The Hunt for Atlantis

by Andy McDermott

  And kept going.

  “Whoa!” said Baillard, rotating Mighty Jack to examine the side walls as the robot ascended. “How did you know that was there?”

  “Just a hunch,” said Chase, grinning at Nina. “Watch out, though. There might be traps on the way up.”

  She gently swatted him away from her headset. “Eddie, somehow I doubt there’s been anybody maintaining this temple for the past eleven thousand years.”

  “I dunno, those mermaids are tricky bitches …”

  Nina smiled, then turned her attention back to the screen. Baillard angled the camera upwards as much as he could, the shaft taking on perspective.

  “I see something,” he announced. A dark line on the wall of the shaft came up fast, a shimmering distortion…

  The image suddenly rolled, tipping back to the horizontal. One of the stone walls filled the screen. “Jim!” Nina called. “What happened? Did you hit something?”

  “Just a second …” The robot slowly turned, the image still shaking queasily. Nothing was visible except the walls. “Okay. I guess that’s as far as Mighty Jack can go.”

  “What do you mean?” Kari demanded. “Is it stuck on something? Have we lost the ROV?”

  Baillard almost laughed. “Not at all. It’s just that… well, Mighty Jack’s only designed for use in the water. So you’ll need some other way to explore from this point on.”

  “Why?” asked Nina.

  “Because we’ve run out of water. Mighty Jack’s floating on the surface. There’s air inside that temple.”

  TWENTY

  The submersibles returned to the surface. The Sharkdozer was recovered and winched back aboard the Evenor, but the Atragon remained in the water, a cable attached so it could recharge its batteries.

  A second dive was being prepared. And this time, the exploration of the temple would not be left to robots.

  “I wish I could go with you,” Nina said. Kari, Chase and Castille were in the final stages of suiting up for their descent.

  “Bet you wish you’d brought your swimming certificate, don’t you?” Chase joked as a crewman assisted him with his helmet.

  The three divers were wearing newly designed “deep suits”—a kind of hybrid of traditional scuba systems and the armorlike, almost robotic hard suits employed for deep, long-duration dives. The divers’ limbs were enclosed in the same neoprene rubber used in regular dry suits, but their heads and bodies were contained in a rigid unit connected to ring seals around the thighs and upper arms.

  At a depth of eight hundred feet, close to the limits of scuba diving, the pressure on a diver’s body was over twenty-five atmospheres, requiring air to be supplied at an equal pressure to enable his lungs to expand against the crushing force surrounding them. But breathing such highly pressurized gas came with a price: the compressed gas that entered the bloodstream expanded as the diver ascended and the pressure around him reduced. Nitrogen bubbles swelled inside the blood vessels, causing excruciating pain, tissue damage and even death…

  Decompression sickness. The bends.

  The deep suits were a way to avoid this. By keeping the body within a shell able to withstand the external pressure, the divers breathed air at just one atmosphere, while keeping their arms and legs free to move with far greater maneuverability underwater than in any heavy, clumsy hard suit. It was a compromise—it was impossible to turn or bend at the waist, and the fact that their limbs were exposed to the pressure of the deep still placed limits on how long they could remain submerged—but it hugely reduced the risk of the bends.

  “You’ll still be able to watch us on the video feed,” Kari promised.

  “It’s not the same thing. This sort of discovery really should be hands-on.”

  “Don’t worry,” Castille said. “We’ll bring you back a golden Nereid.”

  “God, no! Leave everything exactly as you find it, please! And on that subject…” She turned to Chase. “Do you really have to take explosives with you?”

  “If the passage is blocked higher up, we might need to clear it. Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow the whole place up! I know what I’m doing.”

  “I hope so.” She rapped his helmet. “What’s it like in there?”

  “Cramped. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic.”

  “Lucky you,” sighed Castille. He looked down at the yellow shell covering his body. “I feel as though I’m trapped inside a giant bar of soap.”

