Free Atlantis: Gate by Robert Doherty Page A

trying to get back to Earth. The man had swum out to the dark cylinder while the rest of the band had lined the shoreline. He had disappeared into the blackness, only to reappear seconds later, screaming in agony, his skin red and blistered. He’d died within an hour and no one had attempted to enter a portal since.
    Earhart could only assume that the creatures, much like she and the others here, had been caught in the large black sphere that transverse the portals and dumped out here in the space-between. The portals, cylinders of black, usually opened in the large circular lake in the center of the space-between, but sometimes they opened on the land. There were two forces on the Shadow side, of that Earhart had become convinced. A gold force which bode ill and was from the Shadow, and a blue force, that which had saved her. She had no idea who was behind the blue, although Dane had referred to a group called the Ones Before.
    A commotion near the edge of the camp drew her attention from the journal. A pair of samurai came over a ridge made of the black, gritty sand that comprised the ground. Between them they carried a man.
    Earhart hurried over as the samurai laid the man down. His clothes were singed and the skin burned and blistered, reminding her of the man who had attempted to go through the portal on his own. When she saw the man’s face she froze, her heart pounding.
    “It can’t be.” She didn’t even realize she’d said the words out loud.
    She knelt, cradling the man’s head in her hands. “I saw you die,” she whispered as George Noonan’s eyes flickered open and he smiled at her.
    CHAPTER 4 480 BC
    Xerxes’ anger knew no bounds as he surveyed the tattered remains of the bridge. He had stood in the storm for hours as the debris from the bridge was blown away and his men desperately tried to salvage as many boats as possible. His cloak and robes were thoroughly soaked, clinging to his body.
    The rising sun produced steam from the rain-soaked ground and the bodies and clothing of the thousands of men at work. It also revealed the extent of the disaster. All that was left of the bridge were the main anchor pylons on the near shore.
    This invasion was five years in the planning and making. Four years earlier Xerxes had dispatched a force ahead to the peninsula of Mount Athos in northern Greece off of which his father’s fleet had been destroyed in a storm. Rather than try the dangerous waters around the Mount, he had ordered his engineers to cut a canal through the isthmus that attached the Mount to the mainland. For four years conscripted laborers had dug and the canal was finally ready ahead of them so his fleet could shadow his ground movement.
    But first there was the Hellesponte to be crossed by the mighty army while his fleet waited on the eastern side of the Aegean. Xerxes walked to the land’s edge, between the two large tree trunks that were set ten feet into the ground and had served as anchors for the failed effort. Behind him were the chief engineers, cowering in the arms of Immortals.
    “Time is short,” was the whisper in his ear.
    Xerxes looked at the woman who all in his court thought was a slave and perhaps a concubine as she slept inside his imperial tent when the army was on the march. She was indeed worthy of the Imperial bed, tall and willowy with striking black hair that had a single streak of gray in it from above her left eye flowing over her shoulder. However, Xerxes had never bedded her.
    Her name, according to her, was Pandora. Xerxes had had one of his Greek scholars tell him the legend of Pandora and Prometheus and the box given to her by the gods. He thought it no coincidence that she bore the name of that character and he was always wary of her advice, taking some of it when it made sense to him, discarding others that he felt uneasy with.
    Where her homeland was, Xerxes did not know. She had appeared at his court in Persopolis, unable to even speak Persian at first,