The Gods of Atlantis (8 page)

‘Odd place to go spearfishing,’ Jack said.

‘It’s something I’ve been playing with since we were here five years ago,’ Costas replied, eyeing the rock face ahead of them. ‘You don’t tend to think that getting through submerged caverns would be an issue because you can swim through them, but thinking about volcanic activity made me wonder what it would be like if some force were dragging us down, exerting a pull on buoyancy exactly like those gas eruptions would do now.’

‘Got you,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘It’s a grapple gun.’

Costas pressed his wrist control panel, and Jack saw a thin shaft of light from his helmet where a laser rangefinder penetrated the gloom. ‘Twenty-six metres to that ledge,’ Costas murmured. ‘The grapple spear has a lead core to increase weight and the shaft is as narrow as possible for minimal water resistance, but even so its effective range is only about twelve metres. It’ll go further but you need good force of impact for the head to explode.’

‘Explode?’

‘The first ten centimetres of the shaft contains a joined matrix of rods made of titanium with a magnetic ferrous core. The head impacts the rock and detonates a small C-5 charge, and the rods shoot into every nook and cranny for ten centimetres or so around the point of impact. Then they’re locked tight by an electromagnetic pulse I fire down the wire from the gun.’

‘And then you reuse it?’ Jack pointed across the canyon. ‘We’re going to need two lengths.’

‘Once it’s wedged into the rock and magnetized, it won’t come out. But there’s a second head below the first on the shaft, and you can
detach the line from the fired head and put it on the second. It’s a gamble, Jack. The total distance is several metres beyond the specs.’

‘How do we get back?’

‘That entranceway is about five metres higher than we are here. We’ll have to free-swim back, but if we launch ourselves with maximum buoyancy we could swim in an arc and land back here without being pulled down.’

‘Okay. Let’s get going.’

‘Move behind me. This thing fires a substantial black powder cartridge.’ Costas clicked on his laser rangefinder again and aimed at the jagged crevice he had been eyeing on the wall, then pulled the trigger. There was a violent shudder and a jet of bubbles and the spear shot off from the tube, pulling the line behind it. The spool abruptly stopped reeling and Costas was pulled forward, just holding himself in time from being yanked off the ledge over the rising bubbles. He pulled hard on the line, then looked back at Jack. ‘Okay. It’s held.’

‘What’s the drill?’

‘I stay here, you swim along the line. You get there, I swing off this ledge and follow you.’

Jack leaned over the void. ‘That line’s ten metres long, and the lava’s what, eight metres below us? That puts you in the soup.’

‘That’s where you come in. As I swim out as fast as I can from here, you reel in the slack. That way if I’m pulled down, the line will hold me high enough above the lava.’

‘Roger that,’ Jack said, pushing himself off and grasping the line in front of Costas. ‘You secure?’

‘Go for it.’

Jack finned forward over the lava, watching the streaks of red in the cooling lobes and nodules directly below him. At about the halfway point he was suddenly surrounded by a miasma of bubbles escaping from the lava below, a silvery mass that seemed to waft around him, bathing him in refracted light. He lost all points of reference, and seemed to be falling precipitately, a feeling that made him want to let go of the line and spread-eagle himself like a skydiver. His hand jerked
on the line and he twisted sideways. It was no illusion; he really had been falling. He began pulling himself along, his buoyancy computer continuously adjusting to compensate for the effect of being dragged down in the vacuum created by the bubbles. He reached the grapple, checked that it was locked securely into a crack and then turned to look for Costas, who had crouched down on the edge of the tunnel opening, holding the line. Jack held on to the rock face with one hand and put his other out in the diver’s okay signal, his forefinger and thumb joined in a circle, and then transferred both hands to the line. He heard Costas’ voice crackling on the intercom through some kind of interference, the broken sounds briefly becoming distinct. ‘You ready?’

Jack wedged his body as much as he could into the rock. ‘Roger that.’

