ATLANTIS and CATACLYSM...

Not every being in Atlantis shares this mix of reverence, fear, and
pragmatism, however. The Unity is incapable of feeling such emotions,
other than fear, and it certainly feels no fear of this place.
Zadatharion and Aradel, themselves members of the same tiny 'race' as
the Eldest himself, likewise do not share the dread of the central
cone, and it is Zadatharion and Aradel that we find now, standing in a
tiny grove of trees on the central island, sheltered from convenient
view on all sides by the foliage and the lack of any bystanders to see
them.

As with our earlier observation of Sharondra and the Component of the
Unity, we must take a few liberties with the facts as they happened,
because if we were actually there to listen, we would hear nothing of
their conversation, it being purely Telepathic. Indeed, many a
discussion even among the ordinary Human Atlanteans would sound
strange to our ears, a mix of audible words and silent communication,
liberties have been taken where need be for the sake of our
convenience, and now we must do so again. So for our convenience, let
us pretend that had we been there to listen, we would have heard
audible discussion.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zadatharion and Aradel 'listened' as the discussion among the Circle
of Ten, meeting in the Great Palace higher on the side of the ancient
cone, finally broke up. There were few entities in Atlantis with the
Psionic Power and skill necessary to 'listen in' on the Circle of Ten,
but both Zadatharion and Aradel were among them. They stood in
silence, sheltered by the wooded slope, and after a time both opened
their eyes, and Aradel said, "Why do they bother with the farce?
Everyone in Atlantis knows that the Circle has no real power left
now. Yet they continue to meet and go through the motions of
discussing their business. Why bother? Who do they think they are
deceiving?"

Zadatharion smiled a little, without much humor.

"For the same reason that Speaker continues the pretense of merely
being a servant of the Circle," Zadatharion replied. "Habit.
Everyone is _used_ to the Circle ruling. They ruled for centuries,
and even if it's no longer true in the world of fact, it's true in the
world of perception. You'd be surprised how many people, the people
who give public affairs little thought, genuinely don't realize that
the Circle has been sidelined. Even those who do realize it find it
easier to work within the old habits, the old language.

"Hmm..." Aradel mused. "Like the Circle itself, they always claimed
to be ruling in the Eldest's name, even after he was murdered."

"Yes," Zadatharion nodded, running a hand through his silver-white
hair in a nervous habit he'd picked up, "exactly the same principle.
You asked who the Circle is trying to deceive, well, among other
people I'd say they're trying to fool themselves, to maintain the
habit that they're still in control even if they know, intellectually,
that they are not. It can't be entirely enjoyable to know that you've
climbed to the top of the power structure only to discover that you're
actually a mouthpiece. I suspect many of them don't even admit that
fully to themselves."

"I still don't see the point of the Speaker's current plan," Aradel
said. They'd learned the details of what the Speaker intended by
'listening in' on the telepathic discussion of the Circle, but they
still did not understand _why_. They could not read the Speaker's
mind because the Unity was shielding him, both Avatars were fairly
sure that this plan under discussion was at least as much the
inspiration of the Unity as it was the Speaker himself. "I can't see
who benefits from it, and it's going to cost enough that it may wreck
the economy, assuming they go through with it."

"Me either," Zadatharion admitted reluctantly. "The only thing we can
bet on is that this is a feint of some kind. Whatever the Unity is
planning, we have to assume that the constructions and work will
actually be used for some other thing, some other goal. But what that
goal is? I have no idea. The Speaker is proposing a massive
construction project, the biggest in history! He's planning major
construction all over the world, and it's going to require _tons_ of
orichalcum! You said it, if they do this too fast the economy is just
going to collapse!"

"Let's get out in the Sunlight," Aradel suggested, "I'm tired of this
place."

"All right," Zadatharion nodded. "There's no reason to stay here."

The two Avatars walked down the slope, until they came to a walkway
through the woods, paved with pink granite flagstones. The sunlight,
filtering down through the open slice of the walkway, made the
flagstones glisten and sparkle as the two Avatars walked along the
walkway, though neither looked like themselves, illusions shielded
their appearance from the few passerby, leaving them looking like two
Atlantean aristocrats with a perfect right to be on the Inner Island.

The Inner Island was an ancient volcanic cone, its scoria and broken
rock now bound and held by the roots of grass, trees, and brush, more
than half covered in woods that had been replanted centuries before,
with palaces and official buildings dotting the peaceful slopes here
and there. A handful of residences were present, residences of the
very highest of the high, but for the most part the Inner Island was a
public space...though the most of the public was never permitted near
it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let us leave the Avatars to their discussion for the moment, because
we must now turn our attention yet elsewhere, still on this same day.

MORE LATER.

Now we turn our attention northward again, away from Atlantica,
following the eastern coast of Atlantis as it twists along its winding
path. Bending to the northwest, the east coast runs through a stretch
of relatively lightly settled, rocky highlands, then descends again
into a long coast which meets the sea relatively gently, enabling a
fishing industry to operate fairly easily, then the lands rise again
toward a knot of tormented mountain that mark the northern reaches of
Atlantis. In places where the land is richer and access to the sea
easier, cities exist, none so large as Atlantica but many boasting
populations in the hundreds of thousands.

At last, we come upon the northern reaches of Atlantis. Cold, wind-
swept, rocky, yet not entirely barren, home to a sparse population of
miners, small farmers, and fishermen, the slopes of these reaches are
heavy with fir and pine, and the mountains are snowcapped throughout
the year. In winter this region is harsh, in summer it is cool and
moist, and it can be a prosperous region in good years. The peoples
who live here are a bit different than the rest of Atlantis, this
region is rural and changes come more slowly here, both for the good
and the bad. Even the language is older here, the accent of the north
country is a joke in Atlantica, but they speak much as the Atlanticans
once did, in the time of the Eldest.

Nor is it merely a matter of speech, the peoples of the high north
live much as the rest of Atlantis once did as well. Not that the wave
of technological and psionic progress that has swept the Antediluvian
World has left them untouched, not my any means. Aeremes land at the
larger towns, the power of the Flux is used in manufacturing,
agriculture, and everyday life, the wealthier locals have
autocarriages much like those in the streets of Atlantica. The
fishing vessels that range out from the ports of the north country are
powered by coal, not wind or oar.

Yet even so, the changes that have swept the Island and the Empire
have left the north country less changed than the rest. Here the
Unity's effort to 'rationalize' Atlantean society, to make it more
predictable by the Unity, have had far less effect. The old norms of
Atlantis still hold here, at least sometimes, and for this very reason
the sophisticates of Atlantica and the larger cities, and the folk of
the northlands, hold each other in a certain disregard. Neither fully
respects the other, neither fully trusts the other, each knows that
the other is somehow different in a way they can not entirely define
even for themselves.

As we move north of the Island proper, first we encounter a handful of
smaller islands, geological outposts of Atlantis proper. In earlier
times, when the great ice sheets spread down the continents, these
tiny islands and islets were linked to the main land mass. Now a few
miles of sea separate them from each other and from the Island itself,
they are mostly uninhabited, save for a handful of Atlanteans so ill
disposed toward the presence of others that even the north country
seems crowded to them. The largest communities in these Northern
Isles number no more than 100 souls, and these centers of habitation
are widely scattered over 50 or so islands. The islands themselves
range in size from nearly 100 square miles down to bare specks of rock
a few hundred feet wide.

Were we to follow the line of northern Atlantis, we would continue to
the northwest, eventually coming to the northern reaches of will
someday be called North America. This is not our track, however, our
interests take us instead to the northeast, along the now-submerged
line of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and across hundreds of miles of cold,
storm-tossed Atlantic waters, until at last we come to that land that
will, one day in the distant future (as Homosentients think of time)
be known as Iceland. Here we find a large area of land almost devoid
of people, with only one town of any size and a wide scattering of
settlers with a taste for remoteness.

The city has a population of about 10,000, and it exists primarily
because this island is a key stopover point on the North American-
Europe aereme routes, they land here to restock and change crews, and
this community exists to service this trade. The town proper is not
far from the southern coast of the island, and within its walls it is
a bustling, active place. Beyond its walls, Iceland is mostly a vast
wilderness of mountain, glacier, and volcano. Fewer than 10,500
people call this island home, though it is a relatively short distance
of sea miles from the northern reaches of Atlantis, certainly as
easily accessible as North America or Europe.

As accessible...but far less inviting for settlement. There is more
ice here in 4798 than will be the case in a later age, the glaciers
are thicker, wider, extend further, the arable soil is less
accessible, the winds blow harder and the winters are longer. The
interglacial period has not advanced so far here as it has to the
south.

