‘So where does the truly Trulli stuff come in?’ Nina asked.
He grinned. ‘ “Truly Trulli,” ’ never heard that before. Nah, the clever business is all here at the back.’ He patted the spool. ‘See, usually when people do deep ice drilling, they fill the drill shaft with antifreeze, otherwise it ices over in no time. But that’s not really an option here, ’cause as soon as we broke through into the lake, it’d pollute the ecosystem and kill what Dr Bandra’s trying to find.’ He held up the hose. ‘This is the clever bit. It’s basically a length of flexible pipe, but folded back on itself - like when you turn a pair of trousers inside out by reaching down the leg. Only here, the trousers can be however long we want - kilometres, even.’
‘Bloody big trousers,’ said Chase.
‘We run all the control and power cables down inside both layers of the hose - they’ve got a non-stick coating so they slide over the inside of the umbilicus. This way, it doesn’t matter if the top of the drill shaft ices up. But as Cambot goes down, he unrolls more and more of the hose out behind him from this drum here.’ Trulli nodded at it. ‘Once he breaks through into the lake, we disconnect him from the umbilicus so he can swim free. But because we’re still feeding the power cable through to him, he can explore for as long as we want, then recover him by drilling back up through the ice. In theory.’
‘Let’s hope it works,’ said Bandra, as cold as the surrounding landscape. ‘It would be a horrible waste of everyone’s time and money if something went wrong.’
‘Only one way to find out,’ Nina said. ‘How much longer to get ready, Matt?’
‘Not long. Just got to finish the hook-ups, run all the system checks, then we’re set.’
It took him another twenty minutes, using a laptop inside a battery-heated bag to carry out the final checks. ‘All right!’ the Australian finally announced, sitting on a folding canvas chair. ‘Let’s give it a whirl.’
As well as the laptop, the bag contained a control unit bearing twin joysticks and several dials. ‘Stand back,’ he warned as he turned one of the latter. The drill heads rotated reluctantly at first before warming up and spinning more smoothly. He increased the revolutions, checking figures on the laptop’s screen before looking up in satisfaction. ‘Everything looks good. Nina? You want to give the word?’
‘I think it’d be better if Dr Bandra had that honour,’ she said. ‘Dr Bandra?’
He accepted with poor grace. ‘Go on then, Trulli, get on with it.’
Trulli shrugged and operated the controls. The winch lowered the submarine until the whirling drill heads touched the ice. There was a loud rasp, the sub’s nose instantly obscured by spray as it dug into the hardened surface. Nina looked up at the winch frame. The outer layer of the umbilicus was indeed staying still, the slick, shiny inner layer slowly slithering into its open end. The sight was vaguely unsettling, reminding her for some reason of guts.
Cambot was in no particular rush to descend; it took over two minutes before the robot’s cylindrical body completely disappeared from view. Churning water spewed up behind it. But the shaft was already freezing, the exposed surface taking on a glutinous quality with surprising speed.
‘All right,’ said Trulli, checking the readings. ‘Cambot’s cutting through the ice at a hundred and twenty centimetres per minute. So he’ll take, uh . . .’
‘Fifteen minutes to reach the lake,’ Nina told him. ‘Since he’s already covered the depth of his own length.’
‘Thanks. Wish I could do sums in my head like that - it’d save me a fortune in calculator batteries!’
Another round of coffees in the tilt-rotor followed, Trulli waving everyone back to the shaft almost fifteen minutes later. ‘Okay, he’s getting close,’ he announced. ‘The ice is a bit thinner than I thought - must be irregular. Oh, and I wouldn’t stand there, mate,’ he told Chase, who was investigating the now-frozen opening. ‘All the weight of the ice on top of it means the lake water’ll be under pressure. Soon as Cambot breaks through, it’ll come fizzing up like a can of Four-X on a bumpy ride!’
Chase retreated, Trulli also moving back. Everyone stood in a line, anticipation rising. Even Bandra seemed excited. ‘Less than a metre,’ Trulli said, watching the screen intently. ‘But the ice could break any time, so watch out. Half a metre - whoa, there it goes!’
