Atlantis Fallen (The Heartstrike Chronicles Book 1)

by C. E. Murphy

  "There isn't a lot of crusting on the buildings," he wondered aloud.

  Michelle nodded. "We're not sure why. The seabed is pretty active. We've been trying to figure out if there was some sort of protective layer over the city that's been knocked loose recently, maybe a slick residue or a heavy layer of dirt that settled after the city sank. Something that corrosion couldn't quite get a grip on."

  "Favored of the gods," Lorhen murmured, looking back out the window. "Maybe they protected it." Until all its children had left it, he finished silently.

  Michelle chuckled. "Maybe. The amount of buildup is what we'd normally see on something that'd been underwater a century or so, maybe a little less. Their gods must be favoring us. More than they did the people who lived here, at any rate."

  As the submarine moved slowly forward, Lorhen could see that there were huge chunks of land that had been left smooth by the quake. A building on front of them had been sheared in two, one side still standing, a small plain of black rock where the other half had once been. Lorhen closed his eyes a moment, contrasting the absolute stillness of the drowned city to its last panicked minutes. Memories of voices echoed in his ears, terrorized screams and calls for help. The sound of rock, tearing apart and resealing itself without rhythm, ground out the voices, and was in turn replaced by the boiling of water as it drank the city down into the ocean.

  Lorhen could feel the pulse in his throat, throbbing nearly as hard as memory swept him up as it had those many millennia ago. The sheer, stark stab of hope that had jolted through him in the moment that everything had fallen silent ripped into him again, making his heart lurch with a sickening double-beat. Devastation replaced it a breath later, as it had then, as his thoughts reeled through the next seconds, the redoubling of the quake that sent Atlantis to the sea bed. His muscles felt again the stretch as he reached for Ragar's hand, an instant too late, and memory jarred his feet with the falls from one broken piece of road to another.

  There was a hand on his shoulder. Lorhen jerked back, eyes flying open to see Ghean leaning toward him. "I actually think it's taking you harder than it did me," she said in quiet astonishment.

  Lorhen pushed the heel of his hand against his forehead, wiping away beaded sweat. I was there. You were dead.

  Michelle gave him a sympathetic smile, across the sub. "It's hit us all pretty hard," she said. "Can you imagine how terrifying it must have been?"

  Through a dry throat, Lorhen answered, "I think I was." He inhaled sharply, feeling the lack of air in his lungs.

  "There are ghosts here," Anne said, in all apparent seriousness. "I've driven a lot of waldos through a lot of wrecks, but I've never seen anything like Atlantis. Something happened here, something that shouldn't have."

  Lorhen and Ghean locked eyes, neither willing to look away. "I think you're right," Lorhen agreed softly, and shook himself, willing himself toward steadiness. "You're sure this is Atlantis?" The question was meant for Michelle; Ghean knew, and Lorhen had never doubted her.

  "The carbon dating completely fails to match any of the legends," Michelle said slowly. "At least, what we've found doesn't. We've found artifacts dating back six thousand years; from the stories out of Egypt, they should be either twice that, or only four thousand years old."

  "Thera," Lorhen guessed.

  Michelle nodded. "It exploded in 1627BC, drowning Crete. I have to admit that I was a believer, not that long ago, that Crete had been Atlantis, I mean. When Mary pinpointed this location as the city, I assumed anything we found here would date back to then; that the quakes set off by Thera's eruption had perhaps sunk another town, too." She shook her head. "The youngest material we've found is a little more than forty-five centuries old. Whatever sank this place, it wasn't Thera. Not the eruption that drowned Crete." She looked out the porthole, shaking her head again. "This is Atlantis," she said. "I can feel it in my gut." She glanced back at Lorhen with a self-deprecating grin. "Nicely scientific, eh?"

  "Careers have been made on less." Lorhen returned his gaze to the city they drifted through.

  Beneath the crust of sea grime that roughened the once clean lines of the city, the stone was still white, untarnished by its centuries beneath the sea. Under the sub's flood lights, they glowed an unnerving pale blue, the color of moon shadows on snow. Dana changed directions, turning down a wider street; within seconds, Lorhen saw it as one of the main avenues. There was no way to determine if they were heading into town or out, and he frowned in frustration out the window.

