by David Meyer
"I'm making progress. Everyday, I'm becoming more in tune with this place."
"In tune?" Ben shook his head. "Would you listen to yourself?"
"You still don't get it, do you? I could care less about these rocks. They're just snowflakes in a blizzard. What matters is finding a route through them. And to do that, I require a deeper level of understanding."
Ben lingered for another minute. Then he hiked back to his Sno-Cat. He fired up the engine and drove away.
Roy returned to the stone. He studied it again, searching for its secret.
Most archaeologists and historians figured Damascus steel had to be an accident. The blacksmiths had somehow stumbled upon the secret. They hadn't understood it nor could they easily duplicate it. But it had worked. So, they'd proceeded to forge blades using a trial-and-error process.
Roy found such conclusions incredibly frustrating. The so-called experts refused to even consider the idea that ancient people had known about nanotechnology. They thought knowledge only moved in one direction. But Roy knew better. Knowledge didn't always move forward. Sometimes it moved backward.
He stepped back a couple of feet. His eyes rose to the snow-filled sky. He could just see the edges of the giant pile of rocks. They rose upward at soft angles, eventually coming together to form a structure.
He'd dubbed it the Ice Pyramid. It wasn't a traditional step pyramid, like the Ziggurats or the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Nor was it one of those sharply pointed, smooth-sided structures like the Pyramid of Cestius. Instead, it most resembled the Bent Pyramid at the royal necropolis of Dahshur.
The Ice Pyramid's lower half rose out of the tundra at a sixty-degree angle. Halfway up, the angle shifted to forty degrees. All together, it looked like some ancient deity had wrapped its hand around the top of the pyramid and given it a little squeeze.
Roy knew very little about the Ice Pyramid. But he believed that the initial construction had probably shown signs of instability. In order to avert a collapse, the architect had ordered a much shallower angle of ascent.
Regardless, the Ice Pyramid made him tremble with excitement. Somehow an ancient civilization had sailed to Antarctica. It had ventured across the ice and carved stones out of the distant mountains. It had carted them across the tundra. Then it had constructed a giant, intricate pyramid that had withstood some of the harshest conditions on Earth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Roy had yet to find a way inside the structure. But he'd used infrared thermography to peek into the interior. A hollow chamber rested inside the outer walls. A single tunnel branched away from it, extending into the ground. That tunnel, he knew, would lead to ancient technology and other incredible secrets. It was the only explanation that made sense. Why else would an ancient civilization go to such trouble? They must've had something important to hide.
But he knew the establishment wouldn't accept his theory. It didn't fit into their paradigm. And so, they'd demonize him. They'd call his credentials into question. They'd forcibly remove him from the continent and ban him from ever returning to it.
Thus, he needed hard proof. He needed to gain access to the Ice Pyramid. He needed to gather artifacts. Then he could go public, completely skipping the gatekeepers in the process.
That was Roy's role in history. He knew it, accepted it, even relished it. He'd spent his entire life confronting the current paradigm that knowledge only moved forward. But he wasn't meant to merely shift the paradigm.
He was destined to smash it to pieces.
Chapter 34
"Cy." Holly spoke with urgency and without a hint of sweetness in her tone. "Can we talk?"
I didn't feel much like talking at that moment. So, I took a long drink of MacKinlay's Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky. I'd found a couple bottles of it in one of the cupboards and had spent the last two hours swimming in them.
It was good whisky and according to the packaging, an exact duplicate of that carried by Ernest Shackleton during his 1907–1909 expedition to the South Pole. The recipe had been painstakingly reconstructed using the remnants of old bottles excavated from under Shackleton’s Cape Royds hut.
I took another swig and waited for her to get the hint. But she just stood there, hands on hips. "What do you want?" I asked.
"I … wait, are you drinking?"
"What's it to you?"
"You're right. It's none of my business. Listen, can we talk?"
"Sure."
