The Dark Shore (Atlanteans) (16 page)

The weak light outlined a small circular room. There was a waist-high pedestal in the center. I had been wondering if we would find Leech’s skull, but instead we saw some kind of instrument perched there, gleaming like metal.

Leech moved quickly toward it. “Yes,” he said.

“What is that?” I asked, stepping beside him. The instrument shone as if it were new. It was made of that untarnished copper like on the craft. It had a central cylinder surrounded by four metal arcs, like protractors, two horizontal and two vertical. On each arc was a little slider adorned with a red crystal.

“It’s like a sextant, I think, but with more to it.” Leech carefully grasped the instrument. He twisted it gently, and with a click it popped free. At the same time, there was a sharp crack and the pedestal crumbled away into tiny blocks that clattered across the floor.

Standing where the pedestal had been was a black obsidian ball, like we’d seen in the map room back in Eden. Leech put his hand to it. A faint red light began to glow inside, like a demon eye slowly opening. As it grew it turned from red to yellow to white, bright enough to make us squint. Pinpricks of light began to shoot out of it.

A map of the night sky appeared on the rounded walls around us. There was a black outline along the base of the wall. It looked like it was supposed to be land, with white, snowcapped peaks. As the light grew, the stars became uncountable. The Milky Way arced overhead. The painting put us in a high place, the world falling away in all directions, like we were on a mountaintop. All the stars were white, except a giant, golden star and a smaller, reddish star.

“Mars and Venus,” said Leech. “Here, put your hand on the globe.”

I did, and the globe stayed lit as he pulled his hands away and took the sextant back. “Okay, these two dials with the crystals are for orienting to Mars and Venus. And then, this one is to correct for polar shift . . .” He put the sextant to his eye, looked at Venus, looked at Mars, then moved slowly around, angling it up and down. “And this last dial is . . . yes, okay, got it.”

“What?”

“It corrects for precession.”

“For what?”

“Precession of the equinoxes,” said Leech. “The earth isn’t perfectly round, and so its axis moves over time, around in a circle of its own. It takes, like, 26,000 years to go around, and that makes the exact placement of the stars in the sky change. This map is from Atlantean time, something like ten thousand years ago, and so that’s—” Leech tapped his temple—“about a one hundred thirty-eight degree difference.” He fiddled with the dials. “If I correct for that, I can see the night sky as they did.”

“Okay,” I said, “that’s one of the nerdiest things I’ve ever heard.”

Leech grinned. “You probably mean that as some kind of compliment.”

“Yeah.”

“Here.” He handed me the sextant and pulled his notebook from his pocket. “If we correct for the ‘when’ of this map, then we can figure out the ‘where.’” He started sketching.

“The where?” I asked.

“This view isn’t from these mountains where we are now,” said Leech, gazing around. “It’s somewhere else. The place we need to get to . . . Damn!”

I saw him shake his hand violently. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“You can do it,” I said to him.

“Tch,” he muttered, but didn’t add anything sarcastic. “Wherever this location is, it’s where we need to go next. The one thing I can already tell is that it’s south. Way south, from where we are now, anyway. I’ll sketch the basics, then I can figure it out on the way.”

“Do you think it’s where the Paintbrush is located?” I asked.

“More likely my skull.” He drew for another few minutes, while I gazed at the ancient sky. “Okay, got it.” He stuffed away his notebook and stood. I handed him back the instrument. “This is awesome,” he said. He held the sextant like it was a favorite toy. “Finally.” It was the happiest I’d ever heard him.

I took my hand from the globe. It began to dim. Soon we were back in darkness.

We ducked back out to the Anasazi room, and climbed out of the canyon. As I hauled myself up the boulders, the white spots and headache returned and I gasped for breath in the high altitude, body squeezed dry of moisture, and so, so hungry.

