The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery 2)

“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.

The ship shuddered again, throwing Kate against the wall. Her head slammed into the helmet and her body went limp. She couldn’t see anything. She heard footsteps. Janus’s voice echoed in her helmet, but she couldn’t make out the words. She felt him lift her up and carry her.

CHAPTER 91

St. Paul’s Catacombs

Rabat, Malta

David switched on a lantern and focused on Janus. “Answers. I want to know what we’re dealing with here.”

Janus glanced at the rounded stone tunnel the hovering cube was slowly carving.

“Very well. We have a bit of time. Submit your first question.”

Where do I start? David thought. “You saved me. How and why?”

“The how is beyond your scientific grasp—”

“Well dumb it down for my primitive hominin brain, which apparently seventy thousand years of Atlantean intervention hasn’t perfected.”

“Clearly. The how is somewhat related to the why. I shall start there. I will also need to give you a bit of background. I said before that you did not actually see me in Antarctica. You saw my avatar. Have you surmised why?”

“You were in Gibraltar.”

“Yes. Very good, Mr. Vale. Your Dr. Grey actually figured out a great deal of the Atlantean history on this planet. It was shocking for me to read his chronology. It was quite accurate, despite the gaps in his knowledge, things he could not know.”

“Such as?”

“What he described as ‘A$ falls’—the fall of Atlantis, the destruction of our ship off the coast of Gibraltar. It was an attack. As you know, there were two of us. Scientists who had traveled the galaxies studying human evolution on countless human worlds.”

“Incredible,” David mumbled.

“This world, your species, is what is incredible. Our species is old. Long ago, we turned our focus to other worlds, and in particular, to any world that harbored human life. It became our obsession. One question in particular dominated our expeditions, the greatest question of all: where did we come from?”

“Evolution—”

“Is only the biological process. There is much more to the story; your science will reveal that one day. You already know that the universe supports the emergence of human life. In fact, the universe is strictly programmed for it. If any of the constants were even slightly different—gravity, the strength of electromagnetism, the dimensions in space-time—any of them, there would no human life. There are only two possibilities: either human life emerged because the laws of the universe support it by random chance; or the alternative: the universe was created to foster human life.”

David considered Janus’s statement.

“Our first assumption was that it was merely chance; that we existed because we were simply one of an infinite number of biological possibilities in an infinite number of universes that exist in the multiverse. Our theory was that we exist, because mathematically we must exist in some universe, given that there are infinite possible universes and we are a finite possible outcome. We exist in this universe because it is the only one our brains are capable of being aware of.”