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 coordinates. “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 downward. 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 under one thousand feet across,” said Trulli. “Maybe sixty-nine feet at the highest point. Goes right across the valley.”
“Completely blocking it,” Nina mused. “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 be enormously helpful if you could just please be patient. And quiet.”
“This is my expedition!” Bandra hissed in impotent frustration. He stalked off toward 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 around 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. Though it was hard to judge the scale, the blocks seemed 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 around, rising upward 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.”
TWENTY-ONE
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 U.N. 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, her 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 authorize 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 Nina’s 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 adrenaline 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 halfhearted 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 and 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 toward 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 realized 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 afterward. 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. Though 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 sixty-five feet thick, so it should be okay. Three feet 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 more than five feet 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 he’d also resigned himself 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 monitoring 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 feet, 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.
Chase winced. “Bloody hell. Even though it’s a robot, I still felt that.”
Warning signals flashed red on the laptop’s screen. “I think he hit something,” Trulli said, dismayed. “How wide was that crevasse?”
“Eighty, ninety feet.”
Now it was Trulli’s turn to wince. “There you go, then. He just got blown into the wall on the other side. Christ, that waterspout must be bloody powerful.” He turned to look. A cloud of spray rose above the edge of the plain, sunlight glinting off billions of ice crystals as the water began to freeze in midair.
“How badly is it damaged?” Bandra demanded.
“The hull’s still intact, and the internals survived well enough to give us telemetry,” Trulli told him, flicking through different screens for more information. “Looks like we lost the lidar turret and some of the fins, though.”
Bandra glowered at Nina. “I hold you personally responsible for the damage, Dr. Wilde.”
“Bill the IHA,” she told him curtly. The noise of escaping water was a constant thunder, thousands of gallons being blasted out of the shaft every second. But how long would it take to drain the entire lake?
There was no way to know. All they could do was wait for nature to take its course. “I think,” she announced, “that pretty much wraps it up for the day.”
Chase entered the small cabin aboard the Southern Sun to find Nina and Sophia examining photo printouts of the inscription within the buried chamber in Australia. “Ay up.”
“Where’ve you been?” Nina asked.
“Listening to Bandra shout at Matt. Surprised you didn’t hear him down here—he was pretty pissed off.” Chase picked up a page of Nina’s notes. “What’re you up to?”
“Trying to translate the inscription,” Sophia told him.
“Any luck?”
“Some,” said Nina. “We’ve been concentrating on the parts about the city, to see if we can get an idea of what’s down there. For a start, the ‘tree of the gift’ that Ribbsley mentioned? Whatever it was, it’s not unique. The city has one too.”
“And it’s not the only tree they made a big song and dance about. Here.” Sophia indicated one particular section of the ancient text.
Nina looked more closely. “Something about … ‘lowering’ themselves to their god to reach the tree of the gift? Kneeling in supplication, maybe?” Sophia nodded. “Then some stuff about prophets, and a gate to the tree of …” She pointed at the word. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s ‘life,’” Sophia told her. “The tree of life.”
“The tree of life?” Nina repeated, startled. “As mentioned in the Book of Genesis? No wonder the Covenant wants to find it.”
“It was certainly very important to the Veteres—some kind of link to their god.” Sophia pursed her lips. “Interesting that they were monotheistic. Primitive cultures were usually polytheist.”
“Not necessarily. Zoroastrianism dates back to at least the ninth century B.C.”
“They worshipped Zorro?” Chase said, miming the swipes of a sword in a Z-shape. “That’s my kind of religion!”
Nina and Sophia gave each other tired looks. “And you want to marry him,” Sophia said.
“You did marry him.”
“Life is a series of right and wrong
paths.”
“Oi!” Chase protested. “Anyway, this lot aren’t exactly primitive. I mean, look what they built.” He indicated a lidar printout of several dome-shaped buildings, then added, concealing the words with a cough, “Helpedbyaliens.”
“Will you shut up about goddamn aliens?” snapped Nina. She turned back to Sophia. “Does it say anything more about what this tree of life actually is?”
“Not that I can see—or at least that I can translate.”
“You’re doing okay at the translation,” Chase said to Nina.
“I’m a quick study,” she replied.
“Yeah, I know. Keep this up and you won’t even need Sophia.”
Nina arched an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?” Her expression became more suspicious as she regarded the Englishwoman. “You wouldn’t be holding back on anything to keep yourself useful, would you?”
Sophia sighed, somewhat sarcastically. “What would that gain me? My interests are best served by helping you and Eddie.”
“And our interests would have been better served if you’d given me Ribbsley’s notes when I asked,” said Nina. “At least he doesn’t have them, either. Unless that Winnebago had a fireproof safe.”
“That Ribbsley bloke,” Chase asked Sophia, “what do you see in him, anyway? He’s not rich, and he’s not a sexy hunk like me.”
Sophia appeared irritated. “He’s an intellectual equal. Which, of course, you could never appreciate.”
“He’s more on your moral level as well,” said Nina. She looked back at the photos. “If there’s nothing more about the tree of life, what about the tree of the gift? Or the gift itself? Ribbsley said their god punished them for giving it to the beasts, but what was it?”
Sophia’s irritation faded as she concentrated on the text. “I’m not sure. It had something to do with making use of ‘tiny mountains of fire—’”