flipped the knife across the air to bury itself in the dirt. His eyes sparked fire as he stood over Serena, hands on his hips.
Serena had had enough. The Saudi was about to step away when she kicked him in the groin. As he doubled over in pain she jumped up and prepared to knee his bowed face. But suddenly a half-dozen red dots painted her chest and she looked up to see the barrels of a dozen AK-47s pointed at her.
Serena put her hands up in surrender and looked at the Saudi she had kicked. He was groveling in the dirt. Another Arab came behind her, this one an Afghan by the sound of his accent, and marched her outside the circle to stand before the commanding officer, Jamil.
Jamil seemed delighted by her performance. “Ah, what have we here?”
“I’ll show you,” said Serena in Arabic, and with her elbow spiked the face of the Afghan behind her. He let out a cry and dropped his AK-47. Serena took it and pointed it at the wounded soldier.
“Let me go,” Serena ordered Jamil, digging the AK-47 into the back of the Afghan. “Or I’ll kill your man here.”
“You couldn’t hurt a butterfly, mademoiselle.”
Jamil took out a pearl-handled Colt, aimed it at Serena’s hostage, and shot him dead himself. Serena watched in stunned silence as the Afghan fell to the ground, leaving her standing alone and exposed to Jamil’s pistol.
“Hand over the Scepter of Osiris, mademoiselle, or I’ll kill you too.”
“You know about the scepter?”
“Shoot her,” another soldier told Jamil.
Jamil smiled. “Not before she tells me what she knows.”
The wind picked up and Serena looked up to see a chopper flying in. It was one of those French jobs she had flown a couple of times herself, a Z-9A, and it apparently belonged to the UNACOMers, because Jamil wasn’t terribly concerned with its arrival.
“The scepter, I said.”
“I’ve hidden it in a safe place,” she said. “Let me go and I’ll show you.”
But one of Jamil’s men, who was ransacking Serena’s pack, suddenly called out and produced the obelisk.
Jamil took the obelisk in his hands, examined it for a moment, and then looked at her and laughed. “Tell Colonel Zawas we have found the Scepter of Osiris.”
25
From his perch near the summit of P4, Conrad had a bird’s-eye view of the lost city in the late afternoon. If only Dad could see this, he thought, gazing out from the mouth of the exterior shaft.
The city was comprised of concentric waterways laid over a grid. Wide avenues flanked by temples and pavilions radiated outward from the central P4 compound. This layout reminded him of the Avenue of the Dead in Teotihuacon, Mexico, and even the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
About a mile long, the necropolis was anchored by P4 in the center, a Sphinx-like structure at the east end, and at the west end a step-pyramid with working waterfalls that churned brightly in the sunlight. The dimensions were spectacular.
Most astounding of all, Conrad could see the various rings of pavilions slowly shifting and locking into place. Or was it P4 that was slowly rotating? He couldn’t tell. At any rate, the builders did more than construct a city aligned to the stars before an ancient earth-crust displacement shifted the continent. They constructed a city in which the monuments could somehow realign themselves, perhaps through the hydraulic pressure of the water that coursed through its very veins.
Conrad tried to let this otherworldly landscape sink in, to burn this image into his memory so he’d never forget it. The magnitude of its scale, however, defied comprehension. There were probably ten square miles of city to explore inside a crater of ice whose walls rose two miles into the sky along the city outskirts. And that was only the part of the city that was visible. Conrad could only assume what he saw was part of a bigger metropolis.
He was tempted to slide back down the shaft that instant to tell Serena what he had found, if only to convince himself. But he knew he must first capture a picture. He pulled out his pocket digital camera and panned the valley below. Whatever else he took away from this city, he could at least have this, proof that he was the first person in twelve thousand years to glimpse humanity’s earliest epoch. Perhaps he was the first human to glimpse an entirely alien civilization. Maybe even his own, if Yeats was to be believed.
Yeats’s revelation raised more questions than it answered. It certainly raised a wall between him and Serena. He had seen the uncertainty in her eyes as she studied him back in the star chamber. He couldn’t tell if it was for who he was or what he had done. But the pangs of guilt for an obsession that cost the life of the only man who might have answers for them-Yeats-refused to subside.
The reality was that the only father he had ever known was dead.
He loved me, Conrad thought. He did the best he could. He even tried to tell me that in his own way. Now Yeats was gone, and they’d never have the father-son reconciliation Yeats deserved.
Conrad suddenly felt nauseated. But he took a deep breath of fresh Antarctic air and asked himself what Yeats would say. And the answer that came to mind was clear.
Yeats would no doubt quote some military figure like Admiral Mahan of the American Navy during the Revolution and say: “Whenever you set out to accomplish anything, make up your mind at the outset about your ultimate objective. Once you have decided on it, take care never to lose sight of it.”
For Conrad, the objective was clear: he had to map the city and find its Shrine of the First Sun, which was clearly a memorial to the epoch of First Time. Inside the shrine would be the Seat of Osiris, just like the one on the royal seal he had seen. If he could bring the scepter from the star chamber into the shrine and sit in the Seat of Osiris he would unlock the Secret of First Time-surely the “time and place of the most worthy.”
Holding his camera up, Conrad panned to his right and to his left, up to the sky and down to the ground. Then he zoomed in on various structures, starting with the Sphinx-like landmark in the east and working his way toward the step-pyramid with the waterfalls in the west.
Satisfied he had captured everything he could, he replayed some of the images on the viewfinder screen to make sure once again that he wasn’t dreaming. As he did, however, he saw a dot moving across the ground. It was over by the great waterway that cut through the heart of the city.
Heart surging with fear and excitement, Conrad pointed the camera in the dot’s direction, slowly boosting the magnification. There it was, a blurry image, definitely moving. No, there were two blurry figures. He focused further. Suddenly the first one jumped into view.
It was Nimrod, the husky from Ice Base Orion. And walking beside him was Serena. A few moments later the dog dropped in his tracks and a dozen figures surrounded Serena before a chopper landed next to the group. The encounter did not look friendly.
Conrad lowered his camera only to see a swarm of military choppers buzz overhead. Before he could wave, a burst of machine gun fire came his way, raking the side of the pyramid.
He slid down the shaft as fast as he could to the star chamber, which was completely empty. Serena was gone, Yeats’s pack was gone, and the sequence of doors leading out to the gallery was wide open.
Something rattled overhead, and as Conrad looked up the shaft he had just slid down, a smoking canister dropped to the floor. Conrad’s eyes started to burn and he realized it was tear gas. He ran out of the chamber.
Once at the fork at the bottom of the gallery, he looked down the tunnel Serena must have taken to P4’s entrance. A dozen pairs of glowing green eyes were coming his way. His only choice was to drop down the shaft toward the boiler room. He landed in a torrent of water washing down the subterranean channel away from P4.
He was racing down the channel now, caught in a current of such power that there was nothing he could do except keep his head above water. What the hell had he gotten himself into now? he wondered. Then he saw the mouth of a tunnel closing in on him, and a second later he was swallowed up by the darkness.
