Deep Fathom (41 page)

“You've figured it out?”

“I have my theory.”

“Oh, out with it already. Tell me.”

“It's dark energy.”

Jack sighed, sensing another lecture. “And what's dark energy?”

“It's a force conjectured by a cosmologist, Michael Turner, in an article in the
Physical Review Letters.”
Charlie nodded to one of the pages taped to the wall. “After the Big Bang, the universe blew outward, spreading in all directions. And it's still expanding. But from the newest studies of the movement of distant galaxies and the brightness of super-novas, it is now accepted that the rate of expansion is accelerating.”

“I don't understand.”

“The universe is expanding faster and faster. To explain this phenomenon, a new force had to be coined—‘dark energy.' A strange force that keeps the universe expanding by
repelling gravity
.”

“And you think this energy given off by the crystal may be dark energy.”

“It's a theory I'm working to prove. But it's a theory that could possibly explain the crystal's
substance
, too. Dark energy is tied to another theoretical bit of physics—dark
matter
.”

Jack rolled his eyes.

Charlie chuckled. “What do you see when you look up at the night sky?”

“Stars?”

“Exactly,
mon
, what astronomers call
luminous
matter. Stuff we can see. Stuff that lights up the sky. But there is not
enough of the observable stuff to explain the motion of galaxies or the current expansion of the universe. According to calculations of physicists, for every gram of luminous matter there must be nine grams of matter we can't see. Invisible matter.”

“Dark matter.”

“Exactly.” Charlie nodded, his gaze flicking to the crystal. “We know a lot of the missing matter is just run-of-the-mill stuff: black holes, dark planets, brown dwarves, and other material our telescopes just haven't been able to detect. But with ninety percent of the universe's matter still missing, most physicists suspect the true source of dark matter will be something totally unexpected.”

“Like our crystal that emits dark energy?”

“Why not? The crystal acts as a perfect superconductor, absorbing energy so completely that most methods for scanning for its presence would fail.”

“So astronomers have been looking the wrong way all along. Rather than in the night sky, they should have been looking under their own feet.”

The geologist shrugged.

Jack finally understood Charlie's drive. If he was right, the answer to the fundamental mysteries of the universe's origin lay in this room—not to mention a source of amazing power. A power never seen before. Jack pictured the massive crystal on the seabed floor. What could the world do with such an energy source?

George appeared in the open doorway behind him, shuffling papers. “Charlie, you should…oh, Jack, you're here.” George looked disheveled and out of sorts.

“Were you able to find out what I asked?” Charlie asked.

George nodded, a glint of fear in his eyes.

Jack turned to Charlie. “What's going on?”

Charlie nodded to George. “His graph. The fact that every eleven years the number of ships missing in the area spiked. It got me thinking. It looked familiar, especially the dates. I rechecked George's data. His graph follows almost exactly the cycle of sunspot activity. Every
eleven
years the sun enters a period of increased magnetic storms. Sunspots
and solar flares reach peaks of activity. These peaks coincided with the years when the most vessels vanished in the region.”

“And you knew this solar cycle off the top of your head?”

“Not exactly. I was already researching this angle. Remember on the day of the Pacificwide quakes, there was an eclipse coinciding with a major solar storm. I wondered if there might be some correlation.”

“You think the solar storms triggered the quakes—and the pillar had something to do with it?”

“Think about the platinum book. Even back then, the writer reports seeing strange lights in the northern skies before the big quake. The aurora borealis. It grows more brilliantly and expands far south during a solar storm. The ancients were experiencing a peak of solar activity prior to the disaster.”

Jack shook his head. “This is all too much.”

“Then let me put it all together for you. You remember our talk about the Dragon's Triangle a few days back?”

Jack nodded.

