David sat at the table built into the gray wall, trying to wrap his exhausted mind around Janus’ message.
“Play it again.”
From her perch on the narrow bed behind him, Kate used her neural link to play the video.
“What do you want to do?” Kate asked.
“We should share it with the group.”
They had no options that David could see, and he felt they should make their decision together.
David had made the rounds, gathering everyone into the larger lab at the back of the beacon. Kate had programmed the doors to stay open, and she now stood in the open room with Milo, Mary, Paul, and Sonja. David had relieved Sonja, reasoning that she should see the footage for herself. He sat at the makeshift outpost by the portal, his rifle pointed across the entry path toward the empty storage room.
Before the video began, Paul stepped in front of the screen and addressed Kate. “I’m sorry, but can I say something first? I’m just… not sure anyone should be shooting a gun here.” He specifically avoided eye contact with David.
“I agree,” Mary said quietly.
Sonja stiffened.
David yelled back to them. “If Dorian Sloane walks through that door, I am shooting him. End of discussion.”
Mary cleared her throat, “Well, it… seems to me that maybe we should stack the boxes against the portal. Then we would know when he comes through, and you could shoot into the portal—that way, at least the bullets would go back into the other ship.”
“You assume,” Sonja said, “that the portal would transmit bullets. If not, they would go through the portal mechanism in the center, trapping us here, which would be far worse than the quick death of decompression, which is another assumption. A craft this advanced can surely withstand impacts from outside. It’s not my area, but I believe space is filled with floating rocks large and small, some moving quickly. It would stand to reason that perhaps this beacon was also built to withstand a puncture from the inside and if not, in the event of a breach, to rapidly repair itself.”
“I, uh, hadn’t thought of that,” Mary said, her cheeks flushing.
“There’s much to think about,” Sonja said. “And all our minds are weary. Many unknowns.” She turned to Kate. “Unless of course these unknowns are known.”
“Oh, they’re unknown.” Kate said. Her Atlantean memories were spotty, and she had no idea what the beacon was capable of, including whether it could withstand a firefight or not.
“You said there was a movie?” Milo asked.
“Yes. Of sorts.” Kate activated the large screen, the video began, and the five of them stepped back to form a semi-circle around the screen.
Janus stood on the bridge of the ship he and his fellow Atlantean scientist had traveled to Earth upon and hidden on the far side of the moon, burying it below thousands of feet of lunar rock and dirt.
Janus’ expression was stoic as he spoke.
“My name is Dr. Arthur Janus. I am a scientist and a citizen of a long-since fallen civilization. We made a great mistake many years ago, and we have paid dearly for it—with the lives of nearly every member of our society. The remainder of our people took refuge here, on this world, hiding, waiting. And we repeated our mistake.”
The ship shook, and the panels around the bridge behind Janus flickered, popped, and went out.
“I say to you, those who destroyed our world, those we wronged, please do not continue your vengeance on the inhabitants of this planet. They are victims too.”
Flames erupted across the bridge a second before the video ended.
“Yeah, so…” Paul began. “Not exactly a message to an ally.”
Mary bit her lip. “How do we know the response—the message I received—is a response to this message? And do you know what the incoming message is?”
“No,” Kate said. “In fact, what you received is what was in the transmission. Sometimes the beacon translates incoming signals, but it didn’t in this case.” The screen changed, showing an access log of incoming and outgoing messages. “Here’s Janus’ outgoing message, sent from the main vessel fourteen days ago. The strange part is that he routed it to a quantum comm buoy—”
“A quantum comm…”
“It’s like a relay the Atlanteans used to manage communications traffic over distances. Sending information across space isn’t the issue, it’s folding the space, creating temporary wormholes and the power required to do so. The buoys establish those worm holes for an extremely small fraction of a second and transmit data. There are millions of them that form a redundant network.”
There were blank stares all around the room, except for Mary, who was nodding.
“Why is that important?” Paul asked.
“Because it means Janus was masking the origin of his signal—he bounced it off so many buoys I can’t even trace the destination from here. He clearly didn’t want the recipient to know where the message came from.”
“But somehow they traced it,” Sonja said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” Kate replied. She highlighted the next row in the communications log. “Twenty four hours after his message went out, a response comes in. It had an Atlantean access code, so the beacon let it through. What’s strange to me is that it didn’t contain a message in the Atlantean format and encoding. The message is very… ‘Earthlike’—the content is simplistic and far less advanced than what would be expected. The Atlantean computer can’t even read it.”
“As if the sender knew the Atlanteans were hiding on a less advanced world…” Paul began.
“It’s bait!” David yelled from his position by the portal.
“I agree,” Sonja said. “If this was a message to a great enemy, and they could not trace its origin, they could have sent a fake message to any suspected worlds, hoping to lure us out.”
Paul nodded. “Hoping we would respond, reveal our location or better yet, disable the beacon so they could see exactly what’s happening on Earth.”
“It had our address on it,” Mary said, but quickly added, “though, I guess they could have sent a customized message to every world.” Kate thought the realization hit the woman hard, as if some hope she had harbored had finally died.
Paul rubbed his temples and paced away. “I’m too tired to think. We obviously can’t respond, at least not yet, and we can’t disable the beacon. Janus clearly believed the Atlanteans’ enemy was still out there. What’s left? What can we do?” He glanced toward the portal.
“I agree,” Sonja said. “We’re trapped.”
CHAPTER 24
Kate closed her eyes and massaged her eyelids. She was dead-tired and sitting at the small desk in the residential pod, staring at the screen for the last hour felt as though it were draining her even more. Yet… she couldn’t help feeling as if she was missing something. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking, her desperate desire to think that there was a way out of the trap they were in.
The door opened, and David lumbered in, his eyes half closed.
Kate smiled. “How was work, honey?”
He barely made it to the end of the bed before falling into it. “I feel like an Atlantean mall cop.”
She hovered over him.
“Pesky kids getting rowdy in the food court?”
“Supervisor relieved me for falling asleep on the job.”
She began pulling his dirty tunic off. “Well they can’t fire you,” she said in a mock sympathetic tone. “This Atlantis beacon needs you too much. But you’re getting dirt in the bed.” She collected his pants and boots and then inserted them in the garment sanitizer in the corner.
David followed her with his eyes, not moving a muscle. “How does it work? The Atlantean laundry. Actually… don’t tell me. I don’t care.”
She handed him a mushy bag, then uncapped the end and pushed it towards his lips.
“What’s this?”
“Dinner.” She squeezed some of the gel into his mouth.
David sat up and spat the orange goo on the wall. “Oh God, that’s horrible! What the—What did I ever do to you, lady?”
Kate cocked her head. “Really?” She ate some of the goo. “It’s just pre-digested amino acids, triglycerides—”
“It tastes like poop, Kate.”
“You’ve never tasted—”
“I have now. It’s horrid. How can you eat that?”
Kate wondered the same thing. To her, it had almost no taste. She wondered if it was because she was changing, becoming more… Atlantean. She pushed the thought from her mind.
“Well, I’m not eating that for my last meal. I’ll starve first.”
“So dramatic.”
David reached for the pack. “What do we have left?”
Kate