“Nobody knows the future,” Warren said, uncomfortable with this green alarmist’s certainty. “If you ever read old five-year budget projections from the Pentagon, you’d know that. How long will it take for this alleged ring of death to make us all extinct?”
“It’s only an estimate, but my models project an ECD taking place over the next couple of days and running itself out within a week.” Warren was stunned. “All that destruction in a few days?”
“Dude, it took God only six days to create the universe, according to Genesis,” Larson said. “Why should an ECD take any longer to destroy it? It’s like a coil that can unwind with unstoppable, devastating speed once it reaches threshold.” Warren leaned forward. “This has happened before?”
“Several times.”
“And I suppose you were there to measure them all?”
“I wish,” Larson said. “The last one was roughly eleven thousand six hundred years ago, about 9600B .C. That’s when the geological record says vast climatic changes swept the planet. Massive ice sheets melted, ocean levels rose. Huge 137
mammals perished in great numbers. A sudden influx of people flowed into the Americas. It wasparty time, you know?”
“And this happens every twelve thousand years or so?”
“No, every forty-one thousand years,” Larson said, who had suddenly hit his own threshold and run out of gas. He plopped down on a seat. “We aren’t due for an ECD for another thirty thousand years. Somehow the cycle has been accelerated. I don’t know how.”
Neither did Warren. But he was pretty damn sure who was responsible. “And how soon until we reach threshold?” Warren demanded. “What kind of count-down are we talking about here?”
“The ECD should reach threshold by dawn tomorrow morning.” Larson started counting on his fingers with a glazed look in his eyes. “Damn, that’s less than fifteen hours. One last night to get lucky before it all goes poof.” Admiral Warren could only stare at the kid in the hope that his Ph.D. stood for Piled Higher and Deeper. Otherwise, they were all out of luck.
24
Dawn Minus Fourteen Hours
SERENA PACED BACK AND FORTHacross the floor of the geodesic star chamber while she waited for Conrad to return.
Something had gone horribly wrong. She could smell it in the air and feel it in her bones. Something on a large scale, something very profound, had occurred.
Her stomach felt terribly unsettled, like it did when she didn’t eat or drink anything for hours except one cup of espresso after another. If only she had acted on her doubts earlier, or been more persuasive with Conrad, or stalled Yeats longer.
As she paced and pondered, she eyed the empty altar in the center of the room uneasily. In one terrifying moment it had opened up like the pit of hell and incinerated Kovich and swallowed Yeats.
Perhaps it was a geothermal vent of sorts, something that could tap the heat of Earth’s interior and harness its power. After all, the most advanced fuel cells ever devised by human engineers generated the by-products of heat and water. P4
certainly had plenty of both.
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In any case, she concluded, P4 was following the preprogrammed instructions of its builders, whoever they were. And it was clearly intended to create some kind of global extinction event unless humanity could come up with some kind of
“most noble” moment to justify its existence.
Looking to her left and her right, she reached into her pack and pulled out the Scepter of Osiris. She held the gleaming obelisk in her hands. For some intuitive reason she had lied and failed to tell Conrad she had it.
She moved over to the empty altar and eased the scepter into its rotundalike base. There was a rumbling as the geodesic star ceiling whirled. She tried to reset the heavens as they appeared before Conrad removed the obelisk. The whirling stopped and she waited. Nothing happened. Whatever Conrad did could not be reversed. So much for her virginity. Clearly she was no more “worthy” than he was.
She removed the obelisk from the altar and felt a shudder from the wall behind her. She turned to see the four chamber doors open in a row.
For a long minute she stood there, frozen, wondering what to do. Then she looked at the obelisk in her hands. Something about it seemed different. The side with the four suns had changed. Now there were six, the sixth sun being the largest. Her worst fears had been realized: a new age was dawning, which could only spell the end for the old age.
What had not changed was the inscription that said the Scepter of Osiris belonged in the Shrine of the First Sun. Somewhere nearby, she realized, was a structure like P4, a monument to an epoch in time. If P4 was the Pyramid of the Fourth Sun, then the Shrine of the First Sun must have been built during the First Time or Genesis. If Conrad was right, then Genesis simply had to be the
“most worthy time,” since in the beginning God looked upon creation and said it was “good.”
She had to find this Shrine of the First Sun and its secret, she resolved. Then she could reset the star chamber to the most worthy time and stop whatever was happening.
But where was this shrine and how would she even recognize it?
Conrad would know. She walked over to the square patch of sunlight beneath the southern shaft and with her eyes followed Conrad’s line up the shaft. There was a flicker of daylight at the other end. What was taking him so long?
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Serena turned from the shaft and surveyed the empty chamber. There on the floor was Yeats’s backpack. She had already rummaged through it once, but now she noticed that the lining in back didn’t look right. Upon closer inspection she realized there was something flat sewn inside.
She pulled out a military knife from the same pack and used it to slash through the lining. Inside she found a folded blueprint of some sort. It appeared to be a technical schematic of some kind of pillar. Then, all of a sudden, she recognized the “pillar” as the obelisk in her hand, complete with the rotunda at its base.
