The Antarcticans (19 page)

She was reaching for the drawer labeled “Muhammad” then held her index finger up in the air. He noticed her Cartier watch encrusted with several rows of diamonds. “I was going to show you the actual handwriting of one of the first transcribers for Muhammad, but I bet you’ll eat this up.” She went back over to the drawers near the Gospels and opened the drawer above it. “Oh, you’re going to love this.” For a septuagenarian academic, her excitement was infectious. “I’ve already handled this book once in the time period allotted, so I can’t touch it for another month, but this is the first canonical Bible after the Council of Nicaea. There’s even a letter from Emperor Constantine in the beginning, declaring Christianity the state religion and swearing his and his citizens’ allegiance to it. Without Constantine, you might have become a rabbi.” She smiled and backed away from the drawer. It was at eye level with Gavin, set into a perfectly sized Lucite case. The cover was faded and cracked; the edges of the pages looked like they might disintegrate if they were touched. The cover featured a silver embossed stamp with some orange coloring.

Dr. Sagona pointed to the symbol. “That’s the cardinal’s stamp. Since the cardinals would have had to agree to the changes in the Church, they placed their seal on the book. The orange used to be red of course, but this is from the third century, as you know.” She pushed against the Lucite case, and the book rose out of the drawer. She lifted the case out and set it on the table. Then she unlatched it and gingerly opened it so that the book was exposed and there was nothing between their eyes and the cover. She stood over the book, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply.

“Oh, that’s delicious,” she said.

The book was resting on small prongs that held it suspended. She turned the book around, touching only the outside of the case.

“Do you see these two brown spots here?”

Gavin leaned in close.

“Human blood. We don’t know whose, but we’re working on it. The cellular information from the samples date the blood to almost exactly the time the book was written. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.”

“Just fascinating,” Gavin said. “I hope you won’t mind if I spend some time in here.”

Dr. Sagona closed the Lucite case, put the book back in the drawer, and made her way back to her desk. “I don’t have time for anything else today, Mr. Pennings, but you can stay and use one of the terminals to look through our collection. If you’re pressed for time now, feel free to stop by another time. I heard you have a copy of the Gospel of Thomas from our archives. I made that for Lucifer. I’d be more than happy to sit down with you during an appointment and go over the content. The book is a bit mystical, so it might be hard to understand. I’d be happy to put context around the words.”

“Fair enough. I appreciate your time.” Gavin turned around and was heading for the door when he lost his footing and crashed into a one of the lamps used for inspecting the documents.

Startled, Dr. Sagona jumped from the noise then rushed over to where Gavin was sprawled out on his back. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I slipped on something.” He pushed himself up from the floor.

She held his arm as he got up, felt a drop on her face, and looked up. The ceiling was leaking.

Gavin was standing in a small puddle of water.

“It appears we have a leak. Very unusual.” Her hands were on her hips.

The ship tilted, and Gavin and Dr. Sagona grabbed on to the table, which was bolted to the floor. The ship’s alarm blared through a speaker in the wall, and then came instructions. “Attention, crew and passengers. We’re experiencing extreme weather. Please take shelter where you are.”

“Those chairs have seat belts on them,” Dr. Sagona said. “You can sit in one of them until this is over.” She steadied herself, holding on to the table, then made a lunge for the wall, following it to her desk. She sat down behind it, pulled a set of shoulder straps around her, and buckled them into place. She was frantically moving icons around on her desk’s surface screen then looked up.

The open drawer of the book they’d been reviewing retracted into the wall, and large panels slid out from the walls, moved into place, then sealed the walls. The panels began as a glowing opal color then vacillated through different color schemes.

“What are those?” Gavin asked.

“Moderita Cocoons…well, that’s the name of the company that makes them. They’re impenetrable to water, light, radiation, and impact. Nothing can destroy them, as far as we know. They’re kind of fascinating in that they’re layers of cellular fabric that regenerates and…” She stopped to observe Gavin’s face.

His mouth was agape, his eyes wide, and he slowly lifted his arm to point behind Dr. Sagona. She turned around slowly and looked out through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The sea, which had been serene and picturesque just ten minutes ago, was dark and swirling. A wall of water in the distance, much taller than ship, moved toward them with frightening speed. The doctor’s face turned to fear; she instinctively grabbed at her restraints to make sure they were locked into place. Her heart sped as she waited, unable to form any words, unable to double-check that the lockdown sequence on the archives had taken place, unable to tell Gavin one more time to check his seat belt. The water rolled toward them; it would reach them in seconds—a dark monster of the earth coming to swallow them. As the water rose above the windows, Dr. Sagona screamed in fear.

“God help us,” Gavin cried out.

The engines were fully maxed out, moving thousands of gallons of water underneath the ship. The stabilizers were deployed at maximum length; all bow thrusters were firing; and the armadillo shell had been deployed over the top deck, making the
Dragon
look like an alien beetle. Yelling erupted outside the door to the archives, and then the public address speakers instructed everyone on board to brace for impact. For Gavin the next few minutes played out in slow motion.

The
Dragon
held upright and cut through the wall of water. The steel and reinforced carbon fiber moaned and protested against the tremendous force of the gigantic wave. Water poured in through the open crevices and flooded the bilge pumps, which failed under the pressure of the water entering them from the sea. As the wave worked its way through the ship like a beam of light passing through a building, the
Dragon
reared its head on the other side, gasping for breath and sputtering fire.

…

The main control bridge was a rainbow of colors swirling and streaming through the air. Alarms and alerts pierced every surface of the walls and interface consoles. Although the ship’s central computer issued verbal warnings in rapid fire, the messages were outdated as quickly as they were spoken.

“Oxygenation levels on Decks Five, Eight, and Ten have fallen below fifty percent. Emergency oxygen is unavailable.”

