Decipher (51 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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“A gravitational anomaly?” Pearce asked excitedly. “Like maybe anti-gravity? An anti-gravity wave, shielding the earth from the sun?”
“Bob, I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles. You can't shield the earth from gravity,” Hackett said, dismissive. “It doesn't work like that. You can shield against light, electricity, magnetism. You can shield against all that. But you can't shield against gravity. It's not like you can create an anti-gravity wave to cancel the other wave out.”
“Are you sure about that?” Sarah asked provocatively.
“Nope,” Hackett retorted without missing a beat. “Besides, the effects Laithwaite described were time related. The pace of time would be altered closer to the anomaly.”
“Oh shit, talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Destroy the machine and we die,” Pearce said. “Do nothing while the sun goes ballistic—and we still die. Unless we do as the writing says, of course. Follow the instructions and unleash the power of zero.”
“That's a lot of power to be tapping into,” Sarah sighed. “God's own power station. What does Atlantis want it for? You don't just tap into a vast reservoir of energy because you can. You do it because you want to use it for something. What?”
“Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet … Then came flashes of lightning, peals of thunder and an earthquake and violent hail.”
They all turned their attention on November. She was deep in thought, recalling her Scripture. She let her voice grow stronger and more resonant.
“I heard a sound coming out of the heavens,”
she said.
“Like the sound of the ocean or the roar of thunder … And I saw in heaven another sign, great and wonderful … I seemed to be looking at a sea of crystal suffused with fire
…” She smiled, knowing she had their complete attention. “The Book of Revelation,” she said. “The sea appeared frozen like crystal—like my glass of Coke back in the lab, remember?”
 
“My God, is that it?” Matheson asked anxiously. “Could that be it? All those sonic streams pumping acoustic waves around the oceans of the planet? It only takes a frequency shift to start producing standing waves. To start turning the ocean into one giant quasicrystal.”
Hackett held his hand up as he chewed over the theory rapidly. He couldn't see a problem. “It might be,” he said quietly. “It might just be. You can't protect against a gravity wave
per se.
But you can take safety precautions. You want to protect an egg? You put it in an egg-box. You want to stop a flood? You want to stop the seas from swilling around and spilling all over the continents? You freeze the ocean.”
“What about the mantle?” Sarah asked.
Scott was nodding. “That's right. Earth crust displacement. The entire surface of the earth was made to slide across the liquid inner molten core.”
“Well, who's to say they didn't think of that, and that these quasicrystal waves aren't being pumped into the earth's core as well?” November offered. “Make the entire planet one huge solid object for one brief moment.”
“It's zero point energy,” Scott agreed. “It's not like Atlantis needs to worry about where all the energy is gonna come from. It's already been tapped.”
Pearce gave November the most admiring look. “You, young lady, might be a genius.”
November blushed a thank you.
“The only problem I have,” Hackett pointed out, “is that if you pump that much energy into a system, where does it all go afterward? It doesn't just disappear; it had to be removed somehow. That much energy unleashed into a system would wind up causing as much damage as the gravity wave in the first place.”
Sarah shifted on her haunches, aware that the answer was within her grasp. “Of course …” she whispered. “The pyramids!”
“That was mechanical too,” Matheson realized. “Sarah—you're right!”
Hackett wanted further explanation. Everyone could read it in his eyes.
“There was an earthquake in central Africa,” Sarah explained, “remember? Just before I entered the tunnels under the pyramids in Egypt. Somehow the seismic energy was turned into light and some kind of electromagnetic pulse. This energy pulse wound up being circulated around the Giza system before the pyramids shot the energy off up into space.”
“The pyramids,” Matheson enthused, “are release valves! Like on a pressure cooker.”
“Egypt wouldn't be enough,” Hackett said. “You'd need more.”
“Try the Amazon,” Sarah replied confidently. “And China. There are pyramids and ancient sites all over this planet.”
“We're not just talking about a machine the size of a city,” Matheson gasped. “We're talking about a machine that covers the entire surface of the earth!”
“And maybe Atlantis is in stand-by mode,” Scott added. “Maybe the sun's gravity waves alerted the city to a new danger. They woke it up. Maybe it was built to help us. We don't have to shut it off, we have to figure out what to do with it!”
 
