Talos scowled at the crazy old man and then angrily raised his sword for the chain of flags to be readied for the signal. Five hundred of his more severely wounded soldiers had been pulled from the defense of the second circle of Atlantis against the probing invaders. Their duty here would be to relay the signal to the last two warships of the Grand Fleet.
Pythos walked over to a large bronze-and-iron box. He ruthlessly shoved a Nubian slave out of his way and gestured for two guards to lift it. Then Pythos became agitated as the men did his bidding, almost crying out when one of the soldiers let his end slip his grasp. Once steadied, Pythos approached and lifted the wooden lid. His gaze locked on the object inside. He reverently reached in and brought out the Tone Key. He swallowed as he did so. He held the large, perfectly round diamond up to a flaming torch and laughed as he felt its heat rise as it absorbed the flames’ light.
Talos could see deep etchings upon its surface. Strange lines like impressions or gouges that were not natural flaws spiraled around the entire round diamond. The general did not understand how the diamond produced the unheard sounds that activated the great bells on the seafloor, as its science was far beyond the mind of a soldier.
Pythos turned and walked over to a large cylinder. He ordered one of the guards to lift a large lid on what looked like a bronze barrel lying on its side. Once opened, Pythos laid the blue-tinted diamond inside with the care of a mother bedding a newborn child. Then he reached up and brought down a large spike tipped with a much smaller blue diamond, only ten centimeters in diameter. This strange spike had a thick copper wire running from its top. The other end disappeared into the large barrellike device. He placed the spike into one of the diamond’s deep grooves specially chosen for the targeted stratum of seabed, then he gently closed the lid.
Talos allowed his eyes to follow the copper line to a large wheel. The teeth on that wheel disappeared into the teeth of a larger one and that into an even larger cog. There looked to be thirty such wheels aligned side by side, reduction gearing for a device the general would never be able to fathom.
“Start the paddlewheel!” the old man shouted.
Sixteen hundred naked barbarian slaves, captured Greek, Egyptian, and Nubians, began pulling the thick ropes. As they strained as one mass of humanity, the giant floor gate began to slide back on its iron tracks. Steam and heat shot out like a caged animal and assaulted those in the great cavern. The slaves closest to the gate immediately burst into flame. Their very flesh caught fire as they screamed and ran, and archers who lined the upper tiers of the cavern quickly and mercifully brought them down.
As the gate slowly continued to slide open, whips cracked and men screamed. Muscles bunched and feet dug harshly into the grooved stone floor. More flame sprang from the lava well as the flowing river of magma passed by the opening at over sixty kilometers per hour. Still the gate to the volcanic vent needed to be wider and the taskmasters’ whips sang their agonizing song.
“Yes, yes!” the old man moaned under his breath. “That is wide enough!”
The slaves, many burned through to the bone, fell to the floor as women ran to them with water and cooling salve.
Pythos watched and grinned as his plan of action began to take shape. He signaled for the next phase. Five thousand slaves, these bigger and far stronger than the gate slaves, stood as one. Women threw water on their scarred backs in preparation for the great heat that would slam them like the very Wave they would soon produce. Far above them, the great paddle-wheel hung motionless in its cradle. The words and hieroglyphs extolling the assistance of the gods etched deeply into the engineered metal made up of the new, hardened steel. The one million copper spikes placed in bundles of a thousand prickled around the great machine. Above the wheel was a three-meter-thick copper plate, held in place by a spun steel cable that bore its massive weight.
“Lower the lightning wheel to the midpoint marker.”
The slaves moved in unison not by ordered word but by the crack and scream of the whip. They started pulling the six-hundred-foot-long ropes connected to the wheel. With feet slipping and trying to find purchase on the stone floor, the wheel at first refused to move. Old women threw sand beneath the feet of the slaves to soak up the water from the steam and pouring sweat of the thousands. Now finding purchase with the help of the grooved stone beneath their feet as they strained against the ropes, the cavern echoed with the rumble and creak of the giant wheel as it started to move. With a loud roar, it became free of its iron cradle far above the straining mass of men.