“Warning: attitude control at twenty percent. Destabilization in ten seconds.”

“Warning: bilge-pump failure. Water holds are approaching maximums.”

Captain Bongri knew he was way out of his league and wished he wasn’t filling in for Captain Clark, who was returning from Antarctica on the
Viking
right now. He gripped the sides of his chair hard, refusing to strap himself in. He screamed orders to the three analysts sitting at their stations in front of him, who were frantically trying to restore the systems of the ship and keep it upright and floating. Lucifer sat next to the captain in a long gray wool frock, the edges lined with orange velvet, his legs crossed, his blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. He was strapped in tightly with a finger on his closed lips, as if he were waiting for his turn to say something. He watched the small display in front of him, toggling back and forth between the view the aerial drones provided him, which had been deployed seconds before the wave struck, and a phone conversation he was having with Carmen. The upper deck was still above the surface of the ocean, but the seventy-five feet that usually stood between the upper deck and the water was now just a single story. As Lucifer spoke into his headset, Captain Bongri looked at him for a split second then returned to barking commands. Lucifer saw that the wave had now passed, and the ship was tilting to the starboard side. The upper deck’s armadillo shell retracted and reformed into large pipes that pointed off the edge of the ship. The bilge pumps came back online, seawater pouring out of them. The ship slowly rose, inch by inch. Reports of injuries and fatalities started to come in to the chief humanity officer.

Captain Bongri stopped for a moment and looked on-screen as the bilge pumps came back to life. He looked confused and unhappy.

After unstrapping himself from his seat, Lucifer stood and walked calmly, his stride and balance defying the motion of the ship, which was still being tumbled in the ocean, to the chief humanity officer, Benjamin Janus, who sat on the other side of the bridge. He had taken on a pale complexion and looked hopelessly up at Lucifer.

“The kings of Thailand and Jordan are dead. The whereabouts of French Prime Minister Bourcier and US Vice President Anderson are unknown,” Janus said weakly.

“It’s all coming apart, goddamn it.” Lucifer appeared furious. “How long before they’re due at their next public appearances?”

“I’m looking into that now.” Janus was sliding images and schedules around in front of him; intersecting lines on the screen showed appointments and status updates. “It looks like only the French PM is due anywhere in the next twenty-four hours.” His hands stopped, and he looked up at Lucifer for answers.

“We’ll send a doppelganger,” Lucifer said. “Do you have someone available who’ll be convincing?”

“I think so, but even if we pull that off, what about the others? No one’s aware that they’re on the ship, except perhaps their assistants. Questions will come quickly. There’s going to have to be a story, one that makes all the deaths look unconnected. It’ll raise red flags if four major political figures go missing in one day. We could incite a world crisis. Countries around the world are already on edge with the recent environmental disasters that have been occurring.”

Lucifer nodded. “Agreed. Get the communications team working on it. I have to take care of the immediate problem, trying to get the
Dragon
to at least limp along. At this point, I have no way to get back to shore, and neither does anyone else.”

The warning alerts were coming in more slowly now, and the recovery teams had been dispatched. From all reports, the ship had suffered significant damage.

Captain Bongri had calmed down and was quietly talking with the most-senior analyst, Chandro. He stood upright without holding on to anything and announced so that everyone on the bridge could hear, “Chandro, you have the bridge. I need to assess the damage for myself so I can prioritize the recovery.”

Lucifer looked up at the captain from his conversation with Janus. “Captain? You’re leaving the bridge?”

The captain didn’t respond as he made his way to the door. He pulled back the carpet near the lifts outside the main bridge door, manually cranked open the hatch, and climbed down the ladder onto the lower deck. He did this two more times until he was standing on Deck Two, up to his knees in seawater. “Not as bad as I thought,” he said to himself, realizing that most of Deck One was likely submerged. He heard the auxiliary engines and main pumps, which were usually silent, scream for life against the forces of nature sweeping through the ship. A wailing sound came from one of the rooms off the main hall.
The ship’s security and emergency medical teams must be overwhelmed
, the captain thought. They weren’t on this deck, according to the status panel next to the lift. With the last count of injuries and casualties, he assumed there were many people in need who weren’t getting medical attention.

He walked closer to the room, saw that it was a storage area, and waved his hand in front of the door sensor. The panel indicated the door was locked. He waved his hand over the reader a second time and barked, “Captain override,” and the door slowly opened. Huddled in the corner of the room was a pale woman cradling a toddler in her ghostly embrace. She was propped against the wall, her breathing labored, and she was mouthing every other word to a nursery rhyme. The small boy was gripping tightly to her soaked clothes, covered in her blood, his face red with tears; both of them were wet from the water that had infiltrated the ship.

“It’s okay, buddy.” The captain squatted down to reach the child’s level.

As the boy gripped tighter to his mother, her weak arm fell into the water and made a light splash. Her mouth dropped open as her eyes caught something unseen in the distance.

When Captain Bongri pulled closer to the woman and child, the wailing grew louder and more panicked. He slowly put his arms around the boy and unclenched his hands from his mother’s hair and clothes then pulled the child close to him. He reached down for the mother’s limp wrist and felt for a pulse; there was a light beat every few seconds. As he stood up, the boy struggled against him. The captain reached for the communications panel and selected “Severe Medical Emergency” from the options. A blue light pulsed on the perimeter of the door. After the captain had climbed to a higher deck that wasn’t flooded, he set the boy down, dug around in his pocket, and found a strawberry-and-yogurt breakfast bar. He unwrapped it and handed it to the child. The little boy took it from him and looked it over. His crying subsided for a few seconds, and then he took a bite of it and played with the wrapper. The captain looked him over, pulling his shirt up, searching for injuries. The child’s bare toes were wrinkled from standing in the water, but otherwise he appeared unharmed.