Atlantis Reprise

DOC AWOKE the next morning to find that the others had risen before him. Despite the unease with which he had first fallen into sleep, it had proved to move from fitful to deep and dreamless, and he now felt refreshed and less apprehensive. He rose and dressed, going in search of the others. In the quiet of the redoubt, the hum of unmaintenanced machinery the only breaks in the silence, it wasn’t difficult to determine where they were.

Doc’s sense took him to the kitchens, where the others were attempting to construct some kind of appetizing and nutritious meal from what they had left in the stores before leaving the last time. Which was very little. But they were in no condition to be fussy about what they would eat. Even the remains of the stores beat charred and burned mule or dog meat when it came to a contest.

‘Doc, I didn’t want to wake you, so I left you,’ Krysty said on catching sight of him. ‘Hope that was okay. How are you feeling?’

‘Do you mean generally? Or are you being more specific—as in, do I feel quite insane today?’ Doc queried with as much of a grin as he could muster.

‘It wasn’t what I meant, but I guess it’s a fair question,’ Krysty mused. ‘I don’t know what you remember, but you kind of lost it for a while there.’

‘I’ll have to take your word for that,’ the old man answered, settling himself among them. ‘I have no recollection of any events after first leaving here and being caught in a blizzard.’

Ryan had been watching Doc carefully and had no doubts that the old man was telling the truth. There was something disingenuous about the old man. It was always easy to see when Doc was entering one of his mentally fragile phases, and equally it was easy to see when he had clarity of thought. Now was one of the latter times and Doc seemed genuinely confused about events. If nothing else, Ryan was glad to see the back of Joseph Jordan, whoever or whatever he may have been.

‘Dark night, there’s a lot that happened since then,’ J.B. said with a degree of wry understatement. ‘Where do we begin?’

Doc sat entranced while the events of the past few days were relayed to him. The trek across the wastelands, followed by their discovery by the Inuit hunting party when Doc tried to escape them. Their captivity in the Inuit settlement and near sacrifice in pagan- and Christian-inspired ritual to insure the fertility of the waning tribe. From this, the sudden emergence from fever of a new personality within Doc—that of the reincarnated Joseph Jordan. When the story reached this point, all watched Doc closely for some flicker of recognition, yet there was none. The only emotion to register on his face was that of astonishment.

From here, the old man’s astonishment mounted as they unfurled his plans to take on the ville of Fairbanks as a large-scale sacrifice to their Lord, and of the war party he had helped to prepare.

By the time that Mildred and Jak were relaying to him the doomed attack on the ville, and the manner in which they had almost been trapped within the burning streets, Doc’s face was ashen. Racing through his mind were thoughts of how his own insanity had nearly doomed his companions. Thoughts that jostled for space within his mind with others, that were darker and more introverted: how fragile was his mind, his personality, that it was able to be submerged so easily into some kind of disguise? How easy was it for him to sink into a kind of oblivion where he was able to threaten the very existence of those he valued most with no impunity?

‘Doc, Doc, are you okay?’

‘Eh?’ The old man shook himself from his reverie to see that the others were studying him closely. He realized that their story had ended and he had seemed not to acknowledge this.

‘I’m sorry,’ he began haltingly. ‘I just find it hard to comprehend. That I could have seemed to have functioned so clearly and yet to be advocating such madness. In fact, actively pursuing it.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I have no recall of any of the events you have outlined, not even in the sense of a dream from which I was detached, merely the observer. What I recall is so much…less…’ He petered off, not quite sure where to begin.

In the ensuing silence Ryan scanned the companions as they sat around the kitchen of the redoubt. Mildred and Krysty, who seemed to have a better grasp of the complexities of Doc’s psyche than anyone else, were on edge, waiting for the old man to try to explain what had happened to him in his own mind. It was vital information for them, as they would be able to try to assess just where he was coming from…and perhaps where he was going to.

