Raising Atlantis a-1

by Thomas Greanias

  “At ease, lieutenant,” Zawas said, and Yasser relaxed. “We don’t see a sunrise like that often, do we?”

  Yasser grumbled something that Zawas took to be a no. He realized most of his men were showing the effects of exhaustion and stress.

  Zawas sighed and patted his pockets in search of some matches when Yasser’s hand came up with an old-fashioned Zippo lighter. Zawas touched the tip of his Cuban cigar to the flame and inhaled. It felt wonderful.

  “Carry on,” Zawas said and walked back to his command quarters.

  Halfway back, however, he realized there was something familiar about his hand-rolled cigar. No, it wasn’t the cigar. It was the old silver Zippo lighter Yasser flashed. It was just like the one his grandfather had. Only Zawas wasn’t aware of Yasser or any of his other men possessing such an artifact. He would have to ask Yasser where he found it.

  But when Zawas turned to find Yasser, the guard was missing from his post. Zawas swore softly to himself and walked back to the promontory. Peering over the ledge down the falls, he could see nothing. It was as if Yasser had disappeared into thin air. Could he have actually fallen? Yasser was no such fool.

  Zawas grabbed his radio from his belt. “Jamil!” he barked. “Round up your men. Conrad is here!”

  But Jamil wasn’t answering.

  “Jamil,” Zawas repeated when he heard a blast behind him.

  Debris rained down, and Zawas looked up to see flashes of light from the top of the step-pyramid. Suddenly the flaming shell of a Z-9A chopper came tumbling down the east face, steel scraping against stone in an ear-splitting scream. Zawas dove back inside as it crashed onto the promontory and exploded in a ball of fire.

  “The scepter!” he cursed.

  He ran inside to the chamber where the obelisk was kept under guard. But the two guards were on the floor, dead, and the scepter was gone.

  Conrad hit the water at the base of the Temple of the Water Bearer with such force that he thought he died. But a minute later he surfaced for air with a gasp and realized his splash from space went unnoticed by the guards below, thanks to the roar of the falls.

  He swam over through the dark to the Zodiac inflatable, cut it loose, climbed on board and hit the motor. By the time the guards saw what was happening and started shooting, he was a hundred yards down the channel and racing away.

  He glanced back over his shoulder to see the distant explosions coming from the top of the Temple of the Water Bearer. He also saw a big shadow coming down on him fast-one of Zawas’s choppers. Its lights were out and it was flying low, practically on top of him, blocking out the stars. Conrad kicked the onboard motor into high gear but couldn’t shake it.

  The chopper then moved overhead and passed him by, landing a few hundred yards ahead on the banks of the water channel. As Conrad neared the bank, he could see a figure waving him down.

  It was Yeats. And in his hand was the Scepter of Osiris.

  “How did you get here?” Conrad asked as he pulled up to the bank.

  “Followed the gunfire,” Yeats said, stepping into the Zodiac. “You find the location of the shrine?”

  Conrad looked in amazement at the helicopter. “Whatever happened to slipping in and out undetected?”

  “I had to create a diversion and leave Zawas a clue at the same time.”

  Conrad felt the familiar pang of betrayal from his childhood. “You took the scepter and left Serena behind?”

  “I didn’t have much of a choice once I saw you and that goon, son,” Yeats said matter-of-factly, in clipped military speed. “I knew the plan was blown. I grabbed what I could and took off. Now did you find the shrine or not? Zawas is pissed as hell and coming after us.”

  Conrad wiped a wet flop of hair from his forehead. “I found it. It’s just ahead.”

  “That’s my boy,” Yeats said with an approving nod. “Let’s go.”

  They followed the waterway into a tunnel. Conrad’s GPS marker took them to a small dark corridor that branched off the subterranean waterway. At the end of it was some kind of stone grating.

  “That’s the door to the Shrine of the First Sun,” Conrad said. “It’s down there. About a thousand feet.”

  They ditched the Zodiac, sending it on its way down the tunnel as a decoy.

