Costas was wide-eyed, his visor fogged up around the edges from his exhalation. Jack had a sudden sickening feeling. They had just lost their one lifeline, and they had expended more air than they had bargained for. Costas returned his stare. ‘I think that’s twice very lucky,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Let’s get up there, do what we have to do and get the hell out of here.’
As they swam upwards, Jack turned to look out over the lava lake. A surge was rising in the middle, then moving along as if something were swimming just beneath the surface like some ancient spirit monster. Suddenly the mass rose in a giant bulbous dome and split open, disgorging a huge bubble of gas into the water. A second later there was a blinding flash and Jack could see the pressure waves in the water surging towards them. Costas clung to him, pressing his visor against his. ‘Brace yourself!’ The shock wave pushed them violently towards the rock face, and then they were pulled back again over the lava lake by the implosion. Jack held on to Costas with one hand and finned with all his strength back towards the rock-cut door. He seemed to be getting nowhere, as if this were a bad dream, the door impossibly beyond his reach. Then the sucking force of the implosion miraculously relented, and they came to the ledge below the door.
‘What the hell was that?’ Jack said, panting.
‘Phreatic explosion.’ Costas’ visor fogged up as he struggled to regain breath. ‘It happens on land when lava flows over pockets of water, superheating it. Somehow that big bubble of gas under the surface of the lava must have had the same effect, sucking in water, encasing it and boiling it up.’
Jack stared up at the carved lintel above the doorway in front of them. Costas followed his gaze, panting, then he saw what Jack had seen. ‘Symbols. Ancient writing. Is this what you saw before?’
‘It’s fantastic.’ Above the doorway was the rectilinear Atlantis symbol, with other symbols on either side, familiar from the syllabry they had discovered five years before but not yet translated. They looked freshly carved, as if done just before the flood, and several looked only partly completed. Beneath them Jack could make out other symbols, very eroded and clearly much older, some of them looking as if they had been partly chiselled away. He activated his camera. There was no time for detailed recording now. He was jittery with adrenalin, and checked his computer readout. Fifteen minutes of breathing gas left at this depth. He was conscious that the danger had made the reflective part of his mind shut off in the focus on survival, on dealing with each new threat as they encountered it, and that he needed to maintain an awareness of the bigger picture, of just how close they had come to never leaving this cavern alive. He stared at the entrance. He would need five minutes, just to look. With the lava rising inexorably, it was the last chance before whatever lay inside there was lost forever.
‘Jack, you’ve got a problem.’
‘What is it?’
‘Check your internal temperature readout.’
Jack looked sideways inside his helmet, scanning the digital readout. ‘Twenty-six degrees Celsius. I thought it was getting a little warm. I’ll adjust the thermostat.’
‘Don’t do that yet. Wait till you really need it. You’ll blow the system.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It must have been the heat when we were close to the lava. You’ve got a leak from your coolant reservoir, Jack. You can’t afford to be that close to extreme heat any more, as you’ll soon have no way of cooling down.’
Jack shut his eyes, trying to control his breathing. For a moment he felt nauseous, a flutter in his stomach, the sickening feeling of the walls closing in. Part of him wanted to swim up and dump his air against the ceiling, to create a pocket where he could rip off his helmet and be free, but he knew that to do so would only be a brief illusion of normality in an air space that would feel far more confined than the water below. He swallowed hard. Keep focused. He sucked on his water tube, then looked into the doorway and tried to ignore the lava, which was rising up the rock face below at an alarming rate. Costas had already unzipped his front pocket and disgorged the ROV, which he was testing like a remote-controlled helicopter. Jack realized where the nickname Little Joey had come from. It looked like a miniature robotic kangaroo, with hind legs, a swivelling video aperture for a head and a tethering cable for a tail, leading to a spool on Costas’ chest. The robot craned its neck around and peered at Jack with its single video eye, and then jetted back to Costas, hovering in the water in front of him. Jack swam ahead to the door entrance, then switched on his helmet lights. ‘I’m going in. Five minutes, no more.’
