The Cradle of Life

by Dave Stern

  She pointed from one edge of the paper to the other.

  “This is his empire, at its height. He collected treasures from all over the world. He stored them in two places. The majority went here, to his library at Alexandria—” she pointed to the Northern Coast of Africa—“which the Romans torched in an act of historical stupidity. But his most prized possessions went here…”

  She set aside the map, pulled out another set of images. These were sketches of a massive temple, typical Greek construction, columns on either side, and at the center, a statue. This statue, however, was not of Zeus, or Herakles, or Apollo, or any of the other Greek gods, but of Alexander himself, seated on a throne. Presumptuous, one might say.

  Or given the man’s accomplishments, perhaps not.

  “This is the Luna Temple. By law, no one was allowed to record its location. Then, in 350 B.C. it was—”

  “Swallowed by the sea,” Gus put in.

  Lara nodded. “Destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Lost forever. Until yesterday.” She looked around the table, making eye contact with first Nicholas, then Jimmy. “If the temple contains even half of what was rumored to be in it—if even half of that temple is intact—this will be the greatest find since Tutankhamen.”

  The brothers exchanged a look.

  “So what are we waiting for now?” Nicholas asked. “Let’s get down there.”

  “Yes—we’re already way behind,” Jimmy chimed in. He reached underneath the table, and pulled out a set of nautical charts, laid them over the temple drawings. “All morning, the others are heading here, along this shelf—going almost due west.”

  Lara looked at the charts. Jimmy had penciled in the exact locations where the other boats had stopped, and the length of time they’d spent there.

  “Right here,” he said, pointing to two Xs on the chart, “these are the places where they found the statues.”

  “They’re following the currents,” Lara said.

  Jimmy nodded. “Of course.”

  Lara smiled. “No they’re not.”

  All three of the Petrakis looked at her quizzically.

  Lara pulled out a photograph from the stack on the table. It was a satellite image of the Santorini group, the one she’d waited for Bryce to get for her from his friend in Jiquan this morning.

  “This is why I was late,” she said, showing them the image. “It’s a geological taken two hours after the quake. The epicenter was here, five miles northeast of us. Look at the currents along the shelf now.”

  She drew a finger across a reddish swirl that went from the upper left-hand corner of the photo to the lower right.

  Nicholas was the first to see it.

  “They’ve shifted.”

  “That’s right,” Lara said. “I don’t know how long it will last, but for right now, the currents are moving north—not west.”

  “So…” Jimmy looked from Lara’s photo to his charts. “So while they’re all diving there, the ruins will actually be—”

  Lara put her forefinger down on the other side of Therasia—out in the open Aegean.

  “Oh boy,” Jimmy said. “They’re nowhere near it.”

  “But we will be,” Lara said.

  Nicholas and Jimmy looked at each other, and grinned.

  “I’ll do the tanks,” Jimmy said.

  Nicholas nodded. “I’ll do the sleds.”

  They took off like a shot.

  Gus smiled, watching them go. “That is the fastest I’ve ever seen them move.”

  “I’m moving, too.” She picked up her backpack, hefted it over her shoulder. “Where can I change?”

  “Any cabin you want,” Gus said. He picked up the charts, and the satellite image. “I’ll go plot our course.”

  Twenty minutes later, the Konstantinos was anchored off the southern coast of Therasia, and Lara was standing on the deck in her wet suit, frowning. She’d used the time not only to change and get her gear unpacked, but to call Hillary at the manor. No one had been there to answer the phone—which was strange. The way Hillary had been fussing over her last night when she was getting ready to leave, the way he’d insisted on her taking full GPS equipment, so they could find her if there was any trouble…

  She would have thought he’d be pacing next to the receiver, waiting for her call. Ah well. Hers not to reason why.

  Lara climbed up to the wheelhouse, and took a look back toward the islands. No other boats, anywhere in sight—she had worried someone might follow them.

  She looked starboard, saw Nicholas and Jimmy in their wet suits, prepping for the dive. The sleds were hanging by the side. In the water, they looked like motorbikes, submerged from the seat on down—though beneath the surface, of course, the sleds had no wheels, no engine block, no exhaust pipes, not even a footrest. They were electric-powered, propeller-driven—and Nicholas was rotating the propellers now, checking the blades, the batteries, the electrical systems. Jimmy, meanwhile, was up on deck, looking over a row of oxygen tanks. Seeing him bend over, squint at the gauges on the tanks, suddenly reminded her that she had a few instruments of her own to check over.

  Lara looked down at her belt, swung it back to front, and glanced at her D1000C. Bryce had outfitted her camera with new housings from Subal just last week. The housings added several new controls, more than worth the expense of the retrofit, she decided after a few seconds of fiddling—she’d wait to fine-tune the camera until they actually got underneath the water.

  Bryce had also spent quite a bit of time last night on the newest addition to her photographic arsenal, a miniature camera housed on the outer rim of her diving mask itself, set to record whatever she was seeing. And speaking of arsenals…

  She swung the belt back around, and pulled the retrofitted Colt out of her holster. This was Subal work again, the weapon sealed and armored so that it worked underwater, firing true at almost any depth. She slid the clip out—saw she had five rounds left, she’d squeezed off a test back at the manor—then back in again with a satisfying thunk. Checked the spare clips on her belt, slid the weapon back in its holster…

  And looked up to see Stefano, the pilot, frowning at her.

