‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied, ‘but that sounds like something the Covenant would be interested in, don’cha think?’ She gathered up the glowsticks. ‘Let’s find it.’
The library extended for some distance. Nina judged that roughly a fifth of the storage space was empty - which meant that in their flight to warmer climes, the Veteres had been forced to abandon four-fifths of their entire recorded knowledge: an incredible loss to any society. Had they simply sacrificed too much of the knowledge they needed to survive?
They made their way through the maze, eventually reaching the far wall - and discovering the entrance to another room. ‘It’s not a library,’ said Chase, stepping inside. ‘Don’t know what it is, actually.’
Ally-ally-ally . . . his voice echoed back. Exchanging puzzled looks with the others, he raised his torch, and saw that the new chamber’s roof was domed. Nina moved her light across the room. It was circular, with what looked like pieces of machinery spaced around its edge. There was another, larger machine at the centre, a conical copper tube extending upwards from it almost to the ceiling.
‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Sophia, moving to the nearest machine. ‘It looks like a potter’s wheel.’
‘They must have made some bloody weird pots,’ Chase opined as he approached an identical device on the opposite side of the entrance. There was indeed a large wooden wheel at about waist height, a metal rod rising from its centre, but mounted behind it on a hinge was a large copper cone, a thick needle protruding from the narrow end . . . ‘They’re gramophones!’ he exclaimed. ‘Like the one you made in Australia, Nina.’
‘This must be where they played the recordings on the cylinders,’ Sophia said.
Nina went to the chamber’s centre, holding out a glowstick to illuminate the machine there. ‘No,’ she realised, looking up at the copper tube. ‘It’s not where they played them. It’s where they made them. This room . . . it’s a recording studio. Look.’ She followed the tube up to the ceiling, where the interior surface of the dome was marked with odd indentations radiating out towards each gramophone. Even through the ice, it was easy to tell they had been carefully carved into a very specific pattern. ‘The sound of the original goes up the tube to the roof - and then goes outwards to each of the cones around the room. It’s a whispering gallery!’
‘Like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral?’ asked Sophia.
‘Yes, only this one’s designed to send the sound out in multiple directions rather than just to the point diametrically opposite. Pretty sophisticated, even today. The Veteres just keep getting more advanced, don’t they?’ She took a closer look at the machine. Like the others, it had a wheel and a speaker cone, this one angled to point at the mouth of the tube above. Beneath the wheel, she noticed that the vertical axle was wound with fine copper bands. ‘I think this was designed to make copies of existing cylinders as well as recording voices. That’d explain why there was an echo on the cylinders we played in Australia - the recording cones were picking up sounds from other parts of the room.’
‘So this is like a prehistoric iTunes?’ Chase said. ‘Pick your favourite track and they’ll run off copies for you?’
Nina smiled at the comparison. ‘In a way, yeah. Although it might have been more for religious purposes. Just think what it would be like to have an actual recording of, say, the Sermon on the Mount. You wouldn’t need to interpret someone else’s written account - you’d have Jesus’s own words, exactly as he spoke them.’ She bent down, removing a glove to rub the frost off what appeared to be text on one of the copper bands. ‘Although it’d put a lot of religious scholars out of business if everybody could—Ow!’
She jerked back, clutching her finger. At the same moment, a mechanical clunk echoed through the chamber. The wheel of the central machine shuddered, straining against the ice before falling still.
‘What happened?’ Chase asked, hurrying to her. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I just got zapped!’ Nina shrilled, more surprised than hurt. ‘Like a static shock.’ She rubbed her finger. ‘Son of a bitch!’
Chase gingerly tapped the machinery. ‘It’s gone now.’
‘Great,’ Nina muttered. ‘A static charge sticks around for thousands of years, and guess who gets hit by it?’
‘Eddie, turn the wheel,’ Sophia called to them from the machine she had been examining. Chase took hold of the wooden wheel and pulled at it. It only moved fractionally, still jammed by ice - but the wheel of Sophia’s machine creaked in unison. The others did the same. ‘They’re all linked.’
