The Secret of Atlantis (Citadel World Book #2)

by Kir Lukovkin

  “There's a chasm in there!”

  Without pausing to think, Rick pushed him in the back, making him fall into the portal, grabbed Paul hard by the hand and stepped inside after him.

  An instant later, the portal closed before the graybeard managed to stick his head inside.

  W

  THEY WERE SLOWLY descending into the viscous depths of an open space. Rick could not help but notice how funny their poses and faces looked. He was sure that he looked no better.

  The eternally stern Vasilevs was now milling around with his eyes wide like a child that fell into a pool of water. On the other hand, Paul was looking around in amazement and his face reflected the intense thought processes going through his head.

  “What's happening? Where are we?” Vasilevs finally asked after he stopped swing his arms about and let the space around him carry him downwards.

  Rick moved his hands a little to change the position of his body, glanced downwards and answered, “We are inside the pillar.”

  “I don't need you to tell me that!” Vasilevs growled. “I just don't understand why we are falling so slowly!”

  Rick explained that a force field the nature of which he did not understand himself was acting on them and that he had decided to trust Black Ant, so there they were, descending.

  “Then where exactly are we right now?” Vasilevs asked.

  Paul turned and moved closer to the wall. The place that he touched with his finger went yellow. Then Paul put his palm against the wall. The yellow spot started growing. Paul slid his palm upwards and the wall suddenly slowly split apart, as if it was a piece of cloth that had been cut.

  “Oh... You... Why?” Vasilevs asked.

  Rick was also a little afraid, but then Paul suddenly climbed through the hole he made. Vasilevs quickly hurried after him and Rick joined them without pause.

  All three of them rolled onto a hard surface head over heels. Vasilevs was the first to spring up, raising his cleaver, but silence and abandonment surrounded them. They were in a large oval hall that had an impressive sized teardrop-shaped machine at its center. It was in some ways similar to one of the silvery arrows that Rick once got to travel in, but that was the end of the similarity.

  Rick looked back over his shoulder. The pillar was missing. Amazingly, there was only a spiral shaped stream of multicolored dots chained one after another. The stream rose from the floor and disappeared inside the ceiling.

  “What is this place?” Vasilevs gave Rick and Paul a questioning look each.

  Rick looked around and saw a terminal by the wall. At least that was something. It would be good if the ancient device worked.

  He approached the terminal, blew the dust from it and touched the screen. The startup menu flickered with green rows of lettering. Rick went through the options, approving and confirming a series of connections. Lamps lit up with soft light around the perimeter of the hall. It was not all of them, but they did work.

  Vasilevs cried out in awe behind his back. Rick turned around and saw Paul, who was observing his work with the terminal. Paul looked back as well. Part of the wall nearby lit up with light, with the many cells built into the surface projecting a three-dimensional diagram of the city with the tower rising in the middle. The name “ATLANTIS” was displayed in silvery lettering below.

  Rick and Paul approached the hologram. Vasilevs stretched out his hand and touched sector P, making the diagram change its scale and significantly grow in size. At first, the Landmaster stepped back, but then excitedly declared, “That's the home sector of the Division in fine detail! That's incredible!”

  Rick touched the sector marker with his fingers and the diagram returned to its previous size. He went to the interactive menu, selected “Current Status” and activated it. “Gaia Program. Status: Hibernation.” appeared above the city.

  “What does it say there?” Vasilevs excitedly asked, looking at Rick. “Come on, tell me!”

  Rick entered a request for a status description, read the message it produced and replied, “The city landscape is changing, but the process was launched by a machine, not by humans. It's an automatic program. There was a similar one active in my citadel and it was called “Chronos.””

  “So what will happen when these changes in the landscape are complete?”

  “I don't know,” Rick shrugged. “Let's try and find out.”

  He went into the menu again and studied the different options for a long time. Finally, Rick found a sub-menu with the description of the “Gaia” program. He tried to open it, but the diagram blinked again and bright red letters saying “Access Denied” appeared above it.

  “That shouldn't be happening,” Rick said, frowning.

  “What if we try this with a different device?” asked Paul and nodded at the terminal.

  Rick walked up to the terminal and again spent a while digging through the menu and after some complex manipulations to find the right section the result was the same: “Access Denied.”

  Then, Rick ordered Paul to perform exactly the same actions, but the terminal did not react to his touch and refused to give him access to the program. After this, they offered Vasilevs to try it, but it did not work with him either.

  “Very strange,” said Rick, looking downcast. “The machine does not request a password or demand for a code to be entered. It simply denies access.”

  “Is it broken?” Vasilevs suggested.

  “No,” Rick shook his head.

  “Do you remember when the protective field was not letting you into the corridor?” Paul asked and Rick nodded. “And then, when we were in that brightly lit room where the Landmaster took the boy hostage, you said that the graybeard had reconfigured the defensive systems. Maybe it's like that with this too?”

  “We should have dragged those bastards along with us!” Vasilevs punched his own hand in disappointment. “We would have fixed everything quickly by now.”

