Sternly, he said, "Friend Farrell, I understand your grief, but your anger is misplaced. I remind you Cotta volunteered for the mission. I definitely recall Grant trying to talk him out of accompanying them. Cotta was not drafted or pressed into service."

  Farrell opened his mouth to lodge an objection, but Lakesh rushed on, "Friends Grant and Kane have, in their time here, shouldered the lion's share of the risks and never expected any of the staff to join them on their missions. Although I appreciate your distress over losing a friend, I can't help but wonder if the primary source of your anger isn't derived from an incident among you, friend Cotta and Kane."

  Farrell didn't display surprise or any sign he had to ransack his memory to recall the incident. He knew instantly to what Lakesh referred. Vehemently, he retorted, "Kane violated our sec protocols. Cotta and I were only following established procedure."

  A humorless smile stretched Lakesh's lips. "You laid hands on Kane, and he humiliated you for your trouble." He shook his head ruefully. "As you said, you're technical support, not a Magistrate. You should've known better."

  Farrell glanced away, averting his eyes. He exhaled noisily, in resignation. "Point taken. I guess I'm still pissed off about it, even after all this time."

  "Under the circumstances, with you and friend Cotta putting guns on him, Kane's reaction was restrained. He could have easily crippled you. Cotta managed to find the strength within himself to forgive Kane. It's way past time for you to do the same."

  Farrell passed a hand over his shaved head. "I suppose you're right. But I still want to be on the retrieval detail. It's the least I can do."

  Lakesh's humorless smile became one of reassurance. "I'm sure that can be arranged."

  He stepped around the man and went on down the passageway to the dispensary. He was not overly surprised to see Kane seated in a chair at Brigid's bedside, one hand atop hers. What did surprise him was the sheaf of paper-clipped printouts on his lap. When Kane caught sight of him, he withdrew his hand.

  Lakesh stopped at the foot of the bed and repressed a shudder. Brigid's eyes were closed, and her chest rose and fell in a spasmodic, uneven rate of respiration. She was almost as starkly white as the sheets. Only her red-gold tresses, spread out over the pillow, lent her any color. An IV bag hung upside down to the left of the bed, dripping slowly into a shunt on her arm. Diagnostic scanners hummed purposefully, monitoring her heartbeat.

  "No change?" Lakesh inquired softly.

  Kane shook his head, expression inscrutable.

  Shuffling his feet uncertainly, Lakesh ventured, "I understand that some catatonic people are actually aware of their surroundings. It's possible Brigid knows you're here with her."

  Kane didn't respond.

  Clasping his gnarled hands behind his back, Lakesh cleared his throat. "You're not to blame, Kane. You aren't responsible."

  Kane finally cast his gaze in his direction, blue-gray eyes glinting gimlet hard. "I could've put a thumbs- down on the mission."

  "As could friend Grant or dearest Brigid. You all agreed it was important. Now you understand the two- edged sword of a populist democracy. One person, one vote. If everyone is responsible, no one is responsible."

  Kane's eyes narrowed. "Mebbe it's time to go back to the way it was here. One person in charge, in command and ultimately the responsible party."

  Lakesh experienced a quiver of dread. He realized he wasn't certain if he wanted to assume the role of authority again.

  Kane stood up, tucking the printout under an arm. Lakesh nodded to it. "What have you got there?" "A briefing jacket I compiled."

  Lakesh's trepidation gave way to startlement. "That you compiled? From the database?"

  "Where the hell else?"

  "Briefing jacket for what?"

  "An op that I'm going on. I'll give everyone who's interested the full details and ask for volunteers. Even if I don't get any, I intend to go anyway."

  Lakesh's eyes darted from Brigid's wan, marble- white face and back to Kane's. "At a time like this?"

  "Time is the whole crux of the matter, Lakesh. We don't have a lot of it."

  He stepped away from the bed. "I'll be in the cafeteria in fifteen minutes."

  THE CERBERUS REDOUBT had an officially designated briefing room on the third level. Big and blue-walled, it featured ten rows of the theater-type chairs facing a raised speaking dais and a rear projection screen. It was built to accommodate the majority of the installation's personnel, back before the nukecaust, when military and scientific advisers visited.

  Now, because the briefings rarely involved more than a handful of people, they were always convened in the more intimate dining hall. Lakesh, Grant, Domi and Kane sat around a table, sharing a pot of coffee. Access to genuine coffee was one of the inarguable benefits of living as an exile in the redoubt. Real coffee had virtually vanished after skydark, since all of the plantations in South and Central America had been destroyed.

  An unsatisfactory, synthetic gruel known as "sub" replaced it. Cerberus literally had tons of freeze-dried packages of the authentic article in storage, as well as sugar and powdered milk.

  "Is this everyone who's going to show up?" Kane asked, taking a sip from his cup. He noted how Grant sat across the table from Domi and didn't meet the reproachful gaze she cast toward him. Unlike the rest of them, Domi wasn't wearing a white bodysuit. Her petite but firm figure was encased in a very tight, exceptionally short red dress that barely kept her modest. Nor was she wearing shoes.