Nina surveyed the room. ‘Makes sense. If you’re making copies, you want them to be identical. If each wheel was manually operated, they’d all be running at slightly different speeds.’ She looked back at the axle. ‘So what’s making it work?’
‘It can’t be electric, can it?’ asked Chase. ‘No way this lot were that advanced.’
Nina looked back in the general direction of the statue, a puzzled frown crossing her face. ‘I don’t see how, unless . . . could they have used earth energy somehow? Those copper things outside the temple - they could be antenna.’
‘Earth energy?’ Sophia asked.
‘That black project you said Callum was pissed off at us for wrecking?’ said Chase. ‘That used it.’
‘It was a way to channel the earth’s own magnetic fields into a weapon, using Excalibur as a superconductor,’ Nina explained.
Sophia raised an eyebrow. ‘Excalibur? Don’t tell me you found that as well.’
‘Yeah, kinda. Long story.’
‘It can wait,’ said Sophia, pointing her torch at an opening across the chamber. ‘Whatever powered all this, it seems to have stopped working - and finding the tree of life’s more important right now.’
Nina reluctantly had to admit they did need to move on from the fascinating chamber. The tilt-rotor had to return to the ship before nightfall, and they still needed to find another way back down to ground level. ‘Let’s see what’s through there.’
On the surface, Trulli double-checked that the walkie-talkie was still working. It had been some time since he’d heard anything from the party below. But the green LED was lit; the radio was fine despite the cold. He was tempted to call for a status report, but resisted. Knowing Nina, she was probably so engrossed in exploration that she’d forgotten the outside world even existed.
He was stuck in it, though, and so were the others. Shrugging to circulate the warmth inside his thick coat, he slowly turned to take in the scene. The BA609 was now parked further away; Larsson had heeded the warning about the dripping ice above the fumarole. Bandra was plodding across the ice from the aircraft, no doubt to come and complain about something new. Rachel and Baker both sat on folding chairs by the winch, huddled together in their bulky clothing like nesting penguins. He noticed they were sharing the headphones of Rachel’s iPod, and grinned. That was one way to start a relationship.
A faint noise, something other than the constant flutter of the wind across the plain. A low murmur. Powerful, mechanical . . .
And growing louder.
He turned again, scanning the sky. White haze on the horizon, the sun still crawling infinitesimally across the empty blue dome—
And something else, moving more quickly. Aircraft. Some way off, but heading towards him. He recognised the type immediately. C-130 Hercules transports, large, four-engined propeller craft. One painted in high-visibility red and white, the other a pale military grey.
The expedition wasn’t expecting visitors. And in the Antarctic wastes, the odds of encountering anyone by chance were effectively zero. Whoever was aboard knew they were here.
Trulli could only think of one group of people who might be looking for them.
‘Nina! Eddie!’ he shouted into the radio, the urgency in his voice immediately catching the attention of Baker and Rachel, who looked at him in concern. No reply. ‘Eddie, can you hear me? The Covenant are here!’
The radio remained silent, the
warning unheard.
24
‘I can see daylight again,’ said Chase, leading the way. ‘Yeah, but will we be able to get out?’ Nina wondered. The crust of ice covering everything in the frozen city seemed to be thickening, icicles hanging longer and lower.
‘Somehow I don’t think so,’ Sophia said, aiming her torch ahead.
They had reached the end of the passage, the cold azure light illuminating the exit . . . and also revealing that it was blocked. Glassy ice covered the arched opening, angling claustrophobically down to the stone floor.
And even if the ice had not been there, getting out might still have been difficult. Nina could make out the silhouette of what appeared to be a barred metal gate inside the archway.
‘Bollocks,’ Chase murmured. ‘End of the line.’
‘We should have brought those gas cylinders with us,’ said Sophia. ‘We could have melted through.’
‘Wouldn’t make any difference. Look how thick it is. Take days to get through all that - even if we could open the gates.’