  Conrad watched the boat disappear into the dark and then checked his GPS watch. They were running out of time. It was almost 5:15A.M., and the first faint hint of dawn was falling across the city above.

  They dug out the grating to find a manhole-size shaft. They slid down into another labyrinth of subterranean corridors, going deeper and deeper into the earth. A half hour later they reached a long dark tunnel that ended in a blue light.

  “That’s it,” Conrad said.

  Yeats pulled out his flashlight. Its beam revealed a door. As soon as they passed under the blue light, the door slid open, and they stepped inside a dark cavern. This chamber felt like the largest they had stood in yet.

  “I’m sending out a flare,” Yeats said. “Thirty-second delay.”

  Conrad shielded his eyes as Yeats flung the little cylinder into the chamber. He counted down to two seconds when everything exploded with light. For an instant he saw the unbelievable spectacle of a towering obelisk much like the one from P4. Only this one was cradled in some fantastic cylinder and stood at least five hundred feet tall. And at its base was some sort of great rotunda that had to be its entrance.

  All around them, the terraced slopes of the cylinder rose up until they merged into a homelike ceiling. And Conrad realized they stood only halfway down this cavity by the time the light went out.

  “Incredible!” he said, his voice echoing loudly.

  They descended the steps that spiraled alongside the interior of the cylinder to the bottom and stood at the base of the giant obelisk and looked up. He could see no more than twenty feet overhead, except the blinking of red lights around the cylinder-the remote switches to the C-4 bricks Yeats had set on the way down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Conrad said.

  “Setting a trap for Zawas,” Yeats said.

  “Who’s got Serena, remember?”

  “Don’t worry, they’re not on timers. I’ve got the detonator right here.”

  If that was supposed to comfort Conrad, it didn’t. But he was too engrossed with their discovery to be distracted by an argument he couldn’t win. Instead he followed Yeats through the rotunda to what appeared to be a doorway at the base of the giant obelisk.

  Conrad wondered if it was even possible to enter at this point. Then he noticed a square shaft next to the door. It looked about the size of the base of the Scepter of Osiris.

  “We might need the scepter to open this.”

  “Here you go, son,” Yeats said, handing it over.

  Conrad inserted the scepter into the square display and felt a small vibration. The door opened, and they stepped inside the giant obelisk.

  Zawas clenched his jaw as he surveyed the wreckage outside. He cursed the name of Conrad Yeats, a man whose face he’d never even seen but who had managed to steal the Scepter of Osiris from under his nose.

  Zawas shook his head as he looked down the waterfall to the burned-out shell of the Z-9A jammed into the basin, breaking off into bits as the water carried it down the river. With the other one gone too, he now had only one bird left to fly.

  Zawas followed a chunk of windshield as it floated down the canal out toward the horizon, where the first rays of dawn were breaking as the stars began to fade. Something about the pattern of those stars caught his eye. And then he jumped back as he found himself staring at the constellation of Aquarius. Suddenly everything about the map made sense.

  He ran into his quarters and looked at the Sonchis map. He stared at the Temple of the Water Bearer, his present location. Then he looked at the “key” symbols in the corner-the constellations of Aquarius, Capricorn, and Sagittarius. He was sweating slightly as he picked up the Sonchis map with shaking hands and stared at
it as if for the first time.

  He then rushed over to Serena’s chamber and began to untie her.

  “Things going awry, Zawas?”

  “Au contraire,Doctor Serghetti,” he said and pushed her outside to the promontory.

  As they neared the ledge, she resisted, fearing he would throw her over. But instead he told her to follow the water canal with her eyes to the horizon with its first glint of dawn. And then she found herself staring face-to-face with the constellation of Aquarius.

  “I’ve found the Shrine of the First Sun,” he told her, “and that means I’ve found Conrad Yeats.”

  Part Four

  Doomsday

  31

  Dawn Minus Forty-Five Minutes

  Inside the great obelisk, Conrad and Yeats stood on a circular platform five feet wide suspended in darkness. Conrad heard a low hum and could feel a greasy draft against his cheek. He flicked on his halogen flashlight. The beam shot out fifty feet before it struck a towering column and in less than a second ricocheted off three other metallic columns that surrounded them. Each bounce intensified the blinding light. Conrad closed his eyes.

