The Covenant of Genesis

The library extended for some distance. Nina judged that roughly a fifth of the storage space was empty - which meant that in their flight to warmer climes, the Veteres had been forced to abandon four-fifths of their entire recorded knowledge: an incredible loss to any society. Had they simply sacrificed too much of the knowledge they needed to survive?

They made their way through the maze, eventually reaching the far wall - and discovering the entrance to another room. ‘It’s not a library,’ said Chase, stepping inside. ‘Don’t know what it is, actually.’

Ally-ally-ally . . . his voice echoed back. Exchanging puzzled looks with the others, he raised his torch, and saw that the new chamber’s roof was domed. Nina moved her light across the room. It was circular, with what looked like pieces of machinery spaced around its edge. There was another, larger machine at the centre, a conical copper tube extending upwards from it almost to the ceiling.

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Sophia, moving to the nearest machine. ‘It looks like a potter’s wheel.’

‘They must have made some bloody weird pots,’ Chase opined as he approached an identical device on the opposite side of the entrance. There was indeed a large wooden wheel at about waist height, a metal rod rising from its centre, but mounted behind it on a hinge was a large copper cone, a thick needle protruding from the narrow end . . . ‘They’re gramophones!’ he exclaimed. ‘Like the one you made in Australia, Nina.’

‘This must be where they played the recordings on the cylinders,’ Sophia said.

Nina went to the chamber’s centre, holding out a glowstick to illuminate the machine there. ‘No,’ she realised, looking up at the copper tube. ‘It’s not where they played them. It’s where they made them. This room . . . it’s a recording studio. Look.’ She followed the tube up to the ceiling, where the interior surface of the dome was marked with odd indentations radiating out towards each gramophone. Even through the ice, it was easy to tell they had been carefully carved into a very specific pattern. ‘The sound of the original goes up the tube to the roof - and then goes outwards to each of the cones around the room. It’s a whispering gallery!’

‘Like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral?’ asked Sophia.

‘Yes, only this one’s designed to send the sound out in multiple directions rather than just to the point diametrically opposite. Pretty sophisticated, even today. The Veteres just keep getting more advanced, don’t they?’ She took a closer look at the machine. Like the others, it had a wheel and a speaker cone, this one angled to point at the mouth of the tube above. Beneath the wheel, she noticed that the vertical axle was wound with fine copper bands. ‘I think this was designed to make copies of existing cylinders as well as recording voices. That’d explain why there was an echo on the cylinders we played in Australia - the recording cones were picking up sounds from other parts of the room.’

‘So this is like a prehistoric iTunes?’ Chase said. ‘Pick your favourite track and they’ll run off copies for you?’

Nina smiled at the comparison. ‘In a way, yeah. Although it might have been more for religious purposes. Just think what it would be like to have an actual recording of, say, the Sermon on the Mount. You wouldn’t need to interpret someone else’s written account - you’d have Jesus’s own words, exactly as he spoke them.’ She bent down, removing a glove to rub the frost off what appeared to be text on one of the copper bands. ‘Although it’d put a lot of religious scholars out of business if everybody could—Ow!’

She jerked back, clutching her finger. At the same moment, a mechanical clunk echoed through the chamber. The wheel of the central machine shuddered, straining against the ice before falling still.

‘What happened?’ Chase asked, hurrying to her. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I just got zapped!’ Nina shrilled, more surprised than hurt. ‘Like a static shock.’ She rubbed her finger. ‘Son of a bitch!’

Chase gingerly tapped the machinery. ‘It’s gone now.’

‘Great,’ Nina muttered. ‘A static charge sticks around for thousands of years, and guess who gets hit by it?’

‘Eddie, turn the wheel,’ Sophia called to them from the machine she had been examining. Chase took hold of the wooden wheel and pulled at it. It only moved fractionally, still jammed by ice - but the wheel of Sophia’s machine creaked in unison. The others did the same. ‘They’re all linked.’

Nina surveyed the room. ‘Makes sense. If you’re making copies, you want them to be identical. If each wheel was manually operated, they’d all be running at slightly different speeds.’ She looked back at the axle. ‘So what’s making it work?’

‘It can’t be electric, can it?’ asked Chase. ‘No way this lot were that advanced.’

Nina looked back in the general direction of the statue, a puzzled frown crossing her face. ‘I don’t see how, unless . . . could they have used earth energy somehow? Those copper things outside the temple - they could be antenna.’

‘Earth energy?’ Sophia asked.

‘That black project you said Callum was pissed off at us for wrecking?’ said Chase. ‘That used it.’

‘It was a way to channel the earth’s own magnetic fields into a weapon, using Excalibur as a superconductor,’ Nina explained.

Sophia raised an eyebrow. ‘Excalibur? Don’t tell me you found that as well.’

‘Yeah, kinda. Long story.’

‘It can wait,’ said Sophia, pointing her torch at an opening across the chamber. ‘Whatever powered all this, it seems to have stopped working - and finding the tree of life’s more important right now.’

Nina reluctantly had to admit they did need to move on from the fascinating chamber. The tilt-rotor had to return to the ship before nightfall, and they still needed to find another way back down to ground level. ‘Let’s see what’s through there.’

On the surface, Trulli double-checked that the walkie-talkie was still working. It had been some time since he’d heard anything from the party below. But the green LED was lit; the radio was fine despite the cold. He was tempted to call for a status report, but resisted. Knowing Nina, she was probably so engrossed in exploration that she’d forgotten the outside world even existed.

He was stuck in it, though, and so were the others. Shrugging to circulate the warmth inside his thick coat, he slowly turned to take in the scene. The BA609 was now parked further away; Larsson had heeded the warning about the dripping ice above the fumarole. Bandra was plodding across the ice from the aircraft, no doubt to come and complain about something new. Rachel and Baker both sat on folding chairs by the winch, huddled together in their bulky clothing like nesting penguins. He noticed they were sharing the headphones of Rachel’s iPod, and grinned. That was one way to start a relationship.

A faint noise, something other than the constant flutter of the wind across the plain. A low murmur. Powerful, mechanical . . .

And growing louder.

He turned again, scanning the sky. White haze on the horizon, the sun still crawling infinitesimally across the empty blue dome—

And something else, moving more quickly. Aircraft. Some way off, but heading towards him. He recognised the type immediately. C-130 Hercules transports, large, four-engined propeller craft. One painted in high-visibility red and white, the other a pale military grey.

The expedition wasn’t expecting visitors. And in the Antarctic wastes, the odds of encountering anyone by chance were effectively zero. Whoever was aboard knew they were here.

Trulli could only think of one group of people who might be looking for them.

‘Nina! Eddie!’ he shouted into the radio, the urgency in his voice immediately catching the attention of Baker and Rachel, who looked at him in concern. No reply. ‘Eddie, can you hear me? The Covenant are here!’

The radio remained silent, the warning unheard.

24

‘I can see daylight again,’ said Chase, leading the way. ‘Yeah, but will we be able to get out?’ Nina wondered. The crust of ice covering everything in the frozen city seemed to be thickening, icicles hanging longer and lower.