Serena studied him carefully and concluded that he believed what he was saying. She didn’t yet, but she was impressed with his brilliance. It was rare she met a man smarter than she was. Only Conrad was perhaps too brilliant for his own good, like the geniuses used by the Americans to build the atomic bomb during World War II. And too sure of himself. He obviously somehow fancied he was going to take something out of P4 and stake his claim in history.
But Yeats would never allow it, she knew, glancing at the American general. His cold, stone-faced expression told her that once Conrad had served his usefulness he would be disposable. Not as his son, but certainly as an archaeologist. Conrad, however, was too smart to be disposable. Which is why she wasn’t worried so much by what Conrad was saying as by what he wasn’t saying.
“So now you’re concluding that P4 is alien?” She shook her head. “The bodies we found in the ice are human. Yeats said the lab autopsies proved as much.”
“That doesn’t mean those people built P4,” Conrad said. “This thing might have been here long before they arrived.”
The way he referred to “this thing” bothered her. P4 wasn’t a thing. It was a pyramid. Or was it? Without any inscriptions, she was powerless to find any meaning for this monument or argue with Conrad, except to say, “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Have some faith.” Conrad crossed the room and walked over to the opposite shaft. He then pulled out a handheld device from his belt.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Launching my astronomical simulator.” Conrad pushed a button to call up a graphic on the display. “The northern shaft we came through is angled at thirty-eight degrees twenty-two minutes. This southern shaft is angled at fifteen degrees thirty minutes.”
Serena walked over. “You lost me.”
“You’re forgetting this pyramid may be a meridian instrument to track the stars,” Conrad said as he glanced at the palm display. “The shafts in the king’s chamber of the Great Pyramid, for example, target Orion and Sirius. My hunch is that they were modeled after this. All we have to do is match the shafts with various celestial coordinates throughout history and we can date P4 to the precise-” Conrad stopped short. He was staring at his display.
“Go on,” Serena said.
“Wait.” Conrad frowned. “This can’t be right.”
“What is it?”
“Something wrong, Conrad?” asked Yeats, who was still looking up the southern shaft with his flashlight.
“The angle of the shafts targets certain stars in a certain epoch,” Conrad said. “This shaft targets Alpha Canis Major in the constellation of the Great Dog. It was known as Sirius to the ancients, who associated it with the goddess Isis, the cosmic mother of the kings of Egypt.”
“As opposed to the cosmic king Osiris,” Serena said.
Conrad’s eyes lit up. “Whose constellation Orion is rising in the east right now.”
“You told me all this back at Ice Base Orion.” Yeats was now impatiently looking over Conrad’s shoulder.
“You don’t understand,” Conrad explained, and Serena herself was trying to catch up. “This shaft targets Alpha Canis Major right now, on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius, as seen from the South Pole at sunrise on the spring equinox.”
Yeats said, “It’s September, Conrad.”
“For you northerners,” Serena reminded Yeats. “It’s spring here and in the rest of the Southern Hemisphere.” She turned to Conrad. “So what’s the meaning?”
“Well, from a fixed point on the ground, the skies are like the odometer on a car. The heavens change over one complete cycle every twenty-six thousand years,” he explained. “Meaning either this pyramid was built twenty- six thousand years ago, during the last Age of Aquarius. Or-”
“Or what?” she demanded.
“Or it was built to align with the stars at a date in the future.” He looked her in the eye, and she felt her spine tingle. “For this present moment, right now.”
14
Inside Ice Base Orion on the surface, O’Dell was lying on his bunk, listening to Chopin, waiting for some word from Yeats and the team below, when suddenly the walls began to shake and the Klaxon sounded.
Every so often the daily monotony of the base was broken by a “sim,” or simulation. A Klaxon would sound, and the crew would rush to their posts in the command center, where warning light panels and the diagnostic computers were located. A flashing SIM light on the panel was the crew’s notification that the emergency was not real.
But since O’Dell was the man who ordered sims, and he didn’t order this event, he knew no SIM light would be flashing. He could feel his pulse quicken and his adrenaline spike as he darted out of his wardroom and headed for the command center module, where the crew was already gathered around the main monitor screen.
“We’ve got a breach at the outer perimeter, sir,” said the lieutenant on duty. “Sector Four.”
O’Dell looked at the grainy picture of swirling snow. And then a large gray object emerged through the mist. “It’s the Russians,” he cursed as he recognized the Kharkovchanka tractor.
“Breach in Sector Three,” shouted another officer, followed by several others.
“Sector Two breach, sir!” another said.
“Sector One!”
“Sector Three!”
O’Dell looked around the room at the monitors: Kharkovchanka tractors everywhere. The Russians had surrounded the base. He stood very still, the gravity of the situation slowly sinking in. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder. “Sir?”
O’Dell turned to see his communications officer. He blinked. The officer’s lips were moving, but O’Dell couldn’t hear anything. “What?”
“I said the Russians are hailing us, sir. Do you want to respond?”
O’Dell took a breath. “Can we reach General Yeats?”
“We lost contact with his party as soon as they penetrated P4.”
Before O’Dell could reply, a call came over the intercom from the east air lock. “Ivans at the gate!” O’Dell heard the Russians banging against the door with what sounded like the butts of their AK-47s. He exhaled and turned to his communications officer. “Inform the Russians that a reception committee will greet them at the east air lock.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Meanwhile, let’s hide everything we can.”
O’Dell marched out of the command center and into a maze of polystyrene corridors lined with bright, reinforced glass windows. A glance outside at the village of cylindrical modules and geodesic domes told him it would be impossible for him to hide what his team was doing here.
He passed through an air lock into a module where the strains of a Mozart symphony grew louder. He passed a cleanup crew outside the lab containing the benben stone. The double doors with the PERSONNEL ONLY sign had disappeared behind a fake glass window that was conveniently fogged up. He just hoped the Russians wouldn’t look too closely. But it was probably too much to ask for, much like his prayer that they would miraculously be blinded to the dosimeters located in various panels to measure radiation from the base’s nuclear reactor. That alone qualified as a smoking gun that would effectively end his career, O’Dell realized. Yeats would then end his life.
Two unarmed MPs were waiting for him by the air lock. O’Dell nodded, and slowly the heavy inside door
