The Atlantis Origins Read online

  The Atlantis Origins

  Book 5 of the Atlantis Saga

  S.A. Beck

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  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  The Atlantis Origins: The Atlantis Saga

  Copyright © 2017 by S.A. Beck

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  All Books by S.A. Beck

  Excerpt from “The Atlantis Guard”

  Chapter 1

  August 1, 2016, IN THE DESERT NEAR AIN BEN TILI, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN MOROCCO AND MAURITANIA

  4:45 P.M.

  * * *

  Sand. Sky. Nothing else.

  No buildings, no clouds, no roads. Just sand and sky.

  Jaxon Ares Andersen looked out across the low, rolling dunes of the Western Sahara desert and felt fear in a way she had never felt before. She had been attacked by government agents, fought thugs in the back alleys of Los Angeles, and walked alone through the medina of Marrakech, but she had never known fear like this.

  Fear that over the next forty-eight hours, she would probably die a lingering, agonizing death of thirst.

  The fact that she wouldn’t die alone didn’t help. Her friend and supposed protector, Vivian, was pacing through the desert, looking for the rest of the Atlantis Allegiance.

  They’d been camping in the desert of Mauritania, heading on a secret mission to Timbuktu in the neighboring country of Mali, when the sandstorm hit. Vivian and Jaxon’s tent lay half buried next to her. If it hadn’t been for some desperate digging, they might have been dead already.

  They weren’t sure about the rest of the group.

  The scientists Yamazaki and Yuhle, the mercenary Grunt, and Jaxon’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Otto, had all disappeared. Their tents, their equipment, the Land Rovers they’d been driving in—all had vanished without a trace.

  And that left them alone with the sand and sky.

  “Find anything yet?” Jaxon called out.

  Vivian turned from where she had been sticking the supporting rod from the roof of their tent into the sand. She shook her head sadly.

  She’d been at it for half an hour now, as the blazing sun lowered into a brass-colored sunset. Vivian had gone to where the other tents and vehicles had been, in the dip between two large sand dunes, and had been pacing in regular lines along the spot, sticking the rod in every couple of steps in the hope of hitting something buried beneath. So far, no luck.

  Neither of them spoke about the terrible possibility that the entire rest of the camp might have been buried so deep that Vivian couldn’t reach them with a seven-foot-long rod.

  For the hundredth time, Jaxon studied the bleak terrain around her. Yes, the dunes had shifted. Had they shifted enough to bury two tents and two Land Rovers? Their own tent hadn’t been buried, after all. Jaxon tried not to think of the fact that they’d pitched their tent a little up the slope of one of the dunes.

  “Maybe they drove away,” she called to Vivian.

  “Maybe,” the mercenary replied, sticking the rod into the loose sand again.

  “The storm would have covered their tracks.”

  “Maybe.”

  “They could be looking for us right now,” she said.

  “Could be,” Vivian muttered, pulling the rod out of the sand again.

  Jaxon bit her bottom lip and turned away.

  “I’m going to go look again,” she called out.

  “Okay,” Vivian replied. She did not sound hopeful.

  Jaxon tromped up to the top of the dune. It stood higher than most of those in sight and gave a good view of the surrounding desert. She made a slow 360-degree turn. Nothing.

  Bending her legs, she leapt ten feet in the air. That gave her an even longer view and brought into sight parts of the nearer desert obscured by dunes. Still nothing. Turning, she repeated her jump while facing different directions three times. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Sighing, she went back to the remnants of their tent. Vivian walked up to meet her.

  “So now what do we do?” Jaxon asked.

  Vivian dropped the rod at her feet. She wiped the sweat from her brow but did not reach for the one-gallon jug of water Jaxon had recovered from their half-sunken shelter. It was only a little more than half full, and it was the only water they had.

  They looked over the rest of their equipment—a bunch of spare clothes, two sleeping bags for the Sahara’s remarkably cold nights, a pair of flashlights, a few cereal bars, and a heap of ruined electronic equipment. That included Jaxon’s tablet, a pair of high-range walkie-talkies, and a GPS. The tablet had GPS capability too. Any one of those electronic items could save their lives, but they’d all been buried in sand, and the tiny particles had worked their way inside and wrecked the circuits. The fact that their flashlights still worked was a miracle. Given the right tools, they might be able to fix the electronics, but those tools were in Grunt’s Land Rover, and neither of them knew how to do it anyway.

  Vivian sighed. “Well, at least let’s get this tent fixed.”

  Jaxon didn’t reply. Quietly, they reassembled the tent. The weight of the shifting sands had snapped a supporting rod, so the tent sagged on one side, but at least they had shelter.

  By the time they were done, the sun had set and it was almost dark. Dusk was short in the desert, and it went from brilliantly bright to pitch dark in less than half an hour.