  “Or a corset,” added Kari, putting a hand on the waist of her own suit. While Chase and Castille’s units were of a generic design, size adjustments made by moving the seals on their limbs, hers was custom made to fit her precisely, still managing to show off her feminine shape beneath the steel and polycarbonate. “This must be how Victorian women felt!”

  “Yeah, as they fell off the Titanic,” joked Chase.

  “That was Edwardian, not Victorian,” Nina corrected him.

  “Bloody historians ruin all my jokes …” He looked at his companions as the crewmen closed the last clips on their suits. “Okay … Are we ready?”

  “Absolutely,” Kari said enthusiastically.

  “Ready to go into danger again?” said Castille, rather less so. “Well, if I must…”

  “Come on, Hugo, you love it,” grinned Chase. “And at least you don’t have to worry about helicopters down there.”

  “Ah, but what is a submersible but an underwater helicopter?”

  Chase banged a hand on Castille’s helmet. “Yeah, yeah. Now stop moaning and get your Belgian arse in the water!”

  With the three divers holding on to its steel bumper cage, the Atragon disappeared into the ocean.

  Nina watched it go before hurrying to the control room. Chase’s suit had a video camera mounted on the right shoulder, transmitting to the Atragon along a fiberoptic link, the submersible in turn sending the image to the ship via its umbilical. “Hey, Kari, I can see you,” she said, putting on a headset. The figure on the screen waved its free hand.

  “Divers, can you check coms?” asked Trulli from the next monitor station. “Eddie?”

  “Loud and clear,” said Chase. His voice was distorted, but no more so than if he’d been talking on a telephone.

  “Kari?”

  Her response was more garbled, heavily marred by static. “I can hear you, but there’s a lot of interference.”

  “Same for me,” Castille’s voice crackled.

  “What’s the range of those transmitters?” Philby asked. Chase’s communications systems were hardwired to the submersible, but to avoid the risk of entangling cables, Kari and Castille were using an underwater radio link, making him a human relay station.

  “At most, maybe fifteen meters,” Trulli told him. “Depends on the salinity of the water. If it’s real salty, the signal attenuation could be so much that it’ll only travel two or three meters. That close, you’re better off just shouting.”

  “You guys?” Nina said into the mike. “Make sure you stay close together, huh?” Kari gave her a thumbs-up.

  The descent was slower than the first, but Captain Matthews had moved the Evenor directly over the site of the temple to reduce the transit time on the sea floor. Before long, the structure appeared on the LIDAR display.

  “Okay, divers?” said Baillard. “I’m going to set down where I did before, at the edge of the excavation.”

  Nina watched the view from Chase’s camera. The Atragon had fewer spotlights than a conventional submersible, so the temple was little more than an oppressive shade against the near black of the sea. A small flurry of sand swirled up under the thrusters as the sub came to rest with a gentle bump.

  “Evenor,” Baillard announced, “we are down and safe. Divers? Good luck.”

  Chase let go of the tubular bumper and dropped to the seabed. Kari and Castille followed. “Okay, we’re here. Radio check.”

  “I hear you,” said Kari.

  “Radio check okay,” Castille confirmed. Then, more casually: “I
have an itch right in the middle of my back. I think I’ll head back to the ship to scratch it.”

  “What, and miss the fun of going through a narrow stone passage where you don’t know what’s at the top?” Chase took a few experimental steps, his flippered feet kicking up more silt. Even with the neutral buoyancy the deep suit provided, its inflexible body meant the best he could manage was an unflattering waddle. Its broad, flat chest also caused a surprising amount of resistance from the water when he tried to move forward. “Sod it, walking’s going to take forever. Let’s try the thrusters.”

  He kicked himself off the seabed, tilting into a horizontal position. Castille and Kari followed suit. Once they were with him, Chase reached up with his left hand to take hold of a control stick protruding from the suit’s chest on a flexible stalk.

  “Okay, stay close,” he ordered. “If we have any trouble, or anyone has com problems, get straight back to the sub and wait for the others. Let’s go.”

