“The volcanic vents. We got that.”
“Literal, if not very poetic. There’s also what looks like ‘earth sky fire,’ whatever that means.”
“Sky fire—lightning?” Chase suggested. “Or an aurora. You get them at the South Pole, right?”
“Yeah,” said Nina. “But ‘earth’ seems like a modifier. How would you get an aurora in the earth?”
“I have no idea.” Sophia tapped the picture. “But there’s more here about these mysterious ‘beasts.’ Apparently, the Veteres brought them along to Antarctica.”
Chase snorted. “Well, that scores a ten on the stupid-ometer.”
Nina’s response was more thoughtful. “These beasts were a threat they were trying to escape … but they brought them along anyway? And then gave them God’s gift?”
“Thought that was me,” Chase said, grinning. Both women ignored him.
“It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense,” admitted Sophia. “What sort of gift could you give an animal that would arouse God’s wrath?”
Nina shook her head. “Unless it was a Jesus chew toy, I can’t think of anything, either.” She picked up the lidar image. “I just hope that whatever it is, we’ll find out down there tomorrow.”
“Feet dry at oh-seven seventeen,” Larsson announced.
The BA609 was retracing its journey from the previous day—and, somewhat to Nina’s annoyance, with the same passengers. Baker and Rachel were going with Trulli to locate and recover Cambot, but why Bandra had insisted on coming along, other than to add to his ever-growing list of grievances, she had no idea.
Still, so long as he didn’t do anything to interfere, she could tolerate his presence. And the fact that he had let her take the front seat was a small sign of his acceptance of her authority, however grudging.
She donned her sunglasses and looked ahead. The location of the ice field and the crevasse was immediately obvious: a cloud of spray was still rising up from the latter, drifting west in a long plume.
“Okay, first thing,” said Trulli from behind her. “We need to see if Cambot’s still in the same place. Pehr, swing over the ravine and take a look.”
Larsson transitioned to hover mode, descending into the ravine. The hole through which the water was still gushing was somewhat larger than it had been the previous day, a section of the ice cliff above having sheared off as the escaping jet ate away at it. Through the spray, Nina could see fallen chunks of ice strewn everywhere, water flowing past them toward another, lower plain in the distance.
“All right!” Trulli exclaimed. “Cambot’s still where he was yesterday.” He pointed; Nina spotted the robot wedged against the other side of the canyon, encrusted in ice and frost.
“Looks like it’s frozen in,” said Chase. “Bring any pickaxes?”
“Better than that, mate. Got some gas!” He patted a red metal cylinder in one of the cargo racks. “We can just melt the ice right off him, no worries.”
Larsson ascended and circled the previous day’s landing site to look for signs of the ice’s having been weakened by the draining lake. No new cracks were evident, but he still landed cautiously, leaving the rotors running until he was sure the plain wasn’t going to drop out from under them.
The team made their way back to the drill site. Trulli and his assistants had detached the cables from the submarine by remote control and reeled them back in the previous day, so the manhole-sized opening had completely frozen over. However, it was plain that the water level had lowered beneath it; the ice covering the shaft was semitranslucent, revealing a circle of darkness below. “Shouldn’t take long to break through,” Chase decided.
“How are we going to see how low the water is?” Nina asked. “I don’t suppose you brought another robot with you, Matt?”
Trulli placed a heavy insulated pack on the ice and unzipped it. “Afraid not, but I’ve got something that’ll do the job. Bit crude, but it’ll work.” He took out a small digital camcorder in a plastic housing designed to protect it from the cold and wet. “We’ll just lower this on a string! If I set the gain for low-light conditions, it’ll give us an idea of how big the cavern is as well.”
“Quite the bricoleur, aren’t you?” said Sophia.
Trulli gave Nina an uncertain look. “Is that good?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” she told him, raising an eyebrow. “She actually complimented someone. I don’t know if you should feel honored or worried.”
“Put it this way: I wouldn’t let her pat you on the back,” Chase added.
