“IF WE FOCUS HERE FIRST,” said the woman with the most scarred hands he’d ever seen, “we get their attention but we’re far enough from the mainland for easy egress.” She traced the line from Abba to Sip. “Particularly if his goal involved these mountains.”
“Why are you saying ‘if’?” said Fruehoff. “I said that’s what we’re considering the focal, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir.” The age-old conundrum: give a dick a mission and he becomes Patton, but as Sharon was a consummate professional she continued detailing the best courses of action. “We need to be surgical, sir. No matter how best the best of the best are, numbers always matter.”
“Any of your people daunted by Atlantis?”
“No, sir. They’ve all been here before, reconnoitering for the facility we lost.”
“Then they’re good at getting information and finding their asses with both hands. I need less charts and buzz cuts and only get your asses out there and find Buford.” Sweet God, she’d gotten him up before the crack of dawn for this. “If he’s on this rock, find him.”
“We’re operating with major limitations.”
“Somebody found him. You’re saying we can’t?”
“I am not, sir.” She closed the map display. “I’m saying we will.”
Too much stuff happens off the grid, thought Ele as she hacked Shig’s computer. The official post mortem on Lolita Or-Ghazeem was public knowledge. One did not keep such news on a scientist of her stature secret for very long. Ele didn’t view the hacking as particularly clandestine or as the precursor to a bombshell of information. She hacked computers the way people thumbed books at a library. Besides which, Desiree stood over her shoulder. They were after just a little more detail than most needed to know.
“Go back a second,” said Desiree. The mug of peppermint tea her husband had brewed had gone lukewarm. He was still in the galley of the Ann, alone, quietly cooking up everything in sight and inventorying the rest. There was no doubt in her mind that she and he would be quite fat in their waning years. Well, she would at any rate. It sucked having a husband who lived forever.
She scanned the file for key words. Nothing.
“OK,” she said.
“We’re not going to find anything,” said Ele for both of them.
“Shig never gives us everything,” said Desiree. “Would you?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
Ele smiled. “No.”
“Where’s the connection that none of us are seeing?” It was a question born of a sense of urgency. This would be the last time—as a crew—they would be in Atlantis. Ramses’ promise to not bring the battle to Atlantidean soil wasn’t one that would be easily or readily broken, whether Buford ever surfaced again or not. “Buford, Raffic, Lolita, Leviathan, war.”
“You mean our secessionists? Secession is fashion here.” In the time it took Desiree to skim, Ele had entire pages read. She planned to shut the computer down after another moment or two. “There’s nothing here,” she said to Desiree. She swiveled in the chair. “How worried are you about Milo?”
“You feel it?”
“Your emotional control is excellent, not perfect,” said Ele.
Desiree smoothed the empath’s shiny dark hair then patted her on the shoulder. “I’ve never lost anyone under my command.”
Ele smiled. “I didn’t know they were under your command.”
“They are.”
Smoove’s voice issued through the comm. “Luv? You need to see this.”
“Where are you?”
“Starboard aft deck.”
“On my way.”
The instant she saw it she knew what it was. The dragoon the brothers recounted as their rescuer. Its grey mottling darkened and lightened with agitation. It practically paced in the water.
“Says his name is Death-mael,” said Smoove.
“Captain Desiree Quicho,” she said, having to speak a little louder over the water.
“You still only want a Jetstream?” Smoove asked the dragoon.
“Ramses is away,” said Desiree. “What can I do for you?”
Leviathan’s awake.
“We know.”
No, I mean Leviathan’s AWAKE. Where do you think the Mount’s dreams come from?
“It’s not the Mount?” said Smoove.
It’s a rock! Leviathan sleeps beneath the Mount.
“Rather not face Leviathan again,” Desiree said to Smoove. To the bobbing aquatic: “Ramses will be here soon.”
The other one?
“Missing.”
Impatiently, Death-mael dipped under and came up rolling, the equivalent of rolling its eyes. No, he’s not. He’s here. It shut their what-where down with Next time, just ask. Even the yebaums know he’s here. Nothing happened in Atlantis without at least one gossipy species knowing about it.
“Ele, anything?” said Desiree.
She shook her head.
“Can you reach him?” asked Desiree of Death-mael.
Simply communicating with you is extremely hard with Leviathan awake.
“What does it mean to do?” she asked.
Travel.
~~~
Buford invaded Kichi’s dreams.
‘You want me to help you?’ said the dream Kichi Malat.
‘Trust your intuition, man, you wouldn’t be dreaming this if you didn’t think something was wrong. You’ve been to the Mount but you never sensed this. What’s different?’
The dreams were different. The music, the thoughts, the art…were different. The past few days his guitar hadn’t said a word to him that he hadn’t heard before.
Kichi’s dream was nothing but presences, which was the most powerful kind of dream. No imagery, no sound, the only color that of air on water. Sentient emptiness.
