Free Atlantis: Gate by Robert Doherty

Dane saw the spark of life leave Nagoya’s eyes and the body slumped back.
    “What did he mean?” Dane asked.
    Ahana was staring at her bloodied hands.
    “What did he mean?” Dane repeated gently.
    “I don’t know.”
    Dane could tell she was too shaken to make sense of anything. He carefully guided her to her feet. Foreman was on his SATPhone, yelling into it. Dane could see that there were survivors on the Thorn , fighting the fire. He looked past the devastated ship at the gate.
    Their attempt at action through the Chernobyl and Devil’s Sea gates had not only failed, but they had just received a response.
    THE SPACE BETWEEN
    The pencil was worn down to a nub, barely enough for Amelia Earhart to hold between two fingers. She was writing between the carefully scripted lines of her journal, using every possible white space. There was little free space left in the leather-bound book. She noted how much smaller the letters she used now were than the original entries she had made during her attempt to fly around the world in 1937. When now was, she had no idea. How much time had passed since she’d come to this strange location she also had no clue.
    She had been flying on one of the last legs of her record flight when she’d encountered the Devil’s Sea gate. A large fog had appeared in front of her Lockheed Electra, which she, and her navigator, George Noonan, had been unable to fly around. She’d made an emergency landing on the Pacific and then the fog had drifted over the plane. Noonan was killed by a strange sea creature, a kraken, while she had stayed on board the plane. A large black metal sphere had surfaced, encompassing the plane, with her in it. She’d been taken from the plane by a blue glow and when she’d awoken, she’d been here, a place she called, for lack of a better term, the ‘spacebetween’. She called it that because it appeared to be between the world she had known on the day she disappeared, 2 July 1937, and someplace else, where the Shadow came from.
    The others she met here all told similar stories of a blue glow that had saved them. The small camp of which she was the leader by default, consisted of fifty-two individuals. None of them knew how long they had been in this place, and they came from a variety of times and places, including a dozen samurai warriors from 4 th century Japan.
    There were no mirrors in the space-between so Amelia Earhart didn’t know what she looked like now. She had never been vain about her looks, adopting almost a mannish manner, which had led to her being called Lady Lindbergh. Her hair was short and curly, while her body tall and lean. Among the many curious features of the space-between was the fact that her hair had not grown as far as she could tell in the time she had been here. Since there was only the steady glow from unseen light sources here and watches didn’t work, there was no telling exactly how long that was even in terms of days.
    She glanced down at her latest entry, a summary of recent events. A man named Dane had appeared, followed shortly by a Roman legion, which had fought a brutal battle with the Valkyries. Dane had claimed to be from her future, many decades in her future. The legion had been destroyed, the men turned into stone by a weapon of the Valkyries, but not before one of Dane’s companions had shut one of the portals that ran through the space-between. Dane had promised to return, but some time had passed since he had disappeared.
    Earhart and the rest of her group had escaped to go back to their miserable existence, barely eking a survival by raising food in a few patches of Earth soil they’d managed to scavenge near the portals. Occasionally they supplemented their diet with either Earth or Shadow-side creatures that wandered through an open portal.
    She found it strange that these creatures could survive travel in a portal. Not long after she had arrived in the space-between, one of the band had tried going into one,