  “Shut it off!” Yeats shouted, his voice echoing in the darkness.

  Conrad, eyes pressed shut, felt for a switch and turned off the halogen lamp. After a minute he blinked but couldn’t shake the blinding afterglow. “Those columns of light,” Yeats said, still rubbing his eyes. “What are they?”

  “They’re not made of light,” Conrad said. “They just reflect and magnify any light that hits them. Hold on.” Conrad reached into his pocket and pulled out the Zippo lighter. “This is low wattage. Ready?”

  “For you to blind us?”

  “It won’t be so bad this time,” Conrad said. “Put your shades on and relax.”

  Conrad put on his sunglasses and waited for Yeats to do likewise before Conrad flicked on the lighter. The effect was like a single candle burning in a cavernous cathedral. Surrounding them in the dim light were four glowing, translucent pillars, each about twenty feet in diameter, rising two hundred feet into the darkness above and two hundred feet into the abyss below.

  “So here’s your so-called Shrine of the First Sun,” Yeats said, staring straight up.

  “It’s like being inside a bronze coffee filter,” Conrad said, looking around and feeling very small. A halo of mist clung to the glowing pillars, which seemed to come together like a funnel at their apex high above. And the air definitely smelled greasy. Conrad looked down and wondered just how deep into the earth this Shrine of the First Sun descended, and how much farther must they go to discover the Secret of First Time. He was in awe of how much there was for him to absorb and painfully aware of the limited time.

  “Look at this.” Yeats guided the lighter close to a smooth, shiny pillar. The mirror-like surface not only seemed to magnify the brightness a hundredfold but also seemed to tremble. “I bet this surface has a reflectance of greater than a hundred percent.”

  “That’s significant?”

  “The best we’ve been able to come up with is eighty-eight percent using aluminum.”

  “These columns aren’t made of aluminum.”

  “No.” Yeats ran his hand over the surface of the column. “They’re made of something much lighter.”

  “Lighter?” Conrad touched the column. The surface was slick, almost liquid. Yet he could sense some kind of indefinable texture to it. “It feels as soft as a cobweb and as strong as steel. Like some sort of lighter-than-air silk.”

  “That’s because the fabric is perforated with holes smaller than the wavelength of light.” Yeats sounded almost excited. “I’d say somewhere between one-micron or four hundredths of a mil thick. So what now? Do we go up or down this thing?”

  Fabric. That’s just the word he was looking for, Conrad realized. The surprise was that it was Yeats who came up with it. But he was right. These columns were like giant rolls of some thin, lightweight, and mirror-like fabric so shiny they could be mistaken for the light they so brilliantly reflected.

  “Up or down, son?” Yeats repeated.

  “Up,” Conrad said, surprising himself. Because in reality he didn’t know. He had never come across anything like this shrine in the ancient pyramid texts of the Egyptians or in the tales of Meso-American lore. And he couldn’t recall it from any childhood nightmares or memories. Its sole significance, so far as he could tell, was to serve as a live-scale projection of the obelisk he had taken from P4. But somewhere in this obelisk was the so-called Seat of Osiris, the final resting place of the scepter and the Secret of First Time. The only question was whether he would recognize it when he saw it, much less know what to do. “We’re going up.”

  And so they were. The platform they were standing on began to lift like an elevator, carrying them up between the columns of light. Conrad looked up to see the columns funnel toward an apex.

  “Hang tight,” he said, tense but determined. He realized he had never been more excited about anything in his life.

  They must have passed through several levels of compartments, Conrad figured, when he looked up to see a pinprick of light at the end. A minute later they emerged into a cool chamber. Suddenly the platform locked with a thud. Conrad stumbled backward toward the edge of the platform. Yeats caught his arm with a viselike grip.

  “End of the line,” he said.