Baker used one of the gas cylinders to melt through the ice capping the shaft. Frozen lumps dropped into the darkness below. Splashes followed, but only after a few seconds, and quite faintly.
Trulli rigged up his improvised probe, setting it to record before lowering it down the shaft on a length of line marked with red stripes at three-foot intervals. Nina counted them off; the camera passed sixty feet with no trouble, clearing the bottom of the shaft. Ninety feet, one hundred and twenty, and then below the roof of the chamber proper. Trulli paid the line out more slowly. The camera housing would float; as soon as it reached the surface, the line would go slack. One hundred and forty-seven feet. One hundred and fifty, one fifty-three …
“How deep was the lake?” Chase asked. “Must be near the bottom by now.”
“About sixty-five feet,” said Nina. “So nearly two hundred feet below us, more or less.” She checked the line again. One hundred and sixty-eight feet, one seventy-one—
“Whoa,” Trulli said. He hesitantly lowered his hands, then raised them again until the line became taut. “That’s it, we’ve reached water. Just under one hundred and seventy-four feet.”
“So less than twenty-six feet still to drain?” Nina asked. “It’ll be empty sooner than we thought.”
“The drainage tunnel must have got wider.” He raised his hands farther. “Okay. Hopefully, if I swing it a little bit, the camera’ll turn enough to get a three-sixty of the cavern. Then I’ll pull it back up and we’ll have a look.” He slowly twisted the line in his hands, then began the laborious process of returning the camera to the surface.
Once it was recovered, he removed it from the housing and opened its LCD screen, then rewound the recording to the point at which the camera had cleared the bottom of the ice dome. With the water gone, the amount of light coming through the ice was quite surprising. At the bottom of the screen, Nina could see the lake’s surface, the current clearly visible as the water surged toward the hole drilled in the base of the dam. Knowing the depth of the remaining water gave her a sense of scale that the sub’s cameras had failed to provide. The dam was indeed quite an impressive structure, making up for in sheer size what it lacked in complexity.
So what about the city?
The camera continued to descend, still swinging, but to her growing irritation the image only panned over the dam and the valley sides. She wanted to look up the valley to see what lay at the other end. “Okay, fast-forward, fast-forward,” she said impatiently. The lake’s surface rushed closer; then the camera suddenly tipped over at an angle. “Okay, hold it! The camera’s reached the water. Play it.”
The image bobbed for several seconds before leveling out as Trulli pulled the line taut. Nina held her breath as it swung around. Even though it was barely above the water level, it should still reveal something …
The movement slowed. She almost groaned. The camera was going to swing away again before she saw anything—
“Stop!” she gasped. Trulli froze the picture.
The camera had caught something. Just barely visible, at the side of the picture as the camera reached the end of its lazy sideways swing, was a grainy shape lit by the ice-blue glow from above.
It was a building, so tall that its top disappeared into the overhanging ice, towering over everything around it.
A temple.
She stood, eyes wide with amazement as she faced the others. “We have to get down there. As soon as we can.”
TWENTY-TWO
To Nina’s immense frustration, soon wasn’t soon enough. It took the remaining water several more hours to drain away, hours in which she was reduced to pacing impotently across the ice under the disapproving eyes of Dr. Bandra. Trulli and his team could at least accomplish something in the meantime; Cambot had finally been left high and dry, allowing Larsson to fly them into the crevasse to free the dented robot from the ice. The most she could do was get Chase to lower the camera down the shaft again in the hope of getting a better look at the buried city. But even though subsequent recordings revealed more detail, they were still too grainy and unsteady to do more than hint at what lay below.
She needed to see it with her own eyes.
As Trulli and Baker worked on the winch, Chase assembled equipment of his own, strapping gear to the sled used to transport the submarine. “No idea what’s down there, so we need to be prepared for anything,” he told Nina and Sophia as he secured some smaller items with duct tape.
“A tent?” Sophia asked. “Planning a long stay, are you?”