A signal command echoed and the five thousand slaves dropped the ropes and ran to the far side of the open lava gate. Some overflow of the four-thousand-degree magma caught several hundred of the sweating and burned slaves as they ran by. It rendered their flesh and bone to ash so quickly that not one of their screams escaped their lips.
Taskmasters’ whips cracked, and once again sand was thrown by the slave women for purchase as the slaves gained the opposite side of the running river of flame and melted stone. They picked up the identical ropes in a desperate hurry as far above their heads the great wheel had started to roll down its elongated track toward the open gate.
“Arrest the wheel before its momentum carries it too far. Hurry or all will be lost!” the old man screamed as he pulled a whip from one of the guards and pushed him aside. His eyes were aflame as he whipped the nearest slaves mercilessly.
The five thousand slaves worked as one as they pulled against the gathering momentum of the sliding wheel as gravity fought to push it down its track. The front ranks, seventy-five slaves in all, were pulled into the open magma gate by the momentum of the wheel. The giant paddlewheel finally started to slow as it reached the halfway point. It hit a twenty-foot-wide downward-angled notch and came to a grinding, ear-splitting halt as it finally arrested. The slaves fell to the floor as one just as a loud cheer went up from the armor-sheathed guards lining the walls.
Talos observed that the slaves still alive and nearest the old man were bloodied and burned. Many more were lying dead at the feet of Pythos. The old scientist slowly turned and looked at the general.
“Now, we wait for the signal from the sea.”
Two massive warships waited at anchor four kilometers from the northern shores of Atlantis. Admiral Plius, cousin and trusted naval adviser to Talos, held hand to brow, shielding the blazing sun from his eyes as he scanned the green sea before him. He was beginning to think that the people of his nation had received a reprieve from the barbarians and the expected invasion and the bulk of the Greek alliance would not come. That brief thought and hope died in his mind as the first flash of metal against the rays of the sun twinkled in the distance, just above the horizon of the sea. The admiral removed his helmet, the long blue plume of dyed horsehair gathering at his feet as he stepped down from the prow of the ship.
“The Spartans, Thracians, and Macedonians have been sighted,” he said as he took the shoulder of his sailing master.
As the rest of the gallant crew looked out over the gunwales, they saw ten thousand flashes of brightness, as many as the stars in the night sky starting to twinkle off the surface of the sea. The dreaded battle fleet of the alliance would soon to be upon them.
As the admiral watched, the lead ship started to take a wavering, almost dreamlike shape in front of one thousand allied Greek ships of all shapes and design.
The lookout from above called out, “The lead ship has a black hull, black as death, and scarlet sails!”
The admiral knew the legend of the man on the lead ship with the black hull and scarlet sail.
“My Lord, should we signal the mainland?” his ship’s captain asked. “The Thracian king Jason and his fleet will soon be upon us!”
“Loose the signal,” he ordered with no enthusiasm.
“Loose the signal!” the captain called out.
At the stern of the massive warship was a catapult, its rear stocks removed and the front reinforced to give it the proper angle
of trajectory. A sword severed the restraining rope and sent the flaming signal missile high into the blue, cloudless sky. The admiral watched it and prayed that it would be seen through the screening smoke of his burning homeland—the home soil, on which neither he nor his men would ever trod again.
Green signal flags were lowered quickly after the signal was seen from the sea. They coursed down the five-mile-long tunnel as a green wave roaring against stone. In all, the signal took only one minute from the time of the catapult signal to reach its goal.
The slaves again strained and pulled. Whips cracked and captured men from the northern and southern regions grimaced as leather slapped backs already bloody. Slowly the giant paddlewheel started to ease up out of the notch that held it.
