Easy.
Chamberlain checked his command status. No one should be talking on the command frequency while he was giving orders.
“Charlie company will — ”
Easy, Colonel.
“Who is that?” Chamberlain demanded.
“Who is what?” Eddings was next to him.
“Didn’t you hear that?” The voice had to be coming Over the command net, Chamberlain knew, because he was sealed from the outside world inside his suit.
We’re here to transport you. We’re in the sphere. We’re not the Shadow. We’re from another time line the Shadow has attacked. Bring your craft on board.
“Who are you?”
Eddings turned toward Chamberlain but he signaled for her to be quiet.
My name isn’t important.
Looking through the cockpit window, Chamberlain could see that the entire sphere had emerged from the gate and was floating motionless. The gate snapped out of existence. Then the top of the sphere began to open, splitting like a bulb opening to become a flower.
Ask your Oracles.
Dane could understand the colonel’s reticence about trusting a voice that just appeared in his head, especially in connection with the arrival of a Shadow sphere. Then he sensed something below. Dane shifted his attention to the water below. He saw a half dozen large black fins sticking out of the water.
“The High Priestess says do as the voice says,” Eddings told Chamberlain.
As Chamberlain prepared to change his orders, the sphere began to move-downward. The top was still open and now he could see the large open floor bisecting the interior. An excellent landing field. He directed his craft to enter the sphere and land.
The MH-90s flitted forward, settling down on the black metal one by one, a dangerous maneuver as the sphere itself was now moving. As a commander should, Chamberlain took the last position in the line of Nighthawks heading into the top of the sphere.
As he watched his unit enter the sphere, Chamberlain realized that it was going to be a close call for his craft to land before the sphere was submerged as the bottom of the arge ball had now touched the water and it wasn’t slowing.
Inside the pilot pod, Amelia Earhart was also aware of the two rates of progress — her descent of the sphere and the landing of the military craft inside. She was following Dane’s orders, but it seemed as if he were thinking many different things at once.
The sphere was in the water and she kept it going down. Only three more of the strange planes had to land. She had to trust Dane knew what he was doing, because those planes were going to get wet very soon.
As the last one landed on the cargo deck above her, water began to pour in the opening in the top of the sphere.
‘’Everyone sealed?” Chamberlain asked as his Nighthawk was buffeted by a stream of water cascading down.
All answered in the affirmative.
Chamberlain put his helmet against Eddings. “What the hell is going on?”
“Look,” Eddings said, pointing up, through the window in the top of the cockpit.
It appeared that the sphere was no longer moving as the water level had stopped halfway up the large circular cargo bay. Just at the point where the bottom of the splits were.
A killer whale appeared, swimming in through the gap of one of the splits. Then another and another. Soon a dozen of the creatures were inside, swimming just above the parked Nighthawks. The top of the sphere began to close, each petal sealing against the one next to it until it was completely closed.
Chamberlain staggered as his mind was filled with a vision that came unbidden. A beautiful city inside a clear shield. A golden tower extending upward. In the top of the golden tower a large room filled with small golden globes all connected together.
He didn’t know where the vision came from; he’d never had one before.
“That’s the target,” Eddings said.
Chamberlain looked at her in surprise.
“I saw it too,” Eddings said. “Those globes. That’s the Shadow. That’s what we have to destroy.”
“Where now?” Earhart asked.
Straight down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ahana got as close as possible to the Isandlwana Gate without entering it. She shrugged off the pack of gear she’d brought and tossed it on the ground. The sound of the Zulu chant and the British singing echoed this far, even though she knew the sound should not carry the distance.
She knew there was something stronger at work than the physics she understood. Just as this gate was beyond her, so was whatever was now occurring at Isandlwana. And she knew with certainty that just as this gate had been formed and exploited by the Shadow through the power of the massacre, formed into something evil; she knew that what was happening at Rorke’s Drift was the opposite.
Ahana stared at the devices and instruments trying to decide what to do, feeling a tremble sense of urgency.
At Rorke’s Drift the outer stonewall was now lined with warriors, chanting and slamming the haft of their spears against their shields. Unlike earlier though, this chant was not martial. There was a slow and mournful cadence to it.
Inside the Inner wall, the British survivors stood to, looking out at the Zulu warriors, the butts of their rifles on the ground, red-stained bayonets glinting in the remaining firelight, singing hymns under the direction of the sergeant major.
Eyes grew wide on both sides, but none stopped singing, as a bluish glow appeared in the air above Rorke’s Drift. A tendril of the strange glowing blue cloud began to move against the wind toward Isandlwana.
“Stop.” Ahana said the word out loud. She moved back lightly from the machines. She’d had many theories about the Shadow, about the edge of science, about physics, but she realized that throughout it all, Dane had been more right about everything than she and Professor Nagoya.
Forget the machines. The thought came unbidden, but she trusted it. She had graduated number one in her class at every level of schooling. She had always used her mind but she knew she had never really trusted it unless machines and formulas agreed with it.
Now it was time to move past that.
Ahana unsealed the Valkyrie suit and stood on the stony ground just short of the top of Isandlwana. She really felt the true evil of the gate drawing power up from the planet and sending it on. She recoiled from it, stepping back several spaces, almost falling down the side of the mountain.
The hair on the back of her head rose as if a warm hand were brushing along her skin. She halted her retreat. She began to feel stronger, more powerful. And she was beginning to see what she had to do.
A single tear flowed down her smooth skin. Then she thought of Professor Nagoya, her mentor who had been killed outside the Devil’s Sea Gate. Of the millions, billions, killed by the Shadow and not another tear flowed.
In the control pod Earhart could see what was around the sphere she was piloting reflected on the interior walls around her. She had the sphere going down very quickly, the walls of the tunnel flashing by.
Like a driver going someplace she’d never been before she wanted to ask Dane where they were going but she had to trust that he would tell her when necessary.
There was a glow below. A blue glow.