The last inscription. The final written words of the great empire of Atlantis.
“There, there there there!” Nina jabbed a finger excitedly. “Get the camera on it, quick!”
Eddie snapped his book shut. “Calm down, love! It’s not going anywhere.”
“I know, I know. But, well … I want to see it!”
“She was like this the first night I was back home,” he told Matt. “Couldn’t keep her hands off my pants.”
“Eddie!”
“What you do in private isn’t my business,” Matt said, amused. “But give me a sec here, Nina—I still need to put this stone somewhere.” He worked the controls, Nina fidgeting beside him. Finally, the block was released. “All right, let’s have a dekko. Gypsy, you got your cameras switched on?”
“We never turned them off,” said Hayter over the radio, sounding almost as enthusiastic as Nina. “Nina, we’ve got our translator hooked up to our high-definition camera. It’s got better resolution than the ones on your sub, so we should get our pictures first—”
“Sorry, Lewis,” Nina cut in as she opened the laptop containing her own copy of the translation software, “but I’m going to be selfish on this one. My primary interest here is the very last piece of text, so I want to work on that straightaway. Once we’ve got the pictures, you can record the rest of the inscriptions. Okay?”
“If you insist,” came the sour reply.
Matt delicately brought the hulking submersible closer to the wall with careful blips of its thrusters. He stopped when the viewing bubble was about six feet away, the magnifying effect of the thick hemisphere almost making the text readable with the naked eye. But instead, he extended one of the secondary arms until its camera was less than a foot from the metal sheet. “You ready, Nina?”
“Recording,” she answered. “Go ahead.”
Matt slowly panned the arm back and forth over the final section of text. A window on the laptop’s screen displayed the live feed; another, larger window showed the whole inscription building up section by section as the computer automatically matched them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t long before the image was complete, at which point another program began the more complex task of translating the ancient language into English.
“Okay, Lewis,” Nina said into a headset, “I’ve got what I need. You can move in now.”
The snideness behind Hayter’s simple “Thank you” was clear even through the distortion. Matt backed the Sharkdozer away, and Gypsy took its place, cameras peering intently at the rest of the ancient record.
“So, what does it say?” Eddie asked, leaning across the confined cabin to examine the screen.
“Give it a chance,” said Nina. “It’s a lot faster than translating by hand, but it’s not Star Trek.” Words were already starting to appear, though: the image-recognition software was picking out familiar patterns. “Nantalas gets mentioned several times … and so does the sky stone.”
More minutes passed, the gaps in the translation gradually filling in. Some parts remained blank; either the condition of the orichalcum sheet was too poor for the computer to pick out the letters, or the words were simply unknown, having never been found in any previously translated Atlantean texts. But even with gaps, Nina saw a clear narrative taking form.
“It’s what I thought,” she said softly. “This really is an account of the last days of Atlantis—the last hours, even. Someone was still keeping records right up until it fell into the ocean.”
“What caused it?” asked Eddie.
“From the look of this … Nantalas herself. And the sky stone. Listen.” She began to read the translation, attempting to smooth out the computer’s awkward and over-literal phrasing. “ ‘The king and the royal court came to the Temple of the Gods to witness Nantalas bring together all three keys of power and touch them to the sky stone. There was much …’ This is a bit jumbled—ah, something like ‘awe and terror as the great stone rose from the ground, shining with a holy light.’ ”
“So it’s definitely earth energy, then,” Eddie mused. “I don’t get it. It would have been like having nuclear power back in the Stone Age. How could it be forgotten about for eleven thousand years, apart from when Merlin and King Arthur fluked into using it with Excalibur?”
Nina was reading ahead. “I think I know. ‘Nantalas commanded the stone to rise and fall, using no words but those in her thoughts. She then told the court that she would …’ I guess in context