Yun could see the remote gun emplacement up ahead.
It was laid on its side, smashed up and buckled, a twisted heap of barely reusable parts. Yun broke into a run, heading around the curve of the wide ice passage before being brought up short by Gant.
“Easy there,” the major warned darkly, eyeing the machine gun lying just a few feet away. “Don't want you getting any ideas now, do we?”
“You don't understand,” Yun explained, as Gant ordered Hillman to inspect the hardware. “This was where I left the rest of my party.”
“Leading us into a trap, huh? Seems someone beat you to it.”
Hillman threw a chunk of debris back down as he stood. “Totally destroyed, sir.”
“Fire fight?”
“Uh-uh.” The marine tapped the wreckage with his boot. “Claw marks.”
Gant was forced to do a double take. Sure enough, three thick gouges had cut into the black gunmetal. Deep and even.
“This is where the spirits attacked,” Yun gulped, surveying the passage ahead with dread.
Gant had been expecting this. “The Golems.”
“Call them what you will.”
And then the Chinese soldier's breath caught in his throat as a chill wind swept through the passage, accompanied by a deep rumbling yawn of a noise, like distant beasts awakening from a slumber.
Yun twisted his head sharply. “They're here …”
Sarah could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. For a moment she thought she was back in the tunnels under the pyramids at Giza.
“I know that noise,” she said fearfully. “We've got company.”
And that's when Scott's radio chirped into life.
“Pack up your stuff. Do your thing on the move, Doc,” Gant ordered. “We gotta get moving.”
There were no arguments from the rest of the team. Bob Pearce was the next to feel it, followed swiftly by the others. The air around them was being filled with some kind of electrifying force. Instinctively they all knew that not only were they
not
alone—they were being watched.
 
They filled Gant in on their theory on the hoof, a double march with guns drawn: Gant at the front, Hillman bringing up the rear. Nobody wanted to stick around.
Pearce concluded his explanation which Gant took in quietly, never asking a question unless absolutely necessary and never poking holes. Constantly on alert. Constantly keeping a keen eye on the pathway ahead. Gant waited for Pearce to finish explaining the team's theory before responding to it.
“Nice job,” he commented. “Very thorough reasoning.”
“Thank you.”
“I just have one question though.”
“What's that?”
“Well, if that's why they built Atlantis … why didn't it work?” Pearce was stunned as Gant continued: “The earth's crust
was
displaced. The earth
was
flooded. Right?”
Scott clamped his eyes shut and shook his head. Goddamnit, none of them had even thought of that. Just why
didn't
Atlantis save the earth last time around?
“I mean, what you've said makes sense,” Gant agreed, “but did it ever occur to you that what you described is what these people who built Atlantis had
intended,
but it backfired? Wound up creating more harm than good?”
“Anything's possible,” Pearce conceded. “Sure, but—”
“But nothing,” Gant shot back. “If ever there was a better reason to find Michaels and retrieve that bomb—that was it.”
Pearce glanced back over his shoulder at the others. Hackett shrugged in response. “The only marine in the whole outfit who knows how to think and
we
gotta have him.”
Sarah nudged the physicist to be quiet, clearly feeling jumpy.
“I know,” November sympathized. “I feel it too. This is spooky.”
The walls of the passage through the ice were odd-looking
too, which didn't help. They weren't weather-worn and eroded like the ice up on the surface. Here it seemed flatter, more angular-looking. It was a feature which had been puzzling Matheson for some time. So when he couldn't resist any longer, the engineer finally took a chance and stepped out of line to make a closer inspection.
Sure enough the ice was translucent. Thinner, like it was covering something within. Something warmer which was melting the ice and causing it to develop this glassy texture.
Taking the small pick that dangled from his belt, Matheson chipped away at the ice. Nothing major, but enough. It didn't take long to get a result and he was surprised when a smooth flat sheet of the stuff came crumbling away to expose the hard, glyph-laden surface of a structure made entirely from Carbon 60.
“Well, I'll be darned.”
A few feet farther on down the passage and there was a darker patch of ice, like it blocked the way to a recess or maybe even an entire other passage.
Matheson couldn't believe his luck.
The others were a few paces ahead of him now, moving on swiftly. He called after them: “Hey! Hey, wait up! I found something! I think we're there!”
But Hillman was the only one who even bothered to glance back as Matheson raised his pick. “We know, Ralph,” the marine snapped. “But we gotta get to a safer area. Yun thinks we're in trouble here, and I tend to agree with him. Now c'mon!”
Reluctantly Matheson lowered his pick and pulled himself away from his glorious find. Completely unaware that behind the dark ice, a pale ethereal-looking face, blurred by the window of frozen water, had moved up to within inches of the engineer to peer out at him.
And blinked …
 
