Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked by authors_sort

combat that. Or so they‟d claimed. And they‟d won that argument, too. Back before any of the rebels had mobilized. Before quiet stirrings of unrest had solidified into fear, and then concern, and finally defiance.
     
    “Grace?” Sam‟s bushy white eyebrows drew together in a look of concern she‟d seen from him far too often lately. “Penny for ‟em?”
     
    She smiled and shut the cover of her Dell. Time enough later to figure out encrypted messages about supply chains.
     
    “My thoughts aren‟t even worth a penny, not that we have one,” she said, grimacing as she unbent her long legs from underneath the small desk. “Funny how you never think about revolutions needing money. In the movies, the good guys just seem to have a constant supply of shiny new guns and ammo, and they never actually have to eat.”
     
    She walked to the doorway of her cramped office space, part of the officers‟ quarters of the old fort. When they‟d requisitioned the fort for “theater group practice,” the city of St.
    Augustine had been glad enough to turn it over for a monthly fee. Ever since the vampires had shut the fort down as a tourist attraction—apparently it was politically incorrect to celebrate a fort where the Spaniards had once held mass vampire burnings; bet you never saw that in your Florida history books—the city had been operating in the red.
     
    Kind of like the rebels.
     
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    “They never need to take a dump, either. Didja notice that?” Sam asked as he ambled along beside her. “Nobody in movies ever has to go to the bathroom unless it‟s some sort of girly bubble-bath thing.”
     
    He snorted, whether at the idea of not taking a dump or bubble baths, she didn‟t know.
    Probably both. Sam looked and acted like an uneducated redneck when it suited him, but he‟d been a colonel in the army Special Forces back before a new “undead bloodsucker of an ass-wipe general” had railroaded Sam out of the service for insubordination.
     
    “Why didn‟t you ever go into P Ops, Sam?”
     
    He glanced over at her. “What does that have to do with bubble baths, exactly?”
     
    “I‟m sorry. I didn‟t mean to pry. It‟s just that the Paranormal Ops teams would be thrilled to have somebody of your talents, and I‟d think with your background you‟d prefer their organization and structure over our raggedy group. For that matter, you should take over this training mission, and I‟ll be your go-to guy.”
     
    The sounds of excited voices, unmistakably edged with tension, grew louder as Sam and Grace approached the stairs to the upper deck of the building. All the newbies ended up there, and Grace didn‟t blame them. The view was spectacular.
     
    The fort sat right at the edge of the entrance to the harbor, strategically positioned to protect the oldest continuously occupied city in America. Grace had had time to learn some of the history of the area, and it was fascinating stuff. The abandoned gift shop was lined with dust-covered bookshelves filled with various books about the fort, the city, and the military history of the area. Cendoya, the Spanish governor of Florida, had been in charge of building the fort. He broke ground in late 1672, and with a military engineer named Ignacio Daza and labor in the form of soldiers, Indians, slaves, and skilled craftsmen, the work on the fort began. Poor Governor Cendoya died only a few Atlantis Unmasked - Warriors of Poseidon 04
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    years into the project, though, and the fort wasn‟t finished until 1695.
     
    What Grace found most fascinating about the fort itself was the construction of the walls. The beautiful rock, coquina, was composed of tiny seashells that had literally been turned into concrete by the sea itself, as if Alexios‟s sea god had been playing with building blocks as a child. The Spaniards had ferried the coquina on an elaborate system of boats from nearby Anastasia