Costas put a hand on the ROV’s neck. ‘Little Joey will be following you. He can send back remote signals, but I’m keeping him on the tether in this place. If you see anything, hold him like I am and put him on to it. Remember, I’m seeing what he sees on the screen inside my visor. Just point and I’ll drive him forward. Then you come out, pronto.’
Jack stared at the ROV, its single camera eye encased in a sphere of glass. It angled its head around and looked at him, the black lens cap half-down like an eyelid. He realized that he was cocking his own head in the same way, as if they were querying each other. He shook his head in disbelief at what he had just done and looked away. The ROV was not alive. ‘Roger that.’
‘Remember what Macalister said. No disappearing down holes.’ Costas’ voice crackled. ‘That electromagnetic interference is increasing again. There must be a lot of ferrous material in the lava here. I may be out of contact with you.’
Jack surged forward, passing through the entrance and finning down the rock-cut tunnel. After about ten metres the tunnel became a T-junction. Jack stopped and checked his remaining time. Four and a half minutes. It had to be one or the other. The ROV came up alongside him and angled to the right, illuminating the passage. Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Jack, give me a confirmation on what you see. I think I’m looking at another entranceway.’
‘That’s an affirmation. But there’s one on the opposite side too.’
‘Little Joey’s pointing the way. Left would take you to the surface of the volcano, now under tons of lava. Right would take you towards the location of that open-air platform we saw five years ago, a more likely place for some kind of sanctuary.’
Jack heard crackling as Costas tried to say more, and then a low hum. Whatever it was that was causing the interference, this place was the epicentre. He had no time to weigh up the options. He swerved right and followed the ROV into the passageway, kicking hard to get beyond it. He swam about ten metres further, then followed the passageway as it veered left. Ahead of him the tunnel was partly blocked with rough-hewn squared stones that looked as if they had been hastily assembled. Whatever it was that had been beyond there on the eve of the flood seven thousand years ago, somebody had wanted it cut off. An aperture still remained, big enough for someone unencumbered to crawl through, but not big enough for a diver with gear. Jack rolled sideways to fit the hole and shoved his head through, his headlamp angled upwards. It was a chamber, maybe eight metres across. He could see jagged protrusions of lava from the eruption five years ago, visible beyond another wall of crude masonry that blocked what must have been the open front of the chamber, clearly a cave in the face of the volcano. He twisted to the left, lying on his back, and saw that the opposite side was natural rock, a wide opening that extended inwards. Big multifaceted crystals of quartz were visible in the wall just to his right. He flicked on his helmet video camera, moving his head from side to side to ensure maximum coverage, then struggled to twist around until he was lying on his front. He strained to raise his head up, angling the lamp as high as he could, then he froze with horror.
He was staring at a human face. It was a skull, embedded in the floor of the chamber. The bone had been plastered over and was partly covered with a rough calcite accretion that must have formed underwater after the flood. One eye socket was open, and the other was filled with plaster and a cowrie shell, as if the skull were staring at him through the slit. Jac
k instinctively recoiled, his breathing coming in short rasps, and then he forced himself to raise his head higher and look beyond. It wasn’t just one skull. There were dozens of them, all embedded in the floor and facing him, all of them plastered over in the same fashion. The accretion as well as the anoxic conditions of the water must have preserved them. Then he saw another skull lying on its side, unplastered, with the jawbone hanging away, and shapes on the floor covered with accretion. Beside the skull nearest to him was a stone basin about half a metre high on a plinth. He reached out his left arm and put his hand inside, scraping the interior, then pulled his hand away and stared at his glove. It was smeared in a thick, viscous substance that seemed to have lined the bottom of the bowl, some kind of residue. He brought his hand under his headlamp beam and stared at it, his heart pounding. The substance was a deep maroon colour.
He was not only looking at the people of Atlantis. He was touching their blood.
He propped himself up on his elbows, straining his neck up as far as he could. His beam flashed on the interior wall of the cavern. To his astonishment, he saw the shadowy outline of paintings on the rock, ibex, leopards, great horned bulls, faded and ancient. In one part he thought he saw where they had been erased, the rock scrubbed clean. He strained up further, and then he froze again.
