The Sam Reilly Collection

by Christopher Cartwright

  “Okay, so I guess we did make it here in 1908. The question is, where was here?” Tom said. Then, to clarify he said, “If it wasn’t at the bottom of a five-hundred-foot lake, where was it?”

  Sam studied the ladder. Clearly whoever had used it weren’t swimming at the time. “I have no idea.”

  The two men carefully powered their ADS machine toward the end of the room, along another tunnel and finally into the third room. This one had the word SACRIFICE at its entrance. It was relatively small compared to the other rooms. Five pillars stood approximately forty feet above another chasm’s floor. To the side of the middle pillar, about three feet away, stood a single totem pole. Above it, an enormous axe remained attached to the ceiling more than ten feet above, forming a perfect pendulum of death.

  “Now I’m really feeling like I’m in one of Indy’s nightmares,” Tom said.

  Sam laughed. “No Tom, I think Indy would have felt safer inside an ADS machine. Come on, let’s go find the reward.”

  The electric propulsion units whirled into life as they crossed the seemingly easy test of SACRIFICE.

  “What do you think was meant to happen here?” Tom asked.

  “Nothing good, whatever it was. I suppose being a sacrifice, someone had to stand on that additional pillar, in order to trigger a weighted mechanism to open the final door so the other person could exit. The only problem being, he or she would die in the process.”

  At the end of the room the door had been held open once more by a hydraulic strut. Sam continued through the tunnel, which gradually moved in an upwards direction, and toward the fourth room.

  When he reached the end of the tunnel the head of Sam’s ADS machine left the buoyancy of water. Startled, Sam said, “Tom, you’re not going to believe this – it appears the fourth room is still dry.”

  Chapter Sixty

  Sam stepped out of the water and into a massive room. The hum of his ADS machine’s electric propulsion system was replaced by the hydraulic movements of his mechanical limbs. He scanned the cavern they’d entered. There was no question about it -- they were standing inside Poseidon’s temple.

  In Plato’s Critias Dialogue, Poseidon’s Temple was described as a stadia’s length by half a stadia’s width. No one had ever worked out what an Atlantean Stadia represented as a measurement. Looking around, Sam was surprised to discover that although it was large, it wasn’t anywhere near as large as historians had guessed over the years.

  The ancient cavern was nearly barren.

  Inside the temple of Poseidon, the place was completely dry. It looked like one of those fake sets after Hollywood got to it in another movie about destruction of the world. Sam looked around and could imagine it to be Atlantis, as described by Plato, with the one exception – all the wealth had been stolen. The gold statue of Poseidon himself was missing, the walls were no longer covered in orichalcum – the precious alloy mined only in Atlantis. The roof, stripped of its ancient ivory and precious gemstones, was barren blocks of stone.

  “This looks like Atlantis all right,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, the only problem is we got here about a hundred years too late!” Tom replied. “Man, look at this place. Whoever got here first, either the Russians or our guys, certainly did a job on the place. Archeologists would have a seizure if they saw the destruction here.”

  At the center a round ball glowed with a slightly bluish tinge. It was as tall as each of them, were they not wearing an ADS machine. Despite its obvious glow, Sam had nearly missed it during his first reconnaissance of the room, the shock at the wanton destruction of Atlantis – most likely for its precious metals and ivory – distorting his vision. But now, the spherical structure seemed obvious.

  “I’ve seen that blue glow somewhere before,” Sam said.

  Tom squinted. “So have I.”

  “Where?”

  “At the center of the Mayan Pyramid. The same place Billie found the map to Atlantis.”

  “Of course! I remember the bluish glow now. And I remember her showing me the sphere, too. Only hers was only the size of a clenched fist. Billie said she’d taken it to a number of geologists who could only tell her that it appeared natural and similar to a diamond, only stronger, brighter, and it had the unique properties of transmitting sound and light better than any other material ever known.”

  Sam walked up to the sphere and examined it. More than fifty strange markings could be seen on the outside of it. Only, they weren’t completely strange markings. He’d seen them before, too. But where, he couldn’t even imagine.

  “Help me roll this ball will you?” Sam asked.

  “Sure, anywhere you’re planning on taking it?” Tom replied.

  “No, just off this light so I can see what’s under it.”

  Together they attempted to move the sphere. Despite the massive lifting power of the ADS’s hydraulic arms, the sphere didn’t move.

  “This stuff’s heavy,” Tom said.

  “Let’s see if we can rotate it on its axis,” Sam said.

  Carefully gripping the sphere with his metal hands, Sam prepared to rotate their strange discovery. This time, it moved easily, as though it had been floating on water or resting in a pile of tiny ball bearings.

  “Any idea what the hell any of this means?” Sam asked.

  “Not a clue. The sphere that Billie and I found in the Mayan pyramid, buried in the seabed, showed a number of unique locations. Maybe it will show us something. Billie knew about it, so there must be something she wants us to see.”

  Sam moved it again. This time he noticed that the marking on the sphere, when it reached the blue glow at the base, turned to a glowing red. He turned the sphere again, and the same small marking remained bright red, as though it was glowing with fire.

