The Atlantis World (The Origin Mystery, Book 3) (25 page)

The portal’s destination wasn’t a beacon. Kate knew it instantly. The place was expansive, huge, so unlike the cramped, utilitarian beacons.

She, Paul, Mary, and Milo stood in a massive room with a window that stretched at least a hundred feet wide and fifty feet tall.

The scene beyond left the entire group speechless, utterly spellbound. Horrified. For Kate, the view of Earth had been awe-inspiring. The Serpentine battlefield had been terrifying but distant, a danger long-since extinct. This place was very much alive.

Row after row of black spheres stretched out, unmoving, small lights hovering just above, like cars lined up in a parking lot at night.

In the middle row, above the stacks of stationary spheres, a long cylinder stretched out into space with no end that Kate could see. Spheres were moving through it, coming out the other side larger, more complete. This was an assembly line for the spheres, and it was producing thousands per second. Maybe millions, depending on how far the manufacturing cylinders stretched. Large ships moved across the lines, docking with the cylinders. Supply ships? Emptying minerals and raw materials for the manufacturing process?

This wasn’t a beacon. It was a factory in space. A factory making an army of spheres.

The scale was unimaginable.

Kate tried to focus. They couldn’t stay here.

She was fairly certain the soldier lying in the corridor at the last beacon had been Dorian. She thought he was dead. Hoped. But she couldn’t help thinking about David, whether they could go back, save him somehow. She would be risking all their lives. And David might already be dead. She had to focus.
What do I know?

Dorian had found the last beacon—out of a thousand in her diversionary rotation. He could easily find this one if he had discovered Janus’ transmission.

They had to move, get to safety somehow. Maybe the third beacon would offer some refuge.

She activated the portable data core and downloaded the memories Janus had transmitted here.

She programmed the portal to the final destination.

She stepped through, and the others followed without a word.

The moment Kate stepped into the third and final beacon Janus had transmitted memories to, she knew they were in trouble. Heat. The place was burning up. And it was another military beacon.

She peered out the window, which seemed tiny compared to the view from the factory.

A dead world, red and rocky, loomed below. Black burn marks pocked the surface. Kate knew this place. Yes. She had seen it before—in the last memory she had accessed in the
Alpha Lander
, when David had saved her. The thought of that brought a new pang of sadness, but she pushed it out of her mind. Janus had tried to erase the memory of what had happened to this world. In the memory, this world had been under a military quarantine. Janus’ partner had taken the
Beta Lander
to the surface to investigate…

“I think we should get out of here,” Paul said.

Everyone was sweating now, and no one strayed far from the portal, hoping, thinking there was another destination.

Kate interfaced with the beacon. Yes. It had an address, local, close. The
Beta Lander
was still on the surface. She programmed another sequence of beacon connections—ten thousand this time—just in case Sloane made his way here. If she was right and Sloane didn’t know about the
Beta Lander
on the surface, they would be safe. It was their only move.

She stepped through the portal, followed by Paul, Mary, and Milo.

Around them, the beady floor and ceiling lights of the
Beta Lander
grew brighter, the ship around them waking up.

“Are we safe here?” Paul asked.

“I think so.” Kate looked around. The ship seemed intact. Her neural link told her its systems were all online now. She focused on the memory. It had ended with her outside, a burning impact. “Don’t go outside though.”

She walked away from them without another word, wandering lifelessly into the crew quarters section. She picked a residential pod at random and sat on the bed, staring for a moment. It was exactly like the one she and David had shared on the
Alpha Lander
.

She curled up on the bed, but sleep wouldn’t come.

Dorian rolled onto his back, wishing the beacon’s emergency voice would shut up. It was quite apparent to him that he needed to evacuate.

The “assault” hadn’t gone as planned. He blamed two things. First, Victor had continued shooting as he had died, not necessarily in any direction. The imbecile couldn’t even die properly. Dorian had him and his errant gunfire to thank for pushing Dorian back, away from the assault, forcing him to throw the grenades in a desperate attempt to finish off his enemy. It hadn’t worked. The beacon and its forcefields had repelled the impact of the blast back up through the stairwell, into the small space on the first floor, throwing Dorian into a wall. He didn’t remember anything after that, but he knew this: he was okay, he had his gun, and Kate and company were gone.