  Grant shrugged. "It appears so. Once they heard you were looking for volunteers for an op, they decided to stand down. After what happened yesterday, I can't say as I blame them."

  Kane nodded shortly and, without a preface, stated, "During the quantum transit from Antarctica, I experienced a psi communication from Fand."

  Grant's eyebrows lifted toward his hairline, then lowered. "That fused-out three-way mutie in Ireland?"

  "Three-way hybrid," Kane corrected. "Human, Annunaki and Danaan."

  Predecessors of the Archons, the Danaan and Annunaki were also extraterrestrial races intent on hybridization programs that would secure their control of humanity.

  "Whatever. She thought you were the incarnation of—what's his name, Cuchulainn?"

  Grant mangled the pronunciation and Kane said patronizingly, "It's `Koo-kull-ayn.'

  Scowling, Grant said, "Whatever. How do you know it wasn't just a jump dream?"

  "Did you have one?" Kane asked.

  "No, but that doesn't mean anything"

  "In this case, I think it does. I experienced another telepathic communication from her while I was asleep. The message was the same."

  Lakesh interjected quietly, "DeFore mentioned you took all of the pain relievers she gave you. Don't you think it's possible they may have had some effect on your mind?"

  "It's possible," countered Kane. "But not probable."

  "Why isn't it?" Domi challenged.

  "First of all, remember what we learned about Fand?" He turned his attention to Grant. "As I recall, you made the connection first, even before her own mother."

  Grant nodded reluctantly. "Yeah, Strongbow conducted a gene-splicing program on himself and his dragoons, with genetic material harvested from Enlil to give him Annunaki characteristics, including a hive- mind tendency. That's how he exerted such control over his dragoons."

  Kane said, "And Fand, because her mother was impregnated by Enlil, had those same characteristics. That's one reason Strongbow and Fand were so obsessed with each other, on an unconscious level seeking to achieve some kind of fusion but always failing. That's why she was mad."

  "What did Fand impart—or what do you believe she imparted in this telepathic communication?" Lakesh asked.

  Quickly, Kane related what he had seen and been told. Tapping the printout sheaf, he declared, "I went into the historical database and found keyword correlations to almost everything she mentioned. Atlantis, Lyonesse and orichalcum are all in there."

  He touched the side of his head, smiling wryly. "They weren't up here until after my dreams or communications."

  Domi ran an impatient hand through her unruly hair. "What are those places? Villes, countries, what?" "Nobody's sure," Grant muttered.

  Folding his arms over his chest, Lakesh commented musingly, "A very pertinent point, friend Kane. Assuming you underwent a true psionic contact, how can you trust anything Fand says. You just said she was mad."

  Kane's eyes flashed in annoyance. "And she was. If her dementia was due to the psychic link she had with Strongbow, it stands to reason she recovered when he died."

  "We don't know what happened to the snake-eyed son of a bitch," Grant pointed out. "You threw him into the Singularity."

  Kane nodded contemplatively, an image of his last sight of Strongbow flashing into his mind. Impaled by a spear, Strongbow had dropped from the bronze spearhead and somersaulted into the center of the Singularity.

  Kane remembered hearing a slight pop of air rushing to fill a sudden vacuum, and then the man was gone. He brought his mind back to the present. "Regardless of what happened to him, the material about Atlantis checks out. You can read it over or I can give you an overview."

  Domi eyed the dense, single-spaced copy on the printout and said positively, "Overview."

  Chapter 15

  No one commented on the incongruity of Kane delivering a briefing on such an esoteric subject as a lost continent, complete with a background comp printout.

  Linking his hands atop the table, he said tersely, "Nearly every culture in the world has myths and legends of an ancient world before recorded history, and the cataclysm that destroyed it. Dim memories of the great civilization of Atlantis have been hypothesized to be responsible for the myths of the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields and others. According to Plato in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Kritias, Atlantis was a vast island lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules."

  The corners of Grant's lips turned down. "The what of Hercules?"

  "The Strait of Gibraltar. Plato claimed the text was taken from ancient Egyptian records. Some nine thousand years before he was born, Atlantis had been a powerful kingdom with a high civilization, which dominated the Mediterranean and much of the Atlantic. They established a number of colonies and outposts all over the world. What Fand called Lyonesse was one of them. The Atlantean science was very advanced, even to the point where they supposedly bioengineered slave labor and cloned dinosaurs."

  Domi wrinkled her nose in bewilderment. "What for?"

  Impatiently, Kane shot back, "How the hell do I know? The computer never said. In the Kritias, Plato talks about the strange metal orichalcum which was mined and refined in Atlantis. This was used as a power source, like some kind of solar-energy semiconductor chips. They were called firestones and allowed the Atlanteans to attain the neutralization of gravity for their zeppelin-type airships.

  "Though I'm not clear on this, there was a connection between material inventions and spiritual force. The deterioration of Atlantean spiritual beliefs made its final destruction all the more certain. There was civil unrest, the institution of slavery and the creations of 'mixtures,' the offspring of human and animal interbreeding. According to other scholars, there was a long conflict between the so-called Sons of the Law of One and the Sons of Belial, who practiced human sacrifice and the misuse of the forces of nature, particularly the orichalcum."