Costas launched himself forward in a slow-motion dive, his bulky suit making him look like an astronaut. As the line went slack, Jack hauled on it, looping it quickly around a rock protrusion behind him. It suddenly went taut as Costas was sucked down by a gas plume and disappeared out of sight. The line went slack again, and for a horrible few seconds as he frantically pulled on it Jack thought that Costas might have impacted with the lava. Then the crackling came on the intercom again, and Costas appeared out of the plume and ascended a few metres below him. He reached the ledge beside Jack, then wedged in an elbow and took the grapple gun out again from his pocket, unhooking the line from the carabiner on his chest and feeding it back into the tube. He glanced at Jack through his visor. ‘That was close.’

‘Your boiler suit looks like glue.’

Costas grunted, reached into the crevice to disengage the line from the grapple, then pressed a control on the tube to re-spool the line and hook it back into the second grapple, ready for firing. He wrapped his hand round the grip again and peered at their objective, the rock-cut platform in front of the ancient entranceway some fifteen metres away. ‘Twice lucky?’

‘Go for it.’

There was a jolt as he fired the device again, and Jack watched the grapple arc over and disappear into a fold in the rock about a metre
below the ledge. Costas pulled hard, and the line went rigid. He leaned back and Jack swam over him, taking the line in one hand and kicking out above it. This time he quickly made it to the opposite side and Costas followed, swimming forward while Jack hauled, not bothering to loop the line but letting it drop down below. Costas reached the rock beside him and hung on, breathing heavily on his regulator, then he grasped the line near the grapple and let go of the rock to release the carabiner. As he did so, Jack saw a white expanse of gas billow up below them, and at the same moment the rock holding the grapple broke free under the tension and tumbled off the face, dropping down below Costas into the fomenting mass of bubbles now rising up around them. Jack wedged one hand into the rock and reached down with his other to grab Costas under one arm, holding tight as the plume rose through them. For a split second it seemed as if they were dangling in air, and Jack was holding Costas’ entire weight. Then the plume dispersed above them and Costas hit the manual on his buoyancy control. Jack twisted round and looked up, seeing the carved lintel shape above the doorway, straining to look for the ancient symbols he desperately wanted to see.

Just as he relaxed his hold, there was a jerk and Costas’ arm slipped away. Jack twisted back and saw a horrifying sight. Costas was at least five metres below him, his arms flailing, descending fast. Jack slammed his buoyancy control to dump the air inside his compensator and swam downwards. The chunk of rock with the grapple still inside had pulled Costas down like an anchor, and was now embedded in the lava near the edge of the chamber, sinking in and pulling Costas with it. Jack reached him with only a few metres to spare, pulling his chest strap with one hand and releasing the carabiner with the other, then injecting air into both of their buoyancy compensators. He watched the line snake away and disappear into the molten mass below them, and turned Costas round to face him. ‘You okay?’

Costas was wide-eyed, his visor fogged up around the edges from his exhalation. Jack had a sudden sickening feeling. They had just lost their one lifeline, and they had expended more air than they had bargained
for. Costas returned his stare. ‘I think that’s twice very lucky,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Let’s get up there, do what we have to do and get the hell out of here.’

As they swam upwards, Jack turned to look out over the lava lake. A surge was rising in the middle, then moving along as if something were swimming just beneath the surface like some ancient spirit monster. Suddenly the mass rose in a giant bulbous dome and split open, disgorging a huge bubble of gas into the water. A second later there was a blinding flash and Jack could see the pressure waves in the water surging towards them. Costas clung to him, pressing his visor against his. ‘Brace yourself!’ The shock wave pushed them violently towards the rock face, and then they were pulled back again over the lava lake by the implosion. Jack held on to Costas with one hand and finned with all his strength back towards the rock-cut door. He seemed to be getting nowhere, as if this were a bad dream, the door impossibly beyond his reach. Then the sucking force of the implosion miraculously relented, and they came to the ledge below the door.

‘What the hell was that?’ Jack said, panting.

