Out of the Fire

Part 6 - The End and the Beginning

"We don't know what would happen if we recalibrate the portal to send something through to an earlier time after we have already sent something through to a later time," Jean explained. "We don't know if there is a crossover or interference between time settings, we just don't know. We haven't had time to theorise or test the possibilities, so no, we are not going to change settings and send anyone, or thing through out of sequence." She continued in response to Mike's thought bubble that they could send people through and then change the settings to send supplies through earlier, so they could be waiting.

Gunda added, "Just to confuse things, we don't even know why the exit point of the things we send through stays geographically relative to the entry point. Nor, for that matter, why the movement of the planet or even the galaxy isn't an issue, just that it isn't, and that, we have tested and measured ad infinitum but have no theory."

"Well then, we will have to stick to the timeframe, is it possible to say, send a herd of cattle through to arrive fifty or a hundred years before the rest of us?" Mike asked.

"Sure," replied Jean, "as long as we haven't sent anything through to a later time first, so the cattle will have to be sent through before anything else is sent." "Well why don't we do that?"

Walking out of the oversized barn holding the portal and its control systems, Mike gazed up at the sheer cliff in front of him. Anne's team had done a perfect job of hiding the entrance to Sanctuary Two, it looked just like an untouched raw cliff, complete with mosses just starting to dry out as winter fades. He turned and studied the solar power plant, just visible, covering the low hills to the South, and the high voltage power lines looping over landscape to the banks of batteries against the outside of the sanctuary wall. From the battery installation the cables draped over the wall and terminated at a small sub-station inside the barn to power the portal system. Thinking back, Mike was almost overcome with the enormity of what they had achieved over the last fifteen years, they were ready to go.

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"Agent Perilli, you may want to see this," called the duty operator.

"Throw it to the screen," Perilli called.

He spun his chair around to watch the large screen TV mounted on the wall of the NSA San Francisco Operations office. The screen brightened and displayed an aerial view of the Axell Sanctuary Two. There was the fortress walls around a wide compound, almost the size of two football fields, jutting out of the sheer cliff face. To the North of the compound what appeared to be livestock paddocks with stone fences. What used to be a large opening in the cliff was now a solid wall indistinguishable from the original cliff, as if the cave had never existed. Along the outside of the South side wall was a large bank of state-of-art Tesla batteries being fed from the solar power plant further to the South. Halfway along the inside of the South wall was a huge shed open at the cliff end and closed at the bottom end so their drone could not see inside. All this had been documented, what he was now watching in live time was a convoy of cattle trucks entering the compound and one at a time backing out of sight into the open end of the shed and after a short time, driving out empty.

"It looks like they have moved the opening to the Sanctuary to the shed rather than the cliff," observed Agent Perilli. "Send that recording to the Director, it looks like something is starting to move.

Why would they want to take, what, ten trucks, fifty cattle per truck, five hundred head of cattle underground?" He directed to the half a dozen agents standing watching the feed. "Let's find out."

Agent Smith! "Argh damn" cursed Perilli. Since the convoy from Virginia had arrived earlier in the year, security had been tightened at the sites. Subsequently, Smith, busted snooping around the convoys at the truck depot had been sacked and was now back at the operations centre. They had no assets on site.