"Hello Roy."
Roy grunted in annoyance. He hated interruptions. "I trust you found them?"
"Not yet," Ben Savala replied.
"Then why are you here?"
"It's been almost twenty-four hours. I figured you'd want an update."
"I don't want an update. I want those two little spies dead and buried."
"Believe me, I've tried every trick I know. I even procured their transponder data but it seems they disabled the beacon. So, I've got Zoey and Warren watching over Kirby. I'm running search grids in the meantime."
Roy sighed. "What do we know about them?"
"The passenger is named Beverly Ginger. She's a geomorphologist. This is her first time to the continent. Jeff Morin is acting as her guide."
"Is anyone looking for them yet?"
"I don't think so. I called Holly an hour ago. When I asked her if there was any news, all she talked about was the Desolation."
"Eventually, they're going to get curious." Roy thought for a moment. "Are they still throwing the welcome party tonight?"
"As far as I know."
"I think I'll make an appearance, maybe sleep over for a few nights. We need someone at Kirby to keep an eye on the situation."
Ben nodded at the block of stone. "How's the excavation?"
"I'm making progress."
"I've been meaning to talk to you about something." Ben hesitated. "I don't know if we're going about this in the best way. We keep shifting from rock to rock without any overarching purpose or plan."
The snow picked up speed. Roy found it increasingly difficult to see his brother. "Oh, so you're the expert now?"
"I just think we need a fresh approach, a scientific approach."
"Nonsense."
"Hear me out. I say we map out the rocks and record their measurements and positions. Then we split them up, take them one at a time. We examine their markings, dents, and cracks. Anything that might show signs of being worked by human hands."
Roy hated details. The very notion of such painstaking work made his stomach churn. "Sounds like a waste of time."
"We're already wasting time. We've been at this for months without even a hint of progress."
"I'm making progress. Everyday, I'm becoming more in tune with this place."
"In tune?" Ben shook his head. "Would you listen to yourself?"
"You still don't get it, do you? I could care less about these rocks. They're just snowflakes in a blizzard. What matters is finding a route through them. And to do that, I require a deeper level of understanding."
Ben lingered for another minute. Then he hiked back to his Sno-Cat. He fired up the engine and drove away.
Roy returned to the stone. He studied it again, searching for its secret.
Most archaeologists and historians figured Damascus steel had to be an accident. The blacksmiths had somehow stumbled upon the secret. They hadn't understood it nor could they easily duplicate it. But it had worked. So, they'd proceeded to forge blades using a trial-and-error process.
Roy found such conclusions incredibly frustrating. The so-called experts refused to even consider the idea that ancient people had known about nanotechnology. They thought knowledge only moved in one direction. But Roy knew better. Knowledge didn't always move forward. Sometimes it moved backward.
He stepped back a couple of feet. His eyes rose to the snow-filled sky. He could just see the edges of the giant pile of rocks. They rose upward at soft angles, eventually coming together to form a structure.
He'd dubbed it the Ice Pyramid. It wasn't a traditional step pyramid, like the Ziggurats or the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Nor was it one of those sharply pointed, smooth-sided structures like the Pyramid of Cestius. Instead, it most resembled the Bent Pyramid at the royal necropolis of Dahshur.
The Ice Pyramid's lower half rose out of the tundra at a sixty-degree angle. Halfway up, the angle shifted to forty degrees. All together, it looked like some ancient deity had wrapped its hand around the top of the pyramid and given it a little squeeze.
Roy knew very little about the Ice Pyramid. But he believed that the initial construction had probably shown signs of instability. In order to avert a collapse, the architect had ordered a much shallower angle of ascent.
Regardless, the Ice Pyramid made him tremble with excitement. Somehow an ancient civilization had sailed to Antarctica. It had ventured across the ice and carved stones out of the distant mountains. It had carted them across the tundra. Then it had constructed a giant, intricate pyramid that had withstood some of the harshest conditions on Earth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Roy had yet to find a way inside the structure. But he'd used infrared thermography to peek into the interior. A hollow chamber rested inside the outer walls. A single tunnel branched away from it, extending into the ground. That tunnel, he knew, would lead to ancient technology and other incredible secrets. It was the only explanation that made sense. Why else would an ancient civilization go to such trouble? They must've had something important to hide.
But he knew the establishment wouldn't accept his theory. It didn't fit into their paradigm. And so, they'd demonize him. They'd call his credentials into question. They'd forcibly remove him from the continent and ban him from ever returning to it.
Thus, he needed hard proof. He needed to gain access to the Ice Pyramid. He needed to gather artifacts. Then he could go public, completely skipping the gatekeepers in the process.
That was Roy's role in history. He knew it, accepted it, even relished it. He'd spent his entire life confronting the current paradigm that knowledge only moved forward. But he wasn't meant to merely shift the paradigm.
He was destined to smash it to pieces.
Chapter 34
"Cy." Holly spoke with urgency and without a hint of sweetness in her tone. "Can we talk?"
I didn't feel much like talking at that moment. So, I took a long drink of MacKinlay's Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky. I'd found a couple bottles of it in one of the cupboards and had spent the last two hours swimming in them.
It was good whisky and according to the packaging, an exact duplicate of that carried by Ernest Shackleton during his 1907–1909 expedition to the South Pole. The recipe had been painstakingly reconstructed using the remnants of old bottles excavated from under Shackleton’s Cape Royds hut.
I took another swig and waited for her to get the hint. But she just stood there, hands on hips. "What do you want?" I asked.
"I … wait, are you drinking?"
"What's it to you?"
"You're right. It's none of my business. Listen, can we talk?"
"Sure."
Her eyes flitted to Jenner. "Not here."
Jenner wiped his lips and pushed his glass away. "Actually, I was just leaving. I want to take a little drive before dinner."
I waited for him to leave. "So, what's this all about?"
She grabbed my arm, pulled me to my feet. "Come with me."
I followed her down the Work hallway, all the way to her laboratory. She ushered me inside. My eyes widened as she shut the door and locked it. "Is that really necessary?"
She turned around and fixed me with a steely gaze. "Where'd you find those bones?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It does to me."
I sensed something other than curiosity beneath her carefully polished veneer. "What's this all about?"
"I don't want to know what you were doing when you found them. You can keep your secrets for all I care. Just give me a location and you'll never hear another word of this again."