The Atlantis Plague Part 49

David.

"Come on," he said as he sprinted down the corridor.

Dorian's ears rang, and he saw spots. Someone jerked him up. The panel on the opposite wall was exploding. What was happening?

He felt the ship shudder.

Ares slapped Dorian, and held his face. "Focus, Dorian. Ja.n.u.s is activating the self-destruct. We have to move." He pulled Dorian up and out of the room.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dorian saw Shaw lying there, rolling in agony. Dorian gripped the doorframe. "Adam!"

Ares pulled him away and the double doors closed. "We have to leave him. Don't be a fool, Dorian." He dragged him down the corridor.

Another blast threw them to the ground.

Dorian leapt up and started back toward the room where Shaw was still crying out.

Ares grabbed Dorian's shoulders and pinned them to the wall. "I won't leave you. If you won't leave him, you'll kill us both, and everyone down below. Choose, Dorian."

Dorian shook his head. His brother, his only family... He couldn't make that call.

The hands shook his shoulders, slamming him into the wall again. "Choose."

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.

Ja.n.u.s keyed the final sequences into the ship and stepped back, watching the display show the ship's sections explode and decompress. The ma.s.sive 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. Ja.n.u.s 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 Ja.n.u.s steadied himself.

How long do I have left?

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

"My name is Dr. Arthur Ja.n.u.s. 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. Ja.n.u.s had done well. The moment she had seen David alone, she'd known what their plan was. Ja.n.u.s 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. "Ja.n.u.s 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 bloodl.u.s.t, 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 Ja.n.u.s 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 Ja.n.u.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Ja.n.u.s 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 Ja.n.u.s had tried to unleash with the Bell.

In her mind, for the first time, she could grasp all the changes, see them like little glowing lights in a pile of rubble. She could pick them out now, line them up and form different patterns with different outcomes. She worked the computer, running scenarios.

The Symphony database-the collection of billions of sequenced genomes that had been collected in Orchid Districts around the world-was the last piece. It was a shame that the world had to come to the brink of annihilation for such an incredible feat to occur.

The true challenge was that Kate had to stabilize all the genetic changes-both those she and Ja.n.u.s had made as well as Ares' interventions. In essence, she was creating a therapy that would synchronize everyone: the dying, the devolving, and the rapidly evolving, creating a unified, stable genome. An Atlantean-human hybrid genome.

After almost half an hour of work, the screen flashed a message.

One Target Therapy Identified.

Kate examined it. Yes, it would work.

She should have felt euphoria, pride, or even relief. This was the moment she had worked for her entire life: both Atlantean and human. She had finally created a therapy that would complete her life's work, a genetic therapy that would save the human race and fix all the past mistakes. Yet it felt as though she had simply completed a science experiment, arrived at a conclusion she had suspected, hypothesized, antic.i.p.ated her entire life. Where joy should have been there was a cold, clinical interest in the outcome. Perhaps the Atlanteans didn't feel joy in the same way. Maybe joy was so four million years ago for them.

That would be her next task: fixing herself, getting back to who she was before. She wondered what sort of chance that experiment had.

She grabbed the sat phone. "We need to get aboveground."

She followed David out of the ship. On the hillside, she briefly looked down at Ceuta. Dead horses and people lay across the black, charred expanse that led to the ma.s.sive wall. Beyond the wall, the ground was stained red from the carnage David had unleashed. The last remnants of the plague barge floated in the water outside the harbor, slowly drifting toward the sh.o.r.e.

The scene... Yes, she had made the right decision, even if it meant that she was giving up the last piece of herself. She was sure of it now.

Kate plugged the sat phone into the computer and sent the results to Continuity.

When the data had uploaded, she disconnected the phone and dialed Paul Brenner.

He answered quickly, but sounded distracted, unfocused. Kate had to repeat things several times. She realized what had happened: Paul had administered Ja.n.u.s's false cure there-on his own cohort. Continuity was now ground zero for the radiation from Ja.n.u.s's regression therapy, and it had infected Paul. But Kate couldn't do anything to help him. She could only hope he found her results and could remember what to do.

She ended the call. Only time would tell now.

Dorian walked into the dark cavern. "Now what?"

"Now we fight."

"We have no ship," Dorian said.

"True. We can't take the fight to them, but we can bring them to us. There's a very good reason I buried this vessel here in Antarctica, Dorian."

CHAPTER 96.

CDC.

Atlanta, Georgia

Paul Brenner steadied himself against the wall. It was so hard to concentrate. Where was everyone?

The halls were empty. The offices were empty. They were hiding from him. He had to find them.

No. He had to do something else. She had sent him something. The pretty one in the movies.

A set of gla.s.s doors slid open. The screens inside blinked.

ONE RESULT.

One result. Result of what? A trial. He was the head of it.

Trial for what? A cure. For the plague. He was infected. With a cure. No, that couldn't be right. How could he be infected with a cure? Something was wrong.

He surveyed the room. Empty. Coffee cups all over the floor. Stained papers on the table and chairs.

Paul sat down and pulled a keyboard closer.

A flash of clarity seized him. One result.

He typed until his fingers ached.

The letters on the screen changed.

Transmitting new therapy to all Orchid Districts...

CHAPTER 97.