The passage was opening out into a larger area.
Cavernous, but by no means a cavern. A cavern implied an enclosure, a large, but confined space. Whereas the roof on this thing seemed to go on forever. It arched up in a glistening white curve behind them and continued to climb off, up into a greater unseen expanse beyond. For ahead of them,
blocking their entire path, stood a 50-foot-high sheer cliff-face of ice that stretched across from one end of the cavern to the other.
Leading up to the sheer cliff were columns and columns of ice stacks, stalactites and stalagmites. All manner of warped and bizarrely shaped ice sculptures from the relentless build-up of frozen precipitation. Like pillars of salt, or anemic trees, they were made to look even stranger by the fact that the exposed shingle that led in patches all the way up to the cliff, had started to support colonies of lush green moss and lichen.
The party moved in closer and realized the top of the cliff was flattened off because beneath all that ice lay a real structure, one so vast that it beggared belief, but a structure nonetheless that, just like the
kudurru,
glowed.
Light energy pulsed along it, blurred as it was beneath thick layers of frozen water. But as it pulsed, so too did it reveal its very nature.
Like the battlements of some great medieval castle the vast fortress-like outer wall of the City of Atlantis stood before them, shimmering relentlessly. Vast swatches of detail seemed to come and go in fleeting bursts. Patches of swirling spiral-patterned glyphs were revealed. Great arches of inner design, almost Gothic. A whiff of temple.
Its foundations were solid. Its imposing stature unchallenged; in its very center stood its vast and glorious gates, some 20 feet high. And firmly shut tight.
 
“Oh, man!” Matheson exclaimed, running his fingers through his icy beard.
His words echoed across the void of the chamber before anyone realized that they were quickly being swallowed whole by the sound of rushing water, just out of reach. Just over the other side of the mesmerizing city wall.
Scott had his hand cupped over his mouth in wonder, but swiftly composed himself when he noticed Gant and Hillman. The two marines were completely unmoved by the sight, focused instead upon the sense of impending danger.
The rest of the team however couldn't shake their feelings of reverential wonder, even reducing their voices to hushed tones.
“My God,” November breathed. “Is this really it?”
“Atlantis!” Pearce said huskily, coming up next to her. “Just as I saw it.”
But the military men would have none of it.
“C'mon,” Gant ordered, checking his watch. “We don't have much time.”
 
