27
KELLY
“What’s going on up there?” Kelly screamed.
She’d been searching the fallen structure for any sort of hidden passageway into the pyramid while she waited for the LiDar unit, which would produce a three-dimensional map of the interior, to finish scanning when the sonic vibrations from the first sound hit. It almost felt like a whale had nudged the building from the outside, followed by a distinct tremble in the ground. Pebbles and debris had rained from the roof before the first of the massive blocks fell, starting a chain reaction. She’d swum as fast as she could, banging her head and shoulders and knees, as the entire building came down around her. The second sound had collapsed the entrance on her legs, but she was able to drag them out and it only cost her a flipper. Not that a full set would have done her much good with the way the sediment had risen into a seemingly impenetrable cloud.
Her only option had been to grab onto the nearest stone block and brace herself against the violent currents as the underwater world tore itself apart around her.
The third sound had created swirling eddies in the silt, forming momentary gaps through which she glimpsed the base of the pyramid. A stone slab dropped straight down into the mud, causing the ground to shake and revealing what almost looked like a doorway that had been completely concealed behind megaliths and sediment.
The fourth sound had caused the water around her to vibrate. The final stone slab fell away, exposing the darkness contained within.
A heartbeat later she realized what was about to happen.
She barely managed to secure her grip on the stone before the current suddenly shifted, intensified, and sucked her legs all the way over her head and toward the pyramid. A vortex formed in the doorway, inhaling everything within its range. Silt and debris assailed her like buckshot. Bones and rubble bounded along the bottom of the lake. She started to slip and screamed with the strain. It felt like her arms were being wrenched from their sockets.
Kelly soared backward and cartwheeled through the water before she even realized she’d lost her grip. She tumbled blindly along the current until it abruptly waned and left her drifting toward the orifice on an eddy she easily escaped.
“Are you all right?” Evans shouted.
“What the hell just happened?”
“We were hoping you could tell us. The lake felt as though it just dropped out from underneath us.”
“That’s because it did.”
“What do you mean?”
Kelly swam through the settling silt until she could clearly see the doorway, which continued to suck in debris, although at nowhere near the same rate.
“Jesus,” she whispered. “It worked.”
“It worked?” Richards said.
“I’m looking directly into the pyramid right now.”
“It worked!” Richards shouted into her ear. “Did you hear that, Mr. Roche? She says it worked!”
“Not without nearly killing me in the process,” Kelly said. “You could have at least given me a little warning.”
“You have my most sincere apologies, my dear. I genuinely thought you had returned to the surface with Dr. Fleming. Tell me you’re unharmed.”
“I lost a flipper.”
She realized how lame it sounded as soon as she said it.
“What about the remains?” Jade asked.
“There’s no way anyone’s getting to them now.”
“Did the LiDar finish scanning first?”
“Looks like it,” Evans said. “We won’t know if we’re missing any data until we perform the reconstruction, though.”
Kelly floated closer to the orifice, which had inhaled the majority of the sediment around it, creating a fan-shaped trench leading downward to the bare ground. The pull of the current was no stronger than the standard undertow to which she was accustomed, so she inched down the slope until she could barely see the rubble of the fallen structure behind and above her.
The ground was composed of fitted stones of varying size, and yet the seams were perfectly straight and so tightly joined she doubted she could fit anything wider than a razor blade between them. She braced the insulated dry boot she wore beneath the lost diving fin on solid ground and with the other leg flippered against the current for balance. She could hear the others talking, but she couldn’t concentrate on their words as she watched the tendrils of silt pass her and disappear through the trapezoidal opening. The threshold was easily eight feet deep and framed by an aedicule of polished stones that each had to weigh several tons. She couldn’t clearly see the inscriptions on them beneath the rust-colored mud.
The lights mounted to either side of her mask revealed little more than the sparkling silt settling inside.
“I’m going in,” she said. The words were out of her mouth before she even realized she’d reached a conscious decision.
“We should wait until we know everything’s stable,” Richards said. “Dr. Peters said she just received reports of flooding from Troll Station. They said it was like a geyser erupted from inside Snow Fell.”
“The aquifers are connected,” Kelly said. “The water had to have somewhere to go.”
“Exactly my point. Lord only knows what might happen to you if you get sucked down into one of those passages. We don’t have the slightest idea of how many are down there, let alone where they go.”
Kelly slid closer until the pull of the current was almost irresistible. The slabs that had once concealed the doorway were each easily two feet thick and had fallen into the ground in such a way as to create stairs leading up into what looked like a narrow corridor. Strips of copper, green with oxidation, ran vertically down the walls to either side. She could feel the heat radiating from them even through her dry suit.
She glanced up toward the Zodiac, which was barely silhouetted by its own lights in the distance. Her fingers fretted at her side but couldn’t quite touch through the thick gloves.
“Kelly?” Evans said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” The bubbles from her regulator fled her into the darkness. “Couldn’t be better.”
“Wait for me. I’m changing now. I’ll be right down.”
“You know where to find me,” she said and lifted her feet.