Our interest is not in the tiny but bustling Atlantean city on the
southern coast, but northward and eastward, along the line of valleys
and mountains that mark the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as it slices directly
across the island.

MORE LATER.

Far from the single populous community that marks most of civilization
on the Northern Isle, there is a relatively sheltered cove, a place
where rocky walls conceal a narrow inlet of the sea, barely 50 feet
wide, from all sides, only from directly above and to the east is this
cove visible. Only a few hundred feet of water is contained in this
crack in the rock, but it is sufficient to conceal the presence of a
small sail-powered ship. Unlike most ships in this modern technical
age, it lacks both steam power and Flux power, the ship is a true
sailing vessel harkening back to the great age of seafaring of a few
centuries earlier. The sails are furled now on the double masts, and
only a few men stand watch on the ship, waiting for the return of a
party that set out inland on foot days before.

We move inland from the cove, following the trail of the part of four
men as they crossed the rugged wilderness. They had emerged from the
small hidden seacraft, and moved inland on foot, through rugged
country rarely visited by Homosentient beings, the eastern region of
the Northern Isle was sparsely populated even by the standards of the
Isle. Days had passed since the men had seen any sign of sentient
activity, only the wild country, the painfully beautiful empty spaces
of the Northern Isle, had met their eyes since they came inland.

As they entered the central highlands of the Northern Isle, the
terrain changed, becoming rockier, dryer and heavy with sand and dark
rock, and still they continued on a path that would have seem most
peculiar to any observer. They would shift to the north, pause, then
move south again, zig zagging generally westward. Their motions would
have appeared to be purposeful to any observer who watched them over a
period of days, but that purpose would have been most obscure to an
uninformed watcher. All such an observer would have seen would be
that party gathering around a small piece of apparatus at each point
of their zig-zag path, notes being taken and then a change of
direction at each pause.

At times, the men were forced to pause long enough to bring down an
animal for food, they carried supplies, but were required also to
supplement their supplies with the occasional bit of hunting or
gathering, both of which were time consuming. Also, very rarely, an
aereme passed overhead, forcing the men to seek some cover, since none
of them had any wish for anyone to see them in that part of the world,
unlikely though it might have been that they would even be noticed.
Such delays added to the time it required for them to reach their
goal, a place none of them had ever visited, a place they were
approaching, and finding, only by means of the peculiar, complex
apparatus they periodically assembled and constructed.

At last, the four men found themselves in a great valley that ran
across much fo the Northern Isle, trending from the southwest to the
northeast. Within it their track led northward, until they approached
a province of recent volcanism, the basaltic rock sharp-edged and
broken, the terrain rough and difficult to cross. It so happened that
they approached a fissure in the rock, and taking a final observation
from their peculiar, tripod-mounted apparatus, they knew they had
reached their destination, and taking out the digging tools that they
had carried with so much labor across the empty spaces of the Northern
Isle, they began to dig.

At last, we close up to observe our party, as it happens on the same
day that Zadatharion and Aradel had their discussion on the Inner
Island, and that Unity and its servant Sharondra laid their secret
plans in southern Atlantis. Unlike these previous discussions, we
need not take quite so many liberties with the facts, we need only
pretend that their discussion this day occurred in English, since for
reasons of their own the four men refrained from the use of telepathy
in their discussions. So let us pretend that we could overhear their
discussion, and that if we did so we would hear it in modern English.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You're sure?" Ryth said softly, "there is no doubt?"

"There can be none," Nolon replied, sounding both proud and also as if
he were slightly frightened by the implications of his own words. "I
have rechecked the matter, there is no doubt or uncertainty left."

The later man, the one called Nolon, spoke with an unmistakable
accent, a pattern of pronunciation known the world around, that marked
him indelibly as Atlantean, a native of the very Island itself. As he
spoke he held up a piece of basalt, dug out from a pit the men had
laboriously excavated in the broken rock of the lava flow, and
continued, "This rock contains a small amount of orichalcum. Not very
much, just a little...but it's there."

Silence fell for a moment, and Nolon continued almost reverently, as
if afraid the very empty lands around might hear, "It's there."

Unlike Nolon, whose skin was lighter in color, whose features and
bearing spoke of pure-blood Atlantean ancestry, the other three men
were dark-tanned. All were about the same age but the other three
appeared a little older, their features marked by long years of
exposure to wind, Sun, and salt, their accents betraying their origins
in the warm Mediterranean coasts of ProtoAthens. Yet they seemed as
unsettled as Nolon, as if finding what they sought was not so much a
triumph as some disturbing portent.

"It worked," Shavor said. "The device actually worked."

The four men turned to look at the apparatus by which they had come to
this remote place. Resting on a tripod, the device was assembled. It
was portable only in the sense that it could be disassembled into its
component parts and those parts carried. It consisted of multiple
rings of orichalcum alloys, resting on carefully-crafted jeweled
bearings, surrounding a slim, long needle of orichalcum-silver alloy,
the needle surrounded by magnetized iron rings that never quite
touched the needle. The whole spherical assembly was about half a
meter in diameter, the central needle perhaps twenty-five centimeters
in length and about the thickness of a sewing needle.

As the four men stood looking, the central needle, free to rotate, was
pointing almost directly downward, and though it could be pushed in
other directions at a touch, it immediately swung back to the
vertical.

"It works," Ryth said. "The device actually works, it can find
orichalcum!"

"I told you so," Nolon replied, a hint of self-satisfied smugness in
his tone. "The larger one, in Asherai, directed us to the Northern
Isle, it detected the presence of the metal from its mount beside the
Great River. For this smaller one to bring us here was merely a
matter of time."

Ryth looked hard at the Atlantean renegade, wondering if he had truly
been as confident of his invention as he now claimed, or if his
confidence was visible now because the device had worked. Fearing
detection, they dared not use telepathy, and it was harder to judge
relying only on the spoken word. Then he shrugged, it hardly
mattered, after all.

"Orichalcum," Ryth breathed in a mixture of wonder, dread, excitement,
anticipation, and sheer fear. "Orichalcum. We've found
orichalcum...outside Atlantis."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now that we have observed some of the discussions and deeds occurring
on that strange day in 4798 BC, we can turn our attention to what it
all means, and how they connect together. This we will do...in due
time.

MORE LATER.

Three of the men in the Northern Isle, which today is known to most of
the English speaking world as 'Iceland', were either criminals or
patriots, depending on one's point of view. The rulers of Atlantis
would have called them rebels, insurrectionists, or worse, the
Resistors of ProtoAthens and its allied states would have called them
patriots. They represented a faction of the Resistor States who
wished for full independence from an Atlantean society that they
considered not merely oppressive but morally corrupt and tyrannical.

The fourth figure, Nolon, was himself an Atlantean by birth, not an
aristocrat proper but a member of the Orichalcum Guild, of sufficient
rank that his status was equal to that of an aristocrat of moderate
rank. He was also a renegade, a defector if you will. For personal
reasons, he had turned against his fellows in the Guild and in
Atlantis, giving his services to the ProtoAthenians in deep secrecy.
He had left his place in Atlantis by faking his own death, and it
suited him and his desire to continue breathing that his former
fellows not learn that he actually was still breathing.

Nolon had brought to ProtoAthens several useful gifts, such in inside
knowledge of Atlantean government and Guild policies, first-hand
knowledge of movers and shakers on the great Isle itself, and
knowledge of orichalcum kept jealously secret by the Guild. More
importantly, he had brought to the ProtoAthenian independence movement
an inventive genius unsurpassed in his age. Nolon was one of the most
brilliant thinkers and practical operators of his generation, and he
had developed an invention that had the potential to be both
spectacularly lucrative and politically explosive. With great
application of his native genius, plus many long and tiresome years of
hard work and trial and error, Nolon had created a device that could
_detect_ orichalcum ore at a distance.

The mechanism itself required a significant amount of the meta-metal,
as well as considerable skill to construct, and the greater the
distance over which such detection was desired, the more of both was
necessary. The ProtoAthenian independence movement, knowing all too
well that the orichalcum monopoly was the key to Atlantis' control of
the world, was prepared to take a risk. It was a huge risk, even the
suspicion of what they were doing would have brought down the military
wrath of Atlantis in overwhelming force, but it was a risk they were
prepared to take.

