Atlantis Endgame

2002

The Time Agents continue their exploration of Earth's ancient past in their attempts to defeat the Baldies.

Time Agent Gordon Ashe finds himself approached by an old flame from his University days. The woman had been digging on Thera, long known as the site of the historical Atlantis until its destruction by volcano.

What Linnea had found on a student dig could potentially destroy Project Star's hard earned secrecy for what she showed Ashe was a series of pictures of an earring. Not usually something to cause ructions in the quiet world of archaeology. But this earring was unique in that location for it bore a mark that placed its manufacture to a time only a few years earlier.

So, Time Agents had been to ancient Thera, seat of the myths about Atlantis. But to Ashe, the lone earring told an even more personal tale for it was the spitting image of a pair owned by his colleague Eveleen Murdoch. Calling on all the Project's hidden resources projections showed that the influences of Theran civilisation suddenly came to a halt when their island was destroyed by a massive volcanic eruption so many thousand years earlier.

But what if someone wanted to change Earth's history? Theran civilisation was stable and could have lasted for many centuries, but it did not have the expansionist drive of Western Civilisation and the Project's computer projections of Theran civilisation showed the world to be a pastoral place with a low population. Very pleasant to be sure, but a prime target for takeover by... outsiders.

Project Star realised that it's going to have to investigate. Fortunately, things have moved on since the early days of the Project and the Russians have developed a system that enabled the Project to send back a fully equipped team.

With Ashe, the Murdochs and two Greek members of the Project went Linnea, their expert in the time zone they were aiming at. Their biggest difficulty was that they could not be completely sure when Thera had blown up. They could arrive many months, if not years, before the catastrophe, a few months either side of the eruption, or worst of all, right at the time of the eruption with dire consequences for two time zones.

The team get lucky and arrive within a few weeks of the impending final explosion. The regular agents settled into their roles with accustomed ease but Linnea is unused to transferring between time zones and was transfixed by seeing the civilisation she had been digging up living round her.

But its Linnea who provides the team with their first break; the Blue Baldies are in this scenario doing who knew what. As the Terran Time Travellers seek an answer to that question, they are introduced to another set of time travellers!

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