Atlantis Endgame (8 page)

Twice more they encountered people coining down the trail, one of them riding a donkey, and with each the woman ahead asked her question, though with those she spoke a language that Ashe couldn't comprehend. But to her questions the people responded with headshakes and shrugs, age-old gestures.

Finally, just after the last one had vanished on the trail below, Linnea said—in English—"The 'oracle' seems to have nothing to say."

And Ashe said, in Ancient Greek, emulating the accent they had been hearing, "I do not understand you."

Linnea looked up with a brief smile that faded when she saw his expression. Her eyes narrowed, her expression now reflective.

She looked down at her sandals winking in and out below the hem of her bravely colored garment, and at last she said, in Greek this time, "I was wrong. It is not real to me."

To which Ashe replied, "It must become real. There is no record of a woman speaking a foreign tongue, surprising people with things that never have been."

Linnea's cheeks reddened. Again she ducked her head, and Ashe's irritation vanished. It wasn't as if she were the first to think of their guises as mere playacting.

Linnea Edel was a superb archaeologist whose specialty
was volcanic sites. She'd been cramming, during their own training period, with all the new technology' used by vulcanists.

She said, in a low voice, "I did not think about being a woman of the time, only seeing others of the time." A pause, and then, "I envisioned myself invisible to the people now, but I am not, am I?"

Ashe said, "You will be invisible, that is. leave no memory, if you behave as they expect."

Linnea nodded once.

Up ahead, the woman until the donkey said to a family starting down the trail, "Did the goddess speak to you?"

"No," said the family, even the children. The wife added, with a sour glance back, "We even offered our very best fish, fresh caught. But all she spoke of was silence and shadows. She did not forewarn us of the rock rain three moons ago." And, with a sidelong glance at her husband, she said, "I think the goddess has gone away, with the snake fires. I think we ought to hire a boat and go south with my family."

The husband did not respond, and the family moved on down the trail.

Ashe and Linnea kept walking. Not long after, they arrived at the top of a long shelf. A whisper of breeze came off the sea, cooling to their damp faces, but not quite diminishing the whiff of sulfur.

A small number of people stood before a great crack in the rock above the cliff, from which floated the faint sounds of young girls' voices rising and falling in a chant.

Striations of multicolored stone outlined the cave, whose mouth was dark. At the apex of this triangular cave faint wisps of vapor puffed out, swiftly dispersing; inside the cave somewhere had to be a hot stream.

That explained why the unseen oracle, or at least the oracle's attendants, had chosen that place. Water year-round in this climate, hot for cold days, plentiful (if slightly sulfuric) for the long rainless summers, would be important.

Ashe and Linnea edged round the back of the crowd waiting patiently. The woman with the donkey was, for the moment, the only one besides them moving. She plodded straight into the cave as one who had the right.

For a moment Ashe glimpsed robes dyed a robin's egg blue: a priestess. Then the woman had vanished inside, with the first of the waiting people.

Ashe stood in the lee of a great piece of sun-bleached pumice, probably from a blast a million years before, and glanced around. Ah. The smoke came from over there.

He touched Linnea's arm, and tipped his chin.

Her glance of longing was unmistakable, but she turned with no apparent resentment. Ashe felt a surge of relief, even gratitude. He had not wanted to admonish her; the risk was that the assumption of superiority would somehow cross professional lines into the personal. And maybe with a very young agent, it would have. They tended to take things personally, even if it was inadvertent.

Linnea just cast back one last glance of yearning. The archaeologist in her was intensely curious about the living ritual concerning an oracle. But now was not the time to witness it.

They edged along a narrow goat trail and began climbing up along the mountainside, away from the cliffside cave. They were very quickly out of sight of anyone below.

Up and up. The smell of sulfur got considerably stronger. Ashe stopped, holding his breath. Linnea, who had climbed behind him, winced, and mimed putting their breathing masks on.

It was a question. Ashe looked about and saw no one. He nodded, taking out his mask, and said in English, "There is nothing up here but rock and volcanic ash. I think the hydrogen sulfide would drive even the hardiest away—and the locals must know by now how swiftly death can come from these vents."

Linnea nodded, passed a hand inside her robes, and pulled out the cloth-disguised breather that the scientific team had fashioned for her.

Ashe had on his own. The air smelled of plastic, and slightly stale, but the mask successfully absorbed the potentially deadly gases. A small strip of chemplast, visible from the corner of his vision, would change color if the concentration became too much for the mask to handle; another indicated the mask's remaining capacity. Both were green.

They climbed on, easing around a crumbling rock, and felt intense heat. The hardy little tufts of grass and weed that they had seen here and there, more evidence that the rainy season had begun, had long since withered away.

Another ten paces and air shimmered from escaping heat. Ashe paused to glance out toward the sea. Tiny boats and single-masted ships dotted the horizon.

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll do a visual scan."

Linnea nodded once, her intense investigative expression widening her eyes again, She opened her robe, revealing plain cotton shorts and a fine cotton-silk undershirt beneath. Round her waist she wore a sturdy belt, onto which, like a superhero of the comic books, she'd attached pouches and holders.

She undipped several vulcanology instruments—infrared thermosensor, a sensitive sniffer to measure gas types and concentrations, and other devices Ashe didn't recognize— then edged closer to the vent in order to start recording.

Ashe turned in the other direction, pulled out the mini-field glasses the science team had furnished him, and shaded them with one hand so the glass wouldn't glint in the sun as he closely and minutely swept the bay.

Bravely decorated boats circled about, some hung with decorations from prow to stern, others painted along the sides with leaping dolphins and swarming octopi, some with stylized lilies and crocuses. The people, flattened by the distance, talked back and forth or rowed, or sailed, or fished, or gazed off into the distance. These, then, were the people the scientists called "the squatters"—the people who remained behind after the first great quake that destroyed parts of the city and who had begun to rebuild.