  “I’m going to go up to the top of the dune and look for flares,” Vivian said. Both vehicles had been provided with flares and a flare gun. Neither woman had thought to take one of them for their tent.

  “No, I’ll go,” Jaxon said. “I can jump higher, get a better view.”

  It was one of her special abilities thanks to her Atlantean heritage. To all appearances, she was a petite sixteen-year-old girl, but appearances were deceiving. She could outfight a grown man, run as fast as an Olympic athlete, and even make plants grow simply by touching them. She couldn’t make water appear, though. She wondered if the fact that she never got sick meant she’d die of thirst more slowly than Vivian. She certainly felt thirsty already. Would her special abilities, which so far had only made her feel isolated from everyone around her, give her an even slower and more lingering death than her friend?

  She stood there, feeling lost emotionally as well as physically. The rest of the Atlantis Allegiance had disappeared. Swallowed up by the desert for all she knew. She had been with them for such a short time, and yet they’d begun to feel like family. A maladjusted, weird, quarreling family, but still a family. They cared for each other, looked out for each other. She only realized that now that they were gone.

  “Anything?” Vivian called up. There was no hope in her voice.

  “Nothing,” Jaxon called ba
ck.

  “Well, we might as well turn in,” she said.

  “Why don’t we pitch the tent up here?” Jaxon asked. “We’ll have a better view in case they shoot a flare tonight.”

  “Good point,” Vivian said, forcing a smile, although her words still carried not a trace of hope. “That’s good thinking, Jaxon. You’re adjusting to this life well.”

  Just in time to lose it, Jaxon thought.

  Jaxon helped Vivian strike the tent and set it up again on top of the dune. By the time they got all their things inside, it had become pitch dark. They stood outside, pointing their flashlights in opposite directions. No signal came back.

  After an hour, Vivian switched hers off.

  “We better save the batteries. I’m turning in.”

  “I’m going to stay out for a while,” Jaxon said. “Maybe they’ll send up a flare. I’ll try with the flashlight every half hour or so.”

  “All right,” Vivian said from inside the tent. “We’ll stay here tomorrow, try signaling again tomorrow evening, and if we don’t get anything, we’ll try our chances by heading for the road. We’ll travel by night.”

  “Yeah,” Jaxon replied.

  She didn’t need to be told that detail. It was at least 120 degrees by day, sometimes more. If they tried to walk to the highway in the daytime, they wouldn’t make it more than five miles, and the highway lay a lot farther to the west than that.

  Jaxon looked out over the desert, the dunes lit faintly by starlight and rolling like a dark, rumpled blanket to the horizon. Not a light was to be seen except in the sky, which was brilliantly clear. She had never seen such a sky. Each star was a sharp pinpoint of light, and there were so many of them that she had trouble picking out the constellations. High above arched the Milky Way, a faint band of countless stars.

  She found herself staring at the sky a lot lately, wondering about her heritage. The scientists Yuhle and Yamazaki insisted the Atlanteans were human, perhaps the original race of humanity, but Jaxon wasn’t so sure. Perhaps the Atlanteans came from space. There was no shortage of books that said so. Sure, those books were trash, but perhaps they were onto something. She’d always been interested in UFOs and unexplained phenomena, and even though she didn’t really believe in all that stuff, thinking about it made the world more interesting.

  And now she was the unexplained phenomenon.

  The beauty of the desert sky made her forget her problems for a moment, but the awful reality soon came crashing back down on her. They were in the middle of nowhere. From the maps Jaxon had seen yesterday—which were also in one of the Land Rovers—she knew that a remote, dusty highway lay about fifty miles to the west. Fifty miles of walking through the Sahara desert in August. Even if they made it, walking by night and rationing their water, there was only a small chance someone would actually drive by before they died of thirst. That highway was one of the most remote stretches of road in the world.

  And even if someone did come by, Jaxon might prefer to take her chances in the desert. Grunt and Vivian had told her all about Mauritania. There was an active slave trade here, and Bedouin gun runners, and some terrorist group called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. Plus, there was a rebel army of people called the Tuareg who wanted their own nation, and the national Mauritanian army wasn’t too friendly either.

  Since they had crossed from Morocco illegally, the army would assume they had ulterior motives for being here, which was true enough. Explaining to them that they wanted to cross their country illegally so they could enter Mali illegally in order to avoid the attention of the United States government was not the kind of excuse that would go down well with the North African version of Border Patrol.

  So she and Vivian were alone. Alone was safer, but being alone wouldn’t save them. The only people they could trust in this desert might already be lying dead under its surface.

  Jaxon cringed, drawing up her knees and putting her forehead on them. No, Otto couldn’t be dead. He had to be out there somewhere.

  She had been cold to him for the last couple of days. He had been hanging out with that crazy tattooed mercenary, Grunt, too long and was turning into a gun nut. Thought he was a hero in some cheap action movie. Otto had been so kind and accepting before.

