He could feel her searching his eyes for clues. “What did happen, Conrad?”
He wanted to hold her in his arms, if she’d let him, and tell her everything was going to be OK. But they both knew that would be a lie. “I’m going to find out,” he told her. “I promise.”
The square of light overhead grew larger as Conrad neared the top of the shaft. It had been a steeper climb than he expected, slowed by the suction pads he needed for traction, and he was out of breath. The wind whistled as he gripped the outer edge of the shaft and pulled himself up to the light of day.
The brightness was harsh and he blinked rapidly, allowing several seconds for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he blinked again in disbelief.
Spread out a mile below him were the ruins of an ancient city. Temples, ziggurats, and broken obelisks lay strewn amid what had been—could be—a tropical paradise. He noticed a series of concentric, circular waterways radiating out from the base of the pyramid complex, which he deduced was the center of town. It was an advanced, otherworldly city grid hidden for twelve thousand years under two miles of ice.
Until now.
Conrad shaded his eyes. The subglacial terrain stretched out in a six-mile radius from the pyramid—a tropical island in a sea of ice. In the distance he could see the snowcapped Transantarctic Mountains.
The air smelled crisp and fresh, and he could hear the distant rumble of waterfalls. Somehow his fears and doubts and petty ambitions were swept away by the majesty of it all. But as he gazed out across the new world, he suddenly wondered what had happened to the old.
23
DAWN MINUS FIFTEEN HOURS
U.S.S. CONSTELLATION
ADMIRAL WARREN SPLASHED ACROSS the inside hangar deck of the U.S.S. Constellation, surveying the damage. The ship hadn’t capsized after all, but the deck had taken on enough water to sink the Titanic twice. And yet the old girl was still afloat, limping along on emergency power.
Initial reports coming in from the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, and some earthquake-forecasting agency in Japan blamed the tidal wave on a major quake in East Antarctica—11.1 on the Richter scale. But Warren couldn’t confirm it with McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott. All communications with American bases on the continent had been cut off by a burst of EMP.
All of which seemed to validate reports coming out of Moscow and Beijing that the “seismic event” in Antarctica was really a secret U.S.-sponsored nuclear explosion—a flagrant violation of the international Antarctic Treaty.
The electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, had also blinded spy satellites overhead. Warren was told that if he couldn’t get a bird up in the air to fly reconn over the epicenter, it was going to take at least sixteen hours before any U.S. forces could reach the target to either prove the nuke accusations false or cover up Yeats’s dirty work.
“Goddamn you, Yeats,” Warren muttered as he stepped around the floating pieces of a broken wing. Looked like one of their F/A-18 Hornets. The rest was mangled with what used to be an S-3B Viking.
Warren shook his head. Twenty-six wounded, three in critical condition and nine missing. And that was just the Constellation. News reports said one-third of the island of Male, the Maldives’s capital, was underwater. Even a small rise in sea levels at this point could wipe out the island nation—all 1,180 islands. The entire population of 263,000 inhabitants was at risk.
The only positive news Warren could report back to Washington was that his crew had managed to rescue the Greenpeace protesters from their now-sunken ship. The meddlers were helping out with the wounded and serving up some of the best damned coffee Warren had ever tasted.
He was on his fourth cup when one of his radio officers splashed over. “EAM coming over Milstar, sir.”
Warren watched a sock float past him on the hangar deck. Milstar was the president’s communications link to senior military commanders. The $17-billion Military Commanders’ Voice Conference Network was designed to enable commanders to discuss whether a ballistic-missile launch threatened North America and, if so, to determine the appropriate response.
“Priority one, sir.”
“I’m coming.”
Warren took a final gulp as he eyed the rad-hardened Black Hawk chopper that several of his maintenance crew were working on in the corner—at his orders. He then crumpled the Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it on the hangar floor, where it floated away.
Inside the Constellation’s war suite, the water was only ankle deep. Warren walked in to find his senior officer, McBride, seated at the conference table. Next to McBride, to Warren’s surprise and dismay, was the scruffy Greenpeace geek from the Arctic Sunrise whom CNN had featured. He was fiddling with some candy-colored laptop computer that looked like a toy.
Warren frowned. “What’s this civilian doing here, McBride?”
“This is Thornton Larson, a Ph.D. in geophysics from MIT,” McBride said. “He reviewed the Milstar downloads and has a presentation for you.”
“Couldn’t your officers figure it out, McBride?”