  Continuing the process, another four marks became engulfed in a flame red glow, while more than forty others which he’d tried remained unchanged.

  “Okay Sam, I’m here to find Billie, but you’re the expert in ancient mythology – what the hell is this?”

  “If I had a guess, I’d say that it’s some sort of ancient counting device, like a computer.”

  “The Atlanteans had computers eleven thousand years ago?”

  “Not quite, but I’d say this is a pretty complex abacus. The more I look at it, the more I can’t help but feel like I’m triggering a code to something, but what I don’t know.”

  “You mean, the code to Atlantis?” Tom said.

  “Yeah, something like that. Where did you get that idea from?”

  “Because, when Billie called me a few weeks ago, she told me that she’d reached it, but now had to find the code to Atlantis, before it was too late!”

  A cold shiver ran down Sam’s spine. A sixth sense that he was close to achieving something or destroying something. “Too late for what?”

  Tom stopped him turning the sphere again. “I think I know what happened to the scientists who came here in 1908.”

  “Well don’t leave me in suspense. What happened to them?”

  “They activated that sphere.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Sam moved back from the sphere.

  A total of eight markings glowed red. He looked at the device as he would a modern day computer, searching for a delete button or backspace. Surely whatever purpose the device had, the ancient people of Atlantis must have had a means of activating it or deactivating it.

  “We need to find something else. There must be another device around here that will help me clear it. Come on, I cringe to think I’ve inadvertently triggered the next cycle of human life or lack thereof, on this planet.”

  “Already on it,” Tom said while turning over bits of debris within the temple.

  Thirty minutes later, Sam found something on the sphere itself. He was so focused on the sphere that it took a while to notice it was now projecting a small red light on the ceiling. “I’ve got something, Tom.”

  Tom came back and stared at the glow above the sphere
. “I’m sure that wasn’t there before.”

  “No, so am I.”

  “I’ve seen those markings inside the Mayan pyramid, too.” Tom paused for a moment and then said, “I think Billie said they were ancient Egyptian measurements of time.”

  Sam looked at the projection again. “You’re right! They are images of time, but I’ll need my tablet to compute the exact time.”

  Sam locked his machine in park mode, as he would with a car, and then climbed down inside his massive ADS machine. There was enough room there to eat, drink, and store basic necessities. In Sam’s case, that meant his high powered computer tablet and its several terabytes worth of information.

  He quickly scrolled through his ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics page until he reached the section regarding the recording of time.

  “Oh, that’s not good!” Sam said, when his initial worst fear came to an even more apocalyptic fruition.

  “What now?”

  “What other devices do you know display the time when they’re activated?”

  “A bomb!”

  “And didn’t the Secretary of Defense say something about the scientists at the time calculating the force to level 10 million pine trees at around 50 megatons, or the equivalent of about a thousand nuclear bombs? It might be a kinda good idea to find out just how much time we have.”

  “All right, I’m working on it.” Inside the ADS machine, Sam quickly opened his advanced linguistics program on his tablet, designed for cracking these types of problems.

  “The first line is years, months, days, hours…”

  “The image just changed.”

  “Christ, it’s counting down!”

  “Okay I have it!”

  “How much time have we got?” Tom asked hurriedly.

  “Two years, twenty weeks, five hours and ten minutes.”

  Tom stared at the projection on the wall again. “But that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the last image changes every second.”

  “Which means…” Sam looked up and counted the lines of images. There were four. That meant, if the first line represented seconds, the second must represent minutes, the third hours, and the fourth, weeks. “Holy shit, we have just over two weeks!”

  “Sam, we didn’t just activate this – it was already running, we just brought up the display counter!”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Because the Secretary of Defense told you that everything from the Tunguska event was sealed, only to be reopened in just over two weeks from now, when none of it would matter! Damn it Sam, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  “We’re not leaving until we find whatever the hell it was that Billie sent us here to find,” Sam said. “She told me that she’d only just come back from Atlantis, and that it was important that she find something in Amsterdam to help her with her discovery. Now, there’s no way she dived to this sort of depth on her own, so that means to me, that there’s another Atlantis.”

  Tom’s eyes narrowed. “You mean this isn’t Atlantis?”

  Sam started to realize the truth. “No, this isn’t Atlantis. It was created by the ancient Atlantean people, but it doesn’t match up in any way with Plato’s description of its size or grandeur. Okay, if the Atlantean Archive we found in Tibet was created as a library of the events in Atlantis, like an almanac, then could it be possible that the other survivors attempted to rebuild Atlantis, here?”

  “It’s possible. But why go to all the trouble of building a place like this if it served no purpose?”

  “No, it wasn’t just a shrine to Atlantis. This was replacing it completely. Atlantis wasn’t just a place in ancient times. Atlantis was a machine that connected mortals with the stars. How or why, I have no idea. But it has the ability to yield immense power, as the American expedition discovered in 1908, when they too accidentally activated it.”