  She smiled. “Just in case the boys misbehave down there.”

  Off his confused expression, she descended the ladder, from the wheelhouse down to the deck.

  Up front, Gus was standing with arms propped up on the railing, staring out across the ocean, a pensive look on his face. She walked over to join him.

  “Something wrong?” Lara asked.

  He shrugged. “First Alexander doesn’t record its location. Then God wipes it from the earth with a volcano. Now even the currents change…”

  “And your point is?”

  Gus avoided her gaze. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe this temple’s not meant to be found?”

  She leaned in closer. “Everything’s meant to be found.”

  “Hey, Croft! Lara!”

  She turned and saw Nicholas and Jimmy standing on the deck, waving to her. They’d put the DPVs in the water, moored them to the Konstantinos with motors running.

  She waved back at the boys and smiled at Gus.

  “Showtime,” she said.

  Less than a minute later (after a bit of clowning around that reminded her of other times she’d spent with Nicholas and Jimmy, back when they really were boys) she was on her sled.

  Lara put her mask over her face, felt the oxygen flowing immediately. She set the digital camera to record, and sat up straight on her sled.

  The boys were on either side of her. She pointed forward with one hand, then gunned her vehicle straight ahead. They followed an instant later.

  Just before they submerged, Lara turned back to the Konstantinos. Gus was still at the railing, watching. He waved now, his face expressionless.

  Lara waved back, and as she did, Gus’s words came to her again.

  Maybe this temple’s not meant to be found.

  Suppressing a sudden chill, she descended into the i
nky blackness of the Aegean, in search of the past.

  Two

  In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. He was crowned Pharoah at Memphis, and proclaimed the son of Ammon-Ra—making him a god on earth.

  His ascension into divinity was not fiat, imposed by the will of his army. No, Alexander was loved—beloved—by the Egyptians, who hailed him as deliverer, saw in him the glories of their fabled past come to life again. They brought him their country’s most priceless treasures, mountains of gold and precious gems, statues and relics bearing the emblems of long-vanished empires, papyruses and cuneiform tablets relaying secrets thousands of years old.

  The celebrations lasted for weeks; Alexander held ceremonial games for his new subjects, and his old ones, too, issuing invitations to athletes from throughout the known world. Among the messengers that went forth was one directed to Pella, capital city of Macedonia, Alexander’s home. This messenger carried not only an invitation to the games, but (according to a fragmentary reference Lara had found) a command from Alexander to his regent Antipater, a directive to start construction of a magnificent temple to be devoted to “the treasures of mankind.” This temple was to be a twin to one Alexander planned to construct in his new capital, Alexandria. But whereas that temple was to be devoted to Ammon-Ra, the sun god, the one he commanded Antipater to build was intended to honor the goddess of the night.

  This, as best as Lara could tell, was the first reference to the Luna Temple.

  All other mentions she found (and every free moment she’d had, from the instant she finished packing last night to the moment she stepped on her jet-ski this afternoon, Lara had spent searching her library for those references, reading the extant sources, the fragments of descriptive history that had survived, reviewing her notes on the bits and pieces of rumor she had heard over the years) were as maddeningly elusive as that one. All told, what was truly known about the Luna Temple—its construction, its contents—didn’t amount to much more than what she’d told Nicholas and Jimmy.

  The temple was, in short, more the stuff of legend than historical fact. And unlike other legends—Atlantis, El Do-rado, the Cave of Kyir-Banoff—this one was virtually unknown to the general public.

  But if it existed…

  If it could be found…

  It would be easily the most historically significant discovery of her career. Never mind the treasures the temple was rumored to contain (which included a laundry list of items from the ancient world whose very existence was surely apocryphal—the armor Achilles had worn in the Trojan War, the pelt of the Nemean lion killed by Hercules, Pandora’s box itself, and so on), extant sources hinted that the diaries of Alexander’s royal biographer Callisthenes had been sent to the temple, and that alone was enough to make her blood race, a contemporary account of history’s greatest hero which she would be the first to see in over two thousand years.

  Which was why, a scant two meters down from the surface, she had the throttle full-out, headlights (the sleds eachhad four, two groups of two that could be independently operated) blaring, and was streaking toward the ocean floor like a guided missile.

  She was in front, the boys behind her in single-file formation, Nicholas first, Jimmy lagging. She turned and gave them a smile, and then focused her attention downward again, leaning so far forward on the sled that she was laying straight out, just like she sometimes did on her Norton; in fact, now that she thought about it, riding one of the DPVs was a lot like riding her bike. No roads here, of course, no yellow lines or guardrails to help ward off danger, but that was part of the fun then, wasn’t it?

  The ocean floor appeared just beneath them, and Lara leveled out, slowing slightly as she began scanning the bottom.

  Not for the Luna Temple itself—they weren’t going to find Alexander’s treasure out here, in the open, the lack of decomposition on the artifact Bryce had found was proof enough of that. The Konstantinos had anchored at what Lara calculated to be the extreme southern position of the temple’s possible location—their plan was to follow the current north, looking for clues to the temple’s presence.

