Tired and irritated, Chelmsford made a fateful decision in the darkness. He decided to send a relief column to Darnell. And he decided to lead it himself. So for the third time, Chelmsford was dividing his column. He split the Twenty-fourth Regiment, ordering half to come with him in the relief and half to remain at Isandlwana on the defensive. He also sent an order for more troops to come up from Rorke’s Drift to aid in the defense at Isandlwana.
As the orders were issued, the camp at Isandlwana came to life in the middle of the night. Cursing soldiers geared up, wondering why their sleep had been interrupted. They fell in line, and Chelmsford led them out of the camp toward Darnell.
From the Nqutu escarpment, Shakan and Cetewayo could see the activity in the British camp. Cetewayo was confused by the actions of his enemy, as they seemed to make little sense. Why had the British general sent a reconnaissance into the open ground to the east when the most dangerous terrain lay exactly where Cetewayo was, to the north? Did the general have a secret plan?
“He is being foolish,” Shakan said, as if reading his thoughts.
“No one is that stupid,” Cetewayo argued. He had been told that the British were fierce warriors, with an empire that stretched far and wide.
“You can see it with your own eyes,” Shakan said.
Cetewayo knew of Darnell’s patrol. It had run into the left horn of his formation. Since the days of Shaka, the Zulu had adopted the bull as the format for their attack. Two horns that attack on either flank and a massive center on which the enemy would be broken. There were variations to the actual tactics — sometimes the center would · be weak and pretend to break, drawing the enemy fooled weak and pretend to break, drawing the enemy foolishly forward to be swallowed by the horns; sometimes the center would be the only force that attacked while the horns kept the enemy fixed in place for eventual destruction. Cetewayo had not yet determined exactly how he would assault the British because the enemy general was acting in such an erratic and uncertain manner that Cetewayo could not predict the possible next movements.
“You must wait another night,” Shakan said.
“Why?”
“The voice has told me when it should happen.”
Cetewayo grimaced. His men were deployed. The left horn had already been discovered by the enemy. His right horn was to the west, on the Nqutu escarpment. And the center, the bulk of his forces, over twenty thousand warriors strong, was just to the north, hidden in a valley. Keeping many warriors in place for another twenty-four hours was going to be difficult even given the Zulu’s excellent discipline. Plus, he was not sure what the British had planned.
“I will give you one day,” Cetewayo reluctantly agreed, “but only because you have been correct so far in your visions.”
He walked away in the darkness to rejoin his warriors. Alone on the escarpment Shakan pulled her cloak tighter around her body. The voice had told her the day it was to happen. And it had told her that someone was to come to her. Someone she was to help. But who? And where were they?
And what was going to happen on top of Isandlwana? Even this far away from the hill she felt the foreboding evil growing there.
Down to just one company of infantry, Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard were not happy with things at Rorke’s Drift. They’d built up the compound’s defenses as best they could, using bags of millet to form walls connecting the two buildings.
Now they waited completely unaware of what was beginning to develop less than ten miles away.
“We have a second message,” Eddings informed Chamberlain.
They were in his office, set high in the wall of the large chamber two hundred feet below the surface of Antarctica. From the windows along one wall, he could look out into the chamber that housed the bulk of his Battalion. At the current level of alert status, every man and woman was present, minus those in the infirmary.
Eddings turned to the map tacked to the other wall. It displayed the current world’s surface, a much different view from one a hundred years ago. She tapped a spot on the North American coast.
“We’re to move here.”
Chamberlain walked over. He knew the spot. New York. Where one of the gates had been during the Shadow War.
“Has a gate opened?”
“Not yet,” Eddings said. “But the Oracles assume that if we got a message for you to move your troops there that one will.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dane had said quick farewells to both Earhart and Ahana as they departed onboard military transport to fly back to the Devil’s Sea Gate. Then he had gone back into the Dream Land compound to prepare for his second trip into the psychometric plane.
As the tank was being readied, Dane pulled Talbot aside. “I’ve got some questions for you.”
“What?”
“Where exactly am I when I go over to the psychometric plane?”
Talbot frowned. “What do you mean?”
Dane pointed at the tube. “My body is there. And my mind. But my thoughts, obviously, are elsewhere. But are those thoughts being generated inside my mind, or is some part of me, some essence, actually traveling?”
Talbot nodded, understanding what Dane was trying to ask.
“To be honest with you, we don’t really know. Going Over to the psychometric plane via Dream Land is transcending to a level that we don’t know much about. To be frank, the closest experiences recorded that are similar to it are from people who have near death experiences.”
“The long tunnel leading to the light?” Dane asked.
“Sort of. Floating above one’s body, looking down on it. No one really knows what those are either. If you think we don’t know much about physics, we know even less about how our mind works, which is a bizarre paradox if you think about it. We’re trying to understand something that we have to use in order to understand it.
“We’ve had some RVers panic. Even with the screening, we do beforehand. A couple of people have gone over and then become afraid they were never coming back to their bodies. We had to pull them out right away as their bodies began to respond negatively, despite all our attempts at control via the tubes.”
“I don’t think it takes place all in my head,” Dane said. “First, I meet the dolphin.”
“Trina, this time,” Talbot said. “Rachel’s sister.”
“Okay. First, I meet Trina. Second, I go places I’ve never been. So either I’m going or someone or something is transmitting those images into my brain.”
Talbot waited as Dane struggled with what he was trying to get to. “I’m getting ready to try to recon the Shadow’s timeline,” Dane said. “So I have to go there. Since the Ones Before don’t even know where their base is. So wouldn’t that prove that in some manner, I — my essence — is traveling out of my body.”
Talbot shrugged. “I suppose.”
“My point,” Dane said, “is what happens if something goes wrong with that essence? Do I die?”
“Your body will still be here and alive,” Talbot said. ‘’The Structure of the brain will still be intact, so there’s no reason to believe you’d be really harmed if something happens when you are on the other side.”
Dane didn’t buy it. ‘’There’s got to be something that makes us conscious. That makes us human. A core to our selves. The soul you might call it. And that’s what’s going out there. And if it doesn’t come back, I don’t care if you have my body in that tube, I don’t think there’s going to be anybody home.”