In a city along the Great River, which we know as the Nile, the
ProtoAthenians constructed a huge version of Nolon's invention, an
effort that required many repeated attempts. The bearings, the gear
trains, the precision of construction necessary, all challenged the
skill of the artisans, the moreso because of the need for extreme
secrecy. Diverting sufficient orichalcum for the project was the
greatest expense, greater than all the other monetary costs together,
but the cost in time, effort, and secrecy was nearly more than the
independence movement could manage. Almost, but not quite.

The great detector was completed in 4801 BC, hidden within a great
warehouse near the docks of the river city, three great rings of metal
acting as the mount for an orichalcum 'needle' that was fifteen meters
long and ten centimeters thick. In theory, however, it should have
been sufficient to detect orichalcum anywhere in the world. Of
course, even after this proved to be the case, it required practice
and skill to learn to interpret the results the device produced. At
first, the Great Detector tended merely to oscillate through a few
degrees of vertical, pointing groundward. Though they could not know
this, the device was detecting the raw orichalcum of the planet's
inner depths, especially the liquid outer core of the planet. It took
Nolon months to work out a way to make the device 'ignore' these
readings, after he realized in an approximate sort of way what was
happening.

Once they learned how to 'tune' the device only to the surface layers
of the planet, it tended invariably to swing around to point to the
northwest, directly at Atlantis. Again, Nolon had to work out ways to
'tune' his creation to ignore the orichalcum of the Island. Then to
the dismay of of the independence movement, it took some time for the
device to detect any other large mass of the meta-metal. Almost all
the orichalcum in the Earth's accessible crust was in Atlantis.
Almost.

As Nolon refined his device's sensitivity, he discovered that it
sometimes pointed to the northwest even when tuned to ignore Atlantis,
it swung what way in a more than statistically likely percentage of
the time when the 'needle' was allowed to swing free. As he refined
the device and increased its sensitivity, he found that the new
readings were coming from a different direction than the readings from
Atlantis had, further north and not quite so far to the west.
Eventually, Nolon realized that the only two places likely to be in
line with the bearing were the Lesser Land of Ice (Greenland), and the
Northern Isle (Iceland).

Constructing smaller versions of his Great Detector, Nolon led secret
expeditions to the lands near the North Atlantic, taking bearings and
triangulating the location of the posible orichalcum ore, and by this
means, and eventually by means of a personal expedition, Nolon led his
ProtoAthenian patrons to the only other significant mass of orichalcum
ore above sea level, the only one of note outside Atlantis, along the
exposed Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the Northern Isle.

It was a discovery with the potential to change the world.

MORE LATER.

The scale of what the discovery of extra-Atlantean orichalcum meant is
hard to convey, since the modern world has no equivalent single
resource so utterly critical to industry, trade, travel,
communication, and military power. Petroleum would be the closest
modern-day equivalent, and the equivalance is only marginal, the 21st
century is far less dependent upon petroleum than the late
Antediluvian Age was upon orichalcum. The entire Atlantean empire was
based on the orichalcum monopoly, and that monopoly had now been
broken, or at least, the potential to break it, after many centuries
of failed efforts, had been demonstrated.

Of course, the potential was not the actuality. There were many
problems standing between the Resistor alliance and their goal of
using the orichalcum from the Northern Isle, both internal and
external. To begin with, the cabal in ProtoAthens had to operate in
_extreme_ secrecy, they dared not risk involving more than the bare
minimum of personnel even from their own alliance, because even a
_whisper_ of the truth getting out would have meant the deaths of all
the members of the cabal and likely a world-rending war that would end
in defeat for the Resistor Alliance.

From the ProtoAthenian point of view, the new orichalcum was very
inconveniently situated. Though the Northern Isle was little visited
and mostly a backwater, it was still a relatively short distance from
Atlantis proper, within easy reach of the vast Atlantean naval and
aerial power, and far from the centers of power in the Resistor
Alliance. It was hopeless to attempt to hold the Northern Isle by
force, only stripping the entire Alliance of its armed strength would
have offered even a chance of securing the Northern Isle, and it would
have left the Alliance states defenseless to make the attempt. The
idea of seizing active control of the orichalcum in the Northern Isle
was rapidly dismissed by the leaders of the independence movement.

The only plan that had any hope of working, the leadership of the
cabal concluded, was to quietly, secretly mine enough orichalcum to
secretly arm their troops and prepare for war, and eventually, after a
long period of quiet preparation, present the Speaker and the
Atlanteans with a _fait accompli_ of Resistor independence. It was an
approach fraught with heavy risks, extreme difficulty, but it was the
only plan that looked as if it might work.

Thus is was that men began to secretly, very quietly, in twos and
fours, travel toward the Northern Isle. Some travelled through North
America, some through northern Europe and some by sea from Africa or
South America. A very few even travelled there across the Arctic,
from northern Asia and what would someday, in a far distant age, be
northern Canada. A small, secret mine was opened, a shaft mine being
dug under careful camouflage. This slowed the work, and matters were
made the worse because the miners, though experienced in mining other
metals, had never mined orichalcum and were unfamiliar with the
difficulty involved in TL2 and TL3 mining. The necessity for secrecy
meant that they could not even use the conventional steam age
technology readily available elsewhere.

Still, these men were highly motivated, intelligent, and the ore was
relatively rich, compared to the remaining ore in Atlantis proper. By
4795, ore was being moved out along a hidden route through the wilds
of the Northern Isle. This involved indirect routes, moving the ore
in small loads mostly by night, sometimes actually using tunnels
through rock or ice. Tiny boats picked up the ore, and moved it to
the coasts of what would later be called northern Europe, and smuggled
amid loads of ordinary metals through the densely populated region.
[1]

The ore was refined, under heavy secrecy, in the mine of carefully
paid-off and reliable Svarts. [2]

The refined ore was then shipped in secret through a variety of hidden
routes, blinds, and smuggling methods until it finally came to rest in
a number of hidden staging areas spread across Europe and Africa.
Some of the transit routes ran along the coasts of the new Black Sea,
where resentment over the Drowning of Livicia remained deep. Some ran
through classic (for the age) smuggling routes along the northern
Mediterranean, still others were shipped openly as orichalcum. This
last technique involved using clandestine orichalcum publicly,
enabling the diversion of 'above board' orichalcum to covert use
elsewhere. The leaders and operatives of the independence movement
showed enormous amounts of ingenuity in their work, and bit by bit
they did succeed in building up a small stockpile of orichalcum.

In all this secrecy was ultimately important. The cabal enforced
secrecy with ruthless, indeed draconian methods, it was made clear to
those 'in the know' that leaking would be lethal. Unacceptable
personal associations could be lethal. Bad judgement could be
lethal. More than one conspirator was executed simply for getting
drunk in public, for ex, because drunk people sometimes say things
they should not. One member of the cabal would have been executed
because his brother married a well-known Loyalist, except that the
cabal was able to kill the brother and his wife instead. [3]

All this was necessary, because the Quaestors and the spies of the
Atlantean rulers were all too capable, and becoming steadily more
ruthless themselves with the passage of time. This was partly a
function of the growing despotism of Atlantis' rulers, but also
because the supply of orichalcum was being strained as never before
because of the Great Work. Pressing a limited supply of a vital
commodity had its usual effect on the price, and when that price was
already astronomical, it had the effect of straining the entire global
economy.

About that Great Work...MORE LATER.


Shermanlee


[1] The ore in Iceland was never close to as rich as the ore in
Atlantis _had been_, but by the fifth millennium BC the accessible ore
in Atlantis had been heavily mined out.

[2] One of the side-effects of the rise of the Destiny Movement, and
the dictatorship of the Speakers of Atlantis, was a deterioration of
relations between Atlantis and some of the Svarts of Europe. This
made some of the highly isolationist Svart towns amenable to cautious
secret alliances with ProtoAthens.

[3] Of course, the executions were made to look accidental, or like
mundane murders or suicides.

LATER.

The Great Work. That's a fairly literal translation of a word in the
ancient language of Atlantis, a word applied to the larger 'public
works project' in the history of the Antediluvian Age. It was a
project implemented by the Destiny Party and the Speaker, through
their rubber-stamp Circle of Ten, the largest single effort of the
Atlantean government in the history of that state. Behind the scenes,
the Unity and Sharondra, it's chief agent, were prime movers in the
activity, with their own agenda. The Great Work was a project of
years, involving the entire government, every branch of the Atlantean
military, resources from every continent, and all the wealth and
resources that the world-wide empire of the Atlanteans could muster.
All this was none too much for the scale of the effort.