Nina was more interested in what lay to one side of the gate. ‘There’s something here, in the ice.’ She directed her flashlight at it, trying to make out the objects. ‘They look like bowls, metal bowls.’ A word in the Veteres language appeared to have been painted on the side of the largest.
‘Something here an’ all,’ Chase said from the other side of the archway. ‘It’s another record player.’
‘Weird. Why have one here?’
‘Maybe it’s the gate guard’s iPod.’ He turned his attention to the buried gate. ‘Reckon this is the way to the tree of life?’
‘Well, we had the tree of knowledge, so . . .’ Nina tailed off. ‘Huh. I just realised how biblical that is. In the Book of Genesis, the Garden of Eden contained the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.’
‘The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, actually,’ Sophia corrected, moving back down the passage.
‘Well, you’d know about the second one,’ sniped Nina, before turning back to Chase. ‘That’s kind of a coincidence, though. If it is a coincidence.’
‘So these people might have had something to do with the Bible?’ Chase asked.
‘I don’t see how; the time gap is way too big. Even the oldest parts of the Torah only date back to around the tenth century BC. But . . .’ She frowned, thinking. ‘Some sort of race memory, maybe? An idea that passed down over a hundred thousand years . . .’
Sophia’s urgent voice dismissed her musings. ‘Over here! There’s another room!’
Nina and Chase jogged to her. Behind one of the pillars was a narrow gap in the wall, a low passageway. ‘Can you see what’s inside?’ Nina asked.
‘Only that it’s not very big. I can see the back wall.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ said Chase. He began to break away the icicles obstructing it.
‘Eddie, come on!’ Trulli yelled into the radio. Still no response.
He looked up. The two Hercs had flown overhead, and were now circling back round.
‘It’s probably just a supply flight on its way to Vostok or Dome Charlie,’ Bandra said patronisingly. ‘They didn’t expect to see anyone here, so they’re overflying us to make sure we’re all right.’
‘If they didn’t know we were here, how come they were heading right for us?’ Trulli shot back.
‘Does it matter? Why, are you expecting trouble?’ The Indian scientist’s smirk fell when he registered Trulli’s serious expression. ‘Are you?’
‘Why do you think I’m trying so hard to get hold of Nina and Eddie?’
‘Well - but why would there be trouble over an archaeological find?’
The Australian gave him a look of disbelief. ‘Haven’t you ever read anything about Nina? People are always trying to kill her!’ He gave the walkie-talkie one last try, then glared at it in disgust. ‘The radio in the plane’s got more power - I’ll try to hook this up to it and get through to them.’ Another glance skyward. The C-130s had angled away, turning into the wind. They would pass a couple of hundred metres from the site. ‘I don’t know how they found us in the first place, though.’ Bandra’s expression became shifty. ‘What?’
‘That, ah . . . that may be my fault,’ Bandra admitted. ‘Last night, when we returned to the ship, I . . . I contacted UNARA.’
‘You what ?’ Trulli shouted.
‘I’m the leader of this expedition, not Dr Wilde! I sent a detailed email to New York to complain about the way I’d been treated!’
‘And did you tell them about the find?’ Bandra’s guilty countenance was all the answer he needed. ‘Well, that’s bloody marvellous! You’ve just led the bad guys right to us!’
‘Bad guys?’ Bandra snorted. ‘This isn’t some Hollywood movie!’
‘Maybe not,’ said Trulli, pointing at the approaching planes, ‘but what do you call that?’
The rear cargo ramps of both aircraft had lowered. Men and machines poured from them, white parachutes snapping open to send them drifting towards the frozen plain like a line of dandelion seeds.
‘Get to the plane,’ Trulli warned everyone. He ran for the parked tilt-rotor, clutching the radio.
The last icicles smashed on the cold floor. Chase crunched over them and emerged in the room beyond. He switched on the lantern as Nina came through the low opening, followed by Sophia. ‘Another one?’ Nina asked, seeing one of the primitive gramophones in a corner.