As she suspected, the Americans knew far more about this place than Yeats admitted. Clearly Yeats had this blueprint before they even entered P4, much less found the obelisk. Somehow Yeats knew the Scepter of Osiris was down here before he ever saw it.
Surely Yeats’s crazy story about finding Conrad in the ice wasn’t true, she told herself. It was simply a ploy to play on Conrad’s emotions during a crisis situation. Even Conrad thought as much.
But there was something Conrad had mumbled before he woke up, something she had been pondering ever since. It had sounded like a moan made in pain.
But there was something about the structure and syntax and accent of the sound that rang familiar. And now as she thought about it, she realized Conrad had been repeating the wordMama in some kind of pre-Aymaran form. But there was no way Conrad could know that.
A chill shot up her spine. Maybe Conrad was an Atlantean after all. Or maybe she was crazy. She picked up the obelisk and compared it to the blueprint. They looked identical, except for the markings, which, as she had just seen, possessed the ability to change.
Serena opened her pack and removed her coffee thermos. She twisted the outer shell until it unlocked and then slid it off like a sheath. She then rolled the blueprint around the outside of the inner tube and slid the outer shell back on, twisting it until it locked. It was a hiding place she had learned to rely on more than once in her journeys. Then she placed the thermos back into her pack.
She looked up at the southern shaft, thinking she shouldn’t leave without Conrad. But he had been gone too long, she told herself as she glanced at the open doorway. She couldn’t wait forever. And who knew where Conrad’s path of self-discovery would take his loyalties? She, on the other hand, knew exactly what she had to do. She had to take the Scepter to the Shrine of the First Sun.
There she would find, she hoped, the so-called Secret of First Time that would somehow enable her to stop whatever was happening.
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As for Conrad, it was clear
she could not trust him, just like she could not trust Yeats. For all she knew she couldn’t trust the pope or even God. How could he let this happen—again? She thought of the girl in the ice. She couldn’t get the expression on her face out of her mind. This had happened once before, so clearly God could let it happen again. But she couldn’t.
She put the obelisk back in her pack, slung the pack over her shoulder, and stepped out of the chamber through the open door. The tunnel led her to a fork at the bottom of the great gallery, and she took the middle tunnel down and out through P4’s entrance.
When Serena emerged from the dark interior of P4 into the light of day, it seemed to her that the sun was more brilliant than ever. It was hot, but it was the dry kind of heat that she liked. Antarctica was a desert climate with or without the ice, she thought as she shaded her eyes. More likely, however, the heat originated from the vast geothermal machinery underground.
A minute later, after her eyes had adjusted, she realized that she was standing in the center of a city at the bottom of some great crater. Walls of ice lifted up in the distance, forming a spectacular backdrop for this desert landscape of pyramids, obelisks, temples, and waterways. She could hear the roar of a distant waterfall.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The rush of fresh, oxygen-rich air overwhelmed her senses. So did the realization that there were probably centuries of research down here, and if she lived a thousand lifetimes she still would just be getting started at unraveling the city’s mysteries.
Whatever else, she realized, this discovery changed everything about human history.
Eyes still closed, she thought she heard a dog barking. Ridiculous, she thought, and realized she should be praying, listening for some inner prompting from the Holy Spirit or direction from God. But all she heard was that barking, and it was getting louder and more annoying. Then she blinked her eyes open to see Yeats’s husky, Nimrod, trotting toward her.
She was surprised by the joy she felt and called out to him, “Here, boy!” Nimrod ran into her arms and started licking her face.
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“Are you OK?” she asked him. “Is everybody else OK?” Nimrod immediately turned and started running in the other direction, pausing to look back.
“You want me to follow, boy?”
Nimrod barked and kept running and this time did not look back.
Serena followed the canine for a half hour along what appeared to be the main waterway of the empty city. But the longer they walked, the less it felt like a city.
There was nothing to suggest anybody ever actually lived hereon the plateau. No streets, just waterways. Some coursing with glistening water, others dry. And the ground between the pavilions was barren. No plant life, nothing. Maybe that would change in a few days.
Perhaps the dwellings were on the outskirts, she wondered, still buried under ice. But these monuments, however coldly magnificent, reminded her of a city of abandoned oil rigs she once toured along the Caspian Sea in the former Soviet Union: miles of rusted pipes you could drive a truck through and ghostly refineries that stretched like heaps of filth across the horizon.
She also had the uneasy feeling of being watched, although she knew that was absurd. There was nobody around to watch her. Then again, Nimrod was here.
Maybe there were others. She occasionally lost sight of the dog but always remained within earshot of his barks. Then the barks grew louder, and she realized he was waiting to show her something.
From a distance she could see the object glisten in the sun. Soon she came upon a smashed Hagglunds tractor on the banks of the water channel. The rear cab was crushed to bits, fragments of fiberglass gleaming across the ground. But the front cab seemed intact.
Serena walked over to the driver’s side door, which was ajar, and opened it. She gasped as the body of Colonel O’Dell crumpled to the ground at her feet, his head a bloody mess with bits of the dashboard matted in his hair. Nimrod sniffed the corpse with a whimper.