  “No,” Rick shook his head again. “I assure you, they never went down this far. Paul, you're right, someone set up a block here, but someone else did it.”

  When he heard these words, Vasilevs drew his cleaver from his belt and decided to walk around the hall.

  “The Chronos program kept my citadel in hibernation,” Rick thought out loud, as he dug around in the Settings menu. “It was a standby mode in which Thermopolis could spend hundreds or thousands of years until a man intelligent enough to start up a new program and sent a loaded transport ship into space came along.”

  “Wait... So you were not lying to us when you were talking about the launch panel, the incandescent gases and...”

  “It was the honest truth. Do you know what outer space is?”

  “I read about it in the ancient books we have in the Retreat.”

  “Good. Well, the city of Thermopolis, where I grew up, has flown away, but Thermopolis was filled with everything it needed. The citadel here is empty, but it is surrounded by a city with everything it might need. It is probable that the “Gaia” program is active here and that someone had launched it in the past. However, it is automatically going into hibernation now. If that is what's happening, there must be an important reason for it... Damn it!”

  Rick slapped the screen, when he saw the “Access Denied” message again.

  “Maybe it really is the machine itself that's broken?” Paul repeated Vasilevs' idea.

  “I doubt it, as the consequences would be different. If there was an error in the program, there would be a chain of rapid changes to the city landscape, but everything is planned and subject to the logic of the program in our case. If one of the machines had broken down there are always backups, like the hologram behind our backs. It's a completely different device where we could also enter the right menu.”

  “Look at that,” Vasilevs returned and called out to them, pointing at the diagram of Atlantis. “What's going on?”

  The core, middle ring and several segments of the outer ring glowed red. A few seconds passed a
nd the red segments of the outer ring went blue. Segment C in the core also went pale for a moment and then filled with the color blue.

  “I don't think I like this,” Vasilevs said.

  As if in confirmation of his words, a thundering noise came from afar and a slight vibration rolled along the floor.

  “So maybe we should move somewhere else? Why don't we look on the diagram?” Paul suggested and stepped towards the hologram.

  He looked at the three dimensional picture for a while, then swore and told the others, “Everything is so difficult to understand here. I don't quite get where everything is. We need another diagram, better one that shows everything level by level separately, as I can't think about it as a whole.”

  “Hang on,” Rick livened up and came up to the control panel, requesting a report on the process.

  That did not require any codes or passwords. A list of changes appeared on the screen. Rick looked at the chronology from the very beginning and exclaimed, “Here it is!”

  “What? What is it?” Vasilevs bounded over to him.

  “This is where it all started,” Rick pointed at segment O and increased the size of the image.

  “What?” the Landmaster did not understand. “What's the significance of this?”

  “All right, let's have a look,” Rick was visibly animated as he scrolled through the data, commenting on it. “If you look at the intervals, it works out that the hibernation process began just over thirty days ago with one segment. I was there and I saw it all. Those who live in that cluster call themselves fords and they told me that the movements of city buildings do happen but they are very rare. They mentioned an eight year interval. But then, everything happened suddenly. Right, let's keep looking.” He scrolled through more data and exclaimed, “Now here, look, the second sector where the hibernation continued was sector N, where everything happened two days later. And then M, again after two days. Then L...”

  “The intervals were the same,” Paul nodded.

  “Yes,” Rick agreed and glanced at the confused Vasilevs. “But it was not that way everywhere. See, the segments of the outer ring have already completed their shift. The next stage is the segments of the middle ring, but the intervals are much shorter here. The changes were completed ten hours ago. After that, the segments of the core have been moving once every three hours.”

  Rick brought up a calculator as a separate hologram and started to punch numbers into it.

  “Are you trying to figure out when all of it will be complete?” Paul asked.

  “Yes. Considering the number of segments that have remained unchanged, and there are eight of them, it works out that the hibernation of the core will be complete in... Fourteen hours.”

  “Ok, stop!” Vasilevs shook his head and clarified, “What exactly will happen to the city in fourteen hours?”

  “When we went to the top of the tower, we saw how the outer and middle rings turned,” Paul replied quickly. “While that happened, whole quarters were going under the ground, but all that replaced them was a flat surface.”

  “And what for?” Vasilevs turned his eyes to Rick.

  “I think that all the structures in the city do not just go under the ground, they move towards the highways, where they are disassembled into their component parts. It's like when a blaster is taken apart and the stock, the battery with the charges, the firing mechanism and the rest of it to be placed in a warehouse. I hope the gist of it is clear?”

  Paul and Vasilevs nodded.

  “All of this is somehow laid out in a particular order along the highways that all lead to the tower,” Rick finished his explanation.

  “What for?” Vasilevs could not resist asking again.

  Rick sighed and spread his hands, “I don't know.”

  “We must stop this,” Vasilevs said firmly. “Otherwise the city will completely disappear and I don't want to live under the ground.”

  “We can't,” Rick replied. “We need access to the program. That's the way it worked in my world.”

  “So what is that?” Vasilevs pointed at the teardrop-shaped machine. “It's not here for nothing.”