Jak was impassive. His scarred albino features were as grim and unreadable as they always were. Very rarely did any emotion escape the mask that he used to shield himself from the outside world. But he would be taking it in and making his own assessment.

J.B. looked like Ryan felt—as though he wanted to know what was happening with Doc but doubted that he could assimilate it. The two men had been friends for so long that Ryan was sure that J.B. felt the same way as he did. They were men of action and only used their sharp minds when action was called for. This was something beyond that range of experience.

Doc began again. ‘In my mind, I felt as though I were not here. Everything that I experienced on our journey to the Inuit ville was part of some test. I was back in the time from which I originally came. I was insane, locked in a padded room and going through these experiences as a kind of mental exercise. It was as though I were a rat in a maze, running blindly at the behest of some celestial scientist who had a purpose in mind for me, and if I reached the end of the maze I would be rewarded. Not with candy or cheese, but with the truth. A revelation that would explain why I was going through this whole experience…not just since landing here, but in the entire time since you, my dear friends, first saved me from the hands of Cort Strasser.

‘It seemed to me that in order to do this, I had to go through some kind of change, some kind of rebirth. I had to be like the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis…even if that change meant that I had little or no knowledge of the life that I had experienced before that moment.

‘I suspect that that was the moment at which this man Jordan first made an appearance. I could not tell you who or what he was, only that once he appeared, I receded not just in your eyes, but in my own mind, as well. I have no recall of anything that happened after that, and only one fleeting memory from then until I awoke on the sled as we approached this place once more.

‘If I think about it, I can remember, just for a moment, standing in a log cabin staring at you all, wrapped in furs and skins. I tried to speak, but somehow the words would not come out. It was as though I were watching you through a gauze, as though I could hear you through a fog of white noise. My chest was constrained, making every breath something for which I had to fight, every syllable something that had to be forced from my lips. The words were there, but they would not come out.’

‘But it is fleeting, momentary, and after that there is nothing. Nothing until last evening, when I awoke to find myself on a sled, aware that something had happened, but not what that may be.’

Doc stuttered to a halt and shrugged, not knowing where to go.

‘I think that being here triggered things you didn’t want to remember and made you withdraw into yourself,’ Mildred said slowly. ‘Strange thing is, although it may sound like madness, it’s more a way of clinging on to your sanity.’

‘But at what cost?’ Doc spit bitterly. ‘What does it benefit me if I save sanity at the expense of losing identity? What use is it if I close down whenever things get too much? How does this settle with the notion that I am in some way a useful member of this group. Good heavens, Doctor, if I am to retreat into my own head at the drop of a hat, what possible use could I be to you? In fact, I could be nothing except a complete liability. And this is not a world in which to carry passengers.’

‘That’s for us to decide,’ Ryan cut in.

Doc shook his head firmly. ‘I cannot be responsible for such an eventuality.’

‘Then what do you propose to do about it?’ Krysty asked in a reasonable tone. ‘You want to stay here, alone? How long will you cling to your sanity then? You had a set of circumstances that are unlikely to occur again. I can’t see why you—’

‘But that is not the point,’ Doc shouted over her. ‘It may have been a one-off occurrence, but I cannot know that for sure, any more than you can. I cannot risk it happening again.’

‘Doc, the only way any of us can avoid a risk like that is by buying the farm right here and now, and that’s just stupe,’ J.B. said. ‘It’s this fucking place—it messes with our heads. Let’s just get the hell out and see what we feel like when we land somewhere else.’

It was a view with which all could agree, even Doc, who approached the idea with some trepidation, yet could see through his own fears how the redoubt may be, once more, exerting its pernicious influence.

They effected the quickest evacuation of all their redoubt experiences. In next to no time, they had collected what little they had to take with them, replenished from the few supplies left in the stores and were in the mattrans chamber.

Ryan stood by the door while the others filed into the chamber. As he entered and closed the door, Krysty settled on the disk-inset floor next to an apprehensive-looking Doc. She could feel the oppressive atmosphere that had once again been creeping upon them begin to lift, as if carried on the trails of white mist that began to spiral around them.