“And do you remember me telling you how it is exactly opposite the infamous Bermuda Triangle? How the two create some type of axis through the planet that causes disturbances in the magnetic lines of the Earth? Well, now I think I have an explanation. I would wager there are two massive deposits of this ‘dark matter' crystal—one under the Dragon's Triangle and one under the Bermuda Triangle. The two poles have been acting like the positive and negative ends of a battery, creating a massive electromagnetic field. I believe it is this field that drives the Earth's magma to flow.”

Jack tried to wrap his mind around this concept. “The Earth's battery? Are you serious?”

“I'm beginning to think so. And if I'm right, those ancients made a horrible mistake by digging free a sliver of this battery and exposing it to direct sunlight. They made it vulnerable to the big solar storm. A lightning rod, if you will. The crystal took the solar radiation, converted it into dark energy, and whipped up the Earth's magma core, creating
the tectonic explosion that destroyed the continent.”

“And you're suggesting something like that happened
here
two weeks ago?”

“A watered-down version of it, yes. Remember in the past the pillar was on dry land. Today it's insulated by six hundred meters of water. The depths served to shield it from the strongest of the storm's energy. It would've taken a significant solar event to trigger the recent quakes.”

George lifted his hand to speak, but Jack interrupted, afraid to lose his train of thought. “How does all this tie into the President's plane?”

“If it was passing over the site when the crystal was radiating, the dark energy could have damaged the jet's systems. I've noted strange fluxes myself when experimenting with the crystal: magnetic spikes, EM surges, even tiny fluctuations in time, not unlike your own short lapses in the sub. I bet these bursts of energy have been messing with vessels in the area for centuries.”

“If what you say is true…”

Charlie shrugged. “I don't purport to be an expert on dark energy…at least not yet. But can you imagine the devastation here millennia ago? Quakes that tore apart continents. Massive volcanic eruptions. Ash clouds that circled the world. Floods.”

Jack remembered words in the ancient text:
the time of darkness
. The insulating layer of ash would have created a greenhouse effect, melting the ice caps and drowning their ravaged lands.

“We got off easy,” Charlie said. “Can you imagine living during that time?”

“We may have to,” George said sharply, his face stern.

Jack and Charlie turned to him.

George held up a sheet of paper. “I contacted the Marshall Space Flight Center. I confirmed what you wanted, Charlie. On July twenty-first, four days before the quakes, the Yohkoh satellite recorded a massive CME on the sun's surface.”

“CME?” Jack asked.

“Coronal mass ejection,” Charlie translated. “Like a super solar flare. They can hurl billions of tons of ionized gas from the sun's surface. It takes four days for the explosion to hit the Earth, creating a geomagnetic storm. To support my theory, I postulated that such a violent event would have been necessary for the submerged pillar to react so severely.”

George sighed. “They also confirmed that the epicenter for the Pacific quakes has been calculated to be where the pillar lies. At the spot where Air Force One crashed.”

Charlie lit up. “I was right. Not bad for a couple days' work.”

Jack turned to George. The historian held a second piece of paper, at which he was glancing nervously. “You have more news, don't you?”

George swallowed. “After I contacted the Space Center, they forwarded the latest pictures from the Japanese satellite. Another coronal mass ejection occurred just three days ago. It was the biggest ever recorded.” George stared at them. “A hundred times larger than the last one.”

“Oh, shit,” Charlie said, his grin fading away. “When does NASA expect its energy wave to hit us?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Damn…”

“What?” Jack asked. “What's gonna happen then?”

Charlie looked over at him. “We're not talking quakes and tidal waves this time. We're talking the end of the world.”

Miyuki sat at the worktable in the marine biology lab. In the background she heard the muffled voices of Jack and a pair of his crew talking animatedly in the geology suite. Around her a thousand eyes watched from the clear plastic specimen jars lining the shelves and cabinets. It made it hard to concentrate.

