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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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Jack Bulger swung so fast and with such power that when his rock-hard fist connected with Scott's jaw it propelled the anthropologist through the air, smacking him against the far end of the control chamber.
“I'm disappointed,” Bulger beamed. “I was so looking forward to mashing you some more.” He wiggled his toes, pleased, because by wearing the boots he was obviously not in contact with any expanses of Carbon 60 that would deactivate him. “These boots were made for walking,” he hummed. “And that's just what I'll do.”
He swung again, launching himself at Sarah, but she had already anticipated his attack and moved swiftly to the side.
“You really think they'll let you live?” she challenged him.
Bulger shrugged. “It's not much of an after-life. But it's still life
after
death.”
“You're nothing to them,” Sarah countered. “They're microscopic psychopaths. You won't have a place in their new world order. You're just a programming tool. When you've served your purpose they'll discard you.”
Bulger didn't like that, not one bit. Enraged, he swung again and clawed at Sarah's thick parka, literally tearing strips off her. He threw her to the ground and kicked her hard.
All this, while Scott came to at the far end of the chamber. He couldn't see straight and his jaw was broken: he could feel the bone moving beneath his flesh. But in spite of this he staggered over to try and stop Bulger's attack.
 
 
The Golems were closing in.
Those with sonic weapons tried to keep them at bay, as Gant directed their efforts. But it didn't take long for the automatons to figure out the error of their attack, and instead of sending in one or two effigies at a time, they changed tack—and did what they did best.
They swarmed.
The team loosed their sonic blasts. But those Golems which had taken the forms of Maple and Carver were smart. They grabbed their comrades and used them as disposable shields as they advanced.
November fell back a step, and another, only to find other concerns to occupy her mind. A spring of water had started trickling from one of the protruding mini-glaciers, followed by a second spring. Then a third.
She could hear the cracking of ice all around them. The shaking and violent pounding of swarming Golems was weakening the structure of the entire ice cavern. “This place is collapsing!” she cried. “Look over there!” She pointed to the far side of the city.
The entire rear wall of the ice cavern about two miles away was bowed out where the heat from the volcano had warped the ice. But it was cracking under the extreme pressure now and could hold back the reservoir of water built up behind it no longer.
It creaked and groaned as cracks shot through the ice until ultimately its brittleness betrayed it. The far wall exploded, unleashing millions of tons of fresh water.
Swiftly, other ice formations began to collapse. Huge icebergs were starting to rise up in the distance as the tidal wave headed directly for them. Some hit buildings and burst apart so ferociously, the ice shrapnel shot toward both human and Golem like bullets.
Golems to the left and right were decapitated by flying ice as what appeared to be an entire legion was washed away in the distance.
“Run!” Gant ordered.
“Run where?” Matheson panicked.
“Anywhere! We've got to get out from under this pyramid or we drown!”
But as they all broke into a sprint they too were suddenly
swept off their feet as another reservoir of water roared through its icy confines and burst in upon them.
They were separated, each floating freely in a frothing lake of freezing water. Hackett smacked into a boulder of ice with the side of his face and cut his eye open all the way down to the cheekbone. He shrieked in agony.
Gant spotted him and swam for the physicist, picking his way through huge chunks of ice.
“Where are the others?” Hackett asked, clearly having problems with the cold.
Gant could hear the man's teeth chattering away. Much longer in this water and it would kill them both. He looked about sharply and eventually spotted something. “That iceberg!”
Hackett swirled around and saw November fishing Matheson up out of the water. She had made it onto an iceberg and was using it as a raft.
They swam over, to join them, fighting the forces of incredible eddies and currents within the swirl of floodwater. It took every inch of effort their bodies could muster and soon their limbs felt numb.
But the most distressing thing of all was the enemy, because the Golems were relentless.
 
Bulger kicked hard and kicked again, jamming his boot so viciously into Sarah's ribs that Scott could hear them crunch. But even knowing he was endangering his own life, Scott threw himself in front of the Golem and swung it around to face him.
“You don't see what they're doing, do you?” Scott said passionately. “They're not even fighting this war, they're making us kill
each other
. Kill ourselves—and for what? For greed. Tell me something, Jack—what are you going to do with all this carbon crystal and diamond when this is over, if there's not going to be anyone around to sell it to?”
The effigy of Jack Bulger didn't respond, in case it might weaken his resolve. Instead, he stood back a pace and produced one of those grim rapiers the other Golems had used.
 