‘Phreatic explosion.’ Costas’ visor fogged up as he struggled to regain breath. ‘It happens on land when lava flows over pockets of water, superheating it. Somehow that big bubble of gas under the surface of the lava must have had the same effect, sucking in water, encasing it and boiling it up.’

Jack stared up at the carved lintel above the doorway in front of them. Costas followed his gaze, panting, then he saw what Jack had seen. ‘Symbols. Ancient writing. Is this what you saw before?’

‘It’s fantastic.’ Above the doorway was the rectilinear Atlantis symbol, with other symbols on either side, familiar from the syllabry they had discovered five years before but not yet translated. They looked freshly carved, as if done just before the flood, and several looked only partly completed. Beneath them Jack could make out other symbols, very eroded and clearly much older, some of them looking as if they had been partly chiselled away. He activated his camera. There was no time for detailed recording now. He was jittery with adrenalin, and checked
his computer readout. Fifteen minutes of breathing gas left at this depth. He was conscious that the danger had made the reflective part of his mind shut off in the focus on survival, on dealing with each new threat as they encountered it, and that he needed to maintain an awareness of the bigger picture, of just how close they had come to never leaving this cavern alive. He stared at the entrance. He would need five minutes, just to look. With the lava rising inexorably, it was the last chance before whatever lay inside there was lost forever.

‘Jack, you’ve got a problem.’

‘What is it?’

‘Check your internal temperature readout.’

Jack looked sideways inside his helmet, scanning the digital readout. ‘Twenty-six degrees Celsius. I thought it was getting a little warm. I’ll adjust the thermostat.’

‘Don’t do that yet. Wait till you really need it. You’ll blow the system.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It must have been the heat when we were close to the lava. You’ve got a leak from your coolant reservoir, Jack. You can’t afford to be that close to extreme heat any more, as you’ll soon have no way of cooling down.’

Jack shut his eyes, trying to control his breathing. For a moment he felt nauseous, a flutter in his stomach, the sickening feeling of the walls closing in. Part of him wanted to swim up and dump his air against the ceiling, to create a pocket where he could rip off his helmet and be free, but he knew that to do so would only be a brief illusion of normality in an air space that would feel far more confined than the water below. He swallowed hard.
Keep focused
. He sucked on his water tube, then looked into the doorway and tried to ignore the lava, which was rising up the rock face below at an alarming rate. Costas had already unzipped his front pocket and disgorged the ROV, which he was testing like a remote-controlled helicopter. Jack realized where the nickname Little Joey had come from. It looked like a miniature robotic kangaroo, with hind legs, a swivelling video aperture for a head and a tethering cable for a tail, leading to a spool on Costas’ chest. The robot craned its neck
around and peered at Jack with its single video eye, and then jetted back to Costas, hovering in the water in front of him. Jack swam ahead to the door entrance, then switched on his helmet lights. ‘I’m going in. Five minutes, no more.’

Costas put a hand on the ROV’s neck. ‘Little Joey will be following you. He can send back remote signals, but I’m keeping him on the tether in this place. If you see anything, hold him like I am and put him on to it. Remember, I’m seeing what he sees on the screen inside my visor. Just point and I’ll drive him forward. Then you come out, pronto.’

Jack stared at the ROV, its single camera eye encased in a sphere of glass. It angled its head around and looked at him, the black lens cap half-down like an eyelid. He realized that he was cocking his own head in the same way, as if they were querying each other. He shook his head in disbelief at what he had just done and looked away. The ROV
was not alive
. ‘Roger that.’

‘Remember what Macalister said. No disappearing down holes.’ Costas’ voice crackled. ‘That electromagnetic interference is increasing again. There must be a lot of ferrous material in the lava here. I may be out of contact with you.’

Jack surged forward, passing through the entrance and finning down the rock-cut tunnel. After about ten metres the tunnel became a T-junction. Jack stopped and checked his remaining time. Four and a half minutes. It had to be one or the other. The ROV came up alongside him and angled to the right, illuminating the passage. Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Jack, give me a confirmation on what you see. I think I’m looking at another entranceway.’