The Hunt For Atlantis

In the harsh, wavering light of the flare, she realized there was another structure before the Temple of Poseidon, a much smaller building raised up from the cave floor on a steep-sided mound. It was surrounded by a wall about fifteen feet high. A wall of…

“Gold,” said Starkman, awed. “There must be tons of it. How much is gold worth per ounce? Eight hundred dollars? Nine hundred? There’s hundreds of millions of dollars there!”

“Be careful,” Qobras warned. “That kind of thinking led Yuri to betray us. We’re here to destroy all this, not profit from it.”

They walked up to the gleaming wall. It completely encircled the little building, with no apparent way in. “It’s the Temple of Cleito, Poseidon’s wife,” Nina said. “Plato said that it was inaccessible.”

“Inaccessible, huh?” said Starkman, putting down his gear and unslinging his grappling gun. “We’ll see about that.”

“Jason.” The single word from Qobras stopped Starkman midmotion.

“Oh, come on,” Nina chided. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what’s inside? It’s the very beginnings of Atlantis, a replica of the spot where it was founded-for all we know, this might contain the original contents of the temple, rescued from Atlantis itself. Don’t you want to know what you’ve been fighting all these years? Don’t you want to know your enemy?”

Qobras contemplated the golden wall, then nodded to Starkman, who took the grapnel from the gun and unspooled a length of cable. Once he had enough, he stepped back and tossed the grapnel over the top of the wall. He pulled the line; it caught.

“Okay, let’s see what’s in here,” Starkman said, quickly climbing the cable. One of Nina’s guards threw another line up and scaled it, though more slowly.

Reaching the top, Starkman swung around, supporting himself on his stomach. “Dr. Wilde, you’re next.” He gestured to her other guard to hoist her up so he could take her hands.

“You realize I could just push you off and break your neck,” she muttered once she reached the top.

“You realize I could just shoot you in both legs and leave you to die in agony when the bomb goes off,” Starkman retorted. He lowered Nina down the other side.

Philby was next, awkwardly assisted over the top by Starkman, then her second guard and Qobras followed. Qobras was surprisingly agile and limber for a man of his age, Nina noticed. An analogue of Kristian Frost, a dark mirror-image.

Steps led up the steep mound to the temple’s entrance. Again Qobras took the lead; this time, Nina was right behind him, determined to see what was inside.

There was actually surprisingly little to be found. A pair of golden statues awaited them inside the doorway: Poseidon, no longer the giant found inside his own temple, but still larger than life, and facing him Cleito, his wife. Beyond them…

“It’s a mausoleum,” Nina said. A pair of large sarcophagi occupied the rear of the room, the plain, almost crude stonework contrasting sharply with the carefully wrought precious metals lining the walls.

“Yeah, but whose?” Starkman wondered. He directed his flashlight at an inscription chiseled into the end of one of the coffins. “What does this say?”

Nina and Philby began to offer a translation at the same moment, before Philby shrank back. “It says that this is the tomb of Mestor, last king of… I guess that means New Atlantis,” Nina said. The letters were styled differently from the familiar Glozel alphabet, but in this case it didn’t appear to be the result of mutations in the language over time, more from simple sloppiness. She moved to the second coffin. “And this is his queen… Calea, it looks like.” The letters were equally crude.

“The last king?” mused Philby. “What happened to his successors? Even if he had no heirs, there would always be somebody in line for the throne…”

“Give me your flashlight,” Nina ordered Starkman, all but snatching it from his hand as she bent down to read the rest of the inscriptions.

“You’re welcome,” he said sarcastically. She ignored him, focusing on the ancient letters.

“They were dying out,” she realized as she read on. “They thought they could sustain a new empire from here, rule the lands around the Himalayas and use the mountains as a natural fortress. They were wrong.”

“What happened?” asked Qobras.

“What happens to every empire?” Nina replied. “They overstretched themselves, got lazy, decadent. And let’s face it, they didn’t pick the breadbasket of the world to settle in. I guess they thought they could just have the peoples they conquered bring what they needed as tribute, but it didn’t work out.” She almost laughed as she worked through the text. “This place? The last outpost of the great Atlantean empire? They abandoned it. The king and queen here were the only reason anybody stayed. As soon as they died, everyone else hightailed it out and sealed the place up behind them. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually killed the king and queen themselves to speed up the process.”

“Where did they go?” asked Starkman.

“I’d guess they went right where your boss here always thought they did-into other societies. Except…” this time Nina actually did manage a hollow laugh, “they didn’t take over as conquerors. They were assimilated the same way as people are now-as immigrants, refugees. They moved in at the bottom of their new societies.”

“That can’t be true,” Qobras growled.

“That would be an accurate interpretation of the text,” confirmed Philby. “The people who wrote this knew their society was dying out, and that the only way to survive was to integrate into the other cultures in the region.”

“So much for your conspiracy theory, Qobras,” said Nina, not bothering to conceal her contempt. “This Brotherhood of yours, it’s been spending thousands of years fighting something that didn’t even exist.”

“It exists!” Qobras asserted. “The Atlanteans would never accept subjugation by people they considered inferiors. It’s how they think, it’s in their genes. They would work their way back up-it would take generations, but they would regain power.”

“Where’s your proof?” Nina cried, jumping to her feet and jabbing the flashlight at him like a sword. “So Kristian Frost is tracing the Atlantean descendants from their DNA, and wants to find Atlantis itself, the greatest legend in human history-that doesn’t mean he’s trying to take over the world!”

Qobras wheeled on Nina, dazzling her with his light. “You don’t know what Kristian Frost is capable of doing.”

“He can’t be any worse than you!”

His eyes narrowed. “You have no idea…”

Any elaboration was interrupted by Starkman’s radio. “They’ve brought the bomb,” he announced after responding to the call.

“Tell them to prepare it for detonation immediately,” Qobras snapped. “Let’s go.” Everyone moved to the temple entrance, but he held out a hand to stop Nina. “Not you.”

“What?”

“You’re staying here. It seems the appropriate place.”

The full horror of Qobras’s words squeezed her chest like an ice-cold vice. “Wait, no… you’re just going to leave me in here? You’re going to leave me in here until the fucking bomb explodes?”

Starkman put a hand on his holstered pistol. “We could just shoot you in the head if you like.”

“You won’t have time to feel any pain,” said Qobras. “You’ll be vaporized instantly.”

“Well, that makes me feel so much happier! You can’t leave me in here!”

“Good-bye, Dr. Wilde.” Qobras tossed an unlit glow stick at her feet, then left the temple. The others followed. Philby glanced back with an expression of pained sorrow as if about to say something, but then walked silently away.

Nina wanted to run after them, to punch and kick them as they tried to scale the wall, tear down the lines and trap them inside with her… but she couldn’t. Her body refused to cooperate, admitting defeat even as her mind demanded that she fight on. She sagged against the king’s sarcophagus, sliding down to the dusty stone floor.

The men scaled the wall, leaving her in darkness.

This was it? This was how she was going to die? Trapped in a tomb with the last rulers of Atlantis?

She drew in a long, trembling breath, then felt for the glow stick, cracking it to unleash a sickly green light. Not