“I wonder if this is how Schliemann felt when he discovered Troy?” Scott murmured as they all marched on toward the towering gates before them.
“Not like this,” Sarah responded, acutely aware something was wrong.
“I can assure you at any rate,” Hackett commented dryly, eyeing Matheson in the process, “that his defining moment wasn't crowned by the immortal words: ‘Oh man!'”
But the engineer wasn't biting.
“I don't like this,” Hillman kept repeating, over and over as they edged closer to the city wall. “I don't like this at all.”
Gant eyed Yun, who appeared to be growing increasingly agitated, saying: “That's just your imagination.” But he knew, like the rest of them, that it was not.
Only Matheson seemed to be in such genuine awe of the place that he was oblivious to any danger.
The gates loomed large and grandiose. Expansive and forbidding in their stature. And as they drew closer everyone started to feel tingles across their skin, a palpable sense of gooseflesh.
It was almost like this place was alive.
Pearce eyed the gates. “What do we do?”
Hackett assessed the situation objectively. “Try the handle?” he suggested sincerely.
The CIA agent did so. “Locked.”
“Great,” Hackett complained. “Anyone see a doormat around here? Maybe they left a key.”
But before anyone could retort, they noticed that Matheson had wandered off. “Ralph,” Sarah growled. “What the hell are you doing?”
The engineer was moving down the length of the wall, eyeing the light show and testing out the ice with his pick. Behind him, Hillman was constantly spinning on his heel, reacting to strange noises that were echoing throughout the
chamber. Sporadic chunks of ice were collapsing down from the cavern rooftop and crashing to the ground.
“This is bad, man,” Hillman kept saying. Whipping himself into a frenzy of anxiety. “This is really bad.”
“Hillman!” Gant barked. “Calm the fuck down!” He shot Yun a look. “This what happened before?”
Yun nodded. “Uncontrollable fear—and then they attacked.”
“Ralph!”
Sarah exclaimed.
“It's okay,” the engineer told her. He swung his pick and carved out a sizable chunk of frozen covering. He grinned as he pulled it away and laid his hand on the smooth surface of the wall beneath. “It's warm,” he said, surprised. “It's really warm.” He put his ear to the wall. “And it's vibrating,” he said, breathless and awestruck. “I can feel it.”
 
When Euler mathematically proved how a sine curve not only affected a plucked violin string, but a two-dimensional surface like a drum skin, the wave equation was born. A mathematical tool that was used in everything from electricity and magnetism to fluid dynamics and sonics.
“Sound has all sorts of effects on the human psyche,” Hackett commented in a barely audible whisper. “Music is innately mathematical, from one instrument to a complex arrangement of instruments in a whole orchestra. It can make us smile, laugh, cry. Mongolian and Tibetan overtone chants are even said to heal the sick. Maybe the vibrations being produced by this crystal were
designed
to induce this intense terror we're feeling, as some kind of warning at an instinctive level.”
“Oh yeah?” Sarah said sarcastically. “Well, it worked.”
“What about this vibration you said the crystal would be using to tap this zero point energy?” Pearce asked, hanging back with the others. Obviously unwilling to go anywhere near where Matheson had decided to work.
“A crystal has a multitude of vibration modes,” Hackett said reflectively. “There's no reason why it can't be doing both at the same time.” He turned to Scott but found him busily engaged in something which seemed frankly puzzling.
“Trying to figure out how to pick a lock?”
“I would,” Scott replied, indicating the gates. “But there's no keyhole—see?”
More gigantic ice columns tumbled to the ground at the far end of the cavern, to which Hillman reacted fast by swinging his gun up and taking aim, his eyes all a-frenzy. But as it turned out, he was facing entirely the wrong direction if he wanted to protect the group.
 
Ralph Matheson made his way down the wall, stood back and noticed some more of those curious darker patches in the ice. Eagerly he began to chip away, convinced that he was onto something. Perhaps he'd even found a side entrance. Two well-placed blows and he'd broken through …
The cavity beyond was dark and odd-smelling. He plunged his arm deep into it and swung his pick, whacking through the ice in several sweeping gestures. Eventually he cleared a large enough area that he could peer through to the other side—and was startled to come face to face with some kind of crystal statue.
“Jesus!” He stumbled back.
The others looked over to see what the crazed engineer was up to this time, and wished they hadn't.
For the statue was mutating. Changing shape and contorting itself until it had twisted into the familiar face of an old Rola Corp. employee. Shorter and stockier than Ralph Matheson, the Golem opened its eyes, produced a crystal cigar and took a fake puff.
“Good to see you again, Ralph,” the statue belched forth in an odd mechanical imitation of Jack Bulger. “It's been a long time.”

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