“How?”
Fifty thousand local years ago, Kate and her partner had received a transmission: their world, the Atlantean home world, had fallen—violently, in a day and a night. How could there be survivors? Had the home world distress call been wrong? Kate and her partner had heeded the call, had hidden their science expedition, assuming they were the last of their kind, assuming they were now alone in the universe, marooned, two scientists who could never go home. Had they been wrong?
“The vessel is a life raft.” Her partner turned to her. “A resurrection ship.”
“They can’t come here,” Kate said.
“It is too late. They are already landing. They intend to bury the ship under the ice-capped continent at the southern pole.” Her partner worked the control panel. He seemed to tense up. Is he nervous?
“Who’s on the ship?” Kate asked.
“General Ares.”
A current of fear ran through Kate.
The scene changed. Kate stood on another ship—not the lander. This vessel was massive, cavernous. Glass tubes stretched out before her for miles.
Footsteps echoed in the space.
“We are the last,” came a voice from the shadows.
“Why did you come here?” her partner called.
“For the protection of the Beacon. And I read your research reports. The survival gene you gave the primitives. I find it… very promising.” The owner of the voice stepped into the light.
Dorian.
Kate almost reeled back. General Ares was Dorian. How? She focused. The man’s face wasn’t Dorian’s, but the overwhelming sense Kate got was that Dorian was inside this man. Or was it the opposite? Was Ares inside Dorian and Kate was sensing that element—seeing it in its purest form now? When Kate looked at Ares, all she saw was Dorian.
“The inhabitants here are of no concern to you,” her partner said.
“On the contrary. They are our future.”
“We have no right—”
“You had no right to alter them, but what is done is done,” Dorian said. “You endangered them the instant you gave them part of our genome. Our enemy will hunt them, as they will hunt us, to the far reaches of the universe, no matter where we go. I wish to save them, to make them safe. We will advance them, and they will be our army.”
Kate shook her head.
Dorian focused on her. “You should have listened to me before.”
The endless rows of glass tubes faded, and Kate was in a different room in the same structure. There were only a dozen glass tubes here, standing on end, spread out in a semicircle before her. It was a room she had seen before—in Antarctica—where she, David, and her father had met up.
Each tube held a different human subspecies.
The door opened behind her.
Dorian.
“You… are conducting your own experiments,” Kate said.
“Yes. But I told you I cannot do this alone. I need your help.”
“You delude yourself.”
“They will die without you,” Dorian said. “We all will. Their fate is our fate. The final war is inevitable. Either you give them the genetic equipment they need, or they perish. Our destiny is written. I am here for them.”
“You lie.”
“Then leave them to die. Do nothing. See what happens.” He waited. When Kate said nothing, he continued. “They need our help. Their transformation is only half complete. You must finish what you have started. There is no other way, no turning back. Help me. Help them.”
Kate thought of her partner, his protests.
“The other member of your little expedition is a fool. Only fools fight fate.”
Kate’s silence was a signal—to her and to Dorian. He seemed to feed on her indecision.
“They are already splintering. I have collected the candidates, conducted my own experiments. But I don’t have the expertise. I need you. I need your research. We can transform them.”
Kate crumbled. She felt herself falling under his spell. It was the same as before—her before, in San Francisco. She tried to rationalize, tried to think of a deal, but her mind drifted to her experiences in Gibraltar and then in Antarctica when he had cornered her. It was history repeating itself. The same players, playing out a different game, with the same end, on a different stage. Except this was long before, in another life, in another era.
“If I help you,” she said, “I want to know that no harm will come to my team.”
“You have my word. I will join your expedition—as a security adviser. There are additional steps you all need to take to cloak our presence here. And you will program your resurrection tubes to my radiation signature—just in case something… unfortunate were to happen to me.”
Dorian leaned his head against the helicopter’s back rest and closed his eyes. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a memory. He was there, in the past.