The city had flooded to such an extent that a few crystalline buildings were now completely submerged. But the water
level was rising extraordinarily rapidly. It wouldn't be long before the whole place had drowned once again.
Gant used all his strength to heave Hackett up onto the iceberg alongside November and Matheson.
“Don't struggle too much!” Matheson warned, unsteady on his feet. “I don't want to give this thing any excuse to roll over.”
November in the meantime was on her knees, clawing at the marine, trying to get him to safety as well. “Get up here now!” she bellowed. “Move!”
Gant didn't need telling twice. The Golems were already morphing into grotesque versions of sharks with hideous oversized teeth. He clambered aboard, digging frenzied fingers into the ice as he did so, just as two of the sharks rammed the iceberg with their snouts, causing it to spin around in the currents and make the team feel giddy as they were shunted off toward the side of the cavern.
Gant pulled himself upright. “Where's Pearce?” he said breathlessly. “Anybody seen Bob?”
 
Bulger swung, aiming to bring his sword straight down through Scott's head. But his way was suddenly barred by a slender blue crystal arm that thrust out and took the blow.
The arm belonged to Sarah.
She had pulled away part of her parka only to discover that she was changing. She whipped her hand around, snapped off the blade and threw it across the room. It connected with the Carbon 60 flooring, shuddering and melting into oblivion.
Bulger was stunned.
“I've been changing, thanks to you,” Sarah announced. She eyed Scott and revealed: “I didn't even feel it.”
And that gave Scott the idea. He glanced down at his own leg. Had he been changing too? There was only one way to find out. He pulled his leg back and kicked Jack Bulger.
The effigy shot across the room, propelled by a force that defied belief.
Scott and Sarah watched, breathless, as Bulger plowed into the back wall and hung there like a fridge magnet. He wriggled, panicked—and he screamed. Finally he was atomized,
and all that was left were a pair of black leather combat boots which clattered noisily to the floor.
 
They were overwhelmed. Hackett, November, Matheson and Gant.
Though they stood their ground bravely and fought the noble fight, ultimately the Golems were simply too many in number. Too large and too brutish.
Up out of the water the head of Maple arose, attached to the body of a massive sea creature that was still coalescing beneath the iceberg. It reached over and grabbed Gant by the throat and seemed not even to notice the blows that the marine was raining down on it. Meanwhile, another nanoswarm casually slapped November with the back of its massive hand and sent her skidding across to the water's edge.
As November fought for consciousness she could just see Bob Pearce being dragged under the surface of the water, some way off, surrounded by fins.
The Antarctic Team was beaten. And indeed, none of them even heard it when Hackett's watch alarm finally beeped to announce—it was time.
God runs electromagnetics on Monday, Wednesday and Friday by the wave theory … and the devil runs it by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
 
Sir William Bragg, Co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, 1915
Pulsars were God's timepieces.
When a star had used up all its fuel it collapsed down on itself and went one of two ways. It either became a quantum singularity—a black hole—or it exploded in a supernova. A pulsar was said to come
after
the supernova.
All that was left, all the stellar material, would collapse back down into a star again. But it would form a very different kind of star. Protons would meld with electrons to form neutrons. The resulting neutron degeneracy pressure, the need for the unstable neutron to blast itself apart, would fight with gravity, the force keeping the neutron bound together.
Two supreme forces slugging it out in a pressure-cooker until ultimately an equilibrium could be reached. Enormous magnetic field strengths would be produced in the region of ten to the power of twelve times greater than the earth's. The neutron star, like any star, would start to spin. But unlike the sun, whose single revolution would last thirty days, a neutron star's spin cycle could be anywhere from weeks, up to many times per second. The magnetic field-lines would be severely entangled, beams of radio waves would be blasted out across the cosmos as the star rotated like beams of light from a lighthouse.
That was the theory.
Which meant this sort of activity could not possibly be occurring on an ordinary star like the sun. A star that still had plenty of fuel left, enough to burn brightly for another 500 million years. It was nowhere near to becoming a neutron star.
It was a strong theory.
But the theory was wrong.
 
All stars were pulsars, in one shape or another.
They experienced oscillation, resonance—rhythm. There was a pattern to the life of all things. An ebb and a flow. A zenith and a nadir.
There was chaos and there was order.
That was the way of things.
To all things there was a rhythm, measurable, most assuredly.
But to all things there was a timescale by which it was measurable. The life of a star was a long and winding one. It lived on a scale that was simply too large, too incalculable for humans to comprehend.
The sun was a pulsar.
Not in the sense of a neutron star. It did not blast out radio waves in a beam at regular intervals and spin wildly, but it did suffer the consequences of warped and tangled magnetic field-lines. No, the sun's build to ultimate pulsation may have been a slow one, but like the Hare and the Tortoise, it was just as unstoppable.
As the sun rotated about its axis the twisted knots and loops of its magnetic field-lines buckled and tangled, grappled and twisted. Until ultimately the entire surface of the seething ball of nuclear fusion could take it no more.
Once in every 12,000 years, the entire surface of the sun would peel off like removing the entire top layer of an onion—whole and unbroken. It would swell and expand outward in all directions. Such was the instability caused by the departing sphere of matter that it would make the inner mass temporarily wobble and change shape, thus altering its density and affecting its impact on the fabric of space.
Space itself would then undulate, like a rug being beaten, and the undulation—the gravity wave—would carry this escaping shell of stellar material with it at speeds approaching the speed of light.
 
