At her side, Shakan stood perfectly still. Eyes looking beyond the battlefield, head cocked as if she were listening. There was a loud peel of thunder. Shakan grabbed Ahana’s shoulder and pointed.
At the very top of Isandlwana there was an unnatural dark cloud that seemed to have lightning inside of it.
Ahana glanced at her instruments. The muonic reading was off the chart.
Chelmsford did not believe the reports that came to him. The camp overrun? Everyone dead? Zulus pillaging among the dead?
Impossible. He’d left almost two thousand men in the camp.
Chelmsford finally turned his column toward Isandlwana. He came close to the bulk of Isandlwana just before and halted his column just short of it. He forbid his men to enter and led a contingent of officers forward to ascertain what had happened. The silence foretold bad news, but what their eyes beheld under the moon and star light shocked them.
Most of the bodies were stripped naked. Their bellies were sliced open, which was actually a sign of respect by the Zulu, as they believed it allowed the spirit to escape and go to the afterlife. At one place in their camp a circle had been made of a dozen men’s heads, all peering at each other with lifeless eyes. Every living thing, including oxen, horses, even an officer’s dog, had been slain.
Where were the Zulus?
Looking up he could see the strange dark cloud atop the peak.
Chelmsford ordered his men back away from the mountain.
Shakan tapped Ahana on the shoulder and pointed to the southwest.
“What?” Ahana asked, even as she uttered the word knowing the other woman couldn’t understand. She was still focused on the top of Isandlwana.
Shakan pointed once more to the southwest. “Rorke’s Drift,” Shakan said, words that meant nothing to Ahana.
The Japanese scientist did notice though, that a small red light was flickering on one of her monitors. There was just the slightest trace of more muonic activity somewhere Dot too far away from Isandlwana. Ahana picked up the detector and slowly swung it back and forth until she had the direction from which the signal was coming — the southwest.
Shakan nodded. “Rorke’s Drift.”
The diamond lattice field deep underneath Isandlwana was now one hundred percent connected. The power of desperation from the last stand of the British force on the slopes of the bill flowed into the planet, much deeper than their blood had. It gave the necessary power for the field to become a self-sustaining crystal, one that now generated its own power.
Power that flowed upward to the gate on the top of the mountain that directed the power into a portal that led directly to Timeline I.
Colonel Chamberlain N remembered traveling down to New York City while he was attending West Point for many fun-filled weekends. Now he was circling above what remained of what had once been the greatest city on earth.
He could see the top one hundred feet of the towers for the George Washington Bridge — which had once linked New York and New Jersey — poking above the waves as his MK-90 swung down low along the course of what had been the Hudson River but was now part of the Atlantic Ocean.
To his right, some of the towers of Manhattan that were tall enough to reach above the water dotted the skyline. To his left, the top of the Palisades, the cliffs that had once lined the Hudson on the Jersey side, were still above water. There was no sign of Manhattan south of what had once been the Central Park area — no skyscrapers poking above the water. Chamberlain remembered watching images of what happened to the southern tip of New York City during the end of the Shadow War. A large sphere had floated above the city and pulverized the tip of Manhattan repeatedly, blasting a hole into the ground that afterward was measured to be almost six miles deep. It had immediately filled with water and historians and scientists had speculated to no avail why the Shadow had done this strange version of overkill.
The plane banked toward the Palisades as the wings rotated up. to provide lift as it decelerated. They touched down and Chamberlain walked off the back ramp as his visor snapped down into place.
Why here? He wondered.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dane’s essence floated in the swirling red mist that represented the atmosphere in Timeline 1. Whatever they’d done to their planet, Dane thought, it had been extreme. Even the light was wrong, he realized after a few moments. The large black portal that he’d come out of was directly behind him, floating above a sluggish, gray ocean.
Dane froze.
Evil all around.
The human essence corrupted. Warped and twisted.
The Immediate source was obvious. There were hundreds of Valkyries, spears in hand, floating in the air all around the portal. Also several large platforms hung in the air, with no visible means of support. There were large devices on board each, manned by a half dozen Valkyries, which Dane had no doubt were very powerful weapons of some sort. Oriented at the portal.
This was not the way to come, Dane thought.
And they didn’t see him or sense his essence in any way, he realized. But he was powerless. So he did not matter. He was no threat.
Where was he?
The Ocean was completely flat, no waves, no swell. The water looked — the word that came to Dane was heavy. Not normal. And it went as far as he could see in all directions.
Dane looked down. There had to be a reason the portal was here.
Dane descended. He paused just above the turgid water. One more terrible thing to endure among all the other things he’d had to so far.
Dane got angry. Who were these people who made up the Shadow to do these things they had done? To destroy entire timelines to keep this worthless existence alive? Living in a world that has bereft of beauty? Of purpose other than to exist?
Dane plunged down into the oily, thick water.
What light there had been quickly disappeared but Dane continued downward. He had no sensation of swimming now, just movement. He had no idea how long he descended, but soon a light appeared ahead, growing brighter as be got closer.
Dane came to a halt.
There was a city below, enclosed in a huge clear shield. A magnificent city with a golden palace in the very center, with a main tower that had to reach almost a mile upward, ending just short of the very center top of the shield. From Dane’s perspective above, he could see that there were numerous other golden buildings surrounding the palace, then a ring of water — fresh water he assumed. Then a ring of land on which there were white, smaller buildings, apparently homes. Another ring of water enclosing that. To the right was something that appeared out of place, an add on — a large black building, like a warehouse, and a tube that extended out of the clear shield to a gigantic latticework of black, in which nested at least a dozen of the large black spheres that the Shadow used to traverse the portals.
Dane continued down, passing through the clear shield, which was not clear when seen from the other direction. He paused, slowly taking in the panoramic view of bright · blue sky with a few lofty clouds visible and the sun shining. On the edge, where the shield met the ground, there was a surrounding ocean. Not the dirty diseased one that surrounded the city completely, but a clean one with waves running across its surface.
This was how Atlantis must have looked in its heyday Dane realized. It might have been swallowed by the ocean because of their mistakes, but the Atlanteans of Timeline I had used their technology to at least visually re-create what they had once known.