what it is?”
The old woman turned her eyes to him and smiled, the first time he had seen her smile in all the years he’d known her. “No. Not anticipation. Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“Hope.”
Throughout the long flight from the Devil’s Sea Gate to San Diego, Professor Ahana bad kept in contact not only with the crew aboard the FLIP but with her comrades manning the Super-Kamiokande in Japan. Dane had taken the opportunity to catch up on much needed sleep. Earhart did the same, both not knowing when the next opportunity for rest would come.
When they were under an hour out from the West Coast of the United States, Dane cracked open one eye and looked about the inside of the navy transport aircraft. Ahana had two laptop computers open, one on each seat next to her and wore a headset that was linked to the plane: MILSTAR communications system. Earhart was nowhere to be seen.
Dane stood and stretched, then walked forward to the door leading to the cockpit. He opened it and wasn’t surprised to see Earhart in the co-pilot’s seat, her hands on the controls, the crew watching her respectfully. It wasn’t every day you had a legend of aviation — one supposedly long dead — in your cockpit.
Dane stood there for a while watching as the pilot showed her the latest gadgets the plane was outfitted with. He supposed that other than the controls, everything in the cockpit was pretty much new to Earhart, but she seemed a bit unimpressed with the technology.
“Having fun?” Dane asked.
Earhart glanced Over her shoulder. “Too much stuff. · Hell, all my navigator had when I did my round the world attempt was a basic radio set with which he tried to raise whatever transmitter he could pick up to try to triangulate our position. We’d be lucky to figure it out within a hundred miles. That was flying. Now you’ve got this GPR thing that updates a gazillion times every second and locates you to within three feet. Where’s the challenge to that?”
“Takes some of the fun out of it?” Dane asked.
Earhart smiled. ‘’No. I knew from the first time I went up in a plane that this was where I belonged. That hasn’t changed. And flying will always be dangerous.”
Dane jerked his thumb toward the rear of the plane. “We probably ought to see what Ahana has come up with before we land.”
Earhart reluctantly let go of the controls as the pilot took over. She thanked the crew then headed back with Dane. They sat down across from Ahana and waited as she completed another radio call. The Japanese scientist then took off her headset and glanced down at first one and then the other of her computers before lowering both screens closed.
“You say you sensed from the sphere map that there is · a gate near San Diego?” she asked Dane, never one to waste words.
“That’s what I sensed when I held the portal strand — that the clicks were coming from there. Or going to,” he added as he realized he really didn’t know in which direction, if not both, they were being transmitted.
“And the other end of that strand?” Ahana asked. “To the Space Between?”
Dane shook his head. “No. The other end was” — he searched for the word, then shrugged — “blocked I guess. When I tried probing in that direction I hit darkness. Like a solid wall of black.”