Poor O’Dell, she thought, realizing she would have to bury his body. It would be only proper. But first she had to see if the tractor’s transmitter was working and if there was any food or water. She hated to admit it, with O’Dell lying there on the ground, but she was famished.
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She climbed inside the cab and searched methodically for any SAT phones, weapons, food packs, anything. But the cab had been stripped of everything save for a single meal-ready-to-eat and a shortwave radio.
She tore open the MRE. Nimrod made it clear that he expected a share of the food, nuzzling his way into the cab.
“Oh, OK,” she said. “Come on in.”
Together they split the meal. But the longer she chewed, the more she realized what she was really hungry for was news. She eyed the shortwave radio, wondering if it worked, but perversely almost hoping it didn’t.
Unable to bear it any longer, she turned the radio on. It worked. The static grew louder as she turned up the volume and then searched the band of frequencies to find the BBC. When she did, the announcer’s voice was filled with tension.
“Mass evacuations of U.S. coastal cities are under way,” the announcer said.
“The federal government reports that it is opening up the nearly six hundred fifty million acres of public land it owns—almost thirty percent of the United States—
for refugees.”
Bit by bit, the details began to fill in: the massive “seismic event” in Antarctica that split off a glacier the size of Texas, the swamping of the Maldives and other Pacific Islands, the meetings of the U.N. Security Council in New York, and accusations of secret American nuclear weapons tests in Antarctica.
Dear Lord, she thought. What have we done? Serena looked at her food and suddenly lost her appetite. She didn’t stop Nimrod from finishing the meal.
Various commentators, analysts, and scientists of the international sort soon weighed in, some expressing fears that the ice cap was breaking up, others that rising sea levels would wipe out coastal cities and sink low-lying lands such as Florida. Those with access to the corridors of power confessed to hearing whispers of a potential shift in Earth’s crust and global geological catastrophe.
She turned off the radio and removed the Scepter of Osiris from her backpack.
Staring at it, thinking about all that it had wrought thus far, she felt her stomach churn.
She opened the passenger door of the cab. Nimrod jumped out and ran to the river’s edge and began lapping up water. She walked over and squatted next to him and looked across to the other side. It was about five hundred feet away.
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Seeing that Nimrod was no worse for his drink, she removed an empty water bottle from her pack and dipped it into the water. The current was so strong it ripped the bottle away in an instant, so she cupped a hand into the water and sipped. She was splashing some water on her oily, dusty face when she heard a yelp.
She looked over to see Nimrod lying on his side, panting heavily, eyes in shock.
She spit the water out of her mouth and looked him over.
“What’s wrong, boy?” she asked, suddenly worried as she stroked his ear.
“Please don’t tell me it’s the water.”
It wasn’t. There was blood coming from Nimrod’s thigh. She looked closer. It looked like a bullet hole.
“Oh, God,” she began to say when a bright red dot appeared on Nimrod’s furry chest. A second later blood spurted out. She jumped back and screamed.
A dozen soldiers in UNACOM uniforms emerged from the horizon and closed in around her with their AK-47s at the ready. Their commanding officer stepped forward from the circle around her and spoke into his radio.
“This is Jamil,” the man said in Arabic. “We have one survivor, sir. A woman.” The accent sounded Egyptian to Serena, and this was confirmed when she heard the reply on the radio: “Bring her to me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before Serena could move, Jamil motioned to one of his men, an
d the grunt flung her across the ground, holding her down with one hand and considerable strength. He ripped open her fatigues, slipped a hand inside, and felt her up and down.
“What is this?” the soldier said with a Saudi accent, yanking away a switchblade knife.
The Saudi held up the knife and sprang the blade, eliciting howls of laughter from his comrades. Then he flipped the knife across the air to bury itself in the dirt. His eyes sparked fire as he stood over Serena, hands on his hips.
Serena had had enough. The Saudi was about to step away when she kicked him in the groin. As he doubled over in pain she jumped up and prepared to 144
knee his bowed face. But suddenly a half-dozen red dots painted her chest and she looked up to see the barrels of a dozen AK-47s pointed at her.
Serena put her hands up in surrender and looked at the Saudi she had kicked.
He was groveling in the dirt. Another Arab came behind her, this one an Afghan by the sound of his accent, and marched her outside the circle to stand before the commanding officer, Jamil.
Jamil seemed delighted by her performance. “Ah, what have we here?”
“I’ll show you,” said Serena in Arabic, and with her elbow spiked the face of the Afghan behind her. He let out a cry and dropped his AK-47. Serena took it and pointed it at the wounded soldier.
“Let me go,” Serena ordered Jamil, digging the AK-47 into the back of the Afghan. “Or I’ll kill your man here.”
“You couldn’t hurt a butterfly, mademoiselle.” Jamil took out a pearl-handled Colt, aimed it at Serena’s hostage, and shot him dead himself. Serena watched in stunned silence as the Afghan fell to the ground, leaving her standing alone and exposed to Jamil’s pistol.
“Hand over the Scepter of Osiris, mademoiselle, or I’ll kill you too.”
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