The expedition members tensed, but nothing happened for a few seconds - then the cap of ice over the shaft suddenly exploded upwards as a geyser burst through the surface. It reached over thirty feet in the air, dropping back down in a cloud of spray. The fountain continued to gush for several seconds before finally dying down.
‘And . . . he’s through!’ Trulli said triumphantly. He checked some more readings. ‘Okay, time for stage two. Capping off the umbilicus, deploying fins and releasing Cambot for free operation . . . now.’
He operated more controls, seemed satisfied. ‘Okay, let’s see what’s down there.’
Nina watched the screen as the Australian worked the controls. Trulli had configured one window to show a live video feed, which at the moment showed little but a cyan fog, but the display next to it was more revealing. It was a LIDAR display, similar to the scanning system used on some of his previous submarines, sweeping back and forth a blue-green laser beam of a wavelength that could easily penetrate water. The resulting image was only monochrome, but she could clearly make out the ‘roof’ of ice covering the ancient lake.
Trulli turned the submarine to view the bottom of the drill shaft. The end of the umbilicus dangled from it, swaying languidly as the robot’s movements pulled the other cables through it. The ice surrounding the hole seemed almost to be glowing in shades of blue and turquoise, daylight from the surface penetrating the translucent mass. ‘Okay,’ he said, turning to Nina. ‘Where d’you want to start?’
‘Where did the sub come out?’
Trulli checked the co-ordinates. ‘Near the seaward end of the valley.’
‘By the dam?’
‘If that’s what it is.’
‘Check it out first,’ Nina said. Trulli nodded and guided the sub downwards. As he had thought, there was a large indentation in the ice ceiling, a rough dome formed by rising heated water from a volcanic vent below. It took a couple of minutes for Cambot to emerge into a larger open space.
The blue glow was still present even through the greater thickness of ice, but Nina was focused on the LIDAR image as Trulli steered the sub to the end of the valley. Off to the side, the terrain was steep and rocky . . . but ahead, the slope leading up to the roof of ice was much more shallow and smooth.
‘Is it a dam?’ Sophia asked.
Bandra made a sarcastic noise. ‘How could it be a dam? Antarctic beavers, perhaps?’
Nina switched her attention to the video feed as the sub moved closer. Under the spotlights, the slope’s surface could be seen as loosely packed earth. ‘How wide is it?’
‘Let me get a sonar reading . . . It’s a smidge over three hundred metres across,’ said Trulli. ‘Maybe twenty-one metres at the highest point. Goes right across the valley.’
‘Completely blocking it,’ Nina realised. ‘It is a dam. They built it to flood the valley and hide everything under the ice, just like the inscription said.’
Bandra was getting increasingly irate. ‘What inscription? Who are “they”? Dr Wilde, what is going on?’ He stood face to face with Nina. ‘I demand an answer, right now!’
Chase put a hand on his shoulder. Bandra tried to shrug it off, concern crossing his face as the Englishman’s grip tightened. ‘All right, doc, keep calm,’ Chase told him. ‘You don’t want to get overexcited in a dangerous place like this, do you? That’s how accidents happen.’
‘This - this is outrageous!’ Bandra screeched. ‘Let go of me!’
‘Eddie,’ said Nina. Chase shrugged, then lifted his hand. Rapid puffs of angry breath steamed from the Indian’s nostrils. ‘Dr Bandra, I promise I’ll give you a full explanation soon. But for now, it would b
e enormously helpful if you could just please be patient. And quiet.’
‘This is my expedition!’ Bandra hissed in impotent frustration. He stalked off towards the tilt-rotor.
Trulli grimaced. ‘Well, dinner conversation’s going to be awkward tonight.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Matt,’ said Nina. She looked back at the screen. ‘Turn the sub around, let’s see the valley floor.’
Trulli obeyed, Cambot swinging round and descending. Objects appeared at the limit of the scanning laser’s range. Large blocks, possibly boulders . . . but suspiciously regular in shape. She looked back at the video display as the sub drew closer. It was hard to judge scale, but the blocks seemed large, at least as tall as a person.
But whatever their size, one thing was immediately clear.
They were rectangular. Flat sided. Hard-edged.
Man-made.