More slaves were added as the wheel started down the last hundred meters of iron track. The great machine picked up speed and the slaves started to panic as the wheel gained momentum. The whips cracked, but this time the slaves cowered not from the pain of the lash but from fear of the great paddlewheel as it rolled down the tracks toward the flowing lava. Finally, the taskmasters lost control as the men dropped their ropes and arrows started to cut them down for their cowardice.
Pythos watched intently because he knew that there would be no stopping the giant apparatus now as it carried the full weight of its bulk down the guiding track. One and a half million tons taxed the bending and wrenching thirty-meter-thick iron rail. The great wheel finally slammed home at the bottom, again notching itself in a loop of iron that would hold it in place.
Thousands of tons of molten rock shot into the air as the wheel’s massive weight struck the open vent, incinerating slaves and their masters when lava splashed upon them.
“You fool, you’ll kill us all,” Talos said as he grabbed the arm of Pythos.
The old man looked at the general and laughed. “Yes, maybe, maybe, but look, my large friend!” he screamed, pointing upward.
Talos pushed the old earth scientist from him but froze as he saw the great paddlewheel start to turn from the force of flowing lava. Ever so slowly at first, it quickly started to gain momentum. As the wheel turned, its long steel spikes arrayed along the outer side of the paddles were dripping great drops of molten rock as it exited the lava flow. “Release the cooling water, now!”
Above the giant wheel, another gate opened and seawater came forth, striking the steel brushes and cooling them to prevent their melting. Steam shot into the air and soon the environment was nearing intolerable. The interior heat of the great cave had risen to 140 degrees. The paddlewheel moved faster and faster. The spikes were now connecting with the thick copper plate above and generating an electrical field.
No river or water flow in the world could equal the power of the flowing lava vent. As the great Titan watched, another gate opened and fresh water from the city cascaded onto the paddles and the water was trapped when a door sealed them shut. The live steam was shot through a pipe connected to the wheel’s center and that pipe led to the tremendously spinning diamond in its case. Once the steam was released from the paddle, the door would spring free and start all over again as it was dipped into the fast-flowing lava.
The toned grooves whistled their result through the large conducting needle and out into the bronze wire, where not only the tone was carried but the electrical lightning that was needed to power the great bells on the seafloor.
“Red flags—strike!” Pythos ordered.
Talos swung his sword hand down and the long line of signalmen brought large red pendants down to strike the cavern floor.
At sea, the admiral saw three large catapult launches as the missiles streaked from the inner peninsula of the city of Lygos. He quickly nodded his bearded face, giving the signal to connect the line. As he turned away, he saw that Jason’s lead ships were but three thousand yards from his lone vessel as the second ship in his line began connecting the thick line of copper.
Flaming catapults shot from the barbarian ships started striking the waters around the admiral’s vessel as a mile to his rear the second Atlantean warship struggled with the giant grease-covered line of bending copper.
Onboard the second ship, the great cable had been pulled from drums of wood that had been brought to the shoreline and protected with the remaining soldiers of the army of Talos. Thousands were dying on shore so that this vessel could have the time to make the connection of the thick wire to the strange-looking stanchion protruding from the surface of the Poseidon Sea. The floating connection was held in place by a buoy through which another, even thicker copper wire ran to the bottom of the sea, where the great sound inducers had been placed against the sea bottom. They sat directly over the hidden fault line that the Ancients had mapped with their divining skills hundreds of years before.
Sailors struggled with the giant looped end of the line as the first of the Greek’s catapult missiles started to strike the admiral’s ship. Some were aware that the large warship had started to burn; others were fighting madly with the weight of the cable. As they fought, they started to feel the vibrations that signaled that the power of the giant machine was ramping up, that only seconds remained before the Wave that started belowground sent the killing force through the line.
“Hurry, loop the line over the buoy!” the captain called out.
Finally, as he watched, the giant copper ball on the tip of the floating marker accepted the wire, and just as a hundred men started to let go of the line the electrical charge coursed through, immediately killing sixty of his seamen as they started to shake and jump. The stench of burning hair and flesh drove the others back in fear and horror.