Bubba Foom’s dream-presence was in the background, silent and judging, ready to kill if need be. And that was different too. Foom had been the best and gentlest of Kichi’s early adepts. Foom had calmed the jangled minds of Milo and Ramses Jetstream enough to help their own talents grow. Kichi had subliminally implanted certain guides in Foom’s mind and Foom, in turn, unknowingly passed these on to everyone else in the struggle.
‘See? You’re my brother,’ said Buford.
Kichi hushed that part of the dream.
The last from Ramses was that Milo had gone looking for Adam and Eve in the hope of finding Buford.
Hell, Adam and Eve likely had Buford. Kichi knew the cards they dealt. They were the Mobius snake, circling everything back upon itself. They always were. Always had been. Whatever planet they’d arrived from had likely been glad to see them and their small crew go.
But something, even for them, had changed.
‘Tick, tock, old man,’ went the dream presence of an evil so smooth it flowed effortlessly like water in a faucet.
‘Buford?’
‘Yes?’
‘Quiet.’
~~~
Eve needed water. Water was in the opposite direction of where they were going, in a sense, although Atlantis was an island. But it was huge and criss crossed with tributaries and lakes fed by the surrounding ocean. Eve needed a very specific body of water, she felt, which meant her plans were about to take precedence over Fruehoff’s.
She motioned one of the bodies hustling through the encampment to her side.
“Ma’am?”
“I need a vehicle with submersible capabilities, no drivers, no crew complement.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At times homo sapiens was downright precious. She loved the way the entire unit had been pre-drilled to answer anything she or Adam said with an immediate yes. One seldom found help like that outside religious orders.
~~~
Fruehoff briefly blotted out the sun. “Where’d your partner go?”
Adam briefly considered snapping Fruehoff’s neck for interrupting the sip of chive-infused coffee he was about to take. He regarded all thirteen thousand four hundred-eighty two dollars worth of fabric and equipment standing before him, and whistled the opening bars from the Andy Griffith Show, an ancient bucolic television program about small town life whose opening montage featured a sheriff and his son enjoying a stint at the fishing hole. No point in further agitating 13482 though. He stopped openly mocking Fruehoff. “You didn’t know that I could whistle, did you? I taught the Ibis.”
‘I don’t need your frikkin’ ninja poetry!’ railed 13482 internally while giving nothing away externally. “That’s fascinating.”
“I promise to acknowledge your authority during this outing.”
Maybe it was because they were in Atlantis but, even though it was weird to hear this always silent killer speak, it wasn’t as weird as Fruehoff would normally have expected. Maybe even, influenced by the Atlantidean air, going for a third sentence out of the unsettlingly handsome man wasn’t a bad thing to do. “Do you think Buford is here?”
“No.”
‘But we have to give theatre its due,’ thought Fruehoff, who caught the slightest of smirks on Adam’s face as though the man were agreeing, ‘Yes.’
~~~
The house apes have never seen anything as big as you. You’ll destroy the global economy. Mass pandemonium. The dragging of popes in the street. That kind of thing.
*i am the—
You’ve gone a bit insane too, thought Eve.
*the world has not known my kind; the world will not know my kind.*
Because you’ll destroy it.
*yes.*
And get to swim the seven seas.
*i created the ways for the water. i am the path and the—
It was rather fun interrupting Leviathan, like playing a mental game of Words With Friends. Sad, befuddled bear… They woke you far too soon, yes?
*—and i will sleep on the other side of the world and spread out and be the new earth.*
A gigantic, psychic whale-like thing isn’t endearing to Hollywood. Can I convince you to stay, to sleep?
It took a while for the synapses to return a hit, but suddenly Leviathan recognized the timbre of these thoughts and it remembered the name it had given her on its world. It thought the name now, surrounding the name with a huge question mark and a sense of happiness.
Yes. It’s me, thought Eve.
Leviathan so rarely got visitors. It sent the names for the few others from their ship who’d survived, instantly in that act of mental echo-location knowing exactly where each one was. Hell, it even slept atop their ship, as the vessel kept Leviathan warm and even gave off a pleasant white-noise vibration.
The small craft she now occupied was similar in design to that much larger one but in clumsy, retro fashion.
It pulled the Thoom from her mind.
Yes, they’re the tools who woke you up. You were supposed to have killed the Jetstreams, she thought, but Leviathan was still on the Thoom. I honestly didn’t think things would progress this far.
*do they not know i am the alpha and the omega, not to be trifled with?*
They cloned thirteen Milo Jetstreams.
*idiots. part of that one shot me in the eye.* Oh, the synapses were firing to beat the band now. No more fugue state or scrambling half asleep for the surface of the world. No more random peeking through psychic minds via the dreamtime. *i’m certainly wide awake now.*
Will you stay here a bit longer?
*no.*
Her presence effectively negated, Eve severed mental communication. She piloted the submersible away from the encrusted topography that was its body and made way for the surface.
‘We’re going to need Bubba Foom,’ she messaged her mate. ‘And Raffic wouldn’t hurt either.’
‘Milo?’ he messaged back.
‘Time he was reunited with his brother.’