  He pushed his thumb down on the sprung wheel set into the end of the stick. The controls for the thrusters built into the suit’s casing were simple: three speed settings to go forward, one for reverse, and releasing the wheel would automatically stop the motors. He started off at the lowest speed, using his feet to adjust his pitch. Once satisfied that he had full control, he increased speed to the second setting. The fiber-optic cable linking him to the submersible spooled out behind him like a line of spider silk.

  Castille matched his speed. “This is very easy!” he said, voice distorted even over the short distance. “All those years I wasted using my legs to swim …”

  “Just don’t crack your head straight into the wall,” Chase cautioned cheerfully. “Kari, you okay?”

  She swept past him, effortlessly rolling in a lazy corkscrew motion. “Who do you think helped design these suits? I have other passions besides archaeology and architecture!”

  “I do like a passionate boss,” joked Chase. The temple was approaching quickly, taking on color in their suit lights. “Okay, slow down.”

  “Eddie, I can’t see anything except the seabed,” Nina complained over the radio. “How close are you to the temple?”

  Chase let go of the controller and brought himself upright, aiming the camera on his shoulder at the building ahead. “About so close. You seeing that?”

  “Oh, definitely,” she replied, awed.

  The trio touched down less than ten feet from where the sloping wall rose from the piled sediment. Ragged sheets of orichalcum glinted under their spotlights. Fish darted over the temple’s surface, oblivious to the ancient power it represented.

  “Which way to the entrance?” Chase asked.

  “About six meters to your left,” Baillard said.

  The group headed for it, Chase and Kari using powerful flashlights as well as their suit lights. Chase glanced back at the Atragon. Although he could see its spotlights clearly, as well as the unearthly pulse of its scanning lasers, the sub itself was barely visible in the deep gloom.

  “There!” said Kari. Her light shone on the opening.

  Chase crouched as best he could, directing his own light inside. It wasn’t as far as he’d expected to the vertical shaft; the fish-eye effect of the ROV’s camera had exaggerated the distance. “Okay, I’ll go first. Hugo, hook me up.” Castille connected a tether from a reel on his equipment belt to a clip on the lower back of Chase’s suit. “If there isn’t enough room to get around the bend in the shaft, pull me out.”

  Castille yanked on the tether to make sure it was properly connected, then moved to the far side of the entrance so it wouldn’t become tangled in the communications line. “If you ate more fruit and less steak, you wouldn’t be worrying about getting stuck.”

  “You know where you can shove your fruit… Okay, here I go.”

  Kari and Castille helped him to a horizontal position, guiding him into the opening. Flashlight in his extended right hand, Chase took the controls with his left and started the thrusters on low power. The stone walls crept past. Under normal circumstances a four-foot-wide passage would have been easy to negotiate even underwater, but the unbending bulk of the deep suit made him more cautious.

  It wasn’t long before he reached the end of the passage. He rolled onto his back to look up the shaft. It stretched away into blackness. “I’m at the shaft. Shaft! Can you dig it?” Nina groaned. “Going to try to head up.”

  The corner was tight, his helmet scraping against the wall, but he levered himself upright without too much difficulty. “I’m through!” he announced, relieved. “Let’s see what’s up here.”

  He activated the thrusters again, the ducted propellers whirring quietly as he rose. The shaft was at least thirty feet high, the walls sheer. Looking up, he saw the dark square where Mighty Jack had come to a stop—where air had been trapped by the rising water. It was only three feet above him now, two, one …

  He broke the surface, water streaming down his faceplate. Shining the light, he saw he was about six feet short of the top of the shaft, a black void above him.

  No problem. He clipped the flashlight back onto his equipment belt and brought up one of his other items—a gas-powered grappling gun. Bobbing awkwardly like a giant cork in the confines of the shaft, he aimed it over the top of the south wall, then fired.

  The thump of gas echoed through the shaft as the grapnel shot upwards. A few seconds later, he heard it clank against stone. He worked the controls to wind in the cable. After a tense wait, the grapnel caught on something. He pulled it a couple of times to check it was secure, then attached the gun’s strap to his suit and pulled himself up, the motor whining in protest at the weight.