And one such occurrence was happening right now.
They nestled into the integration receptacles and waited.
It did not take long for something to happen.
Their minds were suddenly alive with thoughts and images. Snatches of ideas here and there. Half-formed words and concepts. It was like—
Bang!
Scott couldn't help it. He pulled his head away from the head-rest and looked around the room with a gasp. He glanced down at his hands. His body. Already his fingers had started to melt into the wall. He struggled, but they wouldn't come away. He was overcome with panic and grief. And although he couldn't feel a thing, as the process had obviously already cut the nerve impulses to his brain, his instinctive reliance on fear had gotten the better of him.
Sarah had her eyes closed. He could see her physically melting into the wall on the far side of the room. Turning a pale, pale blue.
The same thing was happening to him.
And then the feeling passed. He could hear the voices again, reassuring and generous.
He glanced around at the clear crystal surfaces one last time, and put his head back.
Closed his eyes.
 
Sarah had this itch. It was a deep itch, right in her toes. She tried to wriggle them and felt a sudden sensation of heat and sand, followed by a deeper sensation of depth and movement and of liquid.
She realized that she was beneath the earth, in the molten core of the planet, examining geologic densities, watching the inner convection currents of the mantle. The closer to the center of the earth, the denser the rock. As these inner layers moved, so the effect was magnified at the surface where the crust lay. Convection currents in three dimensions were incredibly complex, yet she seemed to suddenly grasp every nuance, every facet of the inner workings of the planet. To quasicrystallize the mantle would require at least seven different types of standing wave.
 
Scott was aware of this blinding light off to the left somewhere. He turned his head to see. At least, he had the sensation of turning his head. He reached out and became aware that he was interacting with some kind of device, in a jungle somewhere. Maybe South America. He could be no more specific than that.
He reached out with his other hand and knew instinctively he was operating a similar device somewhere in the
depths of Russia. Like the crystal constructs under the pyramids at Giza he had the sense he was moving entire pyramids of Carbon 60 and shifting them into position, rearranging beams of crystal to complete circuits.
A global machine. A global network, on a planetary scale. It was as if the earth was one entity and he was part of that now.
He was revealing to Atlantis that he knew of this network, knew its potential and its capabilities. And in turn, Atlantis was getting to know Scott. Soon they understood each other.
Remotely, from the heart of Atlantis, Scott and Sarah took a light-speed tour of the entire global network. The more information they requested, the more information they were given until ultimately, they knew everything.
Like seconds ticking on a clock, one by one the other fifty-nine languages encoded in the Atlantis glyphs were revealed to them and the lost history of their own planet was laid bare. Each language was accompanied with the collected stories of each civilization that used it.
And the revelation was great.
At the same time, one by one each Carbon 60 device dotted in subterranean enclaves around the globe was switched on and made ready. Information was exchanged. Lost monuments were rediscovered until the entire network was humming with anticipation.
Finally there was nothing more to do and curiously it all stopped. Scott and Sarah had fulfilled their fates. Atlantis's response would be an automatic reflex now, triggered by whatever actions were taken by the sun.
And equally curiously, it was the sun that Scott and Sarah now found themselves admiring. For they were standing on a hill overlooking Atlantis as it had once been, 12,000 years ago. A shining jewel in a lush valley, in a landscape that was lost to time, if not to memory.
Standing at the gates to this majestic city, monument to Man's achievements, were 10,000 well-wishers eager to greet them and welcome them to their new home. So as the sun shone down upon the sparkling canals of that now sunken city, Scott and Sarah exchanged heartfelt emotional looks, cupped their hands in each other's—and went down to meet them.
 
 
In the control center of Atlantis stood some consoles and podiums and two empty receptacles.
It was barren other than that. Desolate, except for a pair of black leather combat boots and a sense of expectation.
Planet, from the Greek, meaning “wanderer.”
The planets were in crisis.
Within two minutes, the tiny ball of superheated rock known as the planet Mercury, had been entirely engulfed and overtaken. Since its surface was incapable of sustaining life or supporting an atmosphere, the damage inflicted upon this tiny world was difficult to calculate. Perhaps a slightly altered path in its orbit. A lengthening of its overall year, or an extra twist upon its axis had caused a decrease in the length of its day or night. Whatever the effects, they were inconsequential to the people of earth, for as planets go there was no comparison.
It was when the total coronal ejection had continued its relentless expansion throughout the solar system for a total of five minutes that they began to feel the effects, for the human race it was at this point that the stampeding cataclysm intercepted the orbit of Venus.
 
