Destiny (2 page)

Rolling back to my feet, I spun around catching the next Scourge rushing at me with a reverse crescent kick, knocking it clean off the ledge. Seeing another of the creatures rushing out of the darkness, I smashed my foot into the center of its chest. The powerful side kick shot the Scourge back down the path as angry screeches rose out of the darkness.

Spinning around at a loud screech of fear behind me, I was just in time to see one of the Scourge plunge into the chasm below as the icy ledge suddenly gave way beneath its clawed feet. While the second creature froze looking down nervously, I lunged without hesitation smashing my forehead into its bony carapace. As the Scourge staggered backward, I slammed my shoulder into the creature’s chest like a linebacker hitting a quarterback, blasting the Scourge from its feet. Not slowing down, I stomped a steel toed boot through its stunned face as screeches of pursuit rang out behind me.

Focusing on the frozen jagged path before me, I ran all out for the archway. As the wind fought to tear me off the side of the mountain, I bounced precariously off the rocky cliff face as I continued to climb. Around every bend, the sounds of raking claws on stone grew louder. If not for the twisting path and the terrible storm, I would have already been forced to fight. Although now I knew it was only a matter of time before the hunters caught us. Time was the one thing we didn’t have.

Suddenly the ridge before me leveled out as I ran out onto a wide plateau. A short distance away I could see the stones that marked the entrance to the archway between the two peaks when the screeching howls of pursuit erupt directly behind me. Flinging the girls out of my arms, I spun around reaching for the hilts of my katanas as a heavy weight slammed into my back from behind. Sharp claws ripped at my head and shoulders as I sprang backward sliding out of the creature’s grip. Twisting around in midair, I pulled my blades free. Slamming the hilts of my katanas into one of the eyes of the Scourge slashing at my head killing it instantly.

Crossing the katanas in front of my chest, I slammed into the ground just as the next Scourge leaped on top of me to clamp its jaws around my exposed throat. Instantly the tinnearlian metal sliced through the creature’s neck like a hot knife through butter as the Scourge’s head plopped on the ground next to me.

Shoving the dead bodies away, I rolled forward onto my knees as Frostbrand’s wail for help pierced my mind. Slashing out with both blades at waist level I cleaved a line through the next wave of Scourge charging onto the plateau. As the creatures crumpled into bloody pieces around me, I leaped to my feet when Frostbrand’s thoughts flooded my mind.

Suddenly it was as if I was seeing through her eyes. I felt the ice cracking under her clawed fingers as she clung precariously to the lip of the cliff with both hands. As the buffeting winds sought to tear her away, she sank her claws deeper into the ice calling forth the very last of her magic, barely thickening the ice around her hands.

The vision went away as quickly as it had come as Scourge begin streaming out from the ledge. We would have no chance to survive this if I couldn’t push them back down the trail. Charging forward, I felt Starfire’s feverish thoughts touch my mind. Taking a quick look in her direction, I saw the fear on her face as she watched the Scourge surging onto the plateau. Slashing into the wave of screeching monsters with both katanas, I flung myself into the boiling mass focusing my thoughts into a mental scream.

Sharp claws grated against my armor as I hammered at the Scourge like a whirlwind. Their charge faltered, but only for a moment. Slowly the screeching mass of packed bodies began forcing me back. Howling at the top of my lungs, I slashed and dodged again and again at the creatures flooding out of the mountain path with both of my blades, but I was quickly losing ground. As soon as I cut down one, another three would rush forward into the gap. I was being driven back step by step when all of a sudden the dam burst.

I screamed in useless rage as the weight Scourge numbers bore me to the ground. As I fought for my life, claws and fangs tore at my armor as the creatures sought for an opening to rip me apart. Triggering my Rök runes, I cried out a prayer to Ukko.

“Kanskje!”

As the air surrounding me suddenly lit up with a red glow, I felt the spell’s overwhelming power flooding through my veins as the katanas in my hands began burning with blue fire. Burnt pieces of Scourge flew through the air with every swing, but still it wasn’t enough. There were simply too many of the creatures. As more and more bodies piled on top of me, I felt the crackling energy surrounding me start to fade when Starfire’s fury suddenly washed through my mind.

Chapter Two

Location Earth / Larissa Evans:

“Fifteen meters … ten meters … five meters.”

Larissa Evans held her breath as Tony called out the closing range as CHARLIE approached the perfectly round eighty-meter diameter Geode in the center of the volcano. Normally the excited MIT CSAIL Robotics graduate couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes at a time, but now the young man was completely focused as he sat back in the control chair.

Excitedly Tony called out as the multimillion dollar machine touched down. “Nara, we have contact. I’m setting the anchors points now!”

With a sigh of relief, Larissa watched the Titan XI drilling robot spread its bulky quad legs to their furthest extension as Tony worked the force feedback controls. When hooked into the neural suit’s feeds and surrounded by the unit’s one hundred and eighty-degree virtual display, Tony operated as if he were one with his creation. The interface was so precise that he could’ve picked up an egg without breaking the shell or punched through a steel girdle, which was perfect for the level of precision this delicate drilling operation needed.