  Conrad paused to get his bearings. It felt cramped up here compared to the soaring spaces below. Their voices had stopped echoing, and the air felt cooler. Conrad removed his sunglasses and switched on his halogen lamp. This time there was no blinding reflection. The beam stabbed out and bathed the nearest wall in light.

  A quick survey revealed one corridor on either side of them. Conrad entered the corridor to their right.

  “This way,” he said, his impatience hanging thick in the air, pushing them forward.

  “Now how would you know?”

  “According to you, I’m an Atlantean, remember?”

  Conrad led him along the dark tunnel for a minute. At the end was a cryptlike door, about six feet tall. Next to it was a square pad much like the one at the outside entrance. Conrad focused his light on the door. Carved into its metallic surface were unusual engravings that at first defied comprehension. Only when Conrad ran his fingers across them did their meaning register.

  “It’s a constellation,” he said flatly.

  Yeats nodded. “That star right there is Sirius.”

  “The goddess Isis in her astral form.” Conrad placed his hand on the cold metallic door, overcome with awe. His throat constricted and his heart beat faster. He could barely manage a whisper. “We found the queen’s crypt.”

  “I was looking for the king’s.” Yeats sounded detached, businesslike. “How much you want to bet we’ll find that bastard Osiris down the opposite corridor?”

  And the Seat of Osiris and the Secret of First Time, Conrad thought, when he saw a red dot on the back of his hand and spun around. Yeats was pointing his AK-47 at the door, the laser-sighting on.

  Conrad jumped back. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You’re going to open this door so we can see if the bitch is still in there.”

  Conrad, his pulse pounding, put his hand on the square pad, and he could feel a surge of energy. He pulled his hand back and the door slid open. A cool mist escaped from the chamber.

  “You didn’t even need the obelisk for that,” Yeats said, almost in awe.

  “Maybe once you use it, the system remembers,” Conrad said.

  “Or maybe your ID is already in the system.”

  They stepped through the cloud and into the small chamber. The red beam from Yeats’s laser sight crisscrossed the cell and locked onto an intricate alcove of some kind. It was contoured for a human being no taller than two meters. Based on the shape, it was clearly a woman. She had two arms, two legs, ten fingers and ten toes, and an hourglass figure.

  “Mama.” Conrad looked at the display and let out a whistle.
“Are you happy now, Yeats? You’ve met the enemy and she looks like us. Maybe it’s not just me. Maybe we’re all Atlanteans.”

  “Let’s hope not. Not unless you want us to suffer the same fate. Now let’s check out Papa.”

  Down the hall, the door to the Osiris crypt bore the markings of the Orion constellation on its surface. And this time Conrad didn’t hesitate. He put his hand on the door and it split open. Again, a fine cool mist escaped. Yeats climbed through with his AK-47 with Conrad close behind. Conrad shined his light up on the far wall and caught his breath.

  “Say hello to Daddy, Conrad,” said Yeats.

  This crypt was clearly contoured for a vertically standing creature that stood much taller than a human. Inside was an impressive harness or exoskeleton that appeared as mysteriously complex as the being it was designed for. A translucent bandolier crisscrossed the center ring and boasted an awesome array of instruments, gear, and, perhaps, weapons.

  “Holy God,” Conrad murmured.

  “Not so holy if Mother Earth is right,” Yeats said. “This one’s about three meters high.”

  Conrad flicked on the Zippo and held it close to the edge of the harness. Whatever it was made of was fireproof and perhaps even indestructible for all intents and purposes. But it clearly supplied its bearer with only partial protection. Judging by the size of it, Conrad could only assume the rest of such a creature required little else.

  Creature, he thought. Is that what his true father was? Is that what he was? He had more in common with the man next to him than whatever creature used that harness.

  “There is no way in hell I’m related to the thing that belongs here,” Conrad told Yeats. “It would have shown up in my DNA tests or something.”

  “If Serena is right and the Atlanteans are the so-called sons of God from Genesis,” Yeats said, “then your biological father was a generation or two removed from the first coupling and more or less human.”