  “But what good is that to us, if we can’t stop this bomb?” Tom asked.

  “Nothing, unless we can find out what Billie knew about this place. There must be something that we can use to help her.”

  Sam continued to search the room.

  At its center, where Poseidon’s golden statue had most likely been removed, a series of strange shapes covered an area several feet wide. Placed precisely equidistant to the towering dome, it was impossible to believe that they were simply shapes.

  “It looks like something important was here… or at least it was important once upon a time?” Sam said.

  Tom swept the room with his flashlight. “Yeah, whatever it was – it’s easy to believe that it was long ago destroyed – most likely by whatever caused the Tunguska event.”

  “Meaning we’ve already lost whatever it was that Billie wanted us to find?” Sam asked. “That was Billie’s writing in Nepal. She must have wanted us to come here for something.”

  “Or she specifically wanted us off their tail?” Tom pointed out.

  “She intentionally sent us on a wild goose chase, and made us dive in frigid waters?”

  “Possibly.”

  Sam looked up at the ceiling again. The place had been stripped of all its orichalcum by the Russians years ago. Any writings on the wall were long destroyed. “What if it wasn’t such a case of wanting to send us here, but instead, a case of wanting to send someone else away from her?”

  “You mean, her captives told her to write this GPS location?”

  “No, she could have easily made up whatever she wanted. Only a handful of people in the world can interpret the ancient language of the Master Builders. Whatever reason she had to send us here, it was her decision to write it.”

  “Go on.”

  “Which can mean only one thing.”

  Tom looked at him expectantly. “What?”

  “That she’s even more afraid that someone else will beat her to Atlantis.”

  Tom said, “And that someone must be on to us? No wonder she was trying to send us away. Someone else wants the coordinates of Atlantis.”

  “Of course, Andrew Brandt!” Sam just about yelled the man’s name. “The man the organized crime boss from Nice warned us about. Originally, I assumed that he was one and the same as Billie’s captor, but after the events in Nepal, I’m not so sure. Her captor could have sent a separate army in to kill us on Kangchenjunga, but if that was the case, she wouldn’t have sent us to the wrong place.”

  “Which means…” Tom said.

  “We’d better get out of here, while we still can.”

  Sam was about to step into the water which covered the third challenge and leave the dry dome of Poseidon, when he felt the slightest of tremors under his feet.

  Followed by the sound of a loud jet screaming through the water above.

  “That can’t be good,” Tom said.

  Sam swallowed hard. “No, if my ears don’t deceive me, I’d say someone’s just launched a torpedo.”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The tone of the seemingly innocent whirl of the torpedo’s electric motor increased sharply. Sam scanned the room for something structurally strong enough to resist whatever was about to rain down upon them. A single archway at the entrance to the room was the best he could come up with in the short time they had.

  “Over there, Tom, at the entrance. It’s our best chance of survival.”

  “I see it!”

  The two men began moving toward it as fast as they could – their ADS machines at a pace no faster than a walk.

  The dome of Poseidon held true to its strength and resisted the destruction by the torpedo. But the ground below them shook violently.

  At a depth of nearly five hundred feet of water, little had touched the ancient site since the Russians had rendered it worthless in 1908 during the Tunguska event.

  Tom was the first to step into the water again. He returned before Sam had set foot into the second level of the temple.

  “There’s no way out. The r
oof has collapsed and about a million tons of rubble is now blocking our way.”

  Sam casually looked at the counter on his mechanical wrist. “So, we have around 36 hours to find another way out, before our life support runs out of juice.”

  “I don’t know what your plan is Sam, but we already walked around the dome of Poseidon. There’s only one way in and one way out. And that way out is now blocked.”

  A smile came over Sam’s face. “I have an idea there’s another way out – assuming it too hasn’t been blocked.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because this was built as a sister temple to whatever Atlantis Billie went to.”

  “So what?”

  “So there’s always a second way out when it comes to Atlantis.”

  “Of course, but I don’t see any.”

  “Remember how we found the remains of three challenges. Test of strength, wisdom, and sacrifice? With a fourth name being wealth?”

  “Yes, and the fourth being the wealth of Poseidon, which our predecessors appear to have stolen.”

  “What if the wealth of Poseidon was just a ruse -- a final step to dissuade any intruders from looking further inside the temple?”

  “To what?”

  “The true wealth of Atlantis – the code. If our processors got it wrong, and the device sunk Atlantis nearly five hundred feet below the surface of the earth and wiped out hundreds of miles of tree lines, what power do you think the actual code itself might possess?”

  “I have no idea, what?”

  “Neither do I, but I intend to find out. And in doing so, we’re going to get out of here, and more importantly, we’re going to find the code to Atlantis before the timer reaches zero.”

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Sam looked around the large temple of Poseidon. The place somehow appeared smaller since the cave-in to the entrance. It was psychological, of course -- the temple was still enormous. Somehow the sheer knowledge that their exit had been removed introduced a sensation of claustrophobia Sam hadn’t experienced since he was a boy.