Towering above the floor were giant pillars, twenty or more of them, their tops extending outwards in a T-shape. They looked freshly cut, with sharp edges; and had not been hewn out of the living rock but hauled here from somewhere else. The arms were carved with outstretched hands, and other relief carving adorned their sides: swirling abstract forms, parts of human bodies, leopards and bull’s horns, scorpions, a vulture. One swirling circular shape might have been a human face, but he could not be sure. As he looked around, he realized that the outer pillars formed a circle about eight metres across, with pairs of pillars within the circle. His mind reeled. A stone circle. The pillars confronted him like the skulls, ghostly sentinels from the past. Jack felt a shiver down his spine. Were these pillars statues of men, or were they gods?
In a flash, he remembered what he had come here to see.
The birth of the new religion.
The death of the old.
The threshold of a new world order, seven thousand years ago, at the dawn of civilization.
His time had run out.
He struggled backwards, grabbed the ROV and shoved it into the hole, leaving it sitting on its hind legs with the camera aimed inwards. He ripped a small tube out of his sleeve pocket and quickly took a scrape sample from the floor of the chamber. Little Joey’s head turned and eyed him, cocked sideways, and then swivelled back to look into the chamber. Jack disentangled his fins from the tethering line and crouched into a ball, rolling round and extending his legs so that he could fin back along the passage. He pulled hard with his hands at first, anxious not to dislodge the ROV, and then he powered ahead towards the T-junction. As he did so, the low hum and crackle in his intercom suddenly became shouted words. ‘Jack! Get out of there now!’
He surged forward and veered into the main tunnel facing the entrance to the magma chamber, where Costas should have been visible. What he saw instead was an image from hell. A surge of lava was lapping towards him, five metres or more into the tunnel. All his instincts told him to go back, to seek some other way out, but he knew he had to go forward and swim over the lava to where he could now see Costas’ beam shining at him no more than ten metres away.
He finned frantically, following the tethering line for the ROV. After five kicks he was over the lava, almost within touching distance. He was being pushed against the roof of the tunnel, and realized to his horror that the boiling water above the lava was rising and forcing him upwards. He remembered his failing coolant system. He was beginning to overheat. The sweat dripped off his face on to the interior of his visor, and he could see the outside of his suit crinkling and turning brown. He was being cooked alive. Suddenly there was a yank on the tether line and he held on, feeling himself being pulled. He turned upside down and clawed his way along the ceiling, but then remembered his cylinder and air pack. He might survive the Kevlar on the front of his suit being scorched, but not his breathing gear. He turned over again, drew himself up into an upside-down crab crouch and pushed his feet and elbows against the rock, hopping forward a metre or so each time, trying to keep his helmet away from the lava. The sweat in the inside of his visor began to boil like spatters of water on an oven hot ring. He pushed one last time and was free, rocketing up into Costas in a tangle with the tethering line. He was dimly aware of Costas unhooking the line and fumbling with his wrist control panel, and he saw that the thermostat had been turned down to its lowest setting, ten degrees Celsius. Costas spun him round and stared him in the face. ‘There may be enough juice in that thing to give you a burst of cool air before it packs up. Can you feel it?’
Jack felt the sweat drip into the corners of his mouth, and then he sensed the coolness. He opened his eyes, blinking the salt out, then reached with his lips for the water tube and sucked hard, grateful that he had not tried to come out upside down and cooked the water reservoir on his back. He spat out the mouthpiece after a few gulps, then gasped hard for a few moments while Costas looked him over. ‘I don’t see any sign of leakage in your e-suit. But the heat-resistant outer shell and the Kevlar is melted from your elbows and knees. You’re not going anywhere near lava again and surviving it. Which is a good thing, because as of about a minute ago, that option closed on us anyway.’
‘What option?’ Jack gasped. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the option of going back the way we came. The option that would have taken us close to the lava again. Take a look.’