  Ghean reached over the back of the ledge in front of him, and tapped the terminal window at his elbow. "It's mapping," she reminded him, "figure out where we are."

  Lorhen blinked at the screen, then nodded. "Jerry? Can I make it tell me what's been mapped previously?"

  "Sure. Here." Jerry came over, tapping out a sequence. A smaller window opened lower in the screen, covering a quarter of the original image. He said, "Navigate with the arrow keys," and returned to his seat.

  "How many dives have there been?" Lorhen asked absently, studying what Jerry had brought up.

  "This is the fifth," Ghean answered. "We went back to the States to try to get more money to fund more."

  "It worked," Lorhen said dryly. Ghean grinned.

  Lorhen studied the screen intently, trying to overlay his memories of the city onto the map. After several minutes, he concluded memory was making it more difficult than it would be to study it fresh; he was expecting streets and buildings where the map showed only empty stretches of rock. Still, four of the streets spidered inward, and the additions from the new mapping the computer did indicated they were traveling toward the city center. "Did you find the temple?" he asked thoughtlessly.

  Michelle looked away from his camera to lift an eyebrow at him. "Temple?"

  Lorhen kicked himself silently, but tapped the smaller window in his screen. "Look at the layout. There's obviously a central point. Governments and religious institutions go at the center of almost any city."

  Michelle nodded. "There's a building there. Except for one obvious point where the rock was broken, there are no entrances, no decorations, nothing that might indicate it was a temple."

  Lorhen closed his eyes, building the image in his mind. Three daises, the temple centered on the last one. The House symbols, holding the temple roof above its thick walls. And, carved on the outer walls, artistry of the gods coming down out of the mountains to share their gifts with the citizens of the fishing village that became the legendary city. Opening his eyes, he studied Ghean's profile. Could the fire have melted all that away? If so, what had happened to the room below, and the Book? "Is it higher than the city around it?" he asked aloud.

  "Yeah," Michelle said, "but who would build a temple without doors?"

  "Someone who didn't want their gods disturbed," Jerry said to his computer, and looked up defensively when Michelle spun to stare at him with interest. "What? Doesn't the geek get to be esoteric and wise sometimes too?"

  "You seem a little grounded in this century for that, Jerry, that's all," Anne grinned.

  "Hey, I've got a degree in philosophy."

  Anne's eyebrows shot up. "You do? What are you doing here?"

  "Philosophy doesn't pay very well." Jerry shrugged.

  "You may be on to something there, though," Michelle said slowly. "We call our churches the houses of God. An ancient civilization may have taken that idea more literally."

  Lorhen and Ghean exchanged glances, Ghean visibly biting her tongue as a debate ensued. The worst of it was, Lorhen knew, that the mortals' deductions weren't unreasonable. A doorless temple was more likely than the truth, certainly. Lorhen returned his attention to the map, glancing occasionally at Ghean, whose face held more tightness than just the debate could account for.

  He couldn't blame her: the ghost city disturbed him, and its former beauty was far more deeply imprinted on Ghean than it had been on Lorhen. If the temple's features were melted away, there was no real way to tell what
direction anything lay in; he, certainly, wouldn't trust what had once been north and south to have remained the same as the island twisted and sank. He badly wanted a sense of perspective, and if he wanted one, Ghean's sense of being unmoored had to be much more dramatic.

  "Care to explore, Logan?" Michelle asked suddenly.

  Lorhen and Ghean both looked up, equally startled out of their respective musings. "Explore? Perhaps I'm a little narrow-minded, Michelle, but somehow the idea of popping out of the sub for a quick jaunt through the streets doesn't entirely appeal to me."

  Michelle laughed. "Look, practicality dictates we take this in a pretty methodical manner, mapping out the city and then focusing on what we think will be the biggest motherlode of information. If we can find a place with access to the sewer system, that'll be our number one stopping place. Sewers tend to have more information about a culture than anything else."