What exactly was he seeking? Some anomaly, some sign that there were others here, perhaps in disguise as well, from the future.

A sigh made him turn around. Linnea was holding one of the instruments he hadn't recognized, a flattened ovoid with a pistol grip. He saw the tendons in her hand flex as she pulled the trigger: a click, a whirr, and several sets of antennae uncurled from the front and fanned out rigidly. She stared down at the instruments and then pulled the trigger again, and the antennae curled back into the casing.

Linnea crossed to his side. "Well, the brains at home will love these readings," she said. "Isotope concentrations and types, gas readings, just about everything is either off the scale or close as makes no difference." She hefted the odd instrument. "The piezo-EM strain detector, too—and it's not terribly sensitive."

"Meaning?" Ashe asked, though he knew.

"Even without strain readings from fixed laser interferometers, which we didn't bring because we don't have time for them, everything points to a big blow, bigger than anything recorded in modern times. Far bigger," she added seriously.

So it was time for Ashe's own test.

He undipped from his belt a flat meter that was about the size of a video cam. Inside it, though, was a little of the strange tech that had come from the future by way of the past, about which they were still learning. The materials, how they produced their strange effects, including their signature temporal distortion, were still largely a mystery, but scientists, patiently experimenting for twenty-five years, had learned to use the tech for several applications useful to Project Star.

He tabbed the power on and watched the little LED screen light up. Then it was his turn to brave the ferocious heat of the vent, as close as he could get, holding out his meter.

The graph bar on it trembled but did not move.

They looked at each other. Despite the danger, he'd have to get closer.

Ashe edged closer, hearing a whooshing rumble deep below, as if air were being forced through inconceivably big compressors.

Suddenly the graph bar flickered and then leaped halfway across the little screen.

Ashe moved the meter in a slow half circle, just to make certain. The graph bar held . . . held . . . diminished down to nothing when he moved it away from the vent.

Back again. And again, it snapped into a long rectangle, which meant only one thing.

He edged back down to where Linnea waited. He did not know what his face showed, but she seemed to read something there, for she said, "You found it?"

He nodded once. "Somewhere in that vent is Baldy tech."

CHAPTER 7

THE ENTIRE WESTERN horizon was a deep crimson, the bottoms of the approaching march of sheep-backed clouds bluish, the tops the gold of fire. It was a spectacular sunset, almost garish and almost sinister in its intensity.

A volcanic sunset. But none of the six Time Agents noticed it; they were all staring in grim dismay at the destruction of their campsite. Destruction and disappearance: their tents, bedrolls, and the food that the Greek agents had unloaded were all gone. Everything else lay scattered about—broken open by violent hands, rifled through, and then discarded.

"Everything?" Ross asked finally, turning over a pottery fragment with his sandaled foot. He recognized that pot: it had held their oatmeal mix, carefully made to look like regular oats, but vitamin and protein fortified.

"Everything," Stavros said. "Except the last load from the ship." He jerked a thumb behind him at the cloth-wrapped burdens he and Kosta had set down when they discovered the ruined site. "Our gear." He said the words in a low voice, in English: their radio and recording equipment, which would never be left alone.

Ashe, Boss, and Eveleen spontaneously turned, looking outward for signs of incipient attack. Linnea Edel stood, hands cradling her elbows, looking apprehensive.

There was nothing to be seen except the smoke-pall over the sky, the greenish choppy sea, and the barren land stretching in folds toward the sudden, dramatic cliffs along which was built Akrotiri. Behind the warehouse, the desolate land stretched away, dotted with quake-cracked hills and falls of rock, as seabirds circled overhead.

"Baldies," Ross stated. "And one of them is probably lying up on one of those cliffs somewhere now, watching our reaction through a high-tech field glass and gloating. Damn."

"We can't know that," Ashe said. And, to Kosta, "What exactly happened? Did you see or speak with anyone?"

"No," Kosta said. "We chose this empty warehouse, cleared out recently from the looks of things, because it was the very last, the farthest from the city. No people around. Those over there—" he indicated one of the other warehouses, the closest about five hundred yards away, the others lying along the gentle hills in the direction of the city "—we kept them in sight most of the time. The people in that one were all busy with their fish. That was another reason we chose this location." He smiled grimly; when the sluggish air moved, it carried a strong smell of fish. "We did not think this place would be watched."

Ashe nodded. "Baldies might assume that time travelers might come here first and hide equipment. We probably ought to have foreseen that."

"With all our things disguised?" Eveleen asked.

No one answered. She looked around, then sighed. "Yes, we probably would have been on the watch here, too—if we expected unwanted visitors showing up from the past."

"We had just finished unloading the camp gear, and had started setting it up," Kosta said. "Then went back together so we could make the last trip in one session."

"Told you I should have stayed," Stavros muttered in Modern Greek, his big hands tight on the hilt of the knife he wore at his side, his brows a single furrowed line.

"We don't know how many any more than we know who," Ashe reminded everyone. "All right. Then we go immediately to our fallback plan: the men will sleep on the boat with the gear." He pointed to their disguised equipment. "Eveleen, you are in charge of finding us an observation base within the safety of the city."

Eveleen nodded.

"Then let's eat," Ashe said, "and get moving."

——————————

SHORTLY AFTERWARD THEY sat on a grassy crag overlooking Akrotiri, eating the barley-and-lentil flatbread that Eveleen had bought hot from the oven, crumbled goat cheese on the top, and for dessert fresh-picked grapes. Ross and Kosta had carried the precious gear back to the boat, where Kosta stayed on guard.