Atlantis: Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

air is—” she began, but he cut her off.
    “That’s why you stay, isn’t it?” Davon pressed. “The power of the lines. They keep you from aging as quickly, don’t they? You hardly look fifty, yet you’re twice that.”
    “I am not sure that is exactly it,” Reizer said. “I think over a hundred years has passed in the rest of the world, but not here.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Reizer was about to respond when the hairs on the back of her neck tingled, the sensation spreading into her body, racing along her nerve endings. She stood so suddenly the chair fell backward. It was dusk, the sun low on the western horizon, it’s rays almost horizontal.
    “Oh, my,” she murmured as a glow appeared due south of them, emanating up from the surface.
    “What the hell is that?” Davon demanded, taking an unconscious step toward the glow, which was getting brighter.
    “I think you should move,” she said to Davon, who was now straddling the main line.
    But either he didn’t hear her, or he ignored her words. She could see that the glow was getting stronger because it was coming closer. She’d never seen the like before, but her heart pounded in anticipation. After all these years waiting for something to happen!
    Then she saw it, coming up the main channel line. Like a line of fire ten feet high from the earth itself. She turned to Davon, to warn him, but he saw the danger and began to move, but he was too slow, the fire too fast. It caught his right leg as he tried to jump free.
    Davon screamed as he stared at the stump where his leg had cleanly been severed at mid-thigh. He collapsed to the ground, blood pulsing out.
    Reizer was frozen, not by Davon’s wound, but by the sight of every line and wedge on the plain ablaze.
    *************
    In Japan, three miles below the surface of the planet, in an abandoned mine, was a much larger version of the muonic transceiver mounted on the FLIP. The super-kamiokande was a 50,000-ton ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. The tank holding the detector was forty meters in diameter by forty meters high. It was filled with purified water and the walls were lined with over thirteen thousand photo multiplier tubes that were sensitive lights detectors.
    It worked under the principle that any charged particle traveling through water produced Cerenkov light, which was light generated by a particle moving faster than the speed of light in water, which was slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The particle of light produced a shock wave, similar to the sound wave set off by a supersonic aircraft. The wave hit the tubes and formed a ring, which when analyzed, could tell the type of wave, the strength, and to a certain extent the location.
    The super-kamiokande had been Professor Nagoya’s brain-child, funded by both the Japanese and American governments ostensibly to do pure research in physics, but in reality to try to find a way to track the actions of the gates. The public had been told it was located this far underground to prevent interference from human sources on the surface, but while that was true, it was also oriented into the planet.
    The control center for the S-K was linked to Ahana on board the FLIP via real-time satellite feed. Thus those in Japan only had about half-a-second to consider the data that exploded across their screens before Professor Nagoya saw it aboard the FLIP.
    **************
    “What is it?” Foreman was hovering over Professor Nagoya’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the information being forwarded from the super-kamiokande.
    Nagoya turned to Ahana. “Put it on the main screen.”
    The young woman quickly typed the command into her keyboard. The western hemisphere appeared in outline form. And along the meeting lines of tectonic plates, which they had all grown so familiar with in the past year, were lines of extreme muonic activity, flowing, moving toward a spot in South America as if a vortex had opened on the surface of the planet and was