McBride said, “The data is so off the charts, sir, we felt we needed a second opinion. Dr. Larson has some valuable insights.”
Warren sat down and studied the disheveled Larson. The smart-ass hasn’t even discovered the razor blade, he thought to himself, and McBride was sharing national security secrets with him. “Enlighten me, Larson.”
“I was able to retrieve one final image from a satellite overhead before its innards were fried by that EMP,” Larson said excitedly. “I cleaned it up and here it is.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. A blue-tinted image of Antarctica, all too familiar to Warren these days, came into view. But in the middle of it, or rather just off center in East Antarctica, was a brown-yellow dot.
“Is that awesome, dude, or what?” Larson could only marvel at his work.
“God almighty, tell me that’s some storm and not ground zero,” Warren said.
Larson addressed the image on the wall screen. “Well, hello Mr. Ground Zero, are you ready for your close-up?”
The brown-yellow dot on-screen started to magnify, frame by frame, until Warren found himself looking at a crater in the ice, and at the bottom of it was a complex of pyramids, temples, and waterways. The kid was obviously playing them all for fools, Warren decided.
“You think you’re pretty funny, Larson, don’t you?” Warren said, starting to get up. “Let’s see how hilarious the brig can be.”
“Please, sir,” McBride said. “We checked it out and this guy hasn’t doctored anything.”
Warren slowly sat down, his thoughts immediately turning to Yeats. The SOB must have known all along. “So you’re telling me what I’m seeing on that screen is for real?”
“What you’re seeing is a localized event, like a garage band on the verge of stardom,” Larson said. “This is just the first single off an album I’ll call Mother Nature’s Cacophony in Doomsday Major.”
Warren gave McBride his “your ass is on the line here” stare, which his executive officer acknowledged.
Larson said, “Your attention, class.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. The image of an ancient city surrounded by ice was gone. In its place, spinning in the center, flickering with each power drain of the carrier’s electrical system, was what looked like a thermal image of the sun in space.
“Tell me what I’m looking at on the screen, Larson.”
“Earth’s core, baby,” Larson said. “The core! A new technique similar to a medical sonogram enables us to generate an image of the inner planet. I’ve used the latest version of PowerPoint on my G5 to generate—”
Warren waved his hand impatiently. “Get to the point.”
“Earth is an onion, man, made up of layers,” Larson said. “And it’s a rotating onion too, churning up hurricanes and storms in the atmosphere. But the core spins independently, and changes there can trigger significant consequences near and at the planet’s surface. I’m tal
king consequences.”
“You mean earthquakes and tidal waves?” Warren said.
“Big time,” Larson said. “Albert Einstein, Dr. Relativity himself, even theorized that the outer crust, the lithosphere, periodically shifts over the asthenosphere due to ice buildup in the polar regions.”
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying, baby, is that we seem to be witnessing what is known as an earth-crust displacement. You dudes in the military-industrial complex prefer the perverse little acronym ECD.”
Warren didn’t know what this kid was smoking, but he had to know where this theory was going. “And what’s this ECD going to do?”
“Well, here’s where it gets really nasty,” Larson said. “Antarctica is going to get pushed toward the equator and North America into the Arctic Circle.”
Another computer image appeared on-screen, this one of Earth. Warren felt his own temperature rise as Antarctica moved up toward the center of the globe, ice free, and North America was pushed to the top of the globe.
Warren said, “So you’re saying we’re better off staying here and sunning on the beaches of Antarctica rather than freezing our asses off in the USA, which is going to get buried under two miles of ice.”
“Bingo!” Larson said. “Bingo! An ECD would cause extinctions to occur on different continents at different rates, based on varying changes in the world’s latitudes. I’ve mapped the projected lines of destruction. We’ll call them PLDs. Hey, I made up a new acronym! Well, these PLDs are pretty damn awesome, I’ve got to tell you.”
On-screen Larson drew a circle around the globe, through the North and South poles. “The line of greatest displacement runs through North America, west of South America, bisects Antarctica, travels through Southeast Asia, goes on to Siberia, and then back to North America. All the continents along the line of greatest displacement—or LGD—are about to experience mass extinctions.”
“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 9600 B.C. That’s when the geological record says vast climatic changes swept the planet. Massive ice sheets melted, ocean levels rose. Huge mammals perished in great numbers. A sudden influx of people flowed into the Americas. It was party 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 countdown 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 FORTH across 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.
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?
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 word Mama 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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