  "Those other scholars," Lakesh said severely, "based their opinions on very specious sources. Like treatises written by nineteenth-century crackpots such as Ignatius Donnely and Madame Helena Blavatsky."

  Kane ignored the observation. "Supposedly, a natural catastrophe triggered a thermonuclear chain reaction with the orichalcum and blew Atlantis off the map. It caused a worldwide change in the sea levels, and many civilizations were drowned."

  "No Atlantean survivors?" inquired Grant.

  "As a matter of fact, yes. Some scholars thought that a few Atlanteans had foreseen the coming catastrophe and escaped to other countries where they founded all the world's subsequent civilizations: Egypt, Sumer, Akkad, the Mayans, the Aztecs and so on. Apparently, there were a lot of similarities between pre-Columbian culture and the ancient Middle Eastern civilizations."

  "Yes, there were," Lakesh said. "In my day, archaeologists and anthropologists were still unconvinced the similarities were evidence of a vanished `mother' civilization."

  Kane sighed wearily. "When you scrape away the myths, there's still some hard evidence, such as twentieth-century undersea explorers finding roads and ruins on the seabed, not to mention a lot of odd artifacts."

  "Like what?" Domi wanted to know.

  Kane thumbed through the printout. "Like electric batteries found buried in Iraq and jewelry that showed signs of being electroplated. These things were so old they couldn't be accurately dated."

  Lakesh removed his eyeglasses, breathed onto the lenses and cleaned them on his sleeve. "A fascinating account, but the reality of Atlantis was never conclusively proved."

  "It was never conclusively disproved, either," Kane replied.

  Lakesh shrugged. "True. Instead, it was dragged into occult lore and pretty much discredited."

  A bit raggedly, Kane stated, "You've said many times that for every myth and legend, there's a foundation of reality."

  "Yes, not only have I said it, I believe it, too. However, the foundation, the roots of the myths must be closely examined and subjected to the scientific method before they can be accepted. For example, you're postulating that some remnant of Atlantis has surfaced off the coast of Ireland?"

  Kane nodded. "I found a reference to the Firbolgs in the database, too. Irish tradition states they were the pre-Gaelic people of Ireland, 'mixtures' who came from Atlantis or a colony. That fits exactly with the dream I had. So what else could Fand have been trying to tell me with those images?"

  Grant knuckled his jaw thoughtfully. "Bait, mebbe, trying to lure you back to her."

  "I thought of that."

  "And?"

  "I discounted it. The Fand I met in Ireland was crazy, but she wasn't deceptive."

  "But you claim she's changed," Domi said. "You said she was different in your dream."

  "She said she changed," Lakesh argued. "You can't trust your perceptions during phase transit, Kane. You should know that by now."

  Kane didn't respond to that, knowing Lakesh was just getting started.

  "Furthermore," the old man continued, "most legitimate scholars felt Plato's tale of Atlantis to be only a parable, an allegory based loosely on the Theran civilization that flourished around five thousand years ago. It was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1520 B.C."

  Kane nodded impatiently throughout Lakesh's dissertation. "Yeah, yeah. I found references to that, too. But Thera as Atlantis was only an archaeological hypothesis, put forth in the mid-twentieth century. It doesn't cover the corresponding Egyptian legends or the isle of Lyonesse. Even Balam mentioned several global catastrophes."

  Lakesh waved away Kane's words with a dismissive gesture. "I'm not arguing against worldwide cataclysms. They happened, that's a given. But the island of Lyonesse is an even more elusive legend than Atlantis. Over the course of centuries, the Britons and the Welsh Celtic people tied it in with the tales of King Arthur."

  Kane rolled his eyes ceiling-ward in exasperation. "If I'd known you were familiar with all this stuff, I wouldn't have wasted three hours on the computer. Anyway, are you denying the quakes caused by the nukecaust couldn't have uprooted landmasses from the seabed? Our trip to Ambika's pirate empire proved otherwise."

  He shot a challenging glare at Grant. "Right?" Grant nodded brusquely. "Right."

  "Even if dozens of islands popped up," Lakesh stated, "that doesn't make them colonies of Atlantis and worth our investigation. Just because Fand may think so doesn't make it true. In my opinion, it's a rather tenuous line on which to anchor a transatlantic jump."

  "Especially," Grant rumbled, "since to check out Fand's story you'd have to jump to England first...to that tree-place controlled by the Imperial Dragoons. And they weren't particularly happy to see us the first time."

  "I didn't say it wouldn't be risky," Kane retorted.

  "And you didn't say it wouldn't be suicidal, either," Grant argued. "I think the whole deal is ridiculous. I vote no."

  "Me, too," Domi piped up.

  Lakesh pinched the bridge of his nose and made a studied show of being deep in thought. At length he said, "Reluctantly, I must my cast my vote with them, friend Kane."

  The corner of Kane's mouth quirked in a hard, stitched-on smile. "I don't recall putting the matter to a vote."

 

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