“It’s doubtful,” Foreman said, “that the gate in the Shadow’s timeline will be unguarded.”
Dane didn’t respond, knowing what Foreman had said was true.
Earhart turned to Dane. “Do you think the Ones Before have a plan or are just reacting as we are?”
Dane didn’t stop to think. He felt the answer, and it, surprised him that he had not felt this so strongly before. “I think we’re part of something larger. There are others — have been others as we just saw at the Battle of Little Bighorn — who have roles to play.”
Ahana spoke up. “You’ve acted as if there were some · mystical power behind these visions and the voices you near — and that others like you, such as Robert Frost, also heard. But I think we need to look at it in tens of science. If these visions and voices are real then we should be able to do something just as we use this boat to track the activity of the Shadow.”
“What do you mean?” Dane asked.
“What happens in your head, what you get from the Ones Before, is real, isn’t it?” Ahana asked.
Dane nodded. There was no doubting the visions and voices now.
“Then it’s something we should be able to track down,” Ahana said. “Like we did with the muonic emissions from the gates and the Shadow’s lines of power.”
“Do you have any theories about how we can do that?” Dane asked.
“It took us years to track down the correct frequency for the Shadow’s muonic emissions that come through the gates,” Ahana said. “We learned quite a bit doing that. I suspect that the Ones Before are sending on a very similar frequency and in a similar manner.”
“Why haven’t you uncovered it then?” Dane asked.
“Because we haven’t looked,” Ahana replied. “We’ve been so focused on the threat posed by the Shadow and the gates, we never put any effort into looking at the Ones Before.”
“Then do it,” Foreman ordered.
Dane held up a hand. “Wait. We — you — ” he amended looking at Ahana — “zeroed in on the muonic frequencies by focusing on the gates the Shadow was using. Wouldn’t it be easier to figure out how the Ones Before are transmitting if you found what gate they use to send their messages through?”
“Certainly,” Ahana agreed.
Dane stood. “I think I might be able to find the portal line they use.”
“The sphere map?” Earhart asked as she also stood.
Dane’s response was to head for the door, then along the deck to the launch that could take him over to the Shadow’s massive sphere floating nearby. As the launch took them over, they failed to notice the sleek gray form swimming off the port bow, slicing through the water with ease and watching them with one dark eye rotated in their direction.
Manhattan Island was part of a massive slab of granite that encompassed parts of nearby Connecticut and New Jersey. Its top surface had been scoured by water, particularly cut through by the Hudson River flowing to the ocean, but the slab was many miles thick and very stable.
Deep underneath the southern tip of Manhattan, though, was something very strange. Approximately six miles down, just below the slab, was a large cavern, cut out of the planet. Over three miles Wide, the walls of the cavern were perfectly smooth, and the slab had been used as the roof, given some support from long black metal buttresses and beams.
In the exact center of the cavern there was a tall derrick with drilling equipment. A start had been made on the floor, with a hole excavated about fifty meters down, but it appeared as if the work had been interrupted and never resumed.
There was one opening in the wall of the cavern — a tunnel one hundred meters in diameter that went off to the east straight as an arrow. If a light were shone in that tunnel, it would show no immediate end as it ran for over a thousand miles to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where it ended at a metal door. On the other side of that door there was another large chamber, but that one was full of debris and had been flooded by the ocean long ago.
The tunnel and chamber were all that remained in our Earth timeline of the civilization of Atlantis other than the myth that had been passed down through the ages. And · the few people who had survived its destruction by the Shadow.
CHAPTER FOUR
“We will make our stand on these hills,” General Robert E. Lee told his three senior officers as they looked out over the Maryland countryside in the waning light. He was flanked by the three corps commanders of the Army of Northern Virginia: Generals Longstreet, Jackson, and A. P. Hill.
Lee was an imposing figure, a man who commanded respect wherever he went. His father had been Light Horse Harry Lee of Revolutionary War fame and the military had been Lee’s focus since he was a young boy in Virginia. He went to the relatively new Military Academy at West Point and graduated in 1829, second in his class. He fought, and was wounded, in the war with Mexico. He eventually returned to West Point and was superintendent, thus becoming responsible for training many of the men who would be commanders on both sides in the Civil War.
When war broke out he was in command of the Department of Texas. He’d been offered command of the Union forces by President Lincoln on the advice of his generals, but Lee had turned him down. Three days after Virginia seceded, he resigned from the Union Army and became the military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, before taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia.
He had been leading the Southern army in Virginia for two years and his string of successes was becoming almost myth like. He had an uncanny ability to anticipate the actions of his opponents and for understanding their weaknesses. He stayed true to the tactics he’d learned and taught at West Point-particularly using interior lines of communication and presenting his enemy with a convex front so that his supplies, messages, and reinforcements had a much shorter distance to travel than his enemy’s. His greatest tactic though was the use of entrenchments. Heretofore battle had been considered simply maneuvering one’s force against the enemy, and then both sides stood in the field blasting away at each other until one or the other gave way.
Lee believed, and put into practice, that a smaller body of men, which he invariably had when up against Union forces, could hold against a much larger force if it were properly entrenched. While this happened, he would send another element of his army in a flanking maneuver to hit the fixed enemy from the side or rear. This was a radical military concept, one that would not be fully appreciated until the bloody reality of the World War I.
Now he was in the North, with his army. Stonewall Jackson had led the way for the Southern forces into Maryland, arriving in the nearby town of Sharpsburg earlier in the afternoon. With Harpers Ferry having surrendered to his rear, Lee felt he was in a strong position to weather a Union assault, especially as he found this ground favorable. He deployed his army, taking up defensive positions along a low ridge stretching from the Potomac on his left to Antietam Creek on his right. As usual, his front curved back on the flanks, giving him interior lines and forcing the Northern forces to curve concavely.
Lee placed cannon on Nicodemus Heights to his left, the high ground in front of Dunkard Church, the ridge just east of Sharpsburg, and on the heights overlooking the · Lower Bridge. He directed infantry to fill in the lines between these points, including a sunken lane less than a half mile long with worm fencing along both sides. A handful of Georgia sharpshooters guarded the Lower Bridge over Antietam Creek on one flank. This attention to detail and deployment was a trademark of the leadership that Lee had displayed in two years of nonstop victories. Despite all those victories, though, the war was dragging on.