‘Keep going,’ Nina gasped. The others reacted with equal astonishment as Cambot continued past the blocks and headed for a new contact on the LIDAR. A wall, curving round, rising upwards to form a dome-shaped building of carefully carved stone . . .
‘It’s the city,’ whispered Nina. ‘The lost city of the Veteres. We’ve found it.’
21
‘You knew it was there all along,’ Bandra said angrily, stabbing an accusing finger at the images on Trulli’s laptop as Cambot continued its exploration. ‘You knew, but you hijacked my expedition to find it! Why?’
‘I didn’t have a choice,’ said Nina. ‘There’d been . . . a security breach at the IHA. Lives were lost.’
‘What?’ Bandra’s expression changed to one of horror. ‘So you decided to put the lives of a UNARA mission at risk instead?’
‘No, because as far as we know, UNARA’s security hasn’t been compromised. Nobody knows we’re here,’ she explained, exasperated. ‘And I didn’t know for sure that the city was here, only that there was a strong possibility.’
‘But now that you do, now what? You can’t get to it! We don’t have the equipment to carry out an exploratory dive.’ Bandra scowled. ‘You may have made an archaeological find, Dr Wilde, but you’ve done so at the expense of another scientific mission - my mission. As soon as we return to the Southern Sun, I’ll be making a formal complaint to the UN about your actions.’
‘You’re entitled to do that, of course,’ Nina said, forcing back her own rising anger. ‘But I’ll ask you to wait until after we’ve explored the city. However we do that.’
‘I most certainly will not wait,’ he told her, seething. ‘You think that a few interesting finds and some TV appearances give you the right to dictate to the rest of us?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she said, voice cold. ‘But I do think that my position as Director of the IHA gives me that right.’
‘What!’
‘The IHA is as much about global security as archaeological preservation. This is now a security issue.’ She put her hands on her hips, regarding him stonily. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Bandra, but you leave me no choice but to invoke my authority and place this site, and this entire expedition, under IHA jurisdiction.’
Bandra’s rage rose to such a level that he seemed about to melt his own hole through the ice. ‘You - you can’t do that!’
‘I just did. And you know damn well that I have the authority, so I’m giving you an order - you are not to contact the IHA, or anyone else, until I authorise it. Am I perfectly clear?’
For a moment, she thought he was going to hit her. Chase took a small but pointed step closer. Lips twisted, Bandra whirled, almost slipping on the ice as he stomped back to the tilt-rotor.
‘Christ, Nina,’ said Trulli quietly, ‘I know he’s a bit of a dick, but that was harsh.’
Sophia, on the other hand, smirked. ‘Nina, I have to admit, I’m almost impressed. I never thought you had it in you. Of course, it would have been much better if you actually had the auth—’
‘Don’t,’ Nina said, stepping almost nose to nose with her. After a long moment under her hard, unblinking gaze, Sophia turned and walked away, though not without a dismissive sniff.
Chase moved up behind his fiancée. ‘Hey,’ he said softly. ‘You okay?’
She faced him, trembling with a mixture of anger and adrenalin from the confrontations. ‘N-no, not really.’
‘C’mere.’ Chase hugged her. ‘You know what? Fuck Sophia, I was impressed. You should have been in the army, you’d have made a decent drill sergeant with an attitude like that. It’d scare the shit out of the new recruits.’
She let a half-hearted laugh escape into the cold air. ‘He was right, though. What are we going to do about the city? We can’t get down there, and the only way we can get the gear and resources we’d need is by contacting UNARA or the IHA - and as soon as we do that, the game’s up.’
‘Worried about the Covenant?’
‘Them, and Bandra. I think that when he finds out I’ve pulled a snow job on him, he’ll try to kill me.’
‘I’ll watch out for you. Against Bandra or the Covenant.’
‘Thanks.’ She managed a small smile. ‘But it doesn’t change the fact that we can’t actually get to the city. All we can do is look at it on a screen - and that’s not going to be enough. We need to get inside it.’
Trulli looked up from the laptop. ‘I, er . . . I’ve got an idea.’ He glanced towards the plane, which Bandra was circling, kicking up snow. ‘Only I don’t think he’s going to like it. But, well, in for a penny, right?’