  The top was just a few feet above him now, opening out into …

  “Look at that!” Nina gasped. She watched the video feed intently, barely blinking. The view from Chase’s camera revealed the altar chamber, in dimensions an exact match for the one in Brazil.

  In magnificence, however, it was something else entirely.

  Even in the grainy, low-resolution video, she could clearly make out the red gleam of orichalcum, flashes of gold and silver, cat’s-eye sparkles from gemstones set into the walls …

  “My God,” breathed Philby, “it’s incredible. The entire chamber must be lined with precious metals!”

  “It’s not just decorative,” said Nina. She fiddled with her headset. “Eddie? Talk to me. What can you see?”

  “I see … that if I had some tin snips and a crowbar, I could retire on this lot.”

  “Very funny. Can you get closer to one of the walls?”

  “Christ, let me get onto my feet first…” The video image jerked as Chase pulled himself out of the shaft and detached the cable gun, his breath rasping into his microphone. “Okay. Well, I was right about the shaft, it’s in the same place as the blocked one in Brazil. They must have used the same plans. The walls are … God, they’ve used the stuff like wallpaper. There’s sheet after sheet of orichalcum, and it’s all inscribed.”

  “Let me see, let me see!” said Nina, bouncing in her chair in excitement.

  Chase moved closer, his flashlight beam sliding over one section of wall. Nina immediately recognized the script: Glozel, though with none of the hieroglyphic symbols from the Brazilian temple.

  Philby stroked his mustache as he peered at the screen. “Interesting. Maybe they assimilated the language of the Indians … The temple in Brazil would have taken years, even generations to build. That would be enough time for the two systems to intermix …”

  “Eddie, give me a look at the whole chamber, please. Slowly.”

  Chase stepped away from the wall and slowly turned in place, panning his camera around the room.

  “Stop, stop!” Nina shouted, seeing something. “Back to the right a little bit… there! Go over there!”

  “Now I know how Mighty Jack feels,” he complained amiably as he waddled across the room. “What’ve you seen? There’s nothing there.”

  “Exactly!”
The section of wall before Chase was sheathed in orichalcum like the rest of the chamber, but it was blank, the inscribed text stopping abruptly halfway down. “The whole chamber, it’s a record of Atlantis—but that’s where it ends! Which means whatever’s written there is the final record of the Atlanteans! Get closer, let me read it!” She hurriedly checked that the video feed was being recorded.

  “Or you could let me unhook this rope from my arse and fix it to something so Hugo and Kari can climb up here as well,” said Chase. “You remember Kari? Attractive blonde, tall, has a camera?”

  “Well, yeah, that might work too,” she replied, slightly deflated but still desperate to get the first look at what was written on the wall.

  The first look. Nobody had set eyes on the text for over eleven thousand years …

  She waited impatiently as Chase set things up. Finally he announced that Kari was on her way. “Okay, while we’re waiting, can you please go back to the final record?”

  “You’re so domineering. I like that in a woman… sometimes,” he quipped, directing the camera at the text.

  Nina looked across at Trulli. “Matt, is there any way to get a freeze-frame from the video?”

  “Sure. The recorder’s digital, got a terabyte of storage—it’ll keep on recording. What screen do you want it on?”

  “My big one.”

  “It won’t be in 3-D.”

  “I can live with that.” A few seconds later, the screen came to life with a frozen still of the last section of text.

  The image was fuzzy, the colors smeared, but it was clear enough for her to make out the letters. She stared at it, deep in thought.

  One of the crew hurried into the control room. “Captain Matthews? There’s a ship approaching.”

  “What?” Matthews snapped. “How far?”

  “About five miles. It was on a course for Lisbon when we first saw it on radar, but it turned towards us a couple of minutes ago.”

  “Speed?”

  “At least twelve knots, sir.”

  “Is it Qobras?” The name caught Nina’s attention. She looked around at Matthews, worried.