opened it and rifled through the MREs. “Beef stew, barbecue chicken with black beans and potatoes, chili mac…”
David fell back into the bed. “Oh, talk dirty to me now.”
Kate punched him in the chest. “You’re a lunatic.”
He smiled. “You love it.”
“I do. And that makes me a lunatic.”
“I’ll take whatever you don’t want,” he said.
“Don’t think I can tell much difference anymore.”
David’s eyebrows knitted together for a moment, then his smile faded as he seemed to realize what she meant.
He grabbed a pack at random, tore it open, and began wolfing it down.
Kate wished he would eat slower, which would allow more digestive enzymes to release, breaking the food down better and giving him more usable calories from the meal. That had been her goal in feeding him the more nutrient-dense Atlantean pack. But… human needs.
He pinched her nose playfully, trying to lighten the mood. “No more nose bleeds.”
“Nope.”
He was about finished with the pack but stopped. “It was the experiments, wasn’t it? The simulations.”
“Yeah.”
David finished the last few bites. “When Alpha said you had four to seven days… left. It wasn’t unsure of your health—the diagnosis. It was unsure how many experiments you would do on yourself. None means seven days, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” David said. “Seven days is better than four.”
“I agree,” Kate said quietly.
“Okay, let’s talk about the… issue.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “Issue?”
“Throwing the long ball.”
Kate hated sports analogies. “We have a long ball?”
He pushed up on his elbow. “You know, the Hail Mary pass in the fourth quarter. That’s where we are, Kate. We both know it. You said this beacon is connected to countless quantum buoys. To me, we only have one play: we send our SOS. Say… I don’t know, ‘our world is under attack from a superior alien occupying force.’” He paused. “Wow. I was trying to make it sound overly urgent and dramatic, but it’s actually one hundred percent accurate.”
Kate’s mind lit up. That was it. David was still talking, losing steam with every word, the exhaustion and binge eating catching up to him fast.
“I mean, yeah, some bad guys will read it. Maybe they’ll show up, but maybe some galactic good guys will give a crap, and anyway, we’re screwed if we do, screwed if we don’t…”
Kate pushed him into the bed. “Rest. You just gave me an idea.”
“What idea?”
“I’ll be back.”
“Wake me up in an hour,” David called to her as she left. There was no way she would wake him up in an hour. He needed rest. If Kate was right, he would need to be at the very top of his game.
Outside their room, she found Sonja and Milo manning the make-shift fortress adjacent to the glowing white portal. For perhaps the first time in her life, Milo didn’t smile at Kate. He nodded solemnly, a look that said, This is serious. We’re on guard duty here.
Kate nodded back as she passed and almost ran to the communications bay at the back of the beacon. She pulled up the transmission log she had shown the group before. This time, she entered a new date range: about thirteen thousand years ago.
The data scrolled across the screen, and Kate could hardly believe her eyes.
Dorian reached his hand down to Victor. “I’ll pull you up. We have to hurry.”
The soldier had climbed the tree leaning against the arc exit about half as fast as Dorian. The dimwit would never make the Olympics.
He jerked the man into the dark corridor, and they set out again. Dorian was glad to be out of the humid, freakish place with the snakes and flying invisible birds, and who knew what else.
He wanted to barricade the entrance, ensuring that nothing made it out, but there was no time.
The two men moved slowly through the corridor, again barefoot as they had been on the way to the arc, careful not to make a sound that might reveal their position.
Dorian had no problem facing facts: David was strong and clever. It would be just like him to send Kate to the beacon while he remained here, guarding, waiting to spring a trap.
If Kate had already sent a message or disabled the beacon, Dorian would be too late. The thought weighed on him, the proverbial weight of the world, but he couldn’t rush his assault. If there was still a chance, it was up to him to stop them. If he failed, so would the world he was fighting for, had sacrificed so much for.
Ares had been right about one thing: Dorian did have a role to play.
He was adjusting to the darkness now, seeing more and more of the corridor despite the faint emergency lights.
Up ahead, the portal room loomed, waiting.
At the threshold, he and Victor paused, signaled each other, and then rushed in, sweeping the room with their rifles. Empty.
Dorian worked the green cloud of light at the panel, and the silver arched portal came to life.
Victor stepped toward it.
“Wait,” Dorian commanded. “We need to be careful.”
Mary and Paul were lying in the narrow bed, both staring at the ceiling.
“I’m too nervous to sleep,” Paul said.
“Me too.”
“For some reason, I don’t want to shower either.”
“Same here,” Mary replied.
“Why is that? I have to think it’s the fear of being in the shower the moment the invasion happens, when the shooting starts. Maybe it’s the being naked part. Like you don’t want to get shot when you’re naked.”
“Yep. Definitely the naked part.”
“And the guilt. You know, after it’s all over, if aliens get here, you don’t want them entering it in the log:” Paul changed his voice to sound more like a computer, “this little human was butt-naked when his world fell. He was scrubbing his left thigh when the other evil human invaded and killed his team, leading to the end. He also failed to clean his back properly.”
Mary laughed. “We’re officially delirious.” She rolled into him, tucking her face under his arm. “I can’t stop thinking about the code.”
“What about it?”
“Why send two parts? If it is bait, why not something straightforward? Just the binary code.”
Paul smiled.
“The complex, cryptic message just doesn’t make sense as a lure.”
“It’s like it’s a test. To see if we can solve it.”
“Or encryption to make sure no one else can read it. Or can solve it.”
“Interesting…” Paul said.
The door opened, revealing Milo. He grinned and raised his eyebrows. “Dr. Kate has an important update!”
When the group was assembled in the large communications room at the back of the beacon, Kate said, “I may have a solution.”
“Solution for what?” Sonja asked.
“Getting off this beacon.”
CHAPTER 25
Kate pulled up the transmission logs on the large screen in the communications bay. Around the room, the reactions were as diverse as the group. Milo smiled. Sonja’s face was unreadable. Mary squinted, focusing. Paul just looked nervous, as if the results would tell him how long he had to live.
David was guarding the portal, craning his neck around the central cylinder, trying to see the screen.
“This is the transmission log from around thirteen thousand years ago,” Kate said. “This is the exact time of the fall of Atlantis—just after Ares’ attack on the Alpha Lander off the coast of Gibraltar. During that attack, the ship was split in half, and Janus was trapped in the half closest to Morocco.”
“The part we were just in,” Mary said.
“Yes. We know Janus’ partner was killed in the attack thirteen thousand years ago. He tried desperately to resurrect her in one of the tubes in the other half, closest to Gibraltar. In the final days of the Atlantis Plague, I learned that his attempt to resurrect his partner had partially succeeded: I have her memories. But only select memories. Janus longed to bring her back without certain memories. For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to access those memories… in hopes that I could…” Kate caught David’s eye.
She turned to the screen and continued. “I’ve been trying to access the memories, but they were erased from the Alpha Lander data core. That’s not supposed to be possible—resurrection, especially the storage of memory data, must adhere to strict Atlantean guidelines. What I learned a few moments ago is that Janus didn&rsquo