“Hope not, but if something goes wrong, we might need it. Got sleeping bags, food, a camping stove, climbing gear, first aid kit—useful stuff. Just in case.”
“At least we won’t run out of gas for the stove,” said Nina, tapping a foot against one of the gas cylinders.
“Nah, that’s just in case we find something valuable stuck in the ice and need to get it out without whacking it with a pickax. See? I’m getting the hang of this archaeology business.” He smiled. “And if you’re wondering why I’m putting it all on a sledge, it’s because I’m not carting this bloody lot about on my back!”
Bandra came over. “All this equipment belongs to UNARA, you know,” he said, pointing at a laser range finder Nina intended to use to measure the cavern. “If there’s any loss or damage, you’ll be responsible for it.”
Nina let out an irritated breath. “Let me get this straight, Dr. Bandra. You’ve seen the video, you know there’s something incredible down there … and the biggest thing on your mind is nickel-and-diming me over a couple of boxes of Band-Aids?”
“You’ve hijacked my expedition and treated me with nothing but contempt, Dr. Wilde,” he said. “I consider it a professional and personal insult. So you’ll forgive me if I refuse to go along with your cavalier attitude to the work.”
“Fair enough.” She cocked her head to one side. “So I’m sure you’ll forgive me if when I reveal this amazing discovery to the world I omit all mention of you? After all, you clearly don’t want to be associated with me.”
Bandra looked concerned. “Actually, that wasn’t quite what I meant …”
“No, no, I completely understand,” Nina went on, “and I respect your position. Nobody will know you had anything to do with it.”
“It shows admirable integrity,” Sophia added.
“Your name won’t even be mentioned.”
Bandra glanced at the hole in the ice. “We’ll … discuss this further once we actually know what’s down there,” he said, turning back to the tilt-rotor.
“You enjoyed that,” Chase said to Nina once the expedition leader was out of earshot.
“Yup,” she replied smugly before walking to the hole. The shaft dropped away to a circle of darkness sixty feet below.
Where something incredible was waiting for her. A feeling of anticipation was already rising in her stomach. She was so close to finding out the truth …
By the time Trulli and Baker had readied the winch, Chase had pulled the sled over to them. “All set,” he announced, giving Trulli a walkie-talkie.
“So who’s going down first?” asked Trulli.
Chase looked at Nina. “I ought to, to make sure it’s safe, but …”
“I’m going first,” Nina insisted.
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“I have to, Eddie.” She pointed at the safety harness Baker was securing to the winch line. “Fix me up.”
Chase gave her the other walkie-talkie. The harness was fastened around her, and she moved to the edge of the shaft as Trulli prepared to operate the winch controls. “See you down there,” she said to Chase.
“Be careful,” he replied.
“Don’t plunge to your horrible screaming death!” Sophia added cheerily. Nina huffed, then eased herself down until the harness took her weight. “Let’s go,” she told Trulli.
The winch whined, and she dropped down the shaft.
At three feet wide, the tunnel was claustrophobic, and all the more so with her bulky cold-weather clothing. The ice changed in consistency and color as she descended, the milky whiteness near the surface turning to a glassy translucent blue. Below, she saw the opening getting closer, still nothing but darkness beyond. The temperature was already noticeably lower, prickling at her cheeks.
The walkie-talkie crackled. “You okay?” asked Chase.
“Fine, thanks. How deep am I?”
“Fifty feet. You should be coming out into the open soon. If you start swinging, let us know and we’ll slow down.”
“Will do.” But eagerness had already overcome any discomfort. The bottom of the shaft drew closer, closer …
She was through.
The cavern opened up around her, her eyes adjusting to the strange lighting conditions. The domelike ice ceiling was glossy, lumps and bumps smoothed out where rising warm water from the volcanic vents below had gnawed away at it. Looking down, she spotted drifting steam. For one worrying moment she thought she was dropping right into the vent; then she saw that it was off to one side.