Jack floated free of Costas, kicking a loop of the tether cable away, then looked down. It was a terrifying sight. The lava below them had risen at least five metres in the time since they had exited the tunnel. He suddenly realized what Costas meant. He looked over to the tunnel entrance, where the borer had broken through into the magma chamber, their entry point. A great surge of lava flowed up into it, and then another. He spun around to Costas. ‘What are the options?’
‘When Lanowski and I took the submersible over the volcano, we saw a number of places where gas was escaping into the sea. Mostly they were pinpricks, but there was one really big flow. I took a GPS fix on it and I’ve just been trying to relate that to all the directional data I’ve got from our dive. I think it’s one of those two caverns above us.’
Jack looked directly up, and saw two distinct areas of blackness in the rocky ceiling of the chamber some ten metres overhead. ‘Which one?’
‘We’ll have to take pot luck.’
There was a heave in the water, and Jack looked down. To his horror he saw that the entire lava lake had surged upwards, and a great bulge like a wave was rippling towards them from the far side of the chamber. ‘Up! Now!’ he shouted. He finned hard, remembering to breathe out as he did so, then stopped and flipped round, heading back down. Costas was struggling with the tether cord, which was caught around the strap of one fin. Jack reached behind his breathing pack, whipped out his knife and pulled the serrated edge as hard as he could against the cord, sawing the knife against the metallic cable inside. The cord snapped and he pulled Costas’ foot away, smearing himself with the melting rubber of Costas’ fin. He finned frantically upwards, grabbed the cord at the back of Costas’ pack and yanked it to fill the emergency flotation wings in the shoulders of the e-suit. He exhaled forcefully to avoid an embolism and prayed that Costas was doing the same. The lava surge passed only a few metres below them, and seconds later they hit the ceiling of the chamber, jarring against the lava. Jack still had his knife in his hand, and he stabbed it into Costas’ buoyancy aid to expel the air, watching as the bubbles from the torn fabric disappeared up into the darkness above. Costas pushed off, looking down at the melted remains of his fin, and then at Jack. ‘Phew. That was close.’
Jack felt h
imself close to boiling point again. He took a slurp of his water, now unpleasantly warm, and looked down. The lava was surging up all round them, rising at a horrifying speed. ‘I think what we’ve got here is a major volcanic event,’ he said hoarsely.
‘No kidding. It’s called an eruption. And with the lava pressing up into this space, the volume of water inside the chamber is decreasing and boiling up. There’ll be a flashpoint and another phreatic explosion and everything will vaporize, including us.’
A lava fountain licked the bottom of the divide between the two caverns. ‘See that?’ Jack said. ‘We haven’t got any choice. It’s going to have to be this cavern.’ He pushed off the wall, and they both began swimming up. Jack glanced at his gauge. They were sixty-five metres below sea level, which put them about ten metres higher than the point on the outside of the volcano where they had left the sub. He looked at Costas. ‘Does that magic program of yours tell us how far away the sub is?’
‘The system’s crashed in the heat. But I think we’ve come in a curve, so not as far as we’ve swum. Maybe fifty metres from here, a bit more.’ They reached the top of the chamber, a jagged ceiling of solidified lava that looked like malformed stalactites, with deep cracks and crevices between. The upper recess was about five metres wide. Costas flicked on both of his headlamp beams and swam a circuit on his back, staring up, before returning to Jack’s position. ‘There are three possibilities. How much air have you got?’
‘Almost on reserve. Fifty-five bar.’
‘Okay. You vent carbon dioxide from your rebreather into one chamber, I’ll do mine in another. You’ve got about ten bar more than me left in your breathing gas, so for the third chamber vent some air straight from your tanks.’
‘Roger that.’ Jack followed Costas to the first hole and pressed the button that vented the accumulated carbon dioxide from his rebreather. They watched the bubbles ascend in the beam of Costas’ headlamps, and Costas peered hard while Jack looked down at the lava surging below them. ‘I can see where the gas is pooling against the ceiling,’ Costas said. ‘Nothing’s escaping.’ They moved to the next spot and repeated the process. An arc of lava shot up in the water to within a few metres of them. Costas looked at Jack. ‘Same story.’
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