The Prometheus Objective

34

Racing toward the fight, to the shadow of the great mountain and the trails leading around the side, Jacob slammed on the brakes. Sliding one direction, he cranked the controls to aim the other way. Toward the smoke and the flames on the descent toward the icy shore.

“What are you doing?” Phoebe shouted over the roaring of the engine. She pointed to the mountain that was looking more and more artificial. It filled her with dread, a primordial sense of fear tingling down her spine. “We have to get inside that thing!”

She didn’t want to say it, but she was terrified, and wanted each one of them at her side when they went in. Maybe a couple dozen soldiers wouldn’t hurt either. So… “Unless we’re going to get reinforcements.”

“Maybe!” Jacob yelled back as he cranked up the engine, turning and gearing up speed. “But we have to get there fast. Or Temple and his whole team are toast.”

Phoebe looked at Orlando, seeing his grave expression there. She checked with Nina, and just saw her shrug.

“Hurry, then.”

In less than a minute, they were there, in the thick of it. Phoebe and Orlando ducked beneath the seats and pulled Aria down with them as bullets tore into the side of the Sno-Cat, ricocheting off the tracts and cracking the glass. They heard a thunk as Jacob rammed the grill into somebody. Then another thud and a jarring bump.

Did we just run over a couple guys? Phoebe thought with a squeamish cringe.

The vehicle came to a grinding halt, and when she peeked up, Phoebe saw Nina sliding over to the take the driver’s seat as Jacob opened the door and prepared to leap out.

“Here,” she said, handing her boy an automatic weapon as any mother would pass her child an umbrella before heading out into a storm.

“Go,” Jacob said. “I’ve got this, I’ve seen this.”

“I know,” Nina said. “And I’ll see you again, with Temple. Up there.”

He looked like he was about to hug her, or cry, or both. Instead, he leapt out and she slammed the door. Cranked the wheel, and her face — with a rare flash of emotion — turned stone-faced and cold again as she focused on an enemy. Shifted gears and sent the Sno-Cat lurching at him.

Phoebe glanced out the window and saw two hapless men in black parkas running and firing wildly before they went under, grinding under the track gears as Nina eased back onto the icy path. She weaved around vacant snowmobiles and other vehicles, and Phoebe had a glimpse of Jacob — soon to be driving one of those, with an injured man strapped to the back seat.

“They’ll be fine,” Phoebe said — to Nina. To herself and Orlando. To Alexander and Nina, who looked back nervously, uncertainly, as if she thought maybe she should have stayed behind as well.

She spoke about Jacob but couldn’t help wishing she knew the fate of her own children.

Nina floored it, and as they approached the bend, Alexander stood up, leaning over and trying to look out the bullet-riddled windshield.

“The door’s sealed,” he said matter-of-factly. “We’re not getting in…”

Aria shifted beside him, stood and took his hand. Her eyes fluttered, pupils rolling up. She saw her own vision, past the blue, within the blue shield herself.

“No,” she said, more forcefully. “It’s a puzzle. A code.”

Alexander smiled.

So did Orlando.

Someone said it, but Phoebe wasn’t sure who.

“We’re good at those.”

Four more dead soldier guards: three shot and one knocked over the edge. They had raced up and around the slope, ascending the icy ramp that ran parallel to the pyramid’s slope, and arrived at the upper plateau, about the halfway mark.

The sun streamed in from the low angle, above the far horizon, and glinted sharply off the icy walls and the crunched snow path. Fortunately, the slope of the pyramid wall deflected the brightest of the glare, deflecting enough that Alexander could approach without sunglasses. His eyes teared up, but the closer he got to the ancient structure, to the wall and the slanted square doorway, the more his excitement grew, and his vision focused.

He was aware of Nina to his right and behind him, gun drawn, guarding the road they’d ascended, as well as keeping an eye out above and around them for other threats.

Phoebe asked something about “trying to scry for traps and hidden levers.”

Orlando chided that, “A wrong combination would probably cause an avalanche that would pulverize and bury us all at the bottom of the ravine,” while Aria tried to hush them both and said: “Let Alexander think. He’s got this…”

He did have this.

Alexander saw the configuration of the panels around the inverted triangular door. Two only were visible: upper, left and right, and for most — that would be it, with no possibility of success because unless they could ask the right question, unless they could extrapolate and see what was below the ice, there would be no moving forward.