As the great paddlewheel moved faster far below the main city, the giant two-foot-thick brushes scraped against the copper plate at an ever-increasing rate of speed as the magma current hit its peak. The wire running from the city to the sea and up onto the deck of the second ship finally glowed red and softened as the wood railing and then the deck itself burst into flame. The flames lasted only seconds before the ship itself convulsed, and vanished in a great explosion.
On the sea bottom, arrayed along the mapped fault line above the very crust of the earth, were two hundred giant copper bells that had sound-inducing forks installed inside. Electrical current running through the mysterious blue diamond and the thick spike that was spinning around the grooved surface produced a high-pitched sound that could not be heard by the human ear, but could be felt by all through their teeth and bones. The diamond created the invisible wave sent through the copper line to the submerged bells, where its minute vibrations ran into the forks inside the submerged bells. There, the sound, the vibration, the wave grew and expanded outward into the seabed that covered the great fault line. As the sound wave from the great inductors slammed into the seafloor, some of it escaped—a minuscule fraction of the din—and every fish in the sea for three hundred miles died. The now-powerful sound wave was sent on its course through to the fault and through to the very tectonic plates that wedged against each other with over a trillion metric tons of force that held the great halves in place.
The sound wave struck and the edges started to crumble along a two-hundred-kilometer stretch of plating, the force of which would be felt on the surface of the sea as a directionless wave. The ships of Jason’s fleet were tossed about like children’s toys as the sound and the swells grew in size and violence. Finally, the two great halves could not withstand the attack and started to crumble in earnest. In addition, the cascading effect cracked the very surface of the great sea bottom. The two plate edges crumbled and collapsed and two miles of the restraining edges fell apart, and the two plates, having nothing to hold them back, whip-cracked and slammed into each other at over a hundred kilometers per hour, creating a ripple effect that was broadcast to the seabed the plates held above them.
The first devastating effect after the two halves collided created a great chasm in the seafloor, not the effect the Atlantean scientist had anticipated. Instead of the force being pushed u
p and out, it went down. The madman had been seeking a tidal wave of immense proportions that would swallow up the invading fleet of Greek warships, a wave that would eventually wash up on the northern coast of the barbarians’ homeland. With Atlantis sitting high against the mainland to the north and south, they themselves would be protected against the tidal surge. But instead the seabed lurched upward and the supporting volcanic lava lake beneath cascaded into a void of a great, widening chasm, taking the sandy bottom of the Mediterranean with it, and that was followed quickly by the sea itself.
Lookouts perched on the tallest structures and Crystal Dome of the main city of Lygos watched as a giant eruption of water rose into the northern sky. At first it rose a quarter of a kilometer into the air, carrying Jason’s armada toward the clouds as it went. The lookouts started cheering from every defensive wall of the land as they watched the complete and utter destruction of the barbarians. As the sea started its downward plunge, drowning and crushing twenty thousand Greeks as it did, they watched in awe as the waters started to spin in a whirlpool of enormous magnitude. It spread outward as the seafloor opened beneath, taking the remains of smashed ships and men down into a crazily spinning vortex of death.
The cheers stopped as the walls and parapets started to shake beneath their sandaled feet. An earthquake unlike anything they had ever felt before started to gain in intensity and the very air became a warbled wave of displacement.
The great invisible sound wave had ceased; its crushing effect had done its job as the great sound bells cascaded into the void where the seafloor had been. However, the sand and rock continued to slide into the immense fabricated cavern until it struck the lava that flowed beneath the two great plates two miles below the surface of the sea.
Talos knew that something had gone wrong as the look on the face of Pythos went from one of ecstasy to one of sheer terror when the floor beneath them began to tremble. In the giant chamber a mile beneath Atlantis, the general heard a great crack as if the earth’s back had been shattered. It was the sound of the colliding plates sending their killing force back to the source.
Ancients: An Event Group Thriller Page 2