Her excitement rose as she made out structures below in the half-light. The lake had mostly drained. There were still some areas of water that had pooled below the level of the shaft cut through the dam, already freezing over, but most of the cavern was clear.
Which meant, she realized as her descent brought her below the icy ceiling, that she would be able to see what lay at the other end of the chamber.
She twisted on the line, turning around …
The sight took her breath away.
Illuminated by the soft, impossibly pure cyan light coming through the ice above, the city looked unreal. Almost below her was some kind of multilevel construction, small buildings and bridges spanning a maze of catacombs dug out of the ground. A paved road led past it, heading uphill from the dam into the heart of the settlement. Smaller roads split off from it on either side, themselves dividing to form an almost treelike pattern. The “branches” were surrounded by clusters of igloo-shaped stone buildings—just like the ones she’d seen in Indonesia and Australia.
Except these were intact.
They weren’t the only structures that had survived their long entombment. Following the line of the main road, which seemed to be lined with statues, her gaze fell on the temple she had glimpsed on the video screen. In real life it was even more spectacular. Like the other buildings it was circular, but much taller, requiring elegantly curved buttresses to support the walls. Its roof was so high that it actually disappeared into the cavern’s icy ceiling, making it at least sixty feet tall, possibly more—all she could make out through the ice was a vague shadow.
High, thin windows were spaced out on two levels around its circumference, and the main door was equally elongated, close to twenty feet tall. Darkness waited beyond it, ominous—and tantalizing. The heart of the city, the secret of the Veteres, was somewhere within.
There was something else about the temple, which she dismissed as mere decoration before realizing how complex and extensive it was. What appeared to be long lines of copper plate ran up the temple walls from the upper windows, like the road expanding into a treelike pattern—not only flat along the wall but also outward from it. The strange arrangement also disappeared into the overhanging ice. What its purpose might be, she had no idea.
But one thing she could determine was that there was something else behind the temple. Parts of the building appeared to have been cut out of a c
liff face, its summit just below the ice. She looked over her shoulder at the dam. Had it been built to a particular height specifically to cover whatever lay behind the temple?
She put the thought on hold; she was almost at the ground. “Okay, nearly there,” she said into the walkie-talkie. “Slow it … okay, I’m down.” Her boots bumped on the ground, which crackled under her crampons. Everything was covered with a layer of glinting ice and frost, the surface water having rapidly frozen as the lake drained away. She unfastened the harness. Breath steamed from her nostrils; it was much colder than on the surface. “All right, I’m down and safe.”
“What’s it like down there?” Chase asked.
“It’s … it’s kinda wow.”
He laughed sarcastically. “Right, that helps. If you have to get a new job after all this, don’t bother trying to be a tour guide.”
Sophia was lowered down, almost as awed by the sight of the lost city as Nina. The sled came next, followed by Chase. “So, are you absolutely sure this wasn’t built by aliens?” he asked Nina, indicating the glittering, blue-lit buildings. “’Cause that’s usually what stuff buried in the Antarctic ice turns out to be. Just ask Kurt Russell.”
“I don’t know,” Sophia said. “It has a certain Love-craftian air, if you ask me. Perhaps we’ll meet a Shoggoth.” A beat. “Lead the way, Nina.”
Chase chuckled, though Nina was unamused. “No aliens, no Elder Things, no … no flying spaghetti monsters,” she said impatiently, going to the sled. “This was built by people just like us. They just happen to have been around a lot earlier than anyone thought. And if we can get on with it, please, that’s what we’re going to prove.” She unfastened the straps and began taking equipment from the sled.
Chase picked up the heavy-duty, spike-tipped tripod she had just unloaded. “We’re not going to cart this around with us, are we? That’s why I brought the sledge in the first place—so we wouldn’t have to!”
“Oh, yeah. Duh,” Nina said, replacing the range finder that the tripod had been designed to support. “We can do a proper laser survey when we come back. I don’t think we need to know the cavern’s exact dimensions right now. ‘Damn huge’ is near enough.”