The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery 2)

Dorian felt himself turn away from Shaw, away from the only person in the world he truly cared about. Then he and Ares were running. Another blast. They would never make it.

Janus keyed the final sequences into the ship and stepped back, watching the display show the ship’s sections explode and decompress. The massive ship would soon be a burned out wreck.

But she would be safe.

That was all that mattered—the only reason he had come here or to any of the other hundreds of worlds.

Another shudder swept the ship. Death would come soon for him. He had finally done it—given his life to save her, something he had willed himself to do every day for thirteen thousand years in that chamber under the Bay of Gibraltar. It was so easy now, so simple. Janus knew why: he would never awaken, never resurrect. He wouldn’t wake up to remember his death, would never confront the same kind of endless agony the people in Ares’ resurrection vessel endured. He would die knowing he had saved the only person he had ever cared about. In that moment, he understood the stories of Kate’s father. His sacrifice in Gibraltar. And Martin. Maybe subspecies 8472 had come further than he had estimated. Even so, it wouldn’t matter soon. Another blast sent a shudder through the bridge, and Janus steadied himself.

How long do I have left?

Perhaps there was time to correct one last mistake. He activated the ship’s deep space communications array, cleared his throat, and stood as straight as he could.

“My name is Dr. Arthur Janus. I am a scientist and a citizen of a long-since fallen civilization…”

A set of double doors opened onto a room that held three portals. Ares worked the cloud of light from the panel. Dorian felt numb, paralyzed. Ares pulled him through the portal just as the blast broke through the walls.

Dorian stumbled into the room he had seen before, the one with seven doors. Ares was bent over, panting, his hands on his knees.

When Ares had caught his breath, he rose. “Now you see, Dorian. They make you weak. They pull at your heart. Hold you down. They try to keep you from doing what must be done to survive.” He walked out of the room.

Mechanically, Dorian followed. It was as if he were looking at himself from the outside. There was no feeling now. No reaction.

Ares paused at the opening to the vast chamber that held the endless rows of tubes.

“Now you’re ready, Dorian. We will save them. These are your people now.”

CHAPTER 95

Outside Ceuta

Kate flew through the archway of the portal a second before David landed beside her. The portal closed behind them.

Milo was at her side, helping her up.

“Are you all right, Dr. Kate?”

“I’m fine, Milo. Thank you.” She raced to the panel beside the portal doors. Yes, the connection to the ship was closed; it had been destroyed. Janus had done well. The moment she had seen David alone, she’d known what their plan was. Janus had been brave.

Seeing David had confirmed that the fire, that little piece of herself, that small flame she had fanned, was still there. And she had to move quickly to keep it alive.

She brought up a schematic of the ship, or rather, of the section they were confined to. There was a medical bay, one of their labs. She could do it. She began programming the procedure—a gene therapy that would reverse the resurrection process that was rewiring her brain. She would lose the Atlantean memories, but she would be herself again. Her fingers moved quickly across the panel.

David sat up, stared at the portal door for a long moment, then ran over to Kate. “Janus should be here—”

“He’s not coming.”

She almost had the solution. The lab wasn’t far away. A few levels.

“He gave us a false cure.”

Kate made a few last modifications—

“Hey!” David took her by the arm. He held up a backpack. “The therapy he gave Continuity rolls everything back. It’s going to be Flintstones reruns out there soon.” He stared at her. “I brought your computer. Can you fix this?”

She looked up. “Yes. But I don’t have time to fix myself if I do.”

“Fix…” David searched her face. “I don’t understand.”

“The resurrection. The memories. I’m slipping away. In a few minutes, the final stages of the resurrection process will be complete. I will cease to be… me.”

David let the backpack fall to his side.

“What do you want to do?” Kate’s voice sounded mechanical. She waited.

“I know what I want, and that’s you. But I know you—the woman I love. And I know what choice you would make, the sacrifice. I know what you reminded me of a few days ago, belowdecks on a yacht in the Mediterranean. You reminded me who I really was, and now I’m reminding you who you are. I owe you that much, no matter what I want.”

Kate studied him. She saw the memory in her mind’s eye. His irrational bloodlust, her bringing him back, reminding him of the stakes. It was the same here, except she was all too rational, too clinical. She knew what she wanted and she knew the stakes. But if she saved herself, if she erased the memories, she would leave this structure and return to a primitive world, populated by people she had refused to save. Countless deaths would be on her conscience. She would be the same as the people in those tubes in Antarctica, never able to be happy again, always haunted by something from the past. She would never escape this moment, this decision.

The choice was simple: her or them. Save the people suffering from the false cure Janus had submitted to Continuity—or save herself. But it wasn’t that simple at all. If she chose herself, she would never be the same. But if she chose them, she might lose the last bit of herself, the last piece that held on to the person she was, had become.

In that moment, she finally understood Martin. All the hard choices he had made, the sacrifices, the sort of burden he had borne for all those years. And why he had tried so desperately to keep her far away from this world.

She felt herself take the backpack and pull the computer out. She brought up the Continuity program and typed quickly. She saw it—what Janus had done. He was very clever. He had been looking for the pure form of the Atlantis Gene the entire time. The section of the ship with their research database had been completely destroyed and their space vessel had been locked down, making the database there inaccessible. Finding the body of the alpha had been his only choice.

It was amazing: in the genome maps, she could see all the endogenous retroviruses now—those she and Janus had administered as well as the remnants of the changes she had helped Ares/Dorian with. It was as though she was working on a puzzle she couldn’t solve as a child but had returned to as an adult, with the knowledge and mental ability to finally complete it. Martin had been correct. The interventions in the Middle Ages had caused changes to the genome with radical repercussions. And those changes had compromised the rollback therapy Janus had tried to unleash with the Bell.