The third stone.

He thought about it and felt the blue murkiness fogging over his sight.

See it, he willed. And imagined not just clearing away the ice, but going back, farther back, to when this land was ice free, when the poles were not where they were now. To a lush jungle world.

The blue clung to the green, to the details, to the blurry shape of the pyramid he could barely make out; but he was chipping through it. Maybe it was the proximity to the piece of the Emerald Tablet worn by their enemy, so close ahead. Maybe it was Aria, infused now with her own psychic powers, or maybe it was his own confidence in his abilities, maturing after years in the shadow of his supportive father and the comradery of his Morpheus teammates, but he felt stronger, more confident.

He had this.

He could strip away the shield — or at least chip away at it enough to see…

The slabs were symbolic. Of the seasons. The equinoxes and solstices.

“Do you have it?’ Orlando asked. “I think those two are indicative of stellar patterns.”

“Constellations,” Alexander said, his eyes still drifting in and out of the present and the past. Seeing these two, and the third, and then glimpsing the night sky, trying to match the patterns of the weird anthropomorphic figures on each slab. Minotaur-headed octopus body, crab-body humanoid headed archer and the third… the jackal-faced rabbit creature.

“But like none I’ve ever seen on Google Sky.” He blinked and met Aria’s look. Then turned back to Phoebe and Orlando, waiting expectedly.

“What are you thinking?” Phoebe asked.

Dimly, he heard the revving of the Sno-Eat engine, wondering why Nina hadn’t turned it off yet. He also sensed incoming danger.

“Got to hurry,” Phoebe said in a low voice. “We’ve got company coming, ahead of Jacob and the reinforcements, who are still… pinned down.” She said the last part lower, so Nina surely wouldn’t hear.

Alexander focused again, and again it was like he had his face up against a clouded, blue-tinted window pane, and his breath kept fogging the view, but he could still make out the pyramid beyond, the palm trees, the crowds along the main avenue, and… the sky.

“We need to get up there and push the tiles in the right order.”

“Can’t you envision how they did it sixty years ago — or whenever Admiral Byrd got here?”

“I should be able to,” he said. “But I know how they did it, if not the exact order.”

“How?”

“Computer extrapolation, with NASA’s help most likely. It’s a code tied to the date of this thing’s construction, to when the stars were much different. They must have mapped the earths precession, back to when the light from the stars we see now were in much different configurations. And then selected the sequence, which as the ancients always began the year — marking their zodiacal ‘time’ as the constellation in which the sun arose on the spring equinox.”

“Like we’re Age of Aquarius,” Aria said.

“Yes. So, we’d start with that one, then go through Summer and Fall…

“Can you guess?”

“Rather not,” Alexander said. “I don’t know what would happen if—”

“Avalanche,” said Orlando. “Or collapsing bridge.”

“Can we get through to Diana?” Phoebe asked. “Have her access the NASA programs, and…”

“Yes,” Alexander said. He stepped closer, gazing at the ancient door, at the unyielding barrier. He noticed the cracks in the surface, a thick one that ran up from the base. “Start that,” he said, “but I’m close. I can almost… see… the night sky back then. In that time when this was all new.”

He was aware suddenly that something had changed.

He was alone, the others scattering. Someone cried out his name, but it sounded so far away, lost in the grinding drone of the engines and a horn—

Someone grabbed him and they both rolled to the side, just as the Sno-Cat roared by. Over the bridge, bearing down and still accelerating — right into the door.

It crunched into the barrier, splintering metal and riding up on the wreckage, but it had enough force to shatter the wall and break through as the tracks caught and pushed and never relented, riding just ahead through the crack that expanded and exploded in a cloud of dust and wrecked ancient masonry.

Alexander, under Orlando, looked around for Aria. For Phoebe.

And he waited for the avalanche, or the bridge collapse…

…that never came.

A creaking, grinding sound of metal on rock or ice. Crunching footsteps, and Nina came out of the wreckage. A little wobbly, she put her hands on her hips and looked around at everyone, scattered and tense.

“Come on, people. After a hundred million years or whatever, any traps had to be useless, or at least close to it. And that crack was just begging to be widened.” She removed her gun, cocked and loaded it.

“Let’s go rescue Caleb. Again.”