not!’ the Australian replied with mock offence as he took the manipulator controls. ‘Okay, Gypsy, I’m ready to start.’
The other submersible moved closer, spotlights and cameras panning for a clearer view as Matt began the long and involved task of removing the debris covering the altar room. The first priority was the wreckage from the Evenor; even though most of it had already been cut away, it was still a hefty chunk of steel heavier than the Sharkdozer could lift using its thrusters alone. It wasn’t until the sub touched down on top of the temple and used its skids to brace itself that the arms could apply enough leverage to start raising the broken section of superstructure.
It took the better part of an hour to get it safely clear. Once it had been dumped in the silt away from the building, work began in earnest. None of the fallen slabs were as heavy as the ship debris, but they were still fairly massive in their own right.
Time passed. Matt took a break to recharge with an energy drink and a sandwich, while Nina forced herself not to tap her fingers impatiently. Eddie smirked at her over the top of his novel, knowing how she was feeling. Then the work continued, the obstructing blocks gradually becoming fewer in number. Until—
‘There!’ said Nina, as Matt hauled one of the remaining slabs out of the way. ‘There it is!’
A golden light reflected back at them from the sheet of precious metal covering the newly revealed wall. It had been damaged in several places, a great jagged rip through one entire section obliterating the text . . . but the crucial part was still more or less intact.
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 straight away. 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