The current pulled her into the confines. She kicked against it and braced her hands on the walls to slow her progress. Her lights did little more than limn the tunnel, which remained straight for maybe ten feet before starting a fairly steep decline. Twin copper pipes, so green she initially mistook them for algae, traced the ceiling above her before branching upward through a seam between stones. Another dozen feet and she encountered a second tunnel that led upward from the ceiling at roughly the same angle of her descent. The bubbles from her regulator rose toward it before being swept downward into the earth.
Kelly smiled to herself. She knew exactly what that meant.
She swam up into the passage and craned her neck in an effort to see where she was going. Her beams formed a diffuse golden aura that constricted into twin circles on the surface, which she breached for the first time in what felt like forever. She took a moment to gather her bearings before she crawled out of the water. She knew that sunken ships often contained large pockets of air, but was surprised to find what amounted to a giant airlock inside the flooded pyramid. The slanted stone roof was barely high enough to allow her to walk in an awkward crouch, every other step punctuated by the flap of her flipper, until she reached a point where the ground leveled off and the walls receded.
The chamber was maybe ten feet wide, but so tall that her lights diffused before reaching the top. The walls to either side tapered inward like the undersides of twin staircases, only each of the smooth stone steps had to be at least five feet tall. The sound of her footfalls echoed around her in a way that made it sound as though she were in a stadium filled with people clapping in unison. Bits of broken clay and rusted iron covered the damp ground. The high-water mark on the walls came up to her waist,
but only to the knees of the three-dimensional statues sculpted into the walls as though emerging from them.
“Are you seeing this?” she asked. The echo of her voice was disorienting.
Evans said something, but his voice cut in and out to such an extent that she couldn’t understand him.
The statues were so lifelike it felt as though they were watching her as she advanced into the chamber. They held their arms out to support massive wings with such realistic feathers that she half expected them to take flight. Their bodies were taut and muscular and textured with what almost looked like fine scales. All of their chests were bare, although the men wore elaborate loincloths and the women contoured skirts. Each had an ornate headdress that reminded her of the masks samurai wore into battle, only these were carved into the faces of various animals, leaving just enough space through which to see their intricately carved eyes and the bridges of their noses. There was a man with the face and horns of a bull, another with the beak and flared feathers of a bird of prey. A woman with the snout and antlers of a deer. A man peering from the mouth of a fanged serpent. And each and every one of them had a giant disk balanced on his or her head, held in place by a broad V-shaped mount, like the horns of a gazelle.
She passed a tusked man, a lioness, and some creatures she didn’t even recognize before reaching the end of the vaulted chamber and a tunnel so small she was forced again to crawl for roughly ten feet before her lights fanned out into a larger chamber.
Kelly stood and turned in a circle, letting her beam sweep across the recessed walls. The hairs rose along her neck and the backs of her arms.
“Oh, my God.”
Her voice echoed around her like so many ghosts whispering from the shadows.
28
FRIDEN
Max Friden groaned and tried to open his eyes, but the screaming pain in his forehead forced him to close them again. He raised his head and pried his watch from his cheek. He’d apparently fallen asleep on it and hadn’t moved since. He smacked his tongue from the roof of his mouth and, somewhat disoriented, looked around his lab. He just needed some caffeine to take the edge off of his splitting headache, which he knew was caused by ingesting copious amounts in the first place, but that was a problem for another day.
“Sweet nectar of the gods,” he said and killed off the remainder of a warm can of Red Bull he found on the corner of his desk. He belched and launched the empty can toward the trashcan with the others.
A glance at his watch confirmed that not only had he slept through breakfast, he’d nearly missed lunch. Again. This kind of thing was becoming habit for him, but he did his best work in the middle of the night. Always had, always would. There was something about being on the brink of exhaustion that seemed to free his mind from the constraints he unconsciously placed on it during the day.
After Richards left, he’d gotten right down to business and researched ancient musical scales, which led him to the Solfeggio scale, first documented in cuneiform by the ancient Sumerians more than seven thousand years ago and utilized in Europe clear through the Renaissance. In the process, he’d stumbled upon all sorts of New Age mumbo jumbo about its so-called sacred tones, including the belief that the note mi—528 Hz—could repair damaged DNA. While he found the notion laughable, considering it was roughly half the acoustic energy of the tone that had caused the membranes of the organisms to rupture, it seemed like a reasonable starting point.
He’d extracted samples of each of the twenty-eight species isolated from the lake, everything from algae to protozoans, and prepared slides with as many living specimens of each as he could. One by one, he’d mounted them on the light microscope and watched through the lens as he exposed the organisms to that infernal sound. If there was a more annoying tone on the planet, he couldn’t imagine it. After a while he’d started to wonder if stabbing knitting needles through his eardrums wouldn’t have been an improvement.
None of the eukaryotes—single-celled organisms like amoebae and algae—showed any appreciable reaction whatsoever, nor did any of the previously identified multicelled prokaryotes found elsewhere in the world. So much of the scientific method involved ruling out reactions in control samples. Without them, it would be impossible to qualify the reactions of the test subjects, which he had saved for last.
