The Sound of Seas Read Online Free PDF

acres of New York.” He moved closer to Ben until they were inches apart. There was a new, more ominous quality in his voice. “There are thousands of tiles buried beneath the South Polar ice. If Dr. O’Hara taps into them, wakens them in an effort to get home, the forces she will release would be exponentially more destructive than what we saw last night. And not in the past, Mr. Moss. She would pull that fury with her, into the present. It would travel through her. You can imagine, I think, what would be left of her after that.”
    It was as fantastic and sobering a monologue as any Ben had ever heard—and, in the United Nations, he had translated many of those.
    â€œWhere will you be?” Ben asked.
    â€œRight here,” Eilifir said, backing away.
    Though the air was warming slightly, Ben felt cold inside. Without another word, he turned and went into the apartment.

CHAPTER 2
    M ikel Jasso was very tired and extremely frustrated.
    The Basque native lay in the cot that had been assigned to him until such time as he could be evacuated from the Halley VI research station. That would take weeks, but he had been ordered to stay out of the way of the thirty-nine scientists, medics, maintenance workers, and other personnel at the base. He was to remain inside the eight modules—which were connected caterpillar-style, like a train—not venturing outside, not observing experiments or research, simply doing nothing.
    Doing nothing had kept him awake since his adventure under the Antarctic ice. He desperately needed sleep. But there was something he needed more desperately. He had been among the long-frozen ruins. He had interacted with tiles of staggering power.
    He had communicated with the dead.
    Mikel Jasso needed answers, not imprisonment.
    And I need someone above ground to talk to about it all, someone to listen to me , he thought. There was a vast amount of knowledge out there. The technology alone could occupy him for years. Not just the olivine tiles but treated skins that were still fresh, the breathing apparatus thatseemed to employ the mechanism of sea creatures to filter air from a maelstrom; all of that was extremely sophisticated. And he couldn’t get to it, having made himself a pariah by causing the crash of a truck, the denting of a module it was pulling, and endangering the life of an expedition member who had elected to rescue him from an underground cavern.
    Mikel also had a broken wrist, which made it difficult to do anything.
    And so he lay there, his tablet at the ready, staring at the white ceiling, replaying the last two days for anything he may have missed.
    The archaeologist had to laugh, at least inside. He was in a human habitation brought south, and to this spot, with enormous effort. Administered by the British Antarctic Survey, the Halley VI modules had just been successfully towed from a fragile section of terrain on the Brunt Ice Shelf to a more stable region twelve kilometers inland from the Weddell Sea. The accommodation building and garage had come with greater difficulty: not having been erected on skis, they had to be dragged across the ice by trucks and bulldozers struggling against unfavorable winds and cold. Yet nearby, an entire civilization had flourished in this miserable, hostile environment. Even allowing for climatic change, Antarctica was still quite harsh at the dawn of the Ice Age, at the height of Galderkhaani civilization. From what he had gleaned in the caverns, lava had been used to melt and control ice via a network of tunnels. Towers of basalt and other materials had been built. The air had been conquered by ships that spanned the vast continent, and perhaps beyond. Science and religion had struggled with an ambitious, deeply conflicted cultural project, the conquest of the afterlife . . . incredibly, with some success.
    The anthropologist in him was puzzled by something even deeper: How did the Galderkhaani come to be here?