Dane realized he was looking at the inner core of the planet, something scientists in his day had only been able to speculate about. While man had traveled to the moon, he had barely scratched the surface of his own planet. Apparently the Atlanteans had done considerably more than scratch.
Dane became aware of something else as some time went by. The planet was moving, revolving, but not the crystal. Dane tried to recall what Ahana had said about that, knowing it was important. He knew that the Shadow had demonstrated an ability to tap into the power coming out of the splits between the tectonic plates. He wondered why this tap was where it was, wherever that was.
Realizing the location of the tap and tunnel would be important, Dane reversed course and raced up the tunnel. When he reached the chamber underneath the granite slab, he continued on the same vector. Passing into the stone was disconcerting and he concentrated on trying to stay in a straight line.
He came out into pitch-black water, the only difference from the stone, being the element that surrounding him.
Where was he? What had this place been before the deluge?
Dane moved up, toward the surface. He burst up out of the water and halted, searching in all directions. There was something above the water to one side and he headed over there.
Land. Above the waves. He saw a rock wall rising barely thirty feet above the water out the place sparked some memory. He moved closer. The top of the rocks were scoured clean of life. And the land to west of them sloped down into the water again.
Where had he seen similar rock? He knew the context was all wrong, given the water level. He added a few hundred feet to the rock, envisioning cliffs.
Dane knew where he was. The rocks were the very top of the Palisades. And the Core tunnel had been dug underneath what was New York City in his timeline. If the tunnel existed here, it might exist in other timelines, the key issue being when the Atlanteans had dug it.
Dane stayed in place, trying to think this through. He was here for a reason. He had to trust the Ones Before. He, a man who had never trusted anyone other than the men he’d gone into combat with in Vietnam. He realized that he’d gone into combat with the Ones Before many times in the past year.
Why was he here?
There was power below. More power than any of the other timelines had ever tapped. It was what had both destroyed the Shadow and kept it going.
Did he need his body?
The thought was startling to Dane. He’d thought earlier that he could not redirect power without his body, but was that true? Sin Fen had told him he was the step beyond what she was. He was the warrior-priest.
It was time to go back, Dane knew. Time for all the pieces to come together.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Over twelve thousand men on a front slightly more than one mile wide.
It was an artilleryman’s dream target. The officers who commanded the Union batteries were well schooled in their deadly science. Since the Confederates had over a mile of open ground to cover, it worked out that it would take them, if they kept a steady advance, approximately sixteen point nine minutes to reach the Union lines. In that time, a typical gun battery of six twelve-pound Napoleon guns could fire two hundred and twenty-eight rounds.
There was also a science to the order in which different types of ammunition were fired. As the Confederate lines first appeared, the Union guns were loaded with solid shot. This was a solid ball of cast iron, designed for long distance firing. The round would fly to maximum range, and then hit the ground, bouncing several times, often cutting swathes through packed formations.
Stacked near the guns were other types of ammunition, readied for use as the enemy closed. Once the incoming troops came within a thousand yards, shrapnel rounds would be used. And then, at the very end, inside of four hundred yards, there was canister.
The Union guns fired round after round of solid shot at the massed lines coming toward them. This made the maneuvering of the Confederate lines to get in position even more amazing as it took valuable minutes and got them no closer to their enemy.
Even more devastating, Union batteries that had been moved up by General Warren onto Little Round Top now opened fire, parallel to the Confederate lines. Some of the solid shot from these batteries would hit the end of a line en and plow through them, taking out dozens at a time.
The Union infantry, their guns primed, waited and watched. Veterans of Union assaults such as those at Fredericksburg and Antietam were happy to be behind their stonewall and not out in that field, having experienced what their enemy was now facing. They were tom between empathy for fellow human beings and a base desire for revenge.
General Pickett was having difficulty keeping the various units in order and trying to gain contact with Trimble’s division on his left. It took almost fifteen minutes of maneuvering for his left to meet Trimble’s right. At this point their front ranks were about eight hundred yards from the Union lines.
Pickett’s heart soared as he saw the solid line of gray troops moving forward. He grabbed a courier and sent him dashing back to Longstreet with a request for reinforcements to support what he considered the inevitable breakthrough of the Union lines, which he believed, would happen very quickly. Nothing could defeat such a display of Southern manhood.
“On men!” Pickett cried as he stood up in his stirrups, waving his sword. “On for Virginia.”
For the men in the front ranks, things weren’t looking so positive. As the two divisions connected, the troops crowded into each other. Even under these terrible conditions, Southern politeness held sway as a young officer from Virginia cried out to the regiment of Tennesseans his unit was mingling with: “Move on, cousins. You are drawing the fire our way.”
A solid shot hit the pine board over her hole and ripped it away. Earhart decided enough was enough. She managed to unseal the Valkyrie suit and crawl inside. Then she shut it. She scrunched down as tight as possible in the bottom of the hole, wishing she could become an earthworm and rawl even deeper into the dark soil.
The sound of battle, the screams of wounded and dying filled the air. She could hear Confederate officers exhorting their men forward. Then there was another sound, which at first she couldn’t make out. Something being shouted from the Union lines, a chant. It took her a few moments before she realized what it was:
“Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg.”
The colonel in charge of the Eighth Ohio regiment didn’t wait for the Confederates to come to him. In fact, his best estimate watching the oncoming wave of gray convinced him that the attack was directed to his right and that his unit would be spared any frontal assault. His men had been deployed on a wide front as skirmishers, about five hundred yards in front of the Union line but it appeared the attack would pass them by.
So he attacked. He formed his men into a line a hundred yards wide and charged forward into the right flank of Pickett’s division. It was an audacious move, even more unorthodox than Chamberlain’s charge the day before as there was no desperate need for it.