Recall that the Atlanteans had developed a technology we have called
the paralens, a device that concentrated and focused the Flux to make
it more readily available and accessible to Human fluxons. [1]

These devices also 'stabilized' the local Flux, 'calming' the Matrix
and making it safer to access the power of the Flux. Every major city
in the empire was dotted with hundreds of these paralenses, forming
the center of the industrial and economic system of the world. The
paralenses made each major city of the empire zone of high but
paradoxically safe Flux activity. Likewise major military bases and
other high-importance facilities were equipped with paralenses. The
volume of effect was always limited, however, a few miles beyond the
edge of any Atlantean city, on or off the Isle proper, and the local
Flux conditions reasserted themselves.

Paralenses came, broadly speaking, in two general forms. The most
common form took the form of an ovoid of what looked like lemon-yellow
glass, heavily faceted and covered at either end with metal caps made
of a special orichalcum alloy, an ovoid between two and three meters
long on the long axis. There were tens of thousands of these devices
in existence by 4795 BC, spread across the world, in every city ruled
by the Atlanteans. The precise design and exact performance of these
devices varied slightly, but the above description fit them as a
general matter.

There were also more potent versions, which the Atlanteans called by a
name that would translate reasonably well as 'grand paralens'. They
looked very much like the smaller versions, but these devices were
developed later and were much larger, approximately ninety meters on
the longest axis of the ovoid. They were similar in function to the
smaller version, but orders of magnitude more powerful. They could
increase the Flux Rating of regions miles in diameter all alone, and
amplifed by arrays of smaller paralenses they could boost Flux Ratings
for whole cities to the point that even a minor Flux skill could be
used for a huge variety of effects. Though the orichalcum these
devices incorporated was fantastically expensive, the paralenses were
the _sine qua non_ of the entire global economy in by the 4700s.

The Great Work was, in its simplest incarnation, an attempt to take
this Flux technology a huge step further. The Atlanteans wanted to
extend their amplified, stabilized artificial high-Flux zones to cover
the entire surface of the planet Earth, making their highly refined
Flux abilities orders of magnitude more useful. The Atlanteans had
also devised theoretical ways to control which individuals could
access the amplified Flux potential, restricting it to Atlanteans,
whille leaving others with lower levels of power or even just the
natural 'background' levels to draw upon. The rulers of Atlantis had
some suspicions that their Flux secrets were leaking to rival powers,
and were taking steps that they hoped would render this leakage moot.

The Unity, for its collective part, had its own plans for this
enormous new source of power. The Unity could not, itself, wield the
power of the Flux, though it greatly desired to do so. The Flux
skills the Atlanteans had perfected were based around _individual_
minds, and not directly adaptable to the sort of collective intellect
tha tmade up the Unity. Though it was certainly _theoretically_
possible for the Unity to use the Flux directly, as of 4795 BC it had
made no real progress toward this particular goal.

On the other hand, the Unity did have enormously gifted fluxons under
its control, bound to it by chains of money, fear, mental influence
and trickery and a number of other things as well. The amplification
of their abilities was potentially of great use to the Unity.
However, the Unity also had deeper and more secret plans involving the
Great Work.

The Great Work itself was years in the planning, and more years in the
execution. The plan was to construct an unprecedented number of great
paralenses, no bigger than the great paralenses already extant but of
an even more sophisticated design. Instead of installing these in
cities or bases as such, they were to be constructed and activated at
carefully selected, critical locations on Earth's surface, arranged in
intricate geometric patterns across the face of the planet, at
locations of high natural Flux activity, or low background count, at
places where local conditions affected the Flux in subtle ways, or in
places where the Flux was naturally active for its own reasons. The
calculations necessary were of exquisite fineness, the alignments with
each other had to be perfect to within millimeters, across tens of
thousands of miles of distance. The long axes of the new great
paralenses had to be in perfect alignment with the center of the
Earth, to within a tiny fraction of a second of arc, and they had to
_stay_ that way for the entire system to operate properly.

The calculations had to allow for literally thousands of factors, some
of them minute, some huge, all crucial for the Great Work, but the
calculations were the _easy_ part. The difficult part was the
physical execution of the calculations, and of course obtaining the
orichalcum necessary for the Great Work to be completed. This was by
far the hardest aspect of the matter, so much orichalcum was necessary
that it was straining the global economy, the government was buying,
confiscating, extorting, and otherwise squeezing orichalcum from every
source they could track down, the black market price of the metal
reached such levels as to impoverish entire regions, but still there
was never enough to keep the Great Work on schedule. Piece by piece,
paralens by paralens, the project did go forward, however.

The long-term goal was simple to state, but almost inconceivable to
execute: when finished and activated, the Atlanteans' Great Work
would use the very crust of the Earth, the planet's outer shell, as a
focusing array, the planet itself would act as the greatest imaginable
paralens, raising Flux density and stability and accessibility to
undreamed of levels, for those who would have access to that power.
[2]

Thus, the Resistor's discovery of orichalcum in the Northern Isle
corresponded to a raise in demand unprecedented in the history of the
Antediluvian Age.

MORE LATER.

[1] In game terms they raise the local Flux Rating and apply high
bonuses to success roles on the part of fluxons.

[2] In game terms, the project was intended to raise Flux Ratings
world wide to +5 or higher, without the dangers normally inherent in
such Flux intensities.

The Great Work was controversial for a number of reasons, the critics
ranged from master fluxons disputing the technical details of the
execution of the project, to aristocrats and politicians who
questioned the cost and benefits, to rivals who resented the awesome
resources being poured into the Great Work (and thus not into their
own preferred priorities), and also included those who questioned the
purposes of the work, the desirability of such concentrated power in a
few hands, or the sheer safety of the utilization of so much power on
such a scale. These last often pointed out that the Great Work,
however sound it might be in mathematical theory, nevertheless
represented an implementation of theory orders of magnitude larger
than anything tried previously, and also involved some aspects of
basic Flux theory that simply had never been given any small-scale
test.

Yet another criticism aimed at the Great Work was that it involved
taking a significant amount of the world-wide orichalcum supply and
locking it up, more-or-less permanently, in the immense, sophisticated
great paralenses that would be the anchor-points of the new system.
With the mines in Atlantis now producing only a tiny trickle of new
orichalcum each year, this meant that the Great Work was taking a
sizeable chunk of a finite and almost incalculably valuable resource
out of circulation, essentially permanently. There were many who
considered the inherent cost this implied to be greater than the
possible benefits of the Great Work.

The Atlantean society had never been democratic _per se_, not as
modern Westerners understand that concept, anyway. Throughout the
huge majority of Atlantean history, it was ruled by the Eldest, an
immortal, immensely powerful individual monarch, who governed for
thousands of years on end. Secondary and local power was mostly in
the hands of the Eldest's mortal, but very long-lived, offspring, who
functioned as viceroys, more or less. There was some mortal
representation in the system, but the central power was never
elective. After the murder of the Eldest, through brutal civil
warfare and trial-and-error, the characteristic form of Atlantean
government came to be the aristocratic republic. Again, though power
was dispersed among various groups and families and centers, and the
balance varied from one Atlantean state to another, it was never what
modern Westerners would think of as democratic.

This made it difficult for the opponens of the Great Work to
successfully made their objections felt, because now the government of
the central state in Atlantis proper, and the majority of the colony-
states, had been captured by that movement we have called the Destiny
Movement, and thus the real political power now lay in the hands of
unofficial officials, such as the Speaker. The opposition, even
within the Loyalist states, was fragmented, at odds with each other,
and relatively easy to marginalize. When some especially effective or
well-connected leader emerged in opposition to the Great Work, the
usual counter-move by proponents was to 'wedge' the opposition, buying
off or otherwise co-opting some particular faction. This was rarely
hard, because the opposition included many large groups and powerful
individuals who were opposing the Work entirely on self-interested
grounds. Often, the only thing necessary to 'wedge' the opposition at
any given time was simply to pick an amenable member and apply a large
infusion of money, openly or more often in secret.

Sometimes, more extreme measures were necessary, but the Destiny
Movement and its ruthless leaders rarely hesitated over a mere murder,
much less blackmail or bone-breaking. The public culture of the
Atleanteans had degenerated enormously under the slow, steady,
invisible pressure of the Unity, compared to the time a few centuries
earlier, corruption was a way of life. Of course, the late Atlanteans
did not think of themselves as being corrupt, they tended to see
themselves as simply pragmatic or practical, looking back at their
ancestors' moral and philosophical traditions with no little
amusement. The result was much the same.