Chapter Three

Jak wretched and sent a thin stream of bile across the floor, where it settled at Ryan Cawdor’s feet.

‘Jak’s coming around,’ the one-eyed man muttered, watching the stream of liquid congeal at the toe of his heavy combat boot. He couldn’t think much beyond that, having only just managed to clamber to his feet. His head still spun wildly and it was at times like this that he was almost thankful for monocular vision, as it spared him the worst excesses of vomit-inducing blurred and double vision after a jump.

‘It’s not him I’m worried about,’ Krysty slurred, shaking her head as she tried to clear it. The movement only made things worse and she slumped forward from her kneeling position. She felt terrible. Like the others, she had been concerned that with little opportunity to recuperate after a traumatic firefight and flight, the jump would be too much of a strain. Jak always suffered after a jump, but it was the ever-fragile Doc who was the cause of most concern.

She’d worry about him later, though. Right now, her primary objective was to make sure that she was functioning.

J.B. and Mildred had stirred, and while Ryan tried to make out shapes through the opaque armaglass walls of the chamber, Krysty helped the pair of them to their feet. Jak, as ever, eschewed all help, waving away Krysty’s proffered hand to drag himself upright. He spit out a sour ball of bile and looked over at Doc.

‘He okay?’

Doc lay motionless, on his back.

‘I don’t know,’ Mildred muttered unnecessarily as she made her way over to him. The reflex reply had been necessary to cover her own concern. To all intents and purposes, Doc looked as though the trip might have been one trauma too much. He was so still, looked so peaceful, that at first she suspected that he had bought the farm while being reconstituted. It was only when she was kneeling over him that she could see he was breathing shallowly. There was still some life in the old bastard.

Something he confirmed by suddenly opening his eyes. They were wide, staring and alert, with none of the muzziness that he—or, indeed, any of the others—usually experienced after a jump.

‘Why, hello, my dear Doctor. How pleasant to see you. I must say, you don’t seem to be at all well. I, on the other hand, feel as though I have had a most refreshing rest.’ He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at the others, adding, ‘It’s most strange. Usually I feel terrible after a jump, but I feel as though I could fight an army.’

‘Doc, the way I feel, that might be a good thing,’ Ryan commented wryly. ‘But right now, let’s just get our shit together and secure the immediate area.’

He had seen nothing in the vague shapes lurking beyond the opaque armaglass of the chamber to suggest that there was any kind of life in the redoubt. However, triple red was the only way to approach evacuation. When they were sufficiently recovered to make a move, they exited the chamber one by one, assuming positions of cover.

It was a futile exercise. The room beyond the anteroom was in semidarkness, where some of the fluorescent lighting had failed and the constantly blinking lights of the comp desks were all the life that appeared to exist.

Despite the fact that the air-conditioning and recycling plant should have kept a constant temperature, there was a distinct chill in the air, suggesting that it was more than just the lighting that was failing. The air itself was breathable, but carried a dank undertone, suggesting that areas of the redoubt might have been breached by outside elements. The one reassuring thing it did have, though, was that indefinable air of complete desolation. There seemed to be no human life here.

Still keeping their blasters to hand—instinct told them the redoubt was empty, but intellect still counseled caution—they left the chamber room.

The redoubt was in some disarray, not from any looting or ransacking from outside, but from the gradual breakdown of its own systems. At some time, probably during the immediate aftermath of the nukecaust, a breach had occurred in the walls of the structure. An earth movement strong enough to rupture the reinforced, thick concrete walls had caused enough damage to let outside elements creep in. Wherever this was located—and at present they couldn’t be sure—it was beneath the local water table, as damp had suffused the very atmosphere. Great stretches of corridor were unlit where the lighting had shorted. The same could be said of sec doors that had started to close when the circuits shorted, but had been stayed by warps in the wall and were now jammed half open, half shut, a monument to the breach in supposedly safe defenses.