But… he knew where they were going. She had only two options. He stepped to the portal, working the panel. A break: she hadn’t done a random portal rotation before they had stepped off.
Haste makes waste, Kate
, Dorian thought. He could follow them now.

He glanced back, seeing the Serpentine battlefield for the first time. Incredible. How had Ares survived? The mystery would have to wait. Dorian stepped through the portal.

The sentinel assembly line that stretched out instantly struck fear into him. He raised his gun instinctively, and then paused, realization dawning on him. This was an Atlantean portal—at the sentinel assembly line. Were they manufacturing sentinels to fight the sentinels he had seen? Or had the Atlanteans conquered the sentinel army? Was it their army now? Or had it turned on them, destroying their homeworld?

Focus on the task at hand
, he thought. He quickly searched the factory. Empty. Kate and her friends couldn’t go back to the Serpentine battlefield. Dorian had them. He keyed the portal for the final destination and stepped through.

The heat greeted him, and the view from the window confirmed that the beacon was falling into the planet’s atmosphere. And it was accelerating.

Dorian raced through the dark metallic corridors of the military beacon, quickly searching both floors. Empty.

The screen in the communications bay flashed a red warning message.

Orbit Decaying. Atmospheric Entry Imminent.


Evacuate


Dorian checked the computer. Kate had been more careful this time. Ten thousand portal entries. Ten thousand possibilities. The portal connections had sapped the beacon’s last bit of power. It was falling faster now. Dorian had to move.

He stepped through the portal again, back to the only place he thought was safe.

He stared at the sentinel assembly line. He was trapped, but perhaps there were answers here, something he could use.

Kate simply stared at the wall opposite the narrow bed, for how long she didn’t know.

The door opened, and Paul stepped in. “You should see this.”

He led her back to the bridge, a cramped space with several workstations and room for about five people. The small screen showed a glowing ember moving through the clouds.

“Is it the beacon?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” Kate said.

As the beacon burned in the sky, she realized that they were truly trapped now. The
Beta Lander
had been designed for moving between ships and planetary surfaces. So had its portal. They couldn’t leave this world.

“What are you thinking, Kate?” Mary asked.

“I think we have to throw the long ball.”

P
ART
III:
A T
ALE
OF
T
WO
W
ORLDS

C
HAPTER
35

Dorian had searched the sentinel factory again. It was truly empty and had been for some time. To him, the massive base floating in space felt like a hospital except it wasn’t clinical or clean; it was industrial and rugged, utilitarian, yet precise. A symmetrical grid of wide hallways led through the four-story complex, opening onto rooms with strange equipment and mechanical pieces he assumed belonged to prototype sentinels. It was like a workshop. That’s what it was: a place where they tweaked the sentinels, revising the formula for distribution to the assembly line for “the next version.” A research lab.

All the terminals recognized him as General Ares, and the entire facility opened for him without restrictions.

Dorian had been over his options. They amounted to porting back to the beacon around Earth and returning to Ares for help or sorting through the rest of the memories. He felt as though death awaited him down either path, but one held answers, and possibly an opportunity to unravel the mystery behind Ares and change Earth’s fate. It was an easy decision.

He loaded the data core with Ares’ memories into the conference booth and stepped inside.

For Ares, time was like a river: flowing, unstoppable, washing away the last grains of his emotional core. He felt less every second, every minute, every hour.

He watched the Serpentine Army battle the sentinels, which swarmed into the breach. The black sentinel spheres seemed to multiply exponentially. But the serpent grew faster. The black ring of Serpentine ships that harnessed the power of the star formed a blue and white portal in its interior, almost blotting out the sun, except for a thin ring of yellow and orange fire peeking around its edges like a solar eclipse. The great serpent that poured through the portal shed its outer layer as its pieces—ships—sheared off, engaging the sentinels. The spheres dug into the main cord of the serpent and the ships that separated, shredding them, ripping them into tiny specks of black and gray which drifted down to the enormous debris field like ash falling on a highway.

The momentum of the battle coursed back and forth, the serpent growing wide, extending then receding as a new wave of spheres devoured its sides and forced it to collapse back and regain its size. Finally, the serpent pushed through. Its head formed another ring on the other side of the battlefield, and another portal took shape. The great snake flowed through the battlefield, an endless procession of ships moving between the two portals. The remaining spheres winked away, the battle apparently lost.