The riskiest part of the entire plan had been making sure Thera’s lava dome didn’t crumble during the breaching phase of the operation and crush one of the many magma chambers surrounding the circular rock far below. A surge of oxygenated air hitting the exposed magma would automatically trigger a pryroclastic blast, which would ruin the entire operation. Not to mention possibly destroying the entire island of Santorini.

Even if there wasn’t a breach of the magma chamber, at any time scalding hot gasses could fry their equipment in seconds. These ‘Hot Surges’ were naturally occurring in active volcanoes and typically ranged from a hundred degrees centigrade to one thousand three hundred degrees centigrade. They were similar in many ways to pryroclastic blasts, but without the explosive lava eruption.

The Titan had only been designed to handle a maximum temperature of about seven hundred degrees centigrade, so Larissa had made sure the lava dome had several hours to release any pent up gases before sending CHARLIE down into the hole. As the large machine settled into place, Tony triggered the grappling routine as CHARLIE’S onboard computer deployed its specially designed gel-anchors to the smooth rock face. Perched as it was atop the unnatural rock formation, the drilling robot looked like some giant spider hanging from a long thick thread, while perched atop a massive egg.

The “thread” was created from a carbon-graphite composite that had two primary functions. The first was to protect the data cable bundle that was the robot’s central nervous system. The second function was to lower the robot into the center of the volcano. The fibers were woven with a plastic resin that gave the cable an incredible strength-to-weight ratio and heat tolerance that was perfect for these extreme conditions.

“What’s the temperature looking like in there?”

“It’s hovering around four hundred degrees, Nara.”

Whipping her head around, Larissa glared at her longtime friend and subordinate, Sharon Wrigley. Studiously Sharon monitored the flat screens in front of her as she unsuccessfully tried to hide the smirk on her face. Looking around the small control room of the Triumph, Larissa saw the rest of her close-knit team trying not to laugh at the inside joke. Replying calming she ignored the comment.

“That’s well within our safety margins. Let me know if it gets above five hundred fifty centigrade.”

“Rodger that.”

Everyone on the team except Tony knew she hated being called Nara. Not that she hadn’t repeatedly wanted to tell the exuberant young man just how infuriating it was to be compared to that scantily clad video game bimbo everyone loved to compare her too. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much choice in that matter due to her current financial crisis. Simply put, she needed the money.

It pissed her off to no end that some bloody game designer had stolen her life’s story and made it into a popular video game series. They had shortened her name, given her a chrome automatic handgun and a matching Rambo style survival knife and had her gyrating throughout crypts around the world. At times, it was enough to make her want to scream!

It was hard enough for a woman to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of archeology where the ‘Boy’s Club’ ruled the academic circles. Although being the daughter of Sir Arthur John Evans had helped to a point, it always felt like an uphill battle.

Unfortunately, her enhanced physique didn’t help matters either. Her naturally large bust had always made it difficult for men to take her seriously, but now after that video game Thomas Sterling had made of her, it was nearly impossible for her colleagues to even look her in the eye.

“At the very least the bloody buggers could have changed her looks!”

Unlike everything else, that was the one thing they hadn’t altered. While the video game company became richer and richer, her sponsors had dried up in the wake of the games growing fame. In one fell swoop, she had become the laughing stock of the academic world of archeology.

Archeology wasn’t something that you figured out one afternoon after working-out at the gym. It was something you mastered only after years and years of hard research and study. Unlike many armchair archeologists, Larissa had put the necessary time into being the best at her trade. Learning the many dead languages needed to unravel the mysteries of the buried clues left behind by ancient civilizations. Over time, she had become a world-renowned expert on translating archaic writings in her own right.

Early on in her career, she had learned not to trust the researchers who had gone before her to accurately document the literal translations left by these long-dead peoples. In her experience, researchers either translated what they believed the writers meant, or reworded the translation to fit their civilization’s current cultural perspective.

Closing her eyes, Larissa took a deep breath as she forced herself to calm down. If giving Tony his fandom dream of working a dig with his teenage heroine allowed her to find the discovery of a lifetime, then so be it. This would be the first time she’d received anything positive from her infamy.

“Nara, I’m ready to commence drilling.” Looking at the hero-worship shining in the young man’s eyes, Larissa forcibly held back a sigh.

“Proceed when ready Tony. Just remember to keep it slow and steady.”

“Don’t worry, I’m on it.”

Unbelievably she watched the suddenly serious young man get back to work. With steady precision Tony manipulated the massive drill shaft sticking out from the back of the large robot slowly into position. It was a side of him that she’d never seen before. It almost made her forgive him for his constant adoration whenever she was around. As the diamond-headed drill bit began to spin, Tony expertly applied steady pressure. The entire control room held their collective breath as the drill bit dug into the Geode’s smooth surface. This procedure was the second most dangerous part of the entire operation.