Of course the opposition could attempt to make us of the same
techniques, and they certainly did make the attempt, but they were at
a huge disadvantage in terms of their resources of money, power, and
influence. One of the practical upshots of the moral decay of the
Atlanteans was to leave those who did have money and power at a
tremendous advantage, and leaving those relatively lack such with few
or no tools to fall back upon.

The Great Work cut across the Loyalist/Resistor divide, for reasons
both political and practical. The very _nature_ of the Great Work
required that it be implemented in far-flung locales around the world,
determined by the physics of the Matrix/Flux and the geology and
chemistry and psychic status of the planet Earth. Nature cared no
more then than it does now for Homosentient convenience, the
requirements of the Great Work gave no heed to political, social, or
religious boundaries, the great paralens installations had to be
installed where they had to be installed, or the Great Work would
simply fail to function. This meant that the installation of the
Great Work had to be performed in both Loyalist states, which was a
straightforward matter, and in the Resistor states, which was
politically and socially fraught.

Of course, the Great Work also required considerable amounts of work
in non-Atlantean regions, including some that were very hostile to the
Atlanteans. Here again, nature made its demands, and the Atlanteans
had to work within those requirements. In some places, it was
possible to buy off or intimidate the locals sufficiently to do the
necessary work, in others, force was necessary. In some cases the
local powers were weak enough relative to Atlantis that only modest
‘small wars’ were necessary to achieve the necessary access. Other
societies, though, were strong enough to be a serious challenge to the
Atlanteans, especially in their own homelands, which by the nature of
the matter was where the issue had to be decided.

By far the worst case of this category was Goravia, in far eastern
Asia. A powerful, cohesive, and well-governed society, with a
powerful army and technology not impossibly far behind that of the
Atlanteans, the Goravians were far from the centers of Atlantean power
and had mastered enough Flux knowledge to be able to match the
Atlanteans at their own specialties, at least well enough to be
troublesome. Though Goravia had only limited sea power, and could not
hope to challenge the naval or aerial might of Atlantis beyond their
own borders, now the Atlanteans needed access to sites well within the
heartland of Goravian power. It was a challenging problem for the
Atlantean rulers, and it was a problem that _had_ to be solved if the
Great Work was to be successful.

The Goravians proved to be unamenable to diplomatic pressure or
bribery. Their rulers were adamantly opposed to the extension of the
Great Work into their Asian heartland, the commoners, though not
always in accord with their rulers, were solidly behind them on this
matter, doubt of, suspicion toward, and often hatred of the Atlanteans
were well-ingrained into Goravian culture by this point, often with a
solid foundation based in the actions of the increasingly-corrupt
Atlanteans. Both the rulers and the ruled in Goravia recognized, well
enough, that the Atlanteans' power, already enormous, would become
unchallengeable should the Great Work succeed. Realizing that the
Great Work _could not_ succeed without access to the necessary sites
in Goravia, the Goravians came to see balking Atlantis on this matter
as an issue of basic interests, of their ability to live outside the
rule of the foreign and disdained Atlanteans, indeed perhaps an issue
of basic _survival_.

Tensions rose as the incompatible aspirations of the Goravians and the
Atlanteans came into conflict in the early 48th Century BC. The
pressure was increased by time considerations, the Great Work
necessitated not only that certain specific locations be utilized, but
that they be done in a certain sequence and pattern, since each
installation had to interaction with others around the face of the
world in a complex, carefully calculated pattern. Thus the bottleneck
in Goravia as interfering with the Great Work elsewhere, because work
on installations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas began to slow to
a halt because the effort could proceed no further until the
facilities in Goravia were ready, that part of the world-wide pattern
was essential to the rest.

It was clear to most observers on each side that war was now fast
becoming inevitable. By 4790, the work in South America was slowing
because of the stalled effort in Asia, by 4788 the effect was being
felt around the world. The Great Work was slowing, the project
slipping behind schedule, and this in turn made opportunities for
opponents to make more mischief. The vast resources of money, power,
skill, and manpower diverted to the Great Work could not sit idle for
long, it was economically and politically impossible. The bottleneck
_had_ to be removed, if the Great Work was to proceed.

The Goravians, meanwhile, considered that completion of the Great Work
would be contrary to their core interests, and many intelligent and
thoughtful Goravians believed that completion of the Great Work by the
Atlanteans could and probably would mean slavery for Goravia, and
perhaps worse, given the visible decline in Atlantean morality, the
rise of viscious blood sports, a world-wide slave trade, and a
tendency toward what could only be called malice in the highest
circles of the Atlantean government.

Insatiable ambition and political necessity on the Atlantean side was
set against basic fear for freedom and survival on the part of the
Goravians. There was little space for compromise, and neither was
prepared to yield, and in the northern spring of 4787 BC, the tension
reached the point of open war.

MORE LATER.

The decision to go to war came with more reluctance in Atlantis than
one might have expected, given the domination of the Destiny Movement
and the radicalism and corruption associated with that movement.
There were a variety of reasons why the rulers of Atlantis were
reluctant, ranging from some remaining moral qualms in a few quarters,
to the fear of the economic, social, and political disruptions a large
war would inevitably bring, to the practical military-based fears of
the command staff of the Atlantean forces. Though on paper Atlantis
was vastly stronger than Goravia, in practice there were a number of
reasons for professional caution on the part of the experienced
military personnel of the Atlantean Fleets of air and sea.

For one thing, Atlantis was far stronger at sea and in the air than
she was on land, while the vast empire of Atlantis certainly _could_
field large land forces, some of them well-equipped and well-trained,
those land forces were spread out across the entire empire, on
multiple continents, and answerable directly to various colony-states
and indirectly to the central command authority in Atlantica City. To
assemble these forces into a single coherent army, properly trained
and equipped and answerable to discipline from central command was a
large project. To transport these armies across the world to Goravia
was a logistical nightmare. Yet this was inescapably necessary
because the coming war with Goravia would of necessity be a land war
fought on the enemy's home territories, halfway around the world from
the center of imperial power on Atlantis proper and the coasts of the
Atlantic Ocean.

Recall that the lands of the Goravian culture were to be found in
eastern Asia, roughly corresponding to what our age calls the lowlands
of eastern China, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese home
islands. Like the much later Chinese societies, the Goravians were
organized around the great river valleys and rich farmlands of the
lowlands, and they were the richest and most powerful and advanced non-
Atlantean culture of the early 48th century BC. Though they were not
the equal of Atlantis in technology, they were not far behind, and
though they utterly lacked most of the native Atlantean psi faculty,
they did have enough Flux knowledge to wield considerable raw power.
With a large population and a solid agricultural base, they were able
to field a large and highly motivated army, and their naval power,
though not world-spanning, was significant in their local waters, they
had enough of a fleet to make a naval battle in their home waters
potentially quite expensive in blood and treasure, even for Atlantis.

In air power the Goravians were far weaker, their 'air force'
consisted of a handful of aeremes decades behind the state of the art,
with half-trained crews, in this area Atlantis had a tremendous
superiority. It should be remembered, though, that Goravia existed at
the end of vastly long supply chains, with the vast Pacific Ocean on
one side and a huge and hostile continental interior on the other
separating them from the primary power of Atlantis. The closest
Atlantean colony-states were in the Forali lands [1] and separated by
mountain ranges from the Goravian heartland. The Atlanteans
controlled most of the islands of the Pacific, but the Pacific is
vast, the space between the islands immense. Atlantis had many colony-
states and military bases on the west coast of what our age calls
North America, but once again the vast distances of the Mother of
Oceans lay in the way of bringing that military strength to bear on
Gorava.

The closest major Atlantean naval base was on an island the Atlanteans
called Kaltak, south of the great easternmost archipelago of Goravia.
[2] This was primarily a wet-navy base, host to over one hundred
Atlantean warships, it existed there in part as a threat to Goravia,
in part as a defense against Goravia extending their nascent naval
power toward Atlantean holdings in the Southlands. [3] Along with the
naval power stationed there, the Atlanteans maintained a large airbase
and a force of twenty heavily armed aeremes.

The reluctance of the Atlantean commanders was compounded by the utter
impossibility of acheiving stratetic surprise and the near
impossibility of achieving tactical surprise. Every informed person
in the advanced world knew that the Great Project could n ot be
continued without access to the key locations in places such as
Goravia, and it was also equally clear that the Goravians had no
intention, then or ever, of granting such access. They simply did not
see it as being in their own vital self-interest, producing a
diplomatic impasse. Even as it became clear that war was inevitable,
and the Atlantean military planners began assembling assault forces in
places such as Kaltak, Mylinar [4], and the northern coasts of the
Southlands, the planners knew that those preparations could not be
hidden and their meaning could not be mistaken. The Goravians knew
they were coming, and would have time, a significant amount of time,
to make defensive preparations.