The previously unclassified archaea they’d discovered in the lake, those that had matched the fossilized bacteria from the meteorite and had responded so violently to the Metallica song, had reacted not only immediately to the tone, but in the precise manner he’d predicted. Their fimbriae had lashed out and attached to each other and the glass, creating a complex network reminiscent of the chains of neurons and dendrites that formed the human nervous system.
He’d held his breath waiting for their membranes to split and the cytoplasm to leak out, only to find that the system remained stable. Unfortunately, all it did was a whole lot of nothing. Once it was established and its little web was formed, there was nothing he could do to stimulate it to do anything else. Even exposing it to the same frequency that caused the earlier samples to pop had done nothing. Repeating the procedure with a second slide had produced the same results, confirming what at that point he’d known with more surety than anything he’d ever known in his life . . .
He needed to get some sleep.
No doubt he’d intended to lay his head down for a minute or two, but here he was—Jesus, eight hours later?—and he needed to do something about this mother-loving headache so he could get back to work.
He got another can of Red Bull from the mini-fridge and used it to wash down a handful of ibuprofen.
The slides with the archaea species were under the hood. At least he’d had the presence of mind not to leave them sitting out on his desk. A quick peek under the microscope reassured him that their integrated structure remained intact. In fact, it almost looked as though the network had become more tightly woven, but he could have just been misremembering as the small part of his brain that didn’t actively hurt was still foggy with the residue of sleep.
Friden yawned, set the slide back under the hood, and inspected the second sample. It showed the exact same thing, which was great and all, but he still had no idea of its significance, if there even was any.
He laced his fingers behind his head, swung in circles in his chair, and contemplated everything he knew about this strange species of archaea, which had yet to be formally classified, although he was leaning heavily toward something ending with either Fridensii or Fridensis. All archaea had unique qualities that basically set them apart from all other types of life on the planet. They were prokaryotic, which meant they had no nucleus or other organelles, and while they were similar in size and shape to bacteria, their genetic structure more closely resembled that of eukaryotic organisms, especially the enzymes responsible for transcription and translation, the process by which genetic expression was achieved. They were capable of metabolizing energy sources that killed every other organism, from ammonia to metal ions to hydrogen gas, and thrived in extreme environments from the bottom of the sea to the heart of a volcano, which was why the theory that they could survive in space wasn’t so absurd. In fact, many scientists believed that microbes like this one were responsible for processing methane to produce the oxygen that formed the earth’s earliest atmosphere, which allowed for the evolution of higher orders of life.
That was why he hadn’t batted an eye when Richards first approached him about this project. Well, maybe he’d batted one, but when it came right down to it, he did believe in extraterrestrial life-forms, if not in any of their more Hollywood-esque incarnations. The theory that life had been seeded on this planet by a meteorite meant that somewhere out there was at least one other planet capable of sustaining life, although one at a different stage in its own evolution. He couldn’t help but wonder what life on Earth would be like in another sixty million years. Would mankind still be the dominant form of life, or would it have destroyed everything and returned th
e planet to these very organisms so they could begin the process all over again?
Maybe therein lay the key. It had been sound that triggered their strange behavior, and what was sound if not a low-energy electromagnetic wave? Higher energy had initially triggered this reaction, but at an unmanageable rate that had caused its destruction, yet in its current state that same acoustic energy didn’t affect it in the slightest. What if that were the whole point of this phase in the species’ development? While nature itself was random, its individual components tended to react in predictable ways to given sets of stimuli. What if this web was essentially the next stage in this archaea’s life cycle, like a caterpillar encasing itself within a cocoon? And if so, what would be the result? The individual specimens weren’t even moving anymore. They were just stuck there in one place, connected in a filamentous mass like gray matter in the brain.
Friden stopped spinning and mentally retraced his steps. He was onto something. He’d made a breakthrough, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. It was a tip-of-the-tongue sensation that he undoubtedly would have already worked through were it not for this blasted headache.
“Think, think, think,” he said, knocking himself on the forehead.
That was it. What was thought if not a series of electrical impulses carried through the brain on tracts of nerves, which in turn conducted those impulses to the rest of the body? That was the whole theory behind freezing someone’s head in the hopes of one day attaching it to a robot or a cat or whatever these nutjobs wanted to do.
“Battery.”
Friden yanked open one drawer after another until he found what he was looking for. He pried the back from his cell phone and pulled out the battery, cords and all. A quick snip and the plug was gone, allowing him to expose the wires. He had his eye to the microscope before he realized he’d effectively just ended his game of Lara Croft Go and cursed out loud as he aligned the leads with the edges of the slide. The cell phone battery didn’t produce a ton of juice, but it had more than enough to demonstrate the passage of the current through the water on the slide, which caused the thinnest fimbriae to snap and the smaller archaea to rupture. The larger individuals almost looked like they were boiling, until he recognized that what he had mistaken for little bubbles were actually tiny buds.
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