The Hunt For Atlantis

of the vessel; at its rear a second pipe, a flexible concertina arrangement that looked as though it could extend for some length, ran into a second compartment that Nina realized could be detached from the submersible’s spine. Yet another length of extending pipe hung down from the module’s stern almost like a tail. The words “Big Jobs!” were spray-painted, graffiti-style, on the side of the sphere.

“That?” said Trulli proudly. “That is the Sharkdozer. You know, like a bulldozer, only ’cause there’s no bulls underwater, we named it after a shark instead?”

Nina grinned. “I think I get the idea.”

“It’s a self-contained underwater excavator,” Baillard told her, pointing at its two heavy- duty arms. Rather than the claws on the smaller sub, these ended in buckets like those of an earthmover. “The arms move larger rock deposits, and the vacuum pump,” he indicated the maw of the pipe beneath the sphere, “removes silt and sediment-”

“And because the main pump module’s detachable,” Trulli cut in, pointing at the “trailer” section of the vessel, “we can park it away from the site so all the crap we clear doesn’t hang around and wipe out visibility.”

Nina was impressed. “How quickly will it be able to clear the silt over the site?”

“Five meters?” said Baillard. “No time at all; at least enough to see that there’s something underneath it.”

“Actually dredging out enough to see what it is, though…” Trulli shrugged. “Depends how big a hole you want to dig. It’s, what, two hundred feet wide? If it’s nothing but silt covering it, we could suck one end clear in a couple of hours.”

“Then if there’s anything there, we can either use the Atragon’s manipulator arms to pick it up, or send in Mighty Jack.”

“Who?” Nina asked.

Baillard pointed out a small cage attached to the Atragon, inside which was a bright blue boxy object that turned out to be a tiny vessel in its own right. “Mighty Jack’s our ROV, Remotely Operated Vehicle. He’s a robot, basically, a Cameron Systems BB-101. He’s connected to the Atragon by a fiber-optic cable, and we’ve fitted him with a stereoscopic camera so I can operate him right from the pod. Even got his own little arm as well.”

Nina smiled at Baillard’s anthropomorphization of the robot. “And this’ll be the first time you’ve used them?”

“We’ve tested them, but yeah, this is the first full-on real operation,” said Trulli. “Can’t wait to see what we find!”

“Nor can I.” Kari looked at the horizon ahead. “We should be in position in about two hours. How soon will you be ready to launch?”

“We can do all the prelaunch prep in transit. Everything else… about an hour,” Baillard said.

“We’ve got repeater monitors already set up in the main lab,” Trulli told Nina. “You’ll be able to see everything we see, as we see it-in 3-D, as well! Pretty smart, eh?”

“Sounds great.” Nina felt a thrill of anticipation, a sense of impending discovery-but also of stress and tension. If there turned out to be nothing down there…

Kari picked up on her unease. “Are you okay?”

“I just haven’t got my sea legs yet,” Nina fibbed. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while. You’ll let me know when we arrive?”

Kari adopted a deadpan expression. “No, I thought I’d let you miss the moment when we discover Atlantis.”

“Don’t you start,” Nina chided as Kari cracked a smile. “I can’t cope with having two sarcastic friends!”

Nina returned to her cabin and lay on her bed for a while, trying not to think about the enormous amount of money and labor the Frosts were putting behind her deductions. When she eventually realized this was a fruitless hope, the thought of “sarcastic friends” prompted her to get up and knock on Chase’s door. On being invited in, she was mildly surprised to see him on his bed reading a book-and more surprised when she saw the cover.

“Plato’s dialogues?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Chase, sitting up. “Don’t look so shocked! I read. Thrillers mostly, but… Anyway, I thought that seeing as you’ve been going on about them so much, I ought to actually read the things. You know, the bloke doesn’t spend all that much time actually talking about Atlantis.”

Nina sat next to him. “No, not really.”

“I mean, in Timaeus there’s, what, three paragraphs on Atlantis? All the rest of it’s like some stoned student talking bollocks about the meaning of the universe.”

Nina laughed. “That’s not the usual academic description… but yes, you’re right.”

“And the other one, Critias, he doesn’t even start talking about Atlantis for about five pages. And when he does… it’s interesting.” There was a thoughtful tone to his words that caught Nina’s attention.

“In what way?”

“I don’t just mean about the description of the place, and how spot-on he was about the temple. I mean about the people, the rulers. It doesn’t really add up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, in the notes here, some scholars think that Critias was Plato’s blueprint of a perfect society, right? But it’s not. You read what he actually says, and the Atlanteans are a pretty nasty lot. They’re conquerors who invade other countries and enslave their people, they’re a completely militarized society, the kings have absolute power of life and death over the citizens with no democracy…” Chase leafed through the pages. “And then you get to the end, just before the bit that he never finished. ‘The human nature got the upper hand. They then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased.’ So Zeus calls up all the gods to punish them. Glug glug. Doesn’t sound like they were that great to me. In fact, seems like the world was better off without them.”

“I’m impressed,” said Nina. “That was quite a good analysis.”

“I was crap at maths and history-but I did all right at English.” He put the book down, shifting closer to her. “Not wanting to sound funny or anything, but reading this did kind of make me wonder why you’re so keen to find these people.”

Nina felt oddly uncomfortable, almost as if she were being accused of something. Had Kari told Chase about the Atlantean DNA markers? It seemed unlikely. She shook off the feeling, replying, “It’s something I’ve been fascinated by my entire life. So were my parents, actually. I went all around the world with them trying to find anything that might reveal where Atlantis was.” She pulled her pendant out from beneath her T-shirt, holding it up to the light from the porthole. “The irony is, I had something all along and never realized it.”

“Did your parents ever find anything else?”

She let the pendant drop back against her chest. “That’s… I don’t know, I really don’t. They thought they did, but I never saw what it was. The year they, uh, died…” Her voice caught.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Chase began.

She shook her head. “It’s okay. I just don’t often talk about it. They were on an expedition in Tibet while I was taking my university entrance exams…”

“ Tibet?” asked Chase. “That’s a hell of a long way from the Atlantic.”

“It’s been connected to the Atlantis legend for a long time. The Nazis sent several expeditions there, even during the war.”

“Nazis again, eh?” mused Chase. “The bastards get around. So they found the temple in Brazil and nicked the sextant piece from it-but they must have found something else as well, something that made them go to Tibet.”

“There could have been something on the map or in the inscriptions-there were definitely signs that the Atlanteans had visited Asia. I didn’t have enough time to check.”