“I’m getting something,” Noonan said. He had his hands over his headset. Listening intently.
Amelia’s gaze shifted between compass and the growing cloud on the horizon as she waited. She looked down at her hands. Frozen on the controls. She desperately wanted to turn, but the command wouldn’t go from her brain to her hands.
“I don’t know what it is,” Noonan finally said. “A lot of static, then what sounds like Morse code, but I can’t-” he fell silent once more as he focused on listening. His eyes closed. “It’s clearer now.” Noonan opened his eyes and picked up a pencil and began to record the letters in the flight log, speaking them out loud as he heard the dashes and dots. “T-U-RN-O-F-F-R-A-D-I-O-O-R-D-I-E. Turn off radio or die”
The fog was now fewer than five miles ahead and was huge, blocking their path at twelve thousand feet and continuing to climb. In all her flights she had never seen anything like it. She was sure they shouldn’t fly into it, but she couldn’t turn the controls.
“I think we should shut off the radio,” Noonan suggested. “I don’t like the looks of that.”
Earhart tried to answer, to say something, to order him to fly the plane, but no words would come. Why didn’t he notice her paralysis, she wondered.
Noonan had a knee-key on his thigh, and he tapped out a quick query in Morse. Trying to get the identity of the sender of the message.
A golden beam slashed out of the fog directly for the Electra. The gold beam hit the nose of the plane and the engine sputtered. She knew Noonan needed to stop transmitting but she couldn’t tell him. He seemed oblivious to what had just happened, still tapping on the knee-key.
The fog was now fewer than two miles away, a wall stretching as far she could see. North and south. And reaching up at least fifteen thousand feet.
Another golden bolt came out of the fog and struck the plane. Earhart felt the power ripple across her skin. The engine died, and there was only the sound of the air racing by. They were losing altitude, heading down toward the ocean and forward toward the dark wall.
Beads of sweat broke out on Earhart’s forehead as she fought to regain control of her body. She knew they absolutely had to turn away from the dark wall. The front edge of a massive sphere appeared, coming out of the mist. The top half was opening like a gaping mouth, preparing to swallow them. Why wouldn’t Noonan see that? Why didn’t he help her?
Because Noonan was dead. Earhart’s eyes flashed open, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The air coming into her lungs was unnatural, something she had grown used to in her I time in the Space Between. It felt thick. With an oily tinge, as it slid down her throat. She lay in a gully, near a black wall that curved up overhead, eventually fading out of view inward. Beneath her was coarse, sand like material.
She heard a voice speaking in Japanese and turned her seeing Taki and another samurai. They were dressed in I black tunics, having abandoned their armor when their ship was attacked by the Shadow. They were more victims’ trapped.out of time and world in the Space Between. The mime she had given to this strange place. It was a transit point for the portals between worlds and times, consisting of a black land surrounding an Inner Sea, enclosed inside what appeared to l be a massive semi-circular cavern. How large the cavern was she had no idea. The one time Earhart tried to circle the Inner: Sea. It seemed as if she moved in place, never completing the circle and being forced to return to her base camp.
Also in the Space Between was an area where white-suited creatures known as Valkyries had a cavern where they conducted grotesque experiments on humans. A slightly damaged Valkyrie suit floated in the air just a few feet from Earhart’s resting place, the front half-split open, the interior empty. It was one of two she and the Samurai had captured from the experiment cavern. They’d discovered that the creatures inside were humans, but badly warped, missing much of their skin.
The discovery that humans manned the Valkyrie suits troubled Earhart as much as her recent dream did. Were they servants of the Shadow? Or was the Shadow a human force? If so, from where and when? And why was it so bent on destroying Earth time lines?
Earhart sat up. She tried to remember all the details of the dream. Some of it was exactly what had happened when she’d disappeared inside the Devil’s Sea gate while on her around-the-world flight in 1937, trying to become the first woman to accomplish this feat. She’d already been acknowledged as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in 1928. But that accomplishment had been soured by the fact that she had not piloted the plane.
Earhart and her navigator. Frank Noonan. Had been on one of the last legs of the epic Journey, having covered twenty-two thousand miles over the course of several months. Earhart reached into the box she had rescued from the Lockheed Electra and pulled out her leather journal. Tucked into the pages were photos. She pulled one out-of her husband, George Putnam. The Journey had been his idea, a chance for more publicity and to sell more books and magazines. She wondered if he was alive and then realized such a thought was worthless, as there appeared to be no time here and connections via the portals to many Earths and many times.
He thumbed through the journal, noting a picture of herself standing on the wing of the Electra in Miami, Florida, the starting point of her long journey that had ended in a most unexpected place. She was smiling in the photo. She had originally planned on starting from Hawaii and heading west. She wondered now if things would have turned out differently if she hadn’t clipped the wing of the heavily laden plane on the edge of the runway during takeoff and damaged it. Instead of going west, she’d had the plane repaired and shipped back to the States, eventually to Miami, where she’d taken off June 1, 1937, and flown east.
Earhart turned the pages of her journal, noting the entries and remembering the journey. Along the east coast of South America, across the South Atlantic and then Africa. What a beautiful continent, Africa!
She turned the page. She’d been the first to fly across desolate Arabia. Desolate? Nothing compared to this forsaken place or to India. She grimaced as she remembered. It was a horrible place where she’d become sick. She’d wanted to quit then. She’d sent a telegraph to George, begging him to let her stop, but he’d been firm. She must go on Glory and fame awaited. That had been the first time Earhart had questioned the price she was paying for something that no longer seemed so important Perhaps it was the teeming millions she saw in the streets of Calcutta. Living lives where their fate seemed so bleak yet many seemed so happy.
Then Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore and Bangkok, where no one knew who she was and cared less, although they marveled over the plane and the fact that a woman flew it. She looked at a picture-Darwin, Australia, where people knew her name and the reporters flocked to the airport. She had not felt the same jolt from seeing the area in front of the control tower crowded with them. She just remembered feeling so utterly exhausted.
Had she had a vision before the last flight? She now wondered. One that she had dismissed as a dream? Had she heard the voices of the gods as she slept? She scanned the words printed in her fine block lettering, but there was no mention of such, but that meant little, as back then she would have dismissed either.
From Australia she’d flown to New Guinea and then they’d taken off on the final leg-and run into the gate. It had not occurred as in the dream she’d just had. They had not been blasted out of the sky by golden bolts. Earhart had turned the plane and managed to land on the ocean. As she and Noonan tried to escape, he’d been killed by a kraken, one of the sea creatures that inhabited water inside a gate, a creature that must have slid through a portal.