The Covenant of Genesis

stood face to face with Nina. ‘I demand an answer, right now!’

Chase put a hand on his shoulder. Bandra tried to shrug it off, concern crossing his face as the Englishman’s grip tightened. ‘All right, doc, keep calm,’ Chase told him. ‘You don’t want to get overexcited in a dangerous place like this, do you? That’s how accidents happen.’

‘This - this is outrageous!’ Bandra screeched. ‘Let go of me!’

‘Eddie,’ said Nina. Chase shrugged, then lifted his hand. Rapid puffs of angry breath steamed from the Indian’s nostrils. ‘Dr Bandra, I promise I’ll give you a full explanation soon. But for now, it would be enormously helpful if you could just please be patient. And quiet.’

‘This is my expedition!’ Bandra hissed in impotent frustration. He stalked off towards the tilt-rotor.

Trulli grimaced. ‘Well, dinner conversation’s going to be awkward tonight.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Matt,’ said Nina. She looked back at the screen. ‘Turn the sub around, let’s see the valley floor.’

Trulli obeyed, Cambot swinging round and descending. Objects appeared at the limit of the scanning laser’s range. Large blocks, possibly boulders . . . but suspiciously regular in shape. She looked back at the video display as the sub drew closer. It was hard to judge scale, but the blocks seemed large, at least as tall as a person.

But whatever their size, one thing was immediately clear.

They were rectangular. Flat sided. Hard-edged.

Man-made.

‘Keep going,’ Nina gasped. The others reacted with equal astonishment as Cambot continued past the blocks and headed for a new contact on the LIDAR. A wall, curving round, rising upwards to form a dome-shaped building of carefully carved stone . . .

‘It’s the city,’ whispered Nina. ‘The lost city of the Veteres. We’ve found it.’

21

‘You knew it was there all along,’ Bandra said angrily, stabbing an accusing finger at the images on Trulli’s laptop as Cambot continued its exploration. ‘You knew, but you hijacked my expedition to find it! Why?’

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ said Nina. ‘There’d been . . . a security breach at the IHA. Lives were lost.’

‘What?’ Bandra’s expression changed to one of horror. ‘So you decided to put the lives of a UNARA mission at risk instead?’

‘No, because as far as we know, UNARA’s security hasn’t been compromised. Nobody knows we’re here,’ she explained, exasperated. ‘And I didn’t know for sure that the city was here, only that there was a strong possibility.’

‘But now that you do, now what? You can’t get to it! We don’t have the equipment to carry out an exploratory dive.’ Bandra scowled. ‘You may have made an archaeological find, Dr Wilde, but you’ve done so at the expense of another scientific mission - my mission. As soon as we return to the Southern Sun, I’ll be making a formal complaint to the UN about your actions.’

‘You’re entitled to do that, of course,’ Nina said, forcing back her own rising anger. ‘But I’ll ask you to wait until after we’ve explored the city. However we do that.’

‘I most certainly will not wait,’ he told her, seething. ‘You think that a few interesting finds and some TV appearances give you the right to dictate to the rest of us?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she said, voice cold. ‘But I do think that my position as Director of the IHA gives me that right.’

‘What!’

‘The IHA is as much about global security as archaeological preservation. This is now a security issue.’ She put her hands on her hips, regarding him stonily. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Bandra, but you leave me no choice but to invoke my authority and place this site, and this entire expedition, under IHA jurisdiction.’

Bandra’s rage rose to such a level that he seemed about to melt his own hole through the ice. ‘You - you can’t do that!’

‘I just did. And you know damn well that I have the authority, so I’m giving you an order - you are not to contact the IHA, or anyone else, until I authorise it. Am I perfectly clear?’

For a moment, she thought he was going to hit her. Chase took a small but pointed step closer. Lips twisted, Bandra whirled, almost slipping on the ice as he stomped back to the tilt-rotor.

‘Christ, Nina,’ said Trulli quietly, ‘I know he’s a bit of a dick, but that was harsh.’

Sophia, on the other hand, smirked. ‘Nina, I have to admit, I’m almost impressed. I never thought you had it in you. Of course, it would have been much better if you actually had the auth—’

‘Don’t,’ Nina said, stepping almost nose to nose with her. After a long moment under her hard, unblinking gaze, Sophia turned and walked away, though not without a dismissive sniff.

Chase moved up behind his fiancee. ‘Hey,’ he said softly. ‘You okay?’

She faced him, trembling with a mixture of anger and adrenalin from the confrontations. ‘N-no, not really.’

‘C’mere.’ Chase hugged her. ‘You know what? Fuck Sophia, I was impressed. You should have been in the army, you’d have made a decent drill sergeant with an attitude like that. It’d scare the shit out of the new recruits.’

She let a half-hearted laugh escape into the cold air. ‘He was right, though. What are we going to do about the city? We can’t get down there, and the only way we can get the gear and resources we’d need is by contacting UNARA or the IHA - and as soon as we do that, the game’s up.’

‘Worried about the Covenant?’

‘Them, and Bandra. I think that when he finds out I’ve pulled a snow job on him, he’ll try to kill me.’

‘I’ll watch out for you. Against Bandra or the Covenant.’

‘Thanks.’ She managed a small smile. ‘But it doesn’t change the fact that we can’t actually get to the city. All we can do is look at it on a screen - and that’s not going to be enough. We need to get inside it.’

Trulli looked up from the laptop. ‘I, er . . . I’ve got an idea.’ He glanced towards the plane, which Bandra was circling, kicking up snow. ‘Only I don’t think he’s going to like it. But, well, in for a penny, right?’

‘What are you thinking, Matt?’ Nina asked.

‘Well, that dam blocking the valley - it’s just made of soil and maybe some stones, you think?’

‘Probably. If they put it together in a hurry, they’d do it in the simplest way possible - just pile up as much earth as they could.’

‘So it’s probably not going to be all that dense, right? Even if it’s tightly packed, soil isn’t as hard as solid ice . . .’

Nina realised where he was going. ‘Matt! Oh my God, you’re a genius!’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Wait, why’s he a genius?’ Chase asked.

‘Because he can use the sub to drill through the dam and drain the lake!’ she proclaimed. ‘Will it work, though?’

Trulli gestured in the direction of the coast. ‘We saw a crevasse back there, so if I can get Cambot to it the water’ll drain out, but I want to make sure that it’s big enough for us to get the plane into so we can pick him up afterwards. It is a five-million-dollar sub we’re talking about, after all!’

‘If it works, how long will it take to drain the lake?’

‘No idea. I mean, we don’t even know the exact dimensions. But based on the size of the lake from the radar map, it’ll be . . .’ He called up a calculator on the laptop and took off a glove to tap in figures. ‘I’d say at least twenty-four hours. But it could easily be more.’

‘What about the ice?’ asked Chase. He banged a heel on the frozen surface. ‘If you drain the lake out from under it, the whole roof might cave in.’

Trulli looked pensive. ‘There’s a chance . . . but it’s a minimum of twenty metres thick, so it should be okay. A metre of ice’ll support a big truck. There might be some local falls, though. Especially if those volcanic vents are still