  I guess the situation has changed him, she thought. It sure has changed me.

  She looked back at some of the things she had done in the past month, like hunting criminals in Los Angeles in the middle of the night. That had really gotten out of hand. Her friend Brett had been killed because she had gotten used to the adrenaline rush of danger. Then she’d been offered the chance to find her heritage by going on this crazy trip, and she’d said yes despite her misgivings. Now she might have killed a bunch more people.

  Her head slumped in regret and weariness. She’d never had a happy life, never fit in, and now it looked as if she was a curse on everyone around her.

  Giving the desert a final mournful look, Jaxon turned in for the night.

  Despite her fear and the uncomfortably cramped interior of the tent, she drifted off quickly, the first fragments of a dream sparking in front of her eyes. The Forever Welcome Group Home wavered in front of her. Therapy with the kind but clueless Dr. Hollis. Snotty remarks from the bully Lizzie. Glimpses of the TV room, the cafeteria. Why am I here? Long ago. So long ago. A few months but a lifetime. Jaxon rose out of sleep to half consciousness. I’m in the desert. I might die. Sleep. The group home pulled her back.

  Otto. Jaxon and Otto running off to the greenhouse to talk and get away from his oh-so-perfect and oh-so-flawed parents. A smile. A kiss.

  Then an attack. Bulky men trying to grab her. Flames. She could see the greenhouse burning. The red flare of gas igniting, spreading fire across the wooden structure.

  The flames brightening. Fading. Brightening again.

  Jaxon’s eyes snapped open. The light was real. The side of her tent was illuminated in a bright-red glow.

  “Vivian! The flares!” she shouted, untangling herself from the sleeping bag. She fumbled with the zip and scampered outside.

  Just in time to see another red flare shoot high up in the desert. It looked as if it was coming from about a mile away, and as the flare gun shot, she caught a snapshot glimpse of a vehicle and a couple of figures. Otto? Grunt?

  “Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, waving her arms even though she knew they couldn’t see her.

  “Hey!” she shouted louder. Maybe in the still desert air, with nothing to block the sound of her voice and no sound but a gentle breeze rustling across the sand, her voice might carry to them.

  Then she remembered the flashlight. Of course! She pulled it out of her pocket.

  She was about to turn it on when a hand grasped her wrist and another hand clamped over her mouth.

  “Stop shouting, and don’t you dare turn that on,” Vivian whispered.

  She held Jaxon’s mouth for a moment then let go.

  “Why not? They’re right there,” Jaxon objected.

  “Our flares are yellow,” Vivian said.

  Jaxon stared at her, unsure what she meant.

  “Those aren’t our flares,” Vivian explained. “Now help me bust down the tent. We have to get on the other side of this dune in case they have night-vision scopes.”

  Vivian turned and started packing everything up as fast as she could. Jaxon stared at her until realization dawned.

  It had not been Otto and the others.

  Someone else was out here.

  Chapter 2

  August 1, 2016, IN THE DESERT NEAR AIN BEN TILI, ON THE BORDER BETWEEN MOROCCO AND MAURITANIA

  10:00 P.M.

  * * *

  Otto hadn’t played a game of hide and seek since he was a kid, and he decided that he really didn’t like it anymore.

  Sure, when he was eight, it was fun, playing with the neighborhood kids or his cousins, hiding in laundry bins or behind bushes and giggling as the person who was “it” walked right past you without seeing
you.

  Now it wasn’t so funny.

  Hiding in the middle of the Sahara desert in a war zone while trying to avoid some unknown convoy of jeeps and Humvees driving around the area somehow lacked the same childish innocence. In fact, it was really damn scary.

  Grunt had gone through the possibilities of who they could be—human traffickers, smugglers, separatists, radical Islamists, the Mauritanian army, or even the Moroccan army checking out the wrong side of the border. None of those possibilities really made Otto feel like going up and saying hello.

  Otto kept his gun close. It was an AK-47, the most common assault rifle in these parts. He didn’t really know how to use it that well. He had only had a few training sessions with Grunt in the fields outside Marrakech before making this crazy voyage south, but clutching it made him feel better. He tried not to think of the fact that all the people in that mystery convoy probably had AK-47s too and had been practicing with them on live targets since before they were old enough to smoke.

  They’d seen the convoy right after the sandstorm hit, right after that crazy blind escape from the shifting sand dune that buried half their gear and nearly buried them. If it hadn’t been for some quick thinking on Grunt’s part and some heroic digging by Dr. Yuhle to get the Land Rovers unstuck from the moving sands, they’d be buried for all time.

  Burial was still something that could happen pretty soon. As they fled through the sandstorm, the howling winds and clouds of sand making it impossible to see anything beyond a few feet, they had shot along a rocky plain, driving as fast as they dared.