Shaking her head against these distractions, Miyuki continued her own line of research. Earlier she had Gabriel do a global search through all the
rongorongo
examples gleaned from Easter Island to see if there were any other references to the pillar or the ancient disaster. She had little luck. A few scant allusions, but nothing significant. Now she was rereading through the passages in the platinum diary.

At her elbow, the briefcase-mounted computer chimed. Gabriel's voice came through the tiny speakers. He had been assigned to work out a linguistic equivalent to the language, using phonetics supplied by Mwahu. Miyuki looked up from her sheets.

“I'm sorry to disturb you, Professor Nakano.”

“What is it, Gabriel?”

“I have an incoming call from Dr. Grace. Would you care to take it?”

Miyuki almost fell out of her chair. “Karen…?” She slid in front of the computer. “Gabriel, patch in the call!”

Above the flat monitor, the one-inch video camera blinked on. On the screen, a cascade of pixels slowly formed a jerky image of her friend. Miyuki leaned near the microphone. “Karen! Where are you?”

Karen's computer image flittered. “I don't have much time. I was able to contact Gabriel with your coded address for him on the Internet. He was able to encrypt this video line, but I can't trust that someone won't catch on.”

“Where are you?”

“At some undersea research base near Jack's obelisk. Is he there?”

Miyuki nodded. She leaned back. “Jack! Come quick!”

The captain of the
Fathom
poked his head out of the geology lab, his face worried. “What is it?”

Miyuki stood up and pointed to the screen. “It's Karen!”

His eyes widened. He fell out the door of the geology lab and stumbled around the table. “What do you—” Then he
came in view of the computer's screen. He rushed forward, leaning close. “Karen, is that you?”

Karen watched Jack's face form in the small square in the lower right-hand side of her computer monitor. He was alive! Tears welled in her eyes.

“Karen, where are you?”

She coughed to clear her throat, then briefly summarized the past twenty-four hours: her capture, the trip by helicopter, the imprisonment in the sea base. Afterward, she continued, “I tossed a bone the researchers' way and told them about the
rongorongo
connection. It's a useless lead without the additional examples we discovered, but they don't know that. By feigning cooperation, they've given me a little latitude.” She looked over her shoulder when a spat of laughter echoed down the curving length of the tier. “The others are up at dinner or working in private. I don't know how long I can keep this line open without arousing suspicion.”

“I'll find a way to get you out of there,” Jack said. “Trust me.”

Karen leaned closer to the screen. “I wanted you to know. They're planning to blow up the obelisk sometime tomorrow afternoon. They've probed the area and seem to believe there's a larger deposit under it. The tip of the proverbial iceberg.”

On the monitor, Jack glanced to the side. “You were right, Charlie!”

“Of course I was,” someone said off screen.

Karen frowned. “What do you mean? What do you know?”

She listened as Jack sketchily recounted what they had learned from the platinum book and Charlie's theories. Karen sat frozen as the story unfolded: ancient disasters, dark matter, solar storms. She listened with her mouth hanging
open as Jack told her of the coming danger.

“Oh my God!” she said. “When is this storm supposed to strike?”

“Just after noon tomorrow.”

A new face appeared on the screen. Jack made the introduction. “This is Charlie Mollier, the ship's geologist.”

“So what do we do?” Karen asked. Sweat trickled down her back. She was sure she would be caught any moment.

“Tell me about the explosives and intent of the demolition squad,” Charlie said.

Karen explained the Navy's plan to blast into the core of the crystal's main vein.

Jack spoke up. “Maybe that'd be good. At least the pillar won't be poking out any longer.”

“No,” Charlie said, “if they succeed, it'll make matters worse. They'll be laying open the very heart of the deposit, increasing, not lessening, the area of exposure to the solar storm. The only way to protect against this disaster is to bury the pillar or cleanly clip it off, separating it from the main deposit.”

“In other words, knock down the lightning rod,” Jack said.

Karen checked her watch. If the geologist was right, they had only seventeen hours. “What if we specifically target the crystal pillar with the explosives?”