The Atlantis Plague(123)

Dorian leaned forward. “Don’t listen to him, Kate. We both know this is personal. Has been for, what, seventy thousand years now?” He smiled. “That’s your big blind spot, isn’t it? People. You never can get a read on anyone. You’re clever as hell, but you never see the big betrayal coming. I just, God, I love that about you. It’s hilarious.”

Kate closed her eyes and willed herself not to react. She could feel the anger rising inside her. How could he always get under her skin? He manipulated her so easily. The monster seemed to know where every one of her buttons was. He pressed them with such ease, grinning the entire time, knowing exactly how she would react.

She tried to focus, tried to block him out. In the darkness, a voice called, “He betrayed us.”

Kate opened her eyes. She was in a steel room that held four standing tubes. A Neanderthal stood motionless in one. She was in Gibraltar, in the chamber her father had found in 1918. This was the last memory, the one she hadn’t quite been able to reach. Seeing Dorian, his words, had triggered it.

“Did you hear me?” the voice called again.

A video appeared inside Kate’s helmet. A head in a helmet just like hers: Janus. He was the other member of the Atlantean science team, her partner.

“Did you—”

“I heard you,” Kate said. She was leaning against a table at the center of the room. She turned around to face Janus. She had to tell him.

“I—” she stammered. “Yes, Ares has betrayed us—”

Another blast rocked the ship.

“—But I helped him.” Inside her helmet, the video feed of Janus disappeared, and she again stared at the mirrored reflection from his helmet. Apparently Janus didn’t want Kate to see his reaction. “He told me he wanted to help. To make them safe. All of us,” she added quickly.

“He used you—and our research. He must have the gene therapy he needs to build his army.”

Kate watched Janus pace across the room to a control panel. He worked it quickly.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked.

“Ares will try to take the primary ship. He needs it to transport his army. I have locked it down.”

Kate nodded. On her helmet display, she watched the commands scroll by. Each line seemed to bring more memories, more comprehension. The ship they stood in now was simply a local lander. They had come here on a larger science ship, capable of deep space travel. Their protocol was always minimal footprint and minimal visibility. They didn’t need the ship while they were conducting experiments on the planet’s surface, and they didn’t want it to be seen. They had hidden it on the opposite side of the planet’s only moon, burying it deep. The portal doors on the lander provided instant access to the ship if they ever needed it, but Janus’s commands were locking the ship down now—it would be closed to any remote control from Gibraltar or Antarctica. They couldn’t get back to the ship now and neither could Ares, at least not through a portal door.

Janus continued manipulating the controls. “I’m going to set some traps as well, in case Ares does somehow make it to the ship.”

Kate watched the commands scroll by. Another explosion rocked the ship, this one much more violent than the last.

Janus paused. “The ship is breaking up. It will be ripped apart.”

Kate stood there, not sure what to do.

“Has Ares administered his therapy yet? Has he transformed them?”

Kate tried to think. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Janus worked the panel feverishly. Kate saw a series of DNA sequences flash by. The computer was running simulations.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“The ship is going to be destroyed. The primitives will find it. I am modifying the time-dilation devices at the perimeter to emit radiation that will roll back all our therapies. They will be as they were before we found them, before the first therapy.”

That was it—the Bell was Janus’s attempt to reverse all the Atlanteans’ genetic interventions. Except, in this memory, thirteen thousand years ago, when Janus was programming the Bell, he was looking at the wrong genome. The primitives, as he called them, wouldn’t find the ship until 1918, when Kate’s father would dig it up under the Bay of Gibraltar. Janus wasn’t counting on the time difference, the delay in finding the Bell, the genetic changes that would occur. And Kate knew there would be two very big changes—the “deltas” from Martin’s chronology, the two outbreaks of plague in the sixth and thirteenth century. Yes, those must have been Ares’s interventions, the administration of the therapy Kate had helped him create. Why had it come so late? Why had he waited twelve thousand years? Where had he been? And where had Janus been? He was alive here in the past and he had been there in the future.