‘What are you thinking, Matt?’ Nina asked.
‘Well, that dam blocking the valley - it’s just made of soil and maybe some stones, you think?’
‘Probably. If they put it together in a hurry, they’d do it in the simplest way possible - just pile up as much earth as they could.’
‘So it’s probably not going to be all that dense, right? Even if it’s tightly packed, soil isn’t as hard as solid ice . . .’
Nina realised where he was going. ‘Matt! Oh my God, you’re a genius!’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Wait, why’s he a genius?’ Chase asked.
‘Because he can use the sub to drill through the dam and drain the lake!’ she proclaimed. ‘Will it work, though?’
Trulli gestured in the direction of the coast. ‘We saw a crevasse back there, so if I can get Cambot to it the water’ll drain out, but I want to make sure that it’s big enough for us to get the plane into so we can pick him up afterwards. It is a five-million-dollar sub we’re talking about, after all!’
‘If it works, how long will it take to drain the lake?’
‘No idea. I mean, we don’t even know the exact dimensions. But based on the size of the lake from the radar map, it’ll be . . .’ He called up a calculator on the laptop and took off a glove to tap in figures. ‘I’d say at least twenty-four hours. But it could easily be more.’
‘What about the ice?’ asked Chase. He banged a heel on the frozen surface. ‘If you drain the lake out from under it, the whole roof might cave in.’
Trulli looked pensive. ‘There’s a chance . . . but it’s a minimum of twenty metres thick, so it should be okay. A metre of ice’ll support a big truck. There might be some local falls, though. Especially if those volcanic vents are still active. If there’s steam rising, it might melt parts of the ice.’
‘But you definitely think you can get your robot through the dam?’ Nina asked.
‘In theory, yeah. The cable’s easily long enough, and we’ve got plenty of power.’ He looked worried. ‘It’s just that if the dam isn’t just earth, if it’s filled with rocks, then Cambot won’t be able to drill through - and we won’t be able to get him back out.’
Nina put a hand on his arm. ‘You’ve already done a hell of a lot for us, Matt. If you don’t want to risk it . . .’
He pointed at the structures on the screen, entombed below them. ‘Nah, I think it’ll be worth it. Hell, this is easily as big as Atlantis, maybe even bigger. And maybe I’ll get on the cover of
Time with you this time - or at least Popular Mechanics!’
‘So you’ll do it?’
Trulli grinned. ‘Get me a coffee, and I’ll see what I can do!’
As Trulli had thought, the piled soil of the earth dam was indeed easier to drill through than the hardened ice above the lake, Cambot progressing at over a metre and a half per minute. Even so, it still took the better part of two hours before the robot cut all the way through the base of the dam and reached the ice beyond. By this time, Bandra had found out what was going on and become even more livid, but also resigned to the fact that it was an all-or-nothing operation: the only way to retrieve the expensive submarine now was for it to reach the crevasse.
Trulli, Baker and Rachel took turns to monitor Cambot’s progress, the others going back and forth to the tilt-rotor to find respite from the chill wind in its cabin. Nina was idly wondering how much longer the expedition’s supply of coffee would hold out when Rachel, at the controls, waved frantically. Everyone hurried over, Trulli taking back the laptop to check the readings.
‘We’re almost through!’ he said excitedly. Nina watched the screen. With nothing to see while the robot was drilling, Trulli had switched off the cameras, but now he reactivated them. Although the image was obscured as icy slush swept along Cambot’s cylindrical body, the glow of daylight through the ice was clear.
And it was not the blue of deep, thick ice. This was a pure white, coming through only a few metres, if that . . .
A sound like a muffled gunshot rolled across the plain from the direction of the crevasse. The image suddenly flared as Cambot was flung out into the light of day. A blue-white cliff face blurred across the screen before being obscured by churning water. Another crack of ice came from the edge of the plain, almost drowned out by a hissing roar.
The winch shuddered, cables zipping rapidly into the umbilicus as Baker hurriedly pulled a lever to let it run freely. Rachel watched the spinning reel nervously, hand poised over a control on the generator to detach the power line if needed, but then it stopped with surprising abruptness. The view from the video camera jolted violently.