Yet the preparations were unavoidably necessary. While it would
certainly have been easier, faster, and 'safer' in a way to launch a
quick, surgical surprise attack, this would have availed nothing. The
Atlanteans did not need a simple concession from Goravia but rather
permanent, reliable access to various key locations deep within
Goravian territory, as well as access to local resources of people and
raw material for the Great Project. It was to be a war of invasion
and conquest against an established, advanced power, not a 'little
war'. The complications were enough to make veteran military planners
in Atlantis shudder when they contemplated them.

The Goravian leadership, for their part, were no more sanguine about
what was coming. If the Atlanteans were nervous at the prospect of
attacking an established and advanced power like Goravia, the
Goravians were in the position of defending against an attack force
sent out by the world's strongest and most advanced nation. The
Goravians were about to be defending against the military machine that
had already conquered half the world, and they knew all too well how
desperate their position was likely to be once the combat started.
Atlantis surpassed Goravia in wealth, population, military power,
technology, and psionic ability, and though Goravia was not helpless
in matters related to the Flux, their knowledge and skills were far
from equal to those of the fluxons of Atlantis.

Goravia did have a few allies, though.

MORE LATER.


[1] What we would call the Indian subcontinent.

[2] Our age calls Kaltak 'Okinawa'.

[3] Our age calls the Atlantean Southlands 'Indonesia', 'Australia'
and 'New Zealand'.

[4] Our age calls Mylinar ‘the Hawaiian Islands’.

LATER.

No major power dared ally with Goravia _openly_. Atlantis was too
powerful, militarily and economically, to take such a risk. At the
same time, however, those powers still independent of the empire knew
that Goravia was by default their champion, by far the strongest of
the 'independent' societies, for Goravia to fall was not in the
interest of the lesser independents. Thus various other powers did
_quietly_ assist the Goravians during the time before the hostilities
commenced, with smuggled resources, back-channel information and
intelligence, and money. Money was funneled to Goravia by a variety
of hidden pathways, especially during the last two years of hostile
peace, and money is always useful to a realm facing war.

Even more secretly, such armed forces as the other independent powers
could spare were moved into Goravia to reinforce the large Goravian
army, under false colors and false covers. No other power could spare
any significant number of infantry, not on the scale of this war and
Goravia's large army, but trained fluxons, along with specially
trained forces, special 'types' of forces, could be spared to make up
for gaps in the Goravian line of defense. In _deep_ secrecy, plans
were laid by Goravia's silent allies to sabotage Atlantean lines of
communication and supply, to distract the Atlanteans at key moments,
and generally do whatever seemed workable to hinder (in secret) the
Atlantean war effort. The Atlanteans, for their part, had their
suspicions about all this activity, but could prove little, and the
more pragmatic leaders of the Atlantean war machine knew that this was
just part of the 'lay of the land'.

Even more secretly, the Goravians had some unofficial allies _within_
the Atlantean empire.

The Resistor Alliance had been waiting for decades for a chance to
break free of central control, and if ever such a moment was to come,
the approaching war with Goravia looked like a probable time. There
was considerable sympathy for the Goravian cause in the Resistor
states, _especially_ in ProtoAthens, and this added to the pragmatic
considerations of realpolitick to drive secret efforts to assist the
Goravians against a central government which the Resistor states had
come to see as hostile and foreign. Yet so dangerous was this effort
that _utter_ secrecy had to be maintained for the sake of survival.

The secret alliance between Goravia and ProtoAthens was fantastically
cautious on both sides. Goravia distrusted the ProtoAthenians because
they were, ultimately, of Atlantean derivation. The ProtoAthenians
feared that their secrets would be betrayed to their hated overlords
in Atlantis proper. The dealings involved multiple layers of shells
and 'cut-outs', and a great many diplomatic circumlocutions and
cautious horse-trading. Goravia and ProtoAthens needed each other,
however. The Resistors were never likely to have a chance at
independence better than what a failed war against Goravia might
provide. As for Goravia, alliance with ProtoAthens offered access to
Atlantean knowledge, skills, and technology otherwise unavailable,
access to psionically powerful assistance, access to Flux knowledge
beyond what the Goravians themselves had mastered, and of course one
more especially vital commodity: untraceable orichalcum.

The ProtoAthenians were careful to reveal not the slightest _hint_
that they had discovered access to a supply of orichalcum outside
Atlantis. From their point of view, the Goravians certainly had no
need to know about that! The Goravians, for their part, were not
about to question where the small but steady flow of orichalcum from
ProtoAthens was coming from, they suspected it was somehow pilfered
from legitimate Atlantean sources, but they did not care as long as it
kept coming, because orichalcum was _vital_ to the defense effort,
every gram of the material was a precious help. During the two years
of hostile peace that led up to the onset of open warfare, the
ProtoAthenians were able to route small amounts of orichalcum to
Goravia by a variety of secret pathways.

In this secrecy they succeeded, one of the things the Atlanteans
thought they knew that was not actually so was how much orichalcum the
Goravians possessed. With every ounce of the metal so carefully
tracked as it emerged from the mines, the total world supply was known
to the Atlanteans down to an accuracy of kilogram or so. Though they
might lose track of some of the substance from time to time, they
knew, or thought they knew, how much there was overall, since all the
orichalcum in the world came from the island of Atlantis. This in
turn enabled the intelligence personnel to make what they thought were
solid, well-founded estimates of how much orichalcum the Goravians
could _possibly_ have, to within a very narrow range.

Because of the discovery of the deposit in the Northern Isle, and the
elaborate, secret, circuitous routes by which it was moved, the
Goravians had access to nearly a ton of the metal that the Atlanteans
did not suspect. This metal was hidden in caches or used in weapons
and defenses, supervised by a small group of Goravian officials sworn
to utter secrecy on penalty of death by torture. It was one of the
key secrets of the Goravian war machine, and one of the few things
that gave the Goravians a certain amount of cautious hope as the storm
drew close.

For two years the tensions rose, both sides preparing steadily for war
while making a pretense of negotiating an impasse. Finally, on April
18th of 4787, on a bright spring morning, the Atlantean attack began
in earnest, with Atlantean naval and air forces engaging the Goravian
navy and attacking coastal fortifications. So great was the Atlantean
naval force that came against Goravia that it was able to engage the
Goravian navy with sufficient ships to spare to assault the coasts at
the same time, while Atlantean aeremes flew inland, taking the battle
to the regions behind the coastal defenses. The Final War had begun.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

The Goravians were not caught by surprise, they had been well aware
that an attack was coming, all that was in doubt was the day and the
hour, and they had their sources in the Atlantean ruling circles that
narrowed down the range of possible times. What did catch the
Goravians by surprise was the sheer _size_ of the Atlantean attack, so
many ships approached the coasts of Goravia that the Goravian navy was
fully occupied, and there was enough excess naval force to push onward
and engage coastal defenses on both the mainland and the Great
Archipelago [1] as well. The Atlanteans had managed to assemble a far
larger fleet than the Goravian intelligence officers had ever
suspected, and to position it for attack without giving away its
presence. To be sure, the ships were not all capital scale, but there
were enough of them, and htey were heavy enough, to rapidly overwhelm
the first lines of defense.

At the same time, Atlantean aeremes pushed inland, bringing the war
behind the coasts, and if there were far fewer aeremes than naval
vessels in the attack force, the Goravians had no real air force to
counter them, either. The majority of the aeremes were 'bombers',
designed to hover over a battlezone and attack the Goravians from
above, or troop carriers able to deliver as many as 500-1000 Atlantean
soldiers to an inland strike site. The effect of the later was
especially devastating in the first 24 hours of the war, enabling the
highly trained and psionically powerful Atlantean air-assault soldiers
to be placed right on their targets, leaving the numerically superior
but far slower Goravian defense forces hours behind.

Within 48 hours of the first engagements, which came at local dawn,
travel between mainland Goravia and the Archipelago was interdicted,
and firm beachheads had been established on the coasts of mainland
Goravia in a dozen locations, and more Atlantean forces were coming
ashore. The first line of defense had crumbled, overwhelmed by the
surprising size and sheer superiority of Atlantean power in the first
waves. Though the Goravian defenders outnumbered their attackers by
large margins, _each_ Atlantean attacker was psionically powerful,
training in combat using those abilities, backed up by naval and air
control, superior technology, and operating with vastly superior
command and control. At the end of the second day of fighting, the
defenders were falling back on most fronts.