Her eyes flitted to Jenner. "Not here."
Jenner wiped his lips and pushed his glass away. "Actually, I was just leaving. I want to take a little drive before dinner."
I waited for him to leave. "So, what's this all about?"
She grabbed my arm, pulled me to my feet. "Come with me."
I followed her down the Work hallway, all the way to her laboratory. She ushered me inside. My eyes widened as she shut the door and locked it. "Is that really necessary?"
She turned around and fixed me with a steely gaze. "Where'd you find those bones?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It does to me."
I sensed something other than curiosity beneath her carefully polished veneer. "What's this all about?"
"I don't want to know what you were doing when you found them. You can keep your secrets for all I care. Just give me a location and you'll never hear another word of this again."
I crossed my arms.
Holly sighed. "Come over here."
I walked to her desk. A microscope stood in the center of it. Several file folders were stacked to the side. A sticker emblazoned on the top folder said, Rabe.
"Take a look." She waved her hand at a microscope. "Go on. It won't bite."
I stared through the eyepiece. I saw a brown, fuzzy object. It was shaped like a tiny rodent. As I watched, little hands and feet appeared on all sides of its body, propelling it forward.
I turned the dials, but the image remained fuzzy. "What is this?"
"A tardigrade. It was harvested many miles from here."
"So, what's wrong with it?"
"Nothing." She picked up a small Petri dish and slid it onto the mechanical stage. "Now, take a look at this."
I looked through the eyepiece again. "It looks a lot like the first one. Only it's black. And it's not moving."
"That's because it's dead."
"Don't you mean hibernating?"
"No, I mean dead. At first, I thought it was a cuticle, left behind after molting. But under higher magnification, it's definitely a dead tardigrade. All of its vital processes have decayed. Its tissue has become opaque and lost structural continuity."
"I thought you said these things live forever."
"They show the potential to live forever. But the truth is you can find a few dead tardigrades in any large population. Some die due to what appears to be extreme old age. Others die because of environmental changes."
"How'd this one die?"
"Some sort of bacterial infection as near as I can tell. But here's the rub. It wasn't alone when we found it." Holly took a deep breath. "It was part of a large colony of tardigrades. They were all dead, every last one of them."
"Is that rare?"
"It's unheard of. Colony collapse disorder is fairly common among worker bees. But tardigrade colonies are pretty much indestructible."
I recalled the gas chambers. "Tell me more about the bacteria that killed it."
"There's not much to tell. So far, I've only been able to recover dead spore samples. And those have proven exceedingly difficult to study." She gave me a penetrating look. "That's why I wanted to talk to you. I found identical spores on those bones you gave me."
"You did?"
"It wasn't easy. The bone fragments show extensive fire damage. But I was still able to recover three separate samples." She paused. "Look, this bacteria is scary stuff. I need to know more about it. Unfortunately, my research is stalled. I've gone about as far as I can with dead spores."
"So, you're ho
ping I can lead you to some live ones?"
"I'd settle for a look at some additional bone fragments."
I thought about the satellite image of the region. The gas chamber had been the largest anomaly in the area. But it wasn't the only suspicious-looking object. "I'll make you a deal. I'll show you where I got them but only if you take me to where you found the colony first."
"Why would I do that?"
"Because I've got an idea. If I'm right, it might answer your questions." My gaze narrowed. "And mine."
Chapter 35
"Satellite photos, anomalies, bones." Rupert glanced in my direction. "What are you doing out here anyway?"
I twisted the steering wheel a hair to the left. The treads churned through the ice, sending white powder shooting off to either side.
Holly had insisted on coming with me. She'd roped Rupert in as well. I'd tried to turn them down. But they'd closed ranks, refusing to tell me the location of the collapsed colony unless I promised to take them with me.
"I'd rather not say," I replied.
"Why not?"
"Because you're better off not knowing."
"Listen here—”
"Rupert." Holly put her hand on his arm. "Calm down."