It was ironic that a planet named after the Roman goddess of beauty and love was about as far removed from those qualities as possible.
Venus's year took 240 days. It spun retrograde about its axis, meaning in comparison to the earth it spun backward making the sun rise in the west at dawn. It barely had any magnetic field and was almost perfectly spheroid, suggesting its core was more solid than the earth's. Its atmosphere was 96.5 percent carbon dioxide, with sulfuric acid in its upper cloud layers. Its atmosphere was also 95 times more dense than earth's and due to all the carbon dioxide, it
trapped sunlight to such an extent the average surface temperature was 480 degrees Celsius, or 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Even on a cool day on Venus it was hot enough to melt lead.
Other than that, it was just like earth.
And for the purposes of a pulsar ejection impact—it was identical.
For Venus was a landscape dominated by volcanic features, faults and impact craters, much like the earth. But where many of the earth's geological hot spots were often obscured by life, Venus's volcanoes were her prettiest feature. In many vast areas of the planet's surface there was evidence from satellite imagery of periods of multiple lava flooding with lava flows seen piled one on top of the other. One higher region, known as
Ishtar Terra,
was a lava-filled basin the size of the United States with the
Maxwell Montes
mountain located at one end.
And because there was no water and little wind erosion on Venus, its extensive fault-line network was clearly visible as a result of the same crustal flexing that the earth experienced. But since the excessive heat of Venus weakened the rock structure, cracking the crust in multiple regions, it prevented the planet from forming tectonic plates.
And as a result the huge lava features across the planet did hint at one other extraordinary feature. From time to time, vast continent-sized swathes of Venus turned completely molten, as if the planet was attempting to turn itself inside out. The mechanism for such an event was completely unknown.
Or had been, until now.
 
To call the pulsar wave that hit Venus an exercise in pure rage was to underestimate the severity of the gravity wave.
The speed of the wave that hit Venus's upper atmosphere could be measured in microseconds. Its impact was so severe that it immediately took the outer layers with it, peeling the atmosphere back like taking the rind off an orange.
The resulting compression set what combustible gases there were in Venus's atmosphere ablaze, setting into motion a chain reaction that penetrated up to a mile down into Venus's atmosphere and causing vast amounts of carbon
dioxide to glow to the point of molecular collapse. Suddenly the twin atoms of oxygen broke away from their host carbon atoms and exploded.
The entire outer layer of Venus had been transformed. It had ignited, and become pure flame.
As the ever-expanding fireball that was the sun's final, total coronal shell ejection blasted ever outward and impacted upon the volatile planet, for one whole second Venus knew only fire. There was no distinguishing between which part of the maelstrom was Venus on fire, and which part of the fire was merely the coronal shell passing through that part of the solar system.
There was only flame.
But coupled with this, of course, there was the gravity wave.
It swept through the planet in less time than it took to give a blink of an eye. And in much the same way that the series of preceding gravitational fluxes had built up an oscillation effect within the liquid mantle of the earth, so too had these same pulses been churning up geological turmoil across the planet Venus.
If anyone had even thought to correlate the geological data accumulating throughout the solar system they would have seen a pattern emerging from planet to planet. They would have seen that the volcanic and earthquake crisis on earth was not unique to home but part of an overall solar-system-wide catastrophe.
But they had not. And by the time the light from Venus would have reached the earth and given a clue to the type of experience the people of earth could expect to face, the wave would have already been and gone.
For the speed of light was the speed of light. It could not beat itself in a race.
As a result, no one on earth could actually see the surface of Venus buckle and bend. No one could see the countrysized chunks of crust get tossed up into the air and flipped over like pancakes on a giant conveyor belt. No one could see whole continent-sized areas of Venus suddenly heat up within seconds and turn molten. Nor could anyone see the various chunks of stellar matter and debris that had been caught up in the wave, rain down upon the planet's surface
like glowing, white-hot hailstones, and smash whole new valleys into existence.
From a human vantage point on earth, should they survive the next three minutes, Venus would appear more than ten times brighter in the night sky than normal, for a century, as its molten surface churned and twisted and settled into its new formations before cooling.
 
Fortunately for humankind there was already a force in existence that did not need to see the catastrophe to know that it had to do something about it. For the early warning system that Atlantis employed did not rely on light. And it did not solely rely on mathematical predication, but rather quantum gravitational effects. It detected changes within the very fabric of space itself. It was based on a type of physics mankind had only just begun to rediscover—super—string theory and its interaction with the zero point field. The idea that two points in the galaxy could be intimately—and instantaneously—linked.
Atlantis tapped into the shortcuts of the universe. For it knew that just like a tsunami on earth: if a person could see the wave coming, it was already too late.
Atlantis didn't have to see it coming. It just knew.

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