Atlantis Endgame (18 page)

"My head hurts," muttered Ross.

Perhaps the alien heard him. "Your people have not had time travel long enough to develop the language and concepts to deal with it—although there are hints in various of your. . . philosophical texts, one might say, and among some cultures, of the proper approach."

"So what do we do? Destroy the machines?"

"No. Not only would that be almost impossible—they are not entirely material—since their mode of operation is time-like, but even if it were, the consequences would be catastrophic. The uncontrolled release of the energy they contain might unravel space-time itself, unmaking your world and all within it."

Ashe let out his breath in a short, not quite silent curse.

I knew I was going to hate this mission,
Ross thought.
Instinct is right every damn time.

Ashe said slowly, "So, might the Baldies do that, if they get desperate enough, just to make sure we never become technological?"

"They would never do such a thing by deliberate action. They value life too highly."

Ross waved a hand. "So you say. But where does the difference between life and lives lie for them? One, ten, a million?"

The Kayu trilled and clicked in what seemed to be distress, and Ashe turned to Ross. "Hold on a moment; let's just go with them for now." He turned to the Kayu. "So these devices. We can just turn them off?"

"No, that would be equally disastrous. But we can introduce chaotic oscillations in the gravitational knot, which will eventually cause the machines to fail. But you must then prevent the Baldies from relinearizing them for at least. . . seven rotations of the sun, at which point the Baldies cannot use them to abort the volcanic explosion without causing the same type of temporal disaster that destroying them would cause."

"But turning them off will permit the volcano to go off, right?" Ross asked.

"It is so."

Ross thought,
There's a time for talk, a time for thought,

and a time for action. When they hired me on, it was because I took action. And so far I've been right.

He strolled forward and noted how the Kayu retreated a little. So they were afraid of him. Interesting.

"So where are the controls to these devices?"

"The !!! have the controls proper. We know that they have a ship, but its location is unknown to us." The Kayu indicated the two of them. "There were, when we came to this place in your time-line, two more of us. The others we believe had found their ship, but they are no longer in this life." A trill and some dismal-sounding clicks accompanied this statement, which the Kayu did not have the machine translate.

Ross shook his head. "So my question remains: how many lives?"

The first Kayu said something in their language; the second one spoke into the machine.

"You must understand what their history has been," the machine stated.

"All I need to understand right now is, how do we prevent these—adjusters—from operating?" Ross asked.

One of the slim fur-covered hands touched a thing that looked like a cell-phone with a single button extruded from the computer. "But there is very little time."

Ross didn't understand much about superpositions and gravitational theory, but the concept of time running out was definitely in his ballpark. And the Fur Faces had as much as said it would take seven days for the devices to fail.

He looked at Gordon Ashe, who frowned into the middle distance. Well, it was his job to consider all the angles, to negotiate, to compromise, to find the middle ground.

Ross saw action as his own mandate.

And so he reached forward, and before anyone could say anything more, Ross smacked the cell-phone in the middle of those glowing touch pads.

Its light went out.

"All right, then," Ross said, breathing hard in his sweaty mask. "What's next?"

WHEN THE LIGHT shaft reached the gnarled tree-throne, the chanting women brought their ritual to a close, and the seer stepped once again into her seat.

The voices of the girls out on the plateau could be heard rising and falling in pleasing treble tones. This day was almost exactly like the one before; Linnea wondered how the priestesses perceived time, if their experiences blended into an indistinguishable run of days and years.

But she must not be lulled into thinking time did not matter. It did. The smoke burning her eyes and making the back of her throat feel raw was a reminder of that, as were the little tremors that rumbled through the caverns.

Linnea looked up. Was that crack new? Her thoughts scattered when the newest petitioner sat down and spoke in the old language.

Oh, if only Jonathan were here with us,
Linnea thought. She could envision the linguist swathed in robes, pretending to be a woman and hiding a recorder so that he could gather precious words to add to the little known about the language still termed Linear A.

The thought of poor Jonathan being a linguistic spy brought a sad sort of smile to Linnea's lips; the reason the agent was not along for this trip was his wife having recently been killed in a car wreck. He was now coping with two small children.

Why couldn't he go ahead in the time machine and then come back?

Or for that matter, could they use the time machine to go back and save her? Linnea wondered, frowning, as the seer began to writhe, her old woman's form taking on the aspect of the holy serpent. What would it harm? What would it change, besides making a family whole and happy again? Could such an action unravel the world's proper course? What, given the horrors of history, constituted "proper"?

"Asssssssah!"

The seer's hiss turned into a long, gargled shout, her eyes wide and blind.

Everyone stopped, eyes turned toward the seer.

Her hands snaked out, waving. In that strange, hoarse, wailing cry she shouted words, repeating some phrases over and over.

The priestesses looked at one another in bewilderment and in fear. Then the oldest one motioned to the others. "Get the girls. Go down the mountain now. Tell everyone that the goddess has spoken at last: the people, all people, are to live now on the blue water, under the blue sky. Now, at once, before the sun sleeps."

The younger priestesses vanished through the crevasse leading to the plateau.

Linnea lingered, puzzled, confused. Another tremor shook the mountain, a gentle one, but a cascade of little stones poured down through the skylight crack, some of them falling on her.

"Go," Ela urged, touching Linnea's arm. "The goddess has spoken to us all. You must go; everyone must go. The fire spirits have been released, and their battle with the earth is to begin. There will be safety only on the water, in the air, away from rock and earth and fire."