Finally, we emerged in the daylight. The sun had just crested the ridge of the basin. I craned my neck the moment we were at the top, checking the craft, half expecting it to be gone again. But it was there, still in the shade, and I could see Lilly’s hunched form inside.

I took a step toward it and was startled by a flash of movement nearby. I paused, looking for another lizard, and swooned a little, my head pounding, my vision swimming.

Then I heard a sound on the wind . . . low-pitched, vibrating. I winced, trying to push back the curtain of headache. The sound was coming from more than one direction, reflecting around the mountaintops, sharpening into something that was undeniably electric. . . .

“Come on!” I shouted to Leech and tried to get my rubbery legs going on the rock scree.

But the ground began to move.

Soldiers popped up from where they’d been lying in wait behind rocks. Rifles trained on us. They were on all sides, in light gray uniforms, wearing white Rad deflector masks with amber-tinted eyepieces. A group appeared by the craft. One of them grabbed Lilly, unconscious, yanking her up by her armpits, as three hover copters rose above the mountain walls.

“Hello, boys.”

“MY SINCEREST CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU FOR finding this place and retrieving the radial sextant. Another myth come to life.”

Paul’s voice was being broadcast. I found the source; one of the troops was holding out a little black speaker device, as if these troops were robots and Paul their puppet master.

And maybe he was mine, too, because it was so obvious now how stupid we’d been. Leech had been right. Paul had watched and waited, letting us lead the way and collecting the necessary tool to get to Atlantis. All the energy, all the pain, all the suffering and blood seemed meaningless because here we were now, caught.

“You know what amazes me?” Paul asked, as if we were all here to have a philosophical conversation. “The Atlanteans knew to design that device to correct for precession and polar shift ten thousand years ago, which begs the question: How long were they navigating the planet before that? The implications are astounding, but we’ll have plenty of time to discuss it on the way. There’s food and water waiting for you in the copters, and we have a long distance to cover.” I thought I could hear his smile.

“You’ll have to kill me,” Leech muttered. He took a step back, edging his way down the trail into the canyon, clutching the sextant tight to his chest.

Paul sighed, a whoosh over his microphone. “Fine,” he said. “Take the shot. We don’t need him.”

The soldier nearest to us dropped to a knee and raised his rifle.

“No!” Leech shouted and stumbled backward, but he tripped, his body betrayed maybe by his cryo sickness, our dehydration, or from the shock of having Paul call his bluff so casually.

I wanted to move—to do something—

There was a flash—

But it wasn’t from the soldier’s gun. It wasn’t from the ground at all. Or the copters.

A searing jolt of energy vibrated through my body, burning my feet and blinding me. When I looked up, that soldier who’d trained his gun and the bunch closest to him were . . . gone. No, not gone but lying flat on the ground, and not all of them remained. The entire area had been charred into a black twist of melted rock with some vaguely human forms fused to it, all hissing and smoking.

Everyone looked around wildly.

Then the lightning struck again. This time I saw it: a pure white beam of energy streaking through the cloudless sky, as if hurled by a furious god. It incinerated a group of soldiers to my right. Another beam took out one of the hover copters in a spectacular explosion. It fell to earth in streams of flaming shrapnel.

The soldiers scattered, some taking up defensive stances, pointing their rifles skyward but not knowing what to aim at. Others just ran. More lightning bolts rained down. The air heated up with a smell of burned fabric, melted rock, and frying meat.

All I knew was that someone was helping us and that we had to move. “Come on!” I shouted to Leech.

We raced for the craft. My head exploded with stars and fresh waves of pain. My leg muscles felt stuck, no more elastic left. Even my cramp was igniting, twisting tight. But I kept moving as lightning rained to earth around us.

The two soldiers who’d been holding Lilly had dropped her to run for cover. She was slumped over the side. I jumped into the craft, and dragged her back in.

Another flash struck, then another.