  Lorhen shot Ghean a glance, thinking of Atlantis's advanced, tidy sewer system, and forbore to tell Dr. Powers that she was bound to be disappointed by what would usually be a safe archaeologist bet. Powers, however, didn't notice the glance, and went on, "The thing is, we've been given an unexpected donation by an extraordinarily generous fellow, and it seemed like we ought to bend to his whim today. You won't get another chance, Logan, so what would you like to look for?"

  "Buried treasure!" Lorhen said promptly. "Pirate's gold!"

  Anne laughed. "All men are little boys," she said, "and little boys always want pirate treasure."

  "It doesn't seem very likely," Lorhen admitted. "What if we took a spin around the outer edge of the city?" He nodded at his screen. "It looks like you've found some boundaries. I wonder if there's anything beyond them."

  Ghean glanced at him, an eyebrow arched. "I thought you'd want to look at your so-called temple."

  He did, but he hadn't thought of a way to get the submarine into it, and then into the room beneath. It seemed more likely he would have to go swimming, and he couldn't exactly step out of the sub without drowning the lot of them, so: "I do, but I was looking at the symbols on that cup you found, the one with the bull's head. There are points outside it. I have a hunch that the city's laid out like that. The central point is that temple, and maybe there's something in the outlying area that might be of interest." Lorhen widened his eyes, shrugging. "Who knows?"

  Ghean's grin was slow and approving. "Who knows?" she repeated. "Shall we, Dana?"

  "Sure. The readings say we're in sort of a valley here, maybe the original structure of the island, who knows. I'm going to go up a ways, maybe halfway up the valley wall, and we'll buzz around about there. How's that sound?" Dana looked over her shoulder too briefly to obtain approval, and pulled the submarine up through the water.

  Lorhen met Ghean's eyes again, half smiling. The gods lived on the mountaintops; the Houses had been built halfway up, between the gods and the people they'd been raised from. "Sounds like a plan," Lorhen agreed. "Let's see if we can follow the path of one of these wider roads up. Maybe it'll lead to something."

  "Sure." Dana nodded.

  "Don't get your hopes up too high," Anne advised. "I'd hate to see you disappointed on your first dive."

  Lorhen quirked a smile at the blonde woman. "You'd hate to see me put a stop on that check," he teased.

  "Too late," Michelle said cheerfully. "The University called me yesterday morning to say it'd been cashed in and credited to our fund."

  "Ah well." Lorhen spread his hands. "If I'm disappointed, I'll have to just live with it, then. I've been disappointed before."

  "Wise man," Jerry said, without looking up from what he was doing. "You could be a philosopher too."

  Lorhen grinned. "I don't know enough about computers."

  Jerry looked up with a laugh, touching a finger to his nose. "On the nose, buddy," he grinned, "you got it on the nose."

  "Mountains coming up," Dana reported. "Keep your eyes peeled. We'll see if Logan's feeling lucky today."

  "Do ya feel lucky, punk?" Ghean grated in a singularly terrible imitation of Clint Eastwood. "Well? Do ya?" Anne shot her a grin as Lorhen focused out the window.

  Barely two minutes later, he murmured, "Yes, I believe I do. Mary." He nodded out the porthole.

  "What?" Michelle demanded sharply, jumping to her feet to step across the sub and look out Lorhen's porthole. "Did you find—oh, my God. Anne, Anne, give me the camera, Anne." She held out her hand, fingers beckoning impatiently as she leaned over Lorhen's shoulder. Anne handed it to her, switching sides of the submarine to look out Ghean's porthole with her.

  One of the Houses, at least, had survived the fall of Atlantis almost entirely intact. The outer wall nearest the submarine had been partially shattered, and the sub's flood lights cast light into a home unvisited for forty-five centuries. Unlike the guest house Lorhen had lived in, this was a part of the permanent structure, and even the furniture within was designed with eternity in mind. A stone table still stood, cracks at the bases of the legs where it once had melded with the floor. Fragmented pottery lay across the floor in pieces, the sediment in the alcove so low that from their vantage the patterns were still visible, though not decipherable. Slender pieces of stone lay in lengths around the floor; chairs with broken legs and backrests suggested where they had come from.