"But he's—”
"I said calm down."
Rupert clamped his jaw shut.
We drove east, rumbling noisily across the ice. Holly and Rupert had discovered the collapsed colony a couple of miles away from the Nazi bunker. I'd marked the position on my map and compared it to the satellite images. A second anomaly—far smaller than the first one—was located in the area. So, we'd piled into a Sno-Cat and set a course for it.
We drove over a long patch of flat ice. It gave me time to think. What if the second anomaly was Werwolfsschanze? How could I explain it to the Whitlows? Could I trust them? I doubted it. These days, I didn't trust many people.
Treasure hunting had never been all gold bars and glittering jewels. But it had gotten significantly harder over the last few years. Archaeologists, aided by bureaucrats, now wielded incredible power. They were provided impressive funds and exclusive access to dig sites. A steady stream of laws had been erected, protecting them from competition. Soldiers and police were recruited to enforce those laws. These days, it took every skill I possessed just to stay a step ahead of them.
Increasingly, I'd been forced to seek help from unsavory characters. Greedy collectors, grave robbers, smugglers, and black market dealers just to name a few. They weren't all bad, honor among thieves I suppose. But there were plenty of rotten apples in the bunch. And they'd only grown more rotten with the advent of stricter laws. In the last year alone, I'd been betrayed, chased, knifed, shot at, and imprisoned. So, I wasn't about to trust a couple of strangers with one of history's greatest lost treasures.
Not by a long shot.
I cleared my throat. "How are we doing?"
"Pretty good." Holly studied the GPS screen. "We're getting close."
I sensed a note of anxiety in her voice. "What's wrong?"
"The screen's bugging out a bit. I think the blizzard is blocking the satellites."
"Is that common?"
"Common enough. We should be fine. Blizzards die off pretty quickly around here."
"Speaking of death, I get the whole idea of putting a living person into suspended animation." I thought about Graham, thought about his anxieties over meeting the Grim Reaper. "But do you think it would be possible to bring someone back from death?"
Rupert shook his head. "No."
"Yes," Holly said at the same time.
I frowned. "Which one is it?"
"Actually, we agree on this subject," Holly said. "We're just using different definitions. There is ultimate death. We call it eternal oblivion. There's no coming back from that. However, that doesn't mean a dead person is in eternal oblivion. Such a person might be dead only by today's standards."
"You're losing me."
"Once upon a time, a patient who'd stopped breathing and experienced cardiac arrest was considered dead. Now, that same person can be revived with CPR and defibrillation. Death is a process, one we're only just beginning to understand."
"What about a person who dies of, say, old age? You might be able to revive him. But wouldn't he just die again anyway?"
"We wouldn't revive him right away. Instead, we'd wait until scientists had figured out a way to cure old age." She hesitated. "If you're worried about someone dying of old age, a crude form of suspended animation is actually available today. It's called cryonics."
"Cryonics?"
"Cryonics is the practice of preserving life via low temperatures." She breathed deeply. "About two hundred and fifty people have been frozen in liquid nitrogen since 1967. Their bodies, by and large, have held up quite well. So, structural integrity isn't a problem."
"Yeah, but maintaining metabolism is a different story," I replied. "For all you know, those people entered eternal oblivion the moment they died."
"I don't believe that."
My face screwed up into a frown. "Isn't cryonics, I don't know, messing with nature?"
"Sure. But any sort of medical treatment can be viewed as altering nature."
"That's not what I mean. What if you revive someone but their soul has already departed their body?"
"Then we've got a zombie apocalypse on our hands." Her eyes flitted back to the GPS device. "We're real close. We should probably walk from here."
I took my foot off the accelerator. Carefully, I pushed the brake pedal. The Sno-Cat slid to a halt. I opened the door and stepped away from the vehicle. Holly, GPS in hand, took the lead and we trudged northeast for several minutes.