The Goravians were neither overwhelmed nor vanquished, however.
Though caught by surprise (badly!) by the scale and intensity of the
first attack, they had known it was coming and their military
leadership were competent, they were all too aware that they probably
could not stop the Atlantean landings. Thus most of the coastal
forces were under orders to retreat rather than suffer crippling
losses, either to the largest and heaviest coastal citadels, which
continued to hold out, or, more preferably, inland to join up with the
large reserve forces stationed between fifty and two hundred miles
back, while inflicting as much punishment on the enemy as they could
during a fighting retreat.

In the event, though the sequence unfolded faster than expected, it
followed more-or-less the expected pattern. The Goravian naval
forces, rather than stand and risk annihilation, retreated to hidden
redoubts or the open ocean, and the Atlantean navy secured the local
waters and the landing sites, and support ships began to land and
unload reinforcements and supplies. It was at this point that the
Goravians inflicted a surprise in return on the Atlanteans.

The surprise came in midmorning of the fifth day of the war, as the
Atlanteans were assembling their forces on their captured coastal
bases for a major inland push, at about local midmorning. The
Atlanteans were caught entirely off guard by the sudden rain of multi-
ton shells onto their ships and fortified positions. The Antediluvian
Age was certainly familiar with gunpowder and heavy ordinance, but
these shells were beyond anything the naval ordinance or land
artillery of the age could handle. [2] Each of these 'shells' massed
approximately 100 metric tons, most of them struck their targets with
flawless accuracy, and they arrived with impact velocities far above
normal artillery. Each impact on a ship tended to immediately disable
it (if the ship was very lucky) or sink it (usually). Impact on a
land fortification usually smashed it to pieces, collapsing
underground chambers and crushing surface structures.

The 'shells' came flashing out of the sky so fast that they glowed
white-shot with friction, and the time gap between perception and
impact was too short for the stunned Atlanteans to do anything to
defend themselves, and the objects kept coming, and coming, and
coming, hour after hour. Huge warships and supply ships were sunk by
the dozen, land-assault forces were scattered by impacts on their
assembly points and fortifications, enormous quantities of supplies,
ammunition, and equipment that the Atlanteans had staged ashore were
destroyed, and the efforts of the Atlanteans to defend themselves were
singularly futile at that time. They did not even understand the
exact nature of the attack, and they had no real idea of how to
successfully counteract it.

Once they realized that a succession of such objects was coming in.
the Atlantean military ESPers could detect them several seconds ahead,
but so much momentum accompanied each huge 'shell' that even strong
psychokinetic gestalts were usually unable to meaningfully interfere.
Occasionally a strong group of talents were able to use PK to deflect
the course of a shell slightly, to make it miss the target, but even
this was an exception. Attempts to stop or deflect the objects
directly did not work, there was just too much energy in play.

After three straight days of this shelling, the Atlantean attack force
was in disarray, over three quarters of the naval power that had been
sent against Goravia was sunk or wrecked, and the land forces that had
made it ashore were scattered, though not totally disorganized. At
last, though, the shelling slowed and stopped, and the remaining
forces in the field began to regain their order. Just as the
defenders were not entirely overwhelmed by the initial Atlantean
success, the attackers were not entirely repelled by the Goravians
defense. Both sides were bleeding and exhausted after just a week of
war, but both sides remained viable.

MORE LATER.


[1] The Great Archipelago of Goravia is known to our Age as the
Japanese Islands.

[2] Actually, the 'shells' should technically be called 'shot' since
they were pure kinetic weapons.

LATER.

The Atlanteans, for their part, were stunned by the weapon the
Goravians had wielded against them. While gunpowder and heavy
artillery were known to the Antediluvians, nothing they had ever
fielded, nothing _any_ military of that age had ever fielded, utilized
(approximately) one hundred ton shot, nor did any known weapon
technology enable such awesome impact velocities. When they retrieved
the 'shells' from the ocean floor or bombarded land areas, the
Atlanteans discovered to their amazement that the 'shells' consisted
basically of masses of rock with a thin sheath of metal, in the form
of a sphere. There was nothing more to the devices, they relied for
their tremendous destructive potential on their mass and the enormous
velocity at which they impacted.

In fact, the Goravians had developed an entirely new application of
Flux science. Though their overall Flux knowledge lagged well behind
that of the Atlanteans, this did not prevent them from developing
specific unexpected applications, and sometimes the sophistication of
Atlantean psychic science caused them to miss options that depended on
raw brute force type applications. This was such a case.

Working in the mountainous interior of the continent, hundreds of
miles from the coast, the Goravians had prepared for the coming
invasion by constructing a combination weapon, an array of 'cannon'
which combined mundane and Flux techniques to enable them to hurl
spheres of rock, massing over 100 tons, into the upper atmosphere, and
then to steer them downward to a precise target. The Flux could also
be used to protect them from the effects of atmospheric friction
throughout most of their ascent and descent, surrounding the objects
with a 'slippery' protective field that only gave way as the 'shell'
was approaching the target. This both enabled the shells to strike
their target at far above 'terminal velocity' but prevented them from
being destroyed by atmospheric friction due to either their awesome
launch velocities or their fast return to the lower levels of the
atmosphere. [1]

Ironically, the Atlanteans had experimented with some very similar
techniques in their efforts to propel an object to escape or orbital
velocity, but had never pressed the techniques very far, and never
really considered their military applications. The Goravians, with
their backs to the mountain walls and facing slavery, had been more
highly motivated and quite prepared to copy ideas from their enemies
for their own uses.

The Goravians could not keep up a perpetual bombardment, however,
because their own fluxons had limits and it took time to prepare the
weapons, aim them, and maintain them, and ammunition had to be mined
and prepared with its metal coating. The emplacements in the
mountains had plenty of ammunition stockpiled, but the fluxons had to
rest, and it was dangerous to tap the Flux too often or too
repetitiously. Still, they had managed to break what could have been
a crippling initial blow, giving the retreating Goravian army time to
regroup, assemble, and turn a rout into a solid fighting retreat that
was making every mile of Atlantean advance costly.

Now the Goravian Navy revealed that their own orderly retreat from the
battlezone had not been random. The admirals of the small but capable
Goravian navy had their contingency orders, and they now began to
harry the Atlantean supply lines, raiding the troop and supply
carriers, striking at commercial shipping and disappearing, even
raiding coastal cities and territories of the Atlantean Southlands at
times, and they had a secret weapon of their own. The Goravians had
been experimenting with a secret technology for many years, once they
had not even shared with their secret allies in the Final War.
Goravian sages had been studying the structure of matter, and
perceived possibilities missed by most of the science of the age in
the general preoccupation with the psychic and paraphysical. They had
discovered much about the relationship between light waves and the
structure of matter, and discovered that it was possible to
artificially generate some forms of light that were far below the
frequencies the human eye could perceive.

The existence of these invisible frequencies of light had long been
known, but had been seen as a secondary issue by most sages of the
age. The Goravians had learned to generate and detect such forms of
light, and to communicate with them. In short, the Goravians had
invented radio. It was, by the standards of the 21st Century AD, very
crude radio...but it was radio, and the Goravian navy was now using it
to coordinate their ships at sea in their constant harrassment of the
enemy.

It's difficult to overstate how important this was, one of the great
advantages of the Atlanteans in any war in that Age was that their
telepathy enabled them to coordinate their forces with an ease and
reliability and precision that nobody else could even _begin_ to
match. The Atlantean Navy could communicate by telepathy across
hundreds of miles as easily as they could converse in person, no other
power had any means of communication from ship to ship or ship to
shore faster than a heliograph, save for the occasional natural psion
or rogue Atlantean. The Goravians, for the first time, could
partially match the Atlanteans at command and control, and the
Atlanteans had _no idea_ of the principles behind this ability, or
even that such a thing was possible.

The Goravians knew very well how crucial this secret was, they took
dire measures to make sure it did not fall into enemy hands. Only a
handful of officers on any ship knew what their radios were or how to
use them, none knew the operating principles. Matching techniques
were used on land, and those officers with access to the secret were
expected not to permit themselves to be captured.

As the War went on, the Atlanteans gradually secured most of the
coastlands, but their efforts to push inland, both on the mainland and
in the Archipelago, stalled, especially where coastal lowlands gave
way to hilly or mountainous terrains. The Goravians fought
tenaciously, drawing on resources long prepared, and were able to
throw back the Atlanteans in assault after assault, at tremendous cost
to their attackers in terms of both blood and treasure. But the
Atlanteans were still coming, and both sides were being drained by
what was rapidly becoming the bloodiest combat in half a century.