  Rick and Paul stared at the machine.

  “What is that?” Vasilevs asked with interest.

  Rick was the first to approach the machine. He touched its hull, looking at his own reflection and then walked up to its nearest support. He looked at what was written on the hull and shook his head.

  “It can't be!” He glanced over his shoulder. “Come over here. I think that this is a shuttle that can take us into low earth orbit to meet my home ship.”

  “Thermopolis?” Paul asked.

  “Yes.”

  Rick went forward and activated the control panel on the central support. A hatch opened in the bottom of the shuttle above his head and a stairway slid out.

  “Right,” the Landmaster said as he appeared behind his back. “So you have decided to run away to this... outer space of yours?”

  Rick felt a flutter in this chest — he really did think about his sister and Kyoto and about meeting Maya again. It was really bad to have enemies as allies sometimes.

  “Not to run away,” he turned to face Vasilevs, “but to return to my friends and relatives.”

  “Ha, do you think I am that much of an idiot?”

  “No.”

  “I know that is exactly what you think. As soon as we arrive, you will tell your friends that I am an enemy and...”

  Rick had already understood what Vasilevs was thinking and he decided against waiting to become his hostage, so he punched him on the chin. It was powerful and well-aimed. The head of the Landmaster jerked, as his eyes faded and he fell onto the steps of the stairs that led into the hatch at the bottom of the shuttle.

  “Now turn around, and no sudden moves,” he heard a voice say in a controlled but threatening way the side. “Put your hands up.”

  Rick did as he was ordered. Paul stood two steps away from him, holding a compact blaster in his hand.

  “Where did you get the weapon?” Rick asked in surprise.

  “I found it in the cabinet when you asked me to find the injectors.”

  “Paul!” Rick was about to step forward, but then he froze, with his hands raised.

  “Don't come near me.”

  “I know,” Rick said hurriedly, “you can pull the trigger. I have no doubt. But I want you to listen to me. Please, listen. I have lost everything that was dear to me, my home and my family. All that I want to do is to go home to those dear to me. Please, let me go. If you want, we can go together and I swear you won't be harmed.”

  “Do you want to hear the truth?”

  “Of course.”

  “I thought that you would help us. Help us make the city born again and to cleanse it of the possessed.”

  “It's impossible to save everyone, especially when there's no one left to save. You understand that perfectly well yourself. Stay here if you want, or come with me.”

  Paul nodded and sneered.

  “Rick, your problem is that you have something to lose. And that is what makes you weak.”

  “Paul! Just don't...”

  “Yeah!” he bared his teeth. “You are talking to a corporal of the Division. As long as one fighter is still standing, the Division exists.”

  “Don't make me...”

  Rick heard a sound behind him, but he had no time to do anything. He felt something hit him on the back of his head and shake the contents of his skull. He felt no pain, he just saw an impenetrable mist in front of his eyes. The last thing that he heard before his consciousness slipped away was, “Good work, corporal.”

  “Should I finish him off, Landmaster?”

  X

  THERE WAS A GREAT JOLT and the silence was suddenly shattered by a distant rumble, as Rick's eyes came unstuck.

  The fog cleared and he saw a cabin filled with monitors. The lights of indicators shone together like a multicolored rainbow of blossoms. With great difficulty, Rick looke
d at himself — his hands were tied together with a wire and he was securely fixed to a seat with harnesses. The back of his head felt piercing pain with every movement. The distant roar was coming from somewhere behind his back and he could also feel a light vibration.

  Vasilevs and Paul were sitting in the seats in front of him. The Landmaster was patiently questioning his subordinate about the purpose of the buttons and indicators on the instrument panel in front of them. Paul was obediently reading out every word.

  “Radar. Odometer. Barometer. Altimeter. Radiation counter. Compartment radiation level. Propulsion system...”

  The compartment did not have any glass windows. That was strange. Rick immediately remembered the flying machine in Thermopolis, but everything was different and much more complex here.

  “It says, “Launch Capsule” here,” Paul's voice rang out.

  “What's a capsule?” Vasilevs enquired.

  “This ship probably is the capsule.”

  “Good. Go for it.”

  “Should I press the launch button, Landmaster? What if we will have no way back afterwards? Are you sure?”

  Vasilevs thought for a second or two and then spoke.

  “Yes. There are no normal people left in Atlantis anyway, and it's time for us to get out of here. As soon as we arrive in Thermopolis, we can start it all again.”

  Rick struggled and ground his teeth in anger, but he could not move from his place. All he did was make his head feel a strong pang of pain.

  Paul pressed a button. A piercing short signal sounded and a metallic voice announced, “Attention, this is the Autopilot speaking. Capsule launch activated. The program may only be canceled within the next ten seconds. I am beginning the countdown. Ten, nine...”

  The rumble changed to a roar and the vibrations became stronger. Rick struggled again, trying to free his hands, but to no avail. Then he moved his feet, which turned out to be tied as well. Rick could not stop himself from swearing angrily.

  “Ah!” Vasilevs heard him through the noise and turned around in his seat. “He's awake now!”