  The smooth floor gave way to jagged rock. Spectacular formations created by the Santorini volcano seemed to rise up and surround them, lava flows thrusting from the ocean floor at odd angles, encrusted with barnacles and coral, filled with numerous nooks and little caves, home to no end of sea creatures. Beautiful.

  But hard to follow a straight path through. Lara glanced down at the compass on her wrist to orient herself. Nicholas and Jimmy shot past her as she calculated their location.

  When she looked up, the brothers had slowed. She pulled closer and saw why. Just beyond where they waited, the sea floor came to an abrupt end.

  Lara rolled her sled sideways, slipped in between them, and dove straight over the edge without hesitation.

  She caught the surprised expressions on the boys’ faces as she shot by, and smiled.

  She really did have to stop thinking of them as boys.

  The cliff face was sheer, and smooth. She counted one, two, three seconds before the ocean floor came into view, four, five, six before she had to slow the throttle. Sixty-one meters, at a rough guess. A long way down. They were going to have to decompress on the way up.

  She leveled off. Nicholas and Jimmy appeared alongside her, none the worse for wear. Jimmy pointed to his oxygen tanks, and held up one finger. An hour’s worth of oxygen—half of that time they’d have to spend decompressing, Lara knew. Which left them another half hour of dive time to find the temple.

  She nodded her understanding to Jimmy, and turned to examine the cliff face.

  Right in front of her was a narrow opening in the rock. She frowned, and scanned it with the DPV’s headlights.

  The opening itself was barely more than a gap in the rock. But farther in…

  It looked like the gap widened, became a tunnel.

  Lara frowned, and looked up at the cliff again, then at the tunnel.

  Her mind began to churn.

  Alexander had ordered construction of a temple to house the treasures of his empire. He’d decreed that no one record the location of the temple.

  Ridiculous, on the face of it. How could you possibly keep such massive construction—such a splendid temple—a secret? Only one way, really. Do what the pharoahs had done with those who’d helped build their tombs, who knew where their treasures were buried and how to get at them.

  Kill them.

  Which was what most who granted the possible existence of the Luna Temple assumed that Alexander had done.

  But Lara had never bought into that line of thinking. Indiscriminate slaughter was simply not Alexander the Great’s style.

  Next to her, she sensed Nicholas and Jimmy eager to move forward. She held up a finger.

  Wait.

  Alexander wanted a place to keep his treasures safe, she thought. A place that wouldn’t be found, and ransacked. If he couldn’t build it, he would have to find it.

  And these islands were honeycombed with caves.

  Smiling, she gunned her sled forward into the dark, foreboding tunnel.

  The three of them went single file again—this time, because there was only room for one to squeeze through the tunnel at a time. Lara had to lay flat on the DPV, and even then, the runners of the sled scraped against the tunnel walls.

  As she came around a particularly tight curve, she glanced down.

  The headlights reflected off something unnaturally white. Lara bent even farther forward, stretched out a hand, and scraped dirt away with it as she passed by.

  The white surface was smooth as glass. No, not glass. Marble.

  The edges of her mouth twisted up into a grin.

  A second later, the headlights caught another glimpse of white stone, this time embedded in the wall. No need to touch it to know what this was. A column fragment, embedded in the tunnel.

  The grin turned into a full-fledged smile. Her instincts had been correct—about Alexander, about the t
emple. How he’d managed to keep its construction—and its location—a secret.

  But her satisfaction was short-lived.

  Around the next curve, the tunnel came to an abrupt end, blocked by a rockfall from the roof above. Lara’s smile disappeared with it.

  She turned. Jimmy and Nicholas were stopped in the tunnel behind her, their expressions grim, as well. She saw Jimmy glance down at his wrist, knew that he was checking to see how much oxygen they had left. By her guess, they’d been traveling ten minutes, so another twenty before they had to start surfacing.

  Half an hour to the Konstantinos—half an hour, roughly, before their tanks were full and they could dive again, armed with explosives to clear away the rock. An hour all told before they were back here, in this exact position.

  A more prudent person might have waited.

  But Lara Croft had never been prudent. And she wasn’t going to start now.

  She turned back to the rockfall, and focused both sets of headlights on it, searching for something—a passageway narrow enough to squeeze through?—that might allow her to continue.

  The headlights found the rockfall, and lit it up—really lit it—this time.

  And suddenly, Lara’s smile was back.

  She gunned the throttle and drove her sled straight for the center of the collapse. Gritted her teeth and bent over the nose of the sled as it strained forward…

  And smashed into not rock, but coral, the blockage had been coral, solid enough, sharp enough if you scrape against it while diving, but if you hit it hard and fast…

  Not much of an impediment at all, really.

  The DPV burst through the coral, and shot straight up into open air.

  For a split second, despite everything that she’d worked out before, Lara thought that she’d miscalculated the depth of their dive, that the tunnel had led them right back to the surface, only it was somehow dark outside and the Konstantinos had disappeared and the air had gotten dank and stuffy, just like the inside of…