Free Area 51: The Legend by Robert Doherty Page A

them and Donnchadh smiled once more, until she remembered that all the humans who had been alive when she entered this spacecraft were now dust.
    She shivered and turned to Gwalcmai’s tube, impatient. There was the hiss of the lid unsealing. As the top swung open she went over. As Gwalcmai sat up, a slightly confused look on his face, and his eyes closed, she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.
    “A good way to awaken,” Gwalcmai said, his voice hoarse and cracking.
    Donnchadh grabbed his clothes and handed them to him as he finished removing his muscle stimulators and exited the tube. “Perhaps one time you will wake before me.”
    “Perhaps,” Gwalcmai said without much conviction. He dropped to the floor and quickly did fifty push-ups, getting the blood flowing.
    “What do you think has happened?” Donnchadh asked as she went over to the copilot’s seat and powered up the computer.
    Gwalcmai shrugged. “I’ve no idea.” He pulled his sword out of its sheath and checked the edge. “I hope that the metalwork has improved in the past five hundred years. This thing would not last one blow against an Airlia sword.” He actually had an Airlia-made sword, from his time as a God-killer, on board the
Fynbar
, but did not take it with him most of the time as it was so obviously an anachronism that it would draw unwanted attention.
    Always the practical one, Donnchadh thought as she shut down the tubes and the computer that governed them. In thevat behind the tubes were two more fully grown clones, their limbs almost entwined, they were pressed so tightly together. She stared at them for several seconds, realizing that someday she would inhabit the female one of those bodies. She found it interesting that the two were face-to-face. Gwalcmai came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her upper body. “Even they know our love,” he whispered in her ear. His lips came close to the back of her neck. “The surface will wait.”
    It was raining as the hidden door set in the standing stone slid open. That was nothing unusual. What was unusual and stopped Donnchadh and Gwalcmai in their tracks was the fact that the stones they had set in place had been surrounded by a circle of wooden stakes set upright in the ground. Each stake was between six and ten feet high. And, of particular notice, on the top of each stake was a human skull, the bone bleached white by the sun and rain.
    Donnchadh and Gwalcmai stood still as the door slid shut behind them. They slowly turned, surveying the area, but there was no sign of whoever had erected the stakes or placed the skulls there.
    “They could be long dead,” Gwalcmai said.
    “They could be,” Donnchadh agreed. She’d known that the stones sitting in the middle of the grasslands would attract attention from humans passing by, but not enough to attract attention of the Airlia. Apparently, for someone, that attention had turned into a form of gruesome homage. Or a threat, Donnchadh realized with a shiver not caused by the cold rain.
    “Come on,” Gwalcmai said, stepping forward.
    Donnchadh noticed that he had drawn his sword. They made their way onto the plain, heading south.
    Metalworking had not improved much at all on the outer ring of Atlantis, they discovered shortly after landing there, having taken passage on a trading vessel. Gwalcmai found no sword much better than what he had had made the last time they were there. In fact, things in all areas appeared to have gotten somewhat worse, if anything. All they had known were long dead, but the black market and underground network were still alive and well. Human greed had not changed in five hundred years.
    They integrated themselves into this fringe of society with more alacrity than the previous time, given their experiences. They learned that the Airlia were hardly ever seen anymore outside of the palace, and that even the high priests and Guides had begun to isolate themselves on the center island, as if the