Tony’s father owned Bouygues Construction, which was an off-shoot of Caterpillar Inc. He’d paid for his son’s Titan drilling-robot concept initially out of his pocket until he could form a company to expand on the technology his son had developed. Lucky for her, they were both diehard fans of her life story, or, at least, the story as told by Enox Interactive. More importantly, they wanted to be her sponsor and prove their design concept. This was the break she’d needed.

For once things finally seemed to be going her way. Even though she had scored the most famous archeological discovery of the century, the money she had made from the treasures recovered from the site had barely covered the costs of finding the Phaeacian city of Scheria. It hadn’t even come close to scratching the tip of the iceberg of what would be needed to properly excavate the sunken ruins.

She had nearly given up all hope of salvaging the operation when she unearthed the Temple of Atlas. While headlines around the world argued the question if the lost city of Atlantis had been found, Larissa knew the truth. Unlike most of the ancient city that had been destroyed during its slide to the bottom of the sea from tidal waves caused by the Thera eruption around one thousand five hundred BC, the Temple was completely intact. In it, Larissa had found the clues she knew would lead her to the true Atlantis and the discovery of a lifetime.

The first clue etched into the temple’s walls depicted a complete map of the Caspian and Aegean Seas in relation to Athens of Greece and the Pillars of Herakles. On this detailed map, the location of Atlantis was clearly marked as the island of present day Santorini. Similar to the map from the famous Greek historian Herodotus, Atlantis was shown as being located at the center of the island. This location was not the same spot as the recently discovered city of Akrotiri in the late nineteenth century, but an area located on the volcanic island of Nea Kameni in the center of Santorini’s caldera lagoon.

The second clue buried in the temple’s deepest vault was a metallic disc that Larissa had named the Eteocretan Key. Unlike the clay Minoan Phaistos Disc that translated Linear A into a Euboean-derived alphabet after the Greek Dark Ages. The Eteocretan Key was made from a metal never before seen and translated an unknown but highly developed complex written language into Minoan and Euboean. Along with this disc was stored an entire vault of clay tablets. Once translated, these tablets recorded in detail a most remarkable story that ended with the destruction of Scheria.

Once she had reconstructed the unbelievable series of events that had led up to the most devastating volcanic eruption in known human history, the first thing Larissa did was contact an old friend of hers working at the Satellite Imaging Corporation. The company was the world leader in Geospatial Imaging Technology. At her request John Limerick took a Seismic 3D GSI image of the entire island of Santorini. One week later when John contacted her back with the results, he was screaming through the phone in excitement. After opening the satellite images he’d sent over to her in an email, she’d begun screaming excitedly right along with him.

It took them both several minutes to calm down enough to intelligently discuss the results, but once they did John immediately understood the magnitude of what they’d found. He’d readily agreed not to share the photos with anyone else. Without a doubt, Larissa knew that she’d found the discovery of a lifetime. Once the story broke, she knew it would change the world forever.

The volcano was unlike anything she’d ever seen before in her life. It wasn’t a rupture in the Earth’s crust caused by a magma chamber deep below the surface. Instead, it was a relatively shallow chamber of expanding magma with a perfectly circular rock formation approximately eighty meters in diameter sitting at its center. Directly below the magma chamber was what appeared to be the outlines of a massive buried city complex larger than the entire Nea Kameni Island. Logically, there was no way this shallow magma pocket could have created the largest recorded volcanic eruption in written history that completely devastated the ancient Mesopotamian valley. Scientifically, there was no way for it to even exist.

In a move that shocked the entire archeological world, Larissa sold the rights of the entire Scheria dig to her father’s longtime friend, Stefanos Thomopoulos Marinatos, current Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. Next, she cashed in the last of her father’s famous fortune to fund her new enterprise. While the entire academic world called her crazy, Larissa flew to Peoria, Illinois.

Looking for the owner of Bouygues Construction, an innovator in the world of harsh environmental construction robots, Larissa was quickly introduced to Mr. Jonathan Rickshaw. To her amazement, he knew all about her. Jonathan and his son, Anthony Rickshaw (aka Tony), had been playing the Crypt Creeper series for the last fifteen years. They were both hardcore fans of the video game series and had even been following her real life exploits.

The meeting quickly evolved into a dinner at their mansion where Larissa was able to explain in detail what she needed for her next project. Together, the three of them had come up with a plan that, if successful, would make them all rich. Unbelievably, by the end of the night, Larissa had her new sponsor.

A sharp intake of breath from Tony broke her train of thought as the young man shouted over his shoulder. “Nara, we’re breaking through to the inner chamber!”

Suddenly, Tony’s body went ridged as he screamed in agony. Before anyone could react, the entire control room’s power grid went down. In the pitch black darkness that followed, Larissa strong British accent rang out loudly.

“What the bloody hell is going on?”