What did that mean?

Linnea knew one thing for certain: she must find the rest of her team.

She bundled up her skirts into her arms and scooted between the rock slabs, her awareness of their weight, of the inexorable press of stone against stone and how it could so easily crush her, driving her headlong in urgency—and fear.

——————————

THIS THING ISN'T old,
Eveleen thought, looking at the globe ship.

At first she'd assumed it was another find, perhaps a crashed ship from farther back in prehistory. But as she flippered closer, examining the smooth glasslike substance that formed the hull, she realized that there were no barnacles on it, no sea life attached. If the material was somehow impervious to the amazing adaptability of sea life, it would be a first.

No,
this thing is new, or at least, it's newly here.

It's the Baldy ship,
she thought then, looking at it in amazement.

Just then a puff of dust caught her eye and she turned her head. The sea life glowing along the cavern walls waved wildly, and rocks tumbled with hypnotizing slowness through the water.

Quake! Another of those little ones.

She turned her attention to Kosta, who waved an arm at the ship.

She looked down. Before, it had been difficult to make out anything, but now, suddenly, the interior of the ship lit with a variety of colors, some of them blinking quickly. Alarms?

What it meant was, someone might just be along to deal with it. Someone with weapons.

A touch on her arm made her recoil. Eveleen realized her heartbeat was up, adrenaline racing through her system. Danger! Only where?

Kosta pointed upward. Eveleen looked, and where there had been darkness before, a smooth cylindrical vertical shaft, made of clear glass, touched down to the top of the globe ship. She had missed it before; they both flippered up and felt it, solid, smooth, airtight.

Kosta pointed down into the ship. Around the equator, lights chased, the same blue-white cold light of the transporter mechanisms.

Kosta jerked his head toward the ship, and inside his mask, she saw him grin. It was his pirate grin, and she gasped, realizing what he wanted to do: steal the globe ship!

Why not?

Both of them now turned their attention to the ship. How to get into it without it flooding?

But Kosta had learned something about the alien tech. He sped upward again, feeling along the outer connection between the tube shaft and the globe ship. She saw him straighten out, manipulating something.

Clank! Whirr! Sounds reverberated, weirdly flattened, through the water: under the shaft something slid shut in the ship, and then the tube retracted a foot or so.

Kosta then motioned to Eveleen. He mimed pushing the ship, waved his hand at the sled.
Pushing?

Well, why not? It wasn't one of the huge deep-space twelve-crew jobs, like the one that had taken them to the faraway library planet, last mission. This one was small, everything right there: a two- or four-seater scout craft, she'd call it. And under water, it was just mass they had to deal with, which merely took patience.

Kosta ran the sled up to within a few feet of the side of the ship and let it sink slowly while he reached into a pouch and pulled out a brick of some plastic material. He began to mold it into a pancake, then slapped it on the nose of the sled and revved its engine to ram it gently into the ship. He began to pulse the engine, slowly. At first the mass resisted: it was as though nothing was happening. But eventually, the globe began to rock ever so slightly, and then more and more as he timed the engine pulses carefully. Finally, with a puff of mud squirting from underneath, the ship moved up into the water!

Then began a strange ultra-slow-motion bat-and-ball game, with the biggest ball Eveleen had ever seen. They maneuvered the globe ship through the cavern, back to the access tunnel.

Getting out was a lot faster than coming in, now that they didn't have to explore every inch of the walls. They sped as fast as they could, pushing the globe ship faster and faster until it finally shot out of the cavern into the water and dropped slowly down to the seafloor below.

What now? A little beeping noise warned her that
now
was the right time to get to the surface: she was on her emergency air.

Kosta pointed upward. Ah, there was the ship.

As Eveleen grabbed hold of the sled she caught sight of the alien-tech device, and saw that it had gone blank. Batteries? Broken?

They refastened the sled to the ship and surfaced. Her mind was full of questions. Beside her, Kosta shoved back his mask and looked up at Stavros.

"We found one of their ships. Moved it to the seafloor below," he gasped.

Stavros was already reaching over the side to hand them up. "I will put a marker down. But something happened here: the target went dead," he said.

They looked at his alien tech-location device. It was just as blank as the one Kosta had carried.

Rumbling from the cliffs not four hundred yards away brought all three of them around. Strange little waves propagated out and high up a section of cliff gave way, causing a landslide. They watched the slab of rock smash into the water, sending seaweed-veined water shooting up.

When the sound had diminished, Kosta said, "Something has happened. We must get back."

Stavros did not wait for an answer—not that Kosta or Eveleen would have argued.

More tremors shook the cliffs as the ship moved back toward the harbor area. Eveleen, looking up at Akrotiri built into the cliffs overhead, like steps, made mental calculations and looked back again.

That underwater cave, the one that had connected the shaft with the globe ship. Could that perhaps lead up to that mysterious little room high up on the edge of the city?

Another question,
she thought grimly, but before she could say anything, Kosta exclaimed, "Look!"

Stavros exclaimed something in idiomatic Greek.

They all turned their attention westward. Streams of people moved down the road at a frantic pace, many of them carrying bulky objects on their backs. Eveleen, squinting against the glaring sunlight, counted at least three looms, several rolled rugs, and uncountable jars and reed-mat bundled objects.