Sound had lost meaning. The two remaining hover copters buzzed like frantic insects. Soldiers were shouting, some barking orders, others in panic. A few who’d been near the blasts, scalded but not killed, screamed in pain. Rifles fired uselessly into the sky. And everywhere was the hiss and crackle of scorched earth and flesh.

I heard a grunt and turned to see a soldier grabbing Leech’s arm. Leech made a kind of guttural scream, beyond words. His free hand swung his boccie ball sling. It slammed the soldier in the shoulder. The blow loosened his grip and Leech spun, his face savage, and swung again.

I didn’t see the impact because an arm closed around my throat. The tattered gray sleeve was half-melted to blistered skin.
They were going to shoot Leech
, I thought, my hand fumbling for the knife in my belt,
and they’ll kill me, too, once they’re done with me and Leech is right I have to—
my fingers clasped around the knife handle—
I have to fight! It is them or me
. I felt a flood of adrenaline. A red shroud of static and tightness fell over me and I wrenched against the soldier’s grip, twisted my body away, and shoved the knife around my side. I felt it hit, fight resistance, then pop through clothing and skin. The soldier roared in pain as I shook him free, the bloody knife in my hand—

The bloody, dripping knife in my hand—

The soldier stumbled back, blood staining the side of his abdomen and I was getting us out of here. I reached wildly, spinning the burner to full power. The widening flame caught the side of my palm, but I gritted my teeth against the pain and kept moving.

Leech jumped in, cradling the sextant under one arm, his weapon in the other. I saw his attacker staggering to his feet but grabbing at his face, where Leech’s second swing had crushed his nose and eye socket.

The craft started to rise.

“Faster!” Leech shouted.

“I’m working on it!”

The craft lurched. Black-gloved hands grabbed the side and yanked us down. I swung the knife, raking the blade across the fingers, and felt the vibrating of metal across bone and the soldier shrieked and the hands let go and we were up.

I didn’t think, just threw the knife down inside the craft and tried to calculate the winds swirling around in this basin, tried to keep my throbbing head clear.

We rose out of the smoke of smoldering copter wreckage and burned bodies, and I caught a strong gust of wind. It was funneling south, following the trail of the canyon through the narrow notch. That was our best way out. I banked around and we lunged forward, the sails filling, my dead sore arms feeling like they would yank out of their sockets.

“What’s happening?” Lilly croaked. “Eden?”

“Just stay down,” I said, trying to sound calm. “It’s okay.”

Leech was watching behind us. “We need to go faster!”

I looked back and saw the two hover copters dropping into swerving pursuit behind us. Another lightning blast rained down, narrowly missing one of them.

I jammed uselessly at the pedals. “This is all we have!” Without the vortex, there was no way we could outrun them.

Two sharp cracks and then tearing pops. I looked up to see that bullets had punctured the thermal. More metallic cracks. Bullets tore through the sails. The wind began to howl through the holes, and we started to slow.

And suddenly I understood that this was all they had to do, and they would have us.

“Do something!” Leech shouted.

“I can’t!”

More bullets tore at the thermal, and now the wind clawed at the openings, pulling the flaps wide. We slowed. We sank.

With our momentum we might still be able to make the notch . . . but we were dropping fast. I banked back and forth, trying to make us a smaller target. More bullets caught the underside of the craft, splintering through and barely missing Lilly and me. The craft started to shudder. Those shots had chipped the keel. We shimmied to the right, losing my course toward the notch, heading instead for the rock face beside it. And that was if we didn’t plummet to the basin floor first.

“It’s not going to work!” I shouted.

A muffled electronic voice suddenly screeched from nearby.

Leech pulled out the subnet computer.

“This is Heliad Tactical. Come in. Over?”

Leech stabbed frantically at the screen. “Yes! This is us!”

“Owen!” said a voice. “My name is Arlo. I’m at the command center in Desenna. We have you on gamma visual and are prepared to provide you with a power charge for your vortex engine. Don’t worry, it will be smaller than the attack bursts we’re using on Eden.”