MORE LATER.


[1] Absent this protection, the shells would have behaved much like
meteors of comparable mass (albeit with lower velocities).

LATER.

As most of the world's attention was occupied by the ongoing and
bloody Goravian campaigns, other matters were going forward that were
in their own way important, some of them taking advantage of the
secrecy and distraction afforded by the Final War. One such project
was unfolding far from the usual haunts of men in those times, indeed,
it was happening in what might well be called the most remote place on
Earth in the Antediluvian Age.

Then as now, the continent surrounding the planet's south rotational
pole was a vast, icebound desolation, visited but never settled. The
Atlanteans (and other seafaring peoples) of the age did not even
maintain any permanent stations or bases, partly from lack of interest
and partly because their paraphysical technology was not really suited
for such a thing, and their 'mundane' technology was not developed
along those lines. Sages did occasionally visit in pursuit of
scientific matters, but the Antarctic was never as much studied or
commanded as much interest from that civilization as it would from our
own in a later age.

Now, though, humans came to Antarctica in secret, during the endless
daylight of the southern summer in the year 4786 BC. They came in
secret, aboard a small flotilla of ships that _officially_ were part
of a commercial activity thousands of miles away, their actual errand
covered by layer upon layer of deceptive paperwork and false trails.
They came to the south, and broke through the icy barrier around the
continent, powerful psionic abilities aiding the specially-built ships
in punching through to the actual shore of the continent, where a
small temporary base was established in one of the few dry, rocky
valleys of Antarctica. This was a temporary base, a place to prepare
their expedition inland.

The expedition inland was a challenge in itself, but their goal was
some modest distance from the coasts, within the vast icelands. In
fact, their destination was a mountain, rising partly out of the
surrounding terrain like a shard of rock somehow floating in an ocean
of ice. The ice of Antarctica covers almost all of the land mass, and
can be well over a mile deep. Lying icebound for millions of years,
the southernmost continent nevertheless is not without change. The
ice does move, and at times mountain peaks are exposed and then buried
again, and it so happened that this modest peak was revealed at that
time.

It so happened that this mountain was a volcano, though it had laid
dormant for tens of thousands of years at this time. The Atlanteans
who came to this place most certainly knew the nature of the mountain,
but they cared little, their interests were not scientific in nature.
What attracted them here was the available solid rock of the mountain,
a place where they could engage in an excavation operation unhindered
by the miles-deep ice surrounding the site in all directions. This
they did, choosing a hidden ledge from which they could delve a deep
tunnel into the side of the cone, cutting hundreds of feet into the
rock. Then they began to delve out a network of underground chambers
and passages around the inner end of the first tunnel, lining the rock
with metal and other artificial materials, laying out chimneys through
the solid rock by which fires could be vented, and generally preparing
an underground base of remarkable extent for such a remote locale.

In the end, three years were required to finishing delving out this
remote Enclave, because construction work had to stop for the
ferocious Antarctic winter, which was quite beyond the resources of
the construction crews to endure. By the time the endless winter
night fell across the site of the Enclave, the miners and builders had
to be long gone, returned to the warmer, kinder latitudes in which
winter was merely challenging rather than unendurable. With the
return of the Sun each year came the return ot the work crews to
continue digging and preparing this distant outpost.

Delving the passages and chambers was only the beginning, another five
years was required to finish the Enclave to the point that it could be
considered 'ready to use'. This time came in the late southern summer
of 4778 BC. When the work was done the crews that had prepared the
outpost received a surprise, instead of the high pay for which these
skilled laborers had been contracted, they were rewarded with a sudden
mass murder. The men and (and a few women) who had built this remote
base, with the precision and ability of skilled Atlantean artisans
that they were, were murdered and their bodies disposed of on-site.
Their employer had no wish for anyone to know about this remote
facility, and dead men tell no tales. Covers stories were ready,
friends and relatives and acquaintances had no idea of what had really
happened, the supposed storm-driven loss of the ship carrying them
back to their homelands was a tragedy, to be sure, but few if any
suspected anything untoward about the story.

Though none of the murdered workers knew this, they had in actual fact
been working for the Unity, through a variety of shells and false
fronts. Now that the facility was in place, the Unity began to stock
it, with supplies of preserved food, with weapons, with libraries of
rare or useful books and information, with unique and irreplaceable
items of a variety of sorts, with records and tools, with whatever the
Unity could think of that seemed likely to be useful. This facility
was the Unity's 'ace in the hole', its hidden base, its emergency fall-
back point, a place to shelter, to hide, to make a last stand if it
came to such a thing.

Thus the iron secrecy of its construction, and the draconian measures
taken to preserve that secrecy.

MORE LATER.

LATER.

Now comes the time when we must turn out attention to a small
archipelago of limestone islands to the south and west of Atlantis.
In a later time, this cluster of islands would be known as 'Bermuda',
and in the late Antediluvian Age, it was the site of the primary
research and development complex of the dominant guild of master
fluxons, having been so for almost two centuries, after the
suppression of the rival Flux orders in the Great War of Assassins.
In the ensuing years, what had been a research and study complex in
some ways similar to a modern university had grown, and grown, and
grown, as the importance of Flux technology in civilized life and
military affairs had grown. In 4785 BC, the entire archipelago (which
then consisted of somewhat fewer, larger islands, due to he slightly
lower world sea levels of the time) was dedicated either directly or
indirectly to the work of the guild. Those inhabitants who were not
directly involved with the guild were there in one or another sort of
supporting role, the whole carefully supervised from Atlantica.

The paralenses that were the _sine qua non_ of the technological and
industrial base of the Age were conceived, invented, perfected, and
now were manufactured in Bermuda. [1] The millions of small
paralenses and the hundreds of Greater Paralenses were all constructed
here, assembled by master artisans and incorporating the precious
orichalcum from Atlantis, shipped to Bermuda in heavily escorted
freighters with the heaviest security in the empire. Now that the
Great Project had begun, the new Greatest Paralenses required for its
implementation, and much of the supporting technology for them, were
also being assembled in Bermuda, which was now busier and more heavily
inhabited than it had been in its entire history.

Over one hundred thousand people called Bermuda home, making for
crowded conditions. All the larger islands were heavily built up, and
a major naval base was also present, to support the protective cordon
of warships and aeremes that constantly guarded this nerve center of
Atlantean power. Unlike the colony-states, Bermuda was governed
directly from Atlantis, and legally was considered to be part of the
great Isle. All legal and political authority in Bermuda in that age
flowed from the assigned Quasetor, who was in turn answerable in
theory to the Circle of Ten directly, and in practice was always a
personal retainer of the Speaker. Access to Bermuda was restricted
more tightly than to Atlantis proper, the only place on the planet
where this was the case.

Along with the constant work of assembling the paralenses and other
equipment for the Great Project and general use, there was an ongoing
R&D effort in Bermuda, organized and carried out by some of the most
brilliant minds of the age. It was in 4785 BC that a breakthrough was
made, after some decades of development effort, and the symbiotic
crystal was finally perfected. [2]

These devices made both psionic and Flux skills far more reliable and
effective, and were widely coveted. Though no orichalcum proper was
required for their operation, that is, they contained none of the
precious extradimensional metal, orichalcum was required for their
creation, and they were fantastically complex, making them rare and
expensive (and highly restricted by law). The first few symbiotic
crystals produced in Bermuda went to the highest ranking master
fluxons of the order, to some of the highest ranking governmental
officials and aristocrats of Atlantis, and to a handful of highly
connected VIP types. Only about thirty symbiotic crystals were
produced in the first year of their availability, and after that the
production rate fell somewhat due to the other demands on the
resources of Bermuda and to the sheer difficulty of creating these
devices.

The fact of the existence of symbiotic crystals was not secret, but
they were utterly beyond the reach, beyond the hope of reach, for the
vast majority of all people, even in Atlantis, and distribution
outside Atlantis and Bermuda was strictly forbidden, with rather
draconian penalties for violation.

Even as the symbiotic crystals were being developed, the researchers
were going further, using the same basic engineering techniques to
attempt to createa more sophisticated Flux/psi devices. (The
underlying physics of psi and the Matrix/Flux are the same, so the
same techniques were adapatable to both, within limits.) This would
prove to be of vital importance as time passed and events moved toward
their coming confluence.

MORE LATER.



[1] The people of that age did not use the name 'Bermuda', of course.
We shall do so for our own convenience.

[2] This is _mostly_ the same thing as the device described in GURPS
3e Psionics, see related thread for details.