‘Yeah. They really like their decks. But I don’t think that’s what the room’s for.’ He lifted the lantern higher, illuminating one wall.
Nina’s eyes widened. ‘My God!’
It was another inscription, blocks of text scribed into a layer of plaster. But this one featured something the one in Australia lacked.
A map.
It was not an accurate cartographical representation; instead, it was more like a linear account of the various places visited along a journey, what appeared to be coastlines strung out along its length between points labelled with more ancient writing. Nina recognised numbers and compass bearings: the direction and number of days’ sail from each point?
‘The land of cold sand,’ said Sophia, pointing to the symbols at one end of the map. ‘This is where we are now. Antarctica.’
Nina traced the route back. It was apparently a long voyage across open sea to another land - Australia? Then up the coast to . . . ‘That might be the site north of Perth. If it is, then . . .’ Her excitement rose as she continued. ‘This could show the spread of the Veteres culture across the world - if these at the end are Antarctica and Australia, then these other coastlines would be Indonesia, Southeast Asia, India . . .’
‘Which means,’ Sophia said, looking at the other end of the map, ‘this is their origin. The point they expanded from. Where it all began.’
‘God, yes,’ gasped Nina. Heart pounding, she ran her finger along the frosted wall. Westwards from India along the coast of what was now Pakistan, Iran, the mouth of the Persian Gulf . . . which at the time of the Veteres would have been closed off by the lower sea level, the Gulf itself nothing but an inland lake. Along the coast of the Arabian peninsula, another settlement there—
‘Oman!’ Sophia cried, stabbing a finger at the mark. ‘That’s the site I visited with Gabriel eight years ago, it must be. The Covenant had destroyed it.’
‘Looks like they missed quite a few, though,’ said Chase. There were at least a dozen places given as much prominence as the Oman site, and numerous smaller ones.
‘They’re still there to be found,’ said Nina.
‘Unless the Covenant has already found them,’ Sophia pointed out.
Nina’s finger moved faster across the map. ‘They can’t have got them all. Arabia, across the entrance to the Red Sea, up its coast . . . and then they go inland.’ She looked at the others. ‘Into Africa. That’s where they came from. Africa!’ The trail of the Veteres to the coast crossed a river, leading some distance inland back to its origin: three tr
apezoidal symbols, the topmost having four winding lines - more rivers? - running outwards from it.
‘So that’s why their statues look like that one you used to have,’ Chase realised. ‘Same people.’
‘Different times,’ Nina replied. ‘These people had already moved out of Africa at a time when we thought early humans were only just starting to form the most primitive societies, in places like Ethiopia and Sudan.’
‘That would fit with the map.’ Sophia stood, regarding the text above it. ‘The first words here are something like “The journey of the people of God, from . . .” I assume that’s a name. The name of their homeland, maybe. But the first line ends with “to the land of cold sand”.’
Nina looked over the words with her. ‘They left it in case their people ever returned - a reminder of who they were and where they came from. It’s their whole history.’
Sophia read on. ‘More mention of beasts, as well - the word appears quite a lot. They certainly seem to have had trouble with their animals.’
‘Soph,’ said Chase from behind them. ‘That word you didn’t recognise, you think it’s a name, yeah?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it’s here as well.’
Nina and Sophia turned to see him holding his torch over the icy gramophone. Next to it were two of the clay cylinders. ‘So it is,’ said Sophia, looking more closely at the one Chase had indicated. ‘The other characters say . . . I think it’s “the path from”.’
‘So that’s the title of the recording?’ Nina said. ‘The path from . . . from whatever they called their homeland. If we could translate that as well as the whole inscription . . .’ She peered at the second cylinder. ‘What does that one say? Is that “prophet”?’
Sophia confirmed it. ‘I can’t read the other characters.’ She pulled it free of the ice.
‘What does it say?’ Chase asked as she turned the cylinder in her hands.
She looked puzzled. ‘I think it’s “the song of the prophet”.’