down.
The next wave split the twin-finned JSF attack jet in front of him, and Warren ducked to avoid being sliced in half by a broken wing. He willed himself to stand, his numb legs wobbling beneath him, and broke into a run, splashing through the shallows toward the rail.
Part of him wanted to slip and fall so he could just stop fighting and die, but he stayed on his feet until he rammed into the rail. He reached up and grabbed the heavy chain on his shoulders with both hands and lashed himself to the rail before the next wave crashed.
The winds and spray swept the deck as he clung for his life. The wave broke over the bow, and just as Warren could feel the force lift his body off the deck and sweep him aside, his chain caught and held.
For more than a minute he stayed that way, sure his arm would be torn off and he would be washed away like the remaining planes on deck. But God help him, he swore, he was going to survive this cataclysm if only to pay back Yeats. Then, slowly, he felt the carrier shifting and heard the creak of the massive steel buckling. He looked up and saw that the entire ship was on the verge of capsizing before the giant swell had passed.
“Goddamn you, Yeats!”
Part Three
Dawn
22
Inside P4’s star chamber,Conrad coughed as the whiskey stung the back of his throat. He looked up at Serena sitting next to him. Her wet hair was wiped back, her face pale.
“Jack Daniel’s?” he asked hoarsely.
“Found it in Yeats’s pack.” She reached over and touched his face. The feeling of her hand on his face brought him back to life. “You’re warm.”
“This whole place feels warm.” Conrad sat up and felt a terrific pain at the base of his skull. He groaned. “Where’s the obelisk?”
“I don’t know,” Serena said.
“It was right here.” Conrad quickly scanned the star chamber. He saw the empty altar standing in the middle of the cartouche. Something in his gut churned and he remembered a nightmare about the floor splitting open. “Where’s Yeats?”
“Disappeared down the floor shaft.”
Conrad looked for the shaft, but it had closed up again beneath the altar. He’s dead, thought Conrad. He felt himself shake, his heart beating rapidly.
“I’m so sorry about your father, Conrad.”
He looked into her eyes. She was indeed sorry, he thought. But there was something peculiar about the way she looked at him now. Something different. He wouldn’t call it fear, but there was something else in her eyes that put distance between them. Surely she didn’t believe Yeats’s bizarre revelation about his origins, did she? It was obviously a psychological ploy.
“You don’t actually believe-”
“Whatever else you may be, Conrad, you’re clearly not on anybody’s ‘most worthy’ list-not God’s, not the Atlanteans’ and not mine,” she said. “You’re still going to die for your sins. Only this time it looks like you’re going to take the rest of us with you straight to hell. That’s what I believe.”
Conrad could only stare at her. “You never stop, do you? You always have to have the last word.”
“Yes.”
Then Conrad saw something gleaming on the floor. He reached out to touch it. Was it sunlight? He looked up at the ceiling and blinked his eyes. The two concealed shafts he suspected had been there all along were now wide open, and a beam of sunlight strained through the southern shaft and touched the center of the floor where the obelisk had been.
Had the ice chasm overhead collapsed? he wondered with alarm. What about Ice Base Orion? The horrific thought that P4’s geothermal vent might have melted the ice or even shifted the earth’s crust briefly drifted across his consciousness, but he quickly suppressed it. Had something so catastrophic happened, he and Serena would be dead.
“What time is it?” Conrad asked Serena.
“Three in the afternoon,” she said. “Antarctica has equal hours of daylight and darkness in September. So we only have a few hours until dusk.”
Conrad craned his neck at the shafts on the sloping north and south walls of the chamber. He could crawl out one to check. It was the only way out. But the angles of the shafts looked steep, and it was at least a thousand feet up to God knows what.
“I’ll need to have a look outside,” he told her.
She nodded slowly, as if she had reached the same conclusion long before he had regained consciousness. “You’ll need these to climb up the shaft.”
She was holding pressurized suction-cup pads for the knees and hands.
“Where did you get those?” he asked.
“Your father’s pack,” she said. “He seemed to have prepared for everything.”
Conrad looked at the altar in the center of the room covering the shaft that had swallowed his father. “Not quite everything.”
Conrad rose to his feet, took the suction gear from Serena, and crossed the floor to the southern shaft. He stared up at the sun and blinked. “Looks like the polar storm cleared.”
“That’s what it looks like.” Serena didn’t sound so sure. She didn’t even look like she wanted to know.
“If there are any search parties looking for us, we need to send a signal or flare,” he told her, strapping the suction pads on. “I’ll have to crawl up through the shaft. And I’ll carry up a line with me, just in case it’s our only way out and you’ll need to join me. Meanwhile, you try to raise Ice Base Orion on Yeats’s radio and tell them what happened.”
He could feel her searching his eyes for clues. “What did happen, Conrad?”
He wanted to hold her in his arms, if she’d let him, and tell her everything was going to be OK. But they both knew that would be a lie. “I’m going to find out,” he told her. “I promise.”
The square of light overhead grew larger as Conrad neared the top of the shaft. It had been a steeper climb than he expected, slowed by the suction pads he needed for traction, and he was out of breath. The wind whistled as he gripped the outer edge of the shaft and pulled himself up to the light of day.
The brightness was harsh and he blinked rapidly, allowing several seconds for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he blinked again in disbelief.
Spread out a mile below him were the ruins of an ancient city. Temples, ziggurats, and broken obelisks lay strewn amid what had been-could be-a tropical paradise. He noticed a series of concentric, circular waterways radiating out from the base of the pyramid complex, which he deduced was the center of town. It was an advanced, otherworldly city grid hidden for twelve thousand years under two miles of ice.
Until now.
Conrad shaded his eyes. The subglacial terrain stretched out in a six-mile radius from the pyramid-a tropical island in a sea of ice. In the distance he could see the snowcapped Transantarctic Mountains.
The air smelled crisp and fresh, and he could hear the distant rumble of waterfalls. Somehow his fears and doubts and petty ambitions were swept away by the majesty of it all. But as he gazed out across the new world, he suddenly wondered what had happened to the old.
23