The snow was thick as a sheet. I took a quick glance behind me. The Sno-Cat was invisible. "How are we doing?" I asked.
"We're close," Holly replied. "Very close."
"Where do we go from here?"
She pointed. "See that ridge? The one that kind of pops out of the ground? We found the tardigrades on the other side of it."
Peering through the whirling powder, I spotted a peculiar snow bank. It rose about a foot into the air. Then it ran straight for a bit before dipping back to ground level.
I fingered the handle of my machete. Maybe this was the true Werwolfsschanze. If so, that meant the Amber Room—or whatever was left of it—was finally within my reach.
I stopped in front of the snow bank. Kneeling down, I brushed away some powder. Then I thrust my fingers into the snow and started to dig.
Holly's eyes grew wide. "Is that concrete?"
I began pulling away larger sections of snow. Particles danced in the air. "Sure is."
"You knew about this, didn't you?"
I kept my head down and continued to attack the snow. Holly joined me. Rupert retreated to the Sno-Cat and returned with a couple of shovels.
We worked the edges, digging around the sides. The concrete was laid out in a rectangular shape, roughly ten feet long by twenty feet wide. It was too small to be a laboratory. But it was the perfect size for a vault.
My excitement surged. I moved to the center of the object. I stabbed my shovel into the snow a few times. It banged against metal.
"What was that?" Rupert asked.
I scooped away some snow. A curved piece of metal, covered with ice, appeared. "It looks like a door."
"Where's it go?" Holly asked.
I shrugged.
"I think you know more than you're telling us."
"I wish I did." Slowly, I reached for the handle.
"Hold it."
I paused. A gust of cold air slashed against my cheeks.
"We found the tardigrades close to here," she said. "Whatever killed them might be down there."
Rupert nodded. "We should see about getting our hands on some HAZMAT suits."
"Did you experience any ill effects when you found the colony?" I asked.
"No."
"And the bacteria that killed the tardigrades … it was dead right?
"
"Yes, but—"
"Then we'll be fine." I gripped the handle and pulled. The metal groaned. Smoky, rancid air flowed into my nostrils as I swung the door into an upright position.
"Do you see anything?" Holly asked.
I shifted a support bar into place. Then I pointed my flashlight beam into the space. It was at least ten feet deep. I couldn't tell for sure though because the ground was covered. "I see dead bodies," I said. "This is a grave. A mass grave."
Chapter 36
Baxter jumped out of the Sno-Cat. A strange feeling chilled his spine as he stared at the second Sno-Cat. A thin layer of ice covered it. But otherwise, it looked abandoned.
He trudged forward, staying low to the ground. He kept a watchful eye on the landscape. Soon, he reached a small plain. The snow dipped a few inches in height. It felt softer under his feet.
He zigzagged across a series of rifts. His boots sank deeper into the snow. Flurries soared into the air.
He reached the second Sno-Cat. His eyes narrowed to slits. Again, he felt iciness creep down his spine. He stopped and turned in an arc. He didn't see anyone watching him. He only saw snow. Majestic, falling snow.
He studied the powder around the vehicle. He didn't see any of Fenrir's pawprints. Then again, he didn't see any footprints either.
He yanked the door open and examined the cab. What he saw surprised him. Or rather, what he didn't see. Save for a wad of paper on the seat, the cab was empty and surprisingly clean. Baxter picked up the paper. He unfolded it to reveal a satellite image of the region. Several locations were marked and numbered.
He took a quick look at the cargo area. It was well stocked with food, space blankets, and the usual survival gear. Everything was in its correct place. Nothing was missing.
Slowly, he closed the door. The whole situation reminded him of those old ghost ship stories. A crewed ship would happen upon a boat in the middle of the ocean. They'd hail it, only to find it had been abandoned without a trace.
His heart beat a little faster. He'd spent most of the day searching for more pawprints. He'd worked well into the night with no luck whatsoever. Eventually, he'd been forced to abandon his search.