  "Handy Handy Handy," Michelle was chanting, "get Handy in there, Anne." She had the camera up on his shoulder, filming. "My God, Logan, you're a genius."

  "Just lucky," Lorhen demurred, and lifted his hand to block the camera's lens as Michelle swung it to face him. "I'd rather not be filmed, please."

  Jerry finally untangled himself from his computer to lean over and stare out an unoccupied porthole. "Are you nuts? This is the find of a lifetime, and you don't want on-film credit for it? Damn, can I have it, then?"

  Lorhen kept his hand up, a determined smile of apology fixed on his face. "Please, Michelle." He genuinely didn't want to have to wipe the project's data drives, but he was too fond of his head to risk having it displayed anywhere along with other five thousand year old treasures.

  Michelle shook her head, turning the camera back to the apparent dining room setting. "You're not much of a glory hound, are you, Adams? Anne, have you got Handy ready yet?"

  "I'm really not," Lorhen murmured.

  "One more minute," Anne promised. "All right, I'm launching him now." Arms in the waldo, she reached up, twisting her hands. The submarine shook a little as the two-fisted robot detached itself from the bottom and dropped into the water. "Okay, Michelle, here's your eyes." Her screen flickered, light changing as the headlamps on Handy added to the wash of light. "In we go…." The little robot swam up to the break in the wall, looking absurdly slow to the watchers inside the sub. A few seconds later, as the camera perched on its top sent back detailed images of the pottery on the floor, everyone scrambled for a good look at Anne's screen. A plate, nearly whole, was a few feet in front of the robot. Anne carefully extended a hand, clasping with the waldo. A moment later, the plate was held directly in front of the camera. "Damn," Anne said. "That's pretty."

  A shallow, curved groove had been carved into the outer rim of the plate. Below it, baked into the clay, ran a pattern of dancers and bulls; each quarter of the plate had a different step in the dance. In the center of the plate, only a few shades darker than the clay itself, was a representation of the Bull.

  "They must have been bull worshipers," Michelle proclaimed in a hushed voice. "The pattern, the bull's head—it's the second time we've seen that. Look, it even has the bullets around it like the cup did." She made a quick circle above the screen, pointing out the faded detail. "It's beautiful. Anne, can we bring it in?"

  "Sure." Anne lowered the plate away from Handy's eyes, tucking it away out of sight, apparently under the robot.

  "He's got a pouch down there," Ghean explained quietly to Lorhen. "Not much can fit in it, but it means we can bring more than one thing up at a time."

  "Go on, go on," Michelle sa
id excitedly. "Let's see what else there is. Go look behind the table."

  "Wow," Jerry said a moment later.

  A fourth chair lay behind the table, completely intact. Handy hovered above it, focusing on the legs—less slender than they'd appeared lying on the floor, but elegantly carved to maintain the illusion of slimness. The back was squared off, but open, the symbol of the Bull carved into the stone.

  "How the hell did that survive falling over?" Anne demanded. "Want me to pick it up?"

  "Look at that," Michelle whispered. "Hardly any damage, very little crusting, nothing. I wonder why. Maybe it's the stone. This is going to make everybody very, very happy." Still filming, she looked at Lorhen, leaving the camera pointed at the window. "Maybe you should choose all our destinations for us, Adams. Looks like you're a lucky charm."

  Lorhen chuckled, moving back to his seat. "Maybe. Maybe I just got lucky this time. Let Mary decide the next one. It's her project." And she would have a much better idea of where to find artifacts than Lorhen would, now that she was situated. "I'll just sit in the corner and look modest about this find, and let the rest of you do all the work."

  Anne tsked, grinning. "Just like a man. All right. Shall I see if I can get that beauty?"

  "Wait," Lorhen said. "How far can Handy go looking?"

  Anne looked over her shoulder at him. "About forty meters, why?"

  Lorhen nodded. "There's that door," he said, half smiling. "Don't you want to know what's on the other side?"

  30

  The sound of the sub's engines filled the silence for a few seconds. "Wow," Jerry said, "did anybody else get a feeling of impending doom when he said that?"

  Anne exhaled. "I admit I sort of expected a kraken to burst out the door."