Free Area 51: The Legend by Robert Doherty

like this anymore,” Jobb said. Without another word he drew the ceremonial dagger from the belt around his robe and slashed the blade along his forearm from wrist to elbow. Such was his determination that he was then able to switch the dagger to the hand with the cut arm and do the same to his other arm. Donnchadh belatedly tried to stem the bleeding, but Gwalcmai put an arm out, stopping her.
    “It’s his choice.” Gwalcmai pushed her toward the door as Jobb slumped down on his cot, blood soaking the blankets and dripping onto the floor, his eyes closed. “There are worse things than death,” Gwalcmai said.

V

    THE PAST , 10,000 B.C.
    Darkness. Donnchadh woke to absolute darkness. She lifted her right arm and found that the movement was restricted by bands wrapped around it. She managed to get it in front of her face, the back of it lightly striking against something above her, and saw nothing. She pushed upward with both hands and realized she was in a tight, enclosed space.
    Her heart rate accelerated along with her breathing. She reached out to the sides and hit cold metal. She blinked in the darkness, not even sure her eyelids were working, as she perceived no difference with them open or shut. Her mind wasn’t working right. She tried to recall where she was, when she had lain down to sleep, but couldn’t.
    Where was Gwalcmai? Why wasn’t he by her side?
    She slammed the palms of her hand against the metal above, hearing a slight thud, but experiencing no give in her prison top.
    “Gwalcmai,” she cried out in a weak voice that only bounced back to her.
    She screwed her eyelids shut and tried to concentrate. Where was she? What had happened?
    A heavy weight suddenly hit her chest. Her son. Fynbar.
    She knew he was dead.
    But the name drew another thread of memory out of the confusion and she grasped onto it. A gray spaceship. Leaving a massive mothership. An Airlia mothership. Her mission. Gwalcmai’s and her mission. Earth. Atlantis. The high priest Jobb.
    He had killed himself. That oriented her.
    Time. That was why she was here. She was in the Airlia tube in the
Fynbar
. Coming out of the deep sleep.
    Donnchadh fought to get her breathing under control.
    She knew Gwalcmai was close by. In the other tube. He should also be coming out of the deep sleep. They had set the controls for five hundred revolutions of the planet around the sun. It had been just short of the number she had gleaned from the Master Guardian for the lack of messages from Earth to be noticed and a ship dispatched and travel the distance to the planet.
    There was a latch. Donnchadh’s heart rate decelerated to normal as she remembered the latch on the inside of the tube. She felt to her right and her fingers curled around a small lever. She pulled it and, with a hiss, the top of the tube unsealed and slowly swung upward. At first it was just as dark, then faint red light invaded the tube and hit her eyes.
    She had to close them for several minutes to adjust. This was the absolute minimum emergency lighting setting, activated by the movement of the tube’s lid as they had programmed, but it took a while for her eyes to be able to take even that much light after so many years of darkness. She used the time to remove the muscle stimulator bands from around her upper body.
    Then Donnchadh sat up and opened her eyes once more. The familiar interior of the
Fynbar
was all around. She looked to her right, at Gwalcmai’s tube. The top had not opened yet. She smiled. He always was slow to rise after the deep sleep. She removed the muscle stimulators from her lower body, then carefully lifted herself over the edge of the tube and set her feet on the floor.
    It was cold. And damp. Donnchadh shivered and grabbed a robe that was hung near the tube, sliding it over her head and shoulders and pulling tight a cinch at the waist. Then she slipped on a pair of leather sandals. They reminded her of the old lady in the south of this island who had made