An explosive chapter this week. Lulz. EXPLOSIVE. Get it? In all seriousness, things get hectic here.
Side Note 1 - My super amazing editor (my wife) was unable to edit me this week, so it may not be up to snuff. But… It’s Monday, and the chapter must drop.
Side Note 2 - This is a long chapter. Too long? Please let me know. I can split them in the future.
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Chapter 6
The sun was nearly gone when Adam finally unwrapped the artifact.
Ani and Sara had joined him in the trench. Nikolas stayed above, ready to place a call to Menelaos to notify the ministry of a major discovery.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Adam said, placing the object back in its hollow. He pressed it down into the dirt. Instantly, the hair on the back of his neck snapped upright. “Sara, do you have your handheld?”
“Yes,” she responded, pulling it out, her eyes widening as the screen came to life. “The field is back. It’s completely off the scale my equipment can read.”
“Ani?” Adam asked.
“Same tingle. Nothing super different. Wait…” She hesitated. A strange, irrational pull tugged at the back of her mind—intense and childish, like wanting candy or ice cream so badly it ached. “I want to ring it. I can’t explain why, I just do.”
“Don’t hit it, please,” Nikolas said from above, pressing send on his phone.
Ani looked at Adam. He shrugged and gave her a nod. Ani drew her hammer.
“Ani, DON’T,” screamed Sara.
The hammer in Ani’s hand felt right. All it would take was a flick of the wrist and she could ring it– she needed to ring it, just like it said. She struck the bronze. And the world went dark.
--
“Nikolas! Nikolas!”
Menelaos’ voice crackled from the phone.
Nikolas lay face down in the dirt, coughing, his ears ringing. His glasses were cracked, splitting his vision in two. He had no memory of hitting the ground.
Dust surrounded him. Through the haze, he could see the outlines of the basilica as well as scattered masonry.
“Nikolas! Answer me!” He heard Menelaos’s voice crackle from his phone again. Had he hit the call button? How was his phone connected?
He fumbled through the dust, found the phone, and forced the word out: “Hello?”
“Nikolas, thank God! Where are you? I heard an explosion!”
“I… We’re at the site,” Nikolas stammered, checking his extremities. Everything moved, but his head was spinning. “One moment they were excavating, I was calling you, we found something strange… and then I woke up.”
“Yes. Okay,” Menelaos responded, his voice turning away to shout at someone else in the room. “Call emergency services. To Saint Demetrios, NOW!” He snapped back to the line. “Are you injured? What about the others?”
“I’m okay, I think,” Nikolas tried to say, but his speech came out garbled. Hands grasped him by the shoulders and began dragging him away from the excavation. He could feel his heels dragging through the dirt.
Through the smoke and dust, he could barely see what was left of the site, a jagged crater where the excavation had been. The ancient earthen walls had sheared inward, burying everything under tons of brick and stone.
“Oh my God,” Nikolas stammered, trying to shake off the hands pulling him, “The pit collapsed. They’re buried!”
“Hold on. Don’t go near the pit,” Menelaos commanded over the phone, his voice clearly panicked. “Help is coming. I’m on my way. Keep talking.”
The hands pulling him gripped harder and dragged him through the dirt before laying him down. A man looked down at him, concern on his face. He saw others crowding around. He had to tell them to help.
“My friends are trapped down there; we have to start digging.”
“No, no, sir. There was an explosion and a collapse,” the man yelled over the noise, his grip tightening. “We need to get further away. It could explode again.”
The voice crackled again in his hand, “You must get away from the danger. Rescuers are coming. They will help.”
“They must be trapped. We have to get to them.”
“Yes. The first responders will. I’m on my way. Make sure you aren’t hurt.” The phone call disconnected.
All of a sudden, sirens began to break through the ringing in his ears, and blinding lights killed his ability to focus on anything. The stranger lifted Nikolas onto a wooden bench in the church courtyard. The air was a thick, chalky fog of pulverized mortar. All around him, onlookers were coughing, pulling their shirts over their mouths.
Two fire engines and an ambulance roared into the courtyard, tires screeching on the stone. Firefighters scrambled out, moving toward the pit with tools in hand. They hadn’t even reached the edge when a chorus of shrill, high-pitched alarms began chirping from the small detectors clipped to their turnout gear.
The firefighters froze, then instantly recoiled, violently waving the crowd back.
“The area is contaminated! Everyone, back two hundred meters! Team, establish a hot zone and call HazMat!”
As more first responders arrived, police began pushing the growing crowd further and further from the pit. A paramedic approached Nikolas.
“Sir, are you alright?”
“I’m ok. My colleagues… They were in the pit. You need to help them.”
“We’re helping. I need to check you out. You’re bleeding. Do you know where from?”
Nikolas noticed that his scalp and neck were damp. Patting it with his fingers, he found blood trickling from his ears and nose. Paramedics surrounded him, and he found himself being loaded onto a gurney.
Across the courtyard, another shout erupted from the edge of the crater. “We’ve got a reading! High gamma! Close off the area!”
Suddenly, Menelaos was there, pushing through the cordon, his face pale. “Nikolas, dear God.” He reached out to check Nikolas’s face before a paramedic firmly intercepted him.
“No, it’s alright,” said Nikolas.
“Sir, you need to step back,” the paramedic ordered.
A firefighter wearing a full respirator mask stepped up to the gurney, holding a yellow survey meter. He swept a probe over Nikolas’s clothes. The device ticked rapidly, but didn’t scream. “He’s clear of surface dust, but he was in the immediate blast radius. He needs radiological containment at the hospital. Now.”
Before Nikolas or Menelaos could speak, the gurney was slammed into the back of the ambulance. The doors clicked shut, cutting off the chaos of the courtyard, and the rig tore off into the night.
He still couldn’t hear properly, but the ringing began to subside only to be replaced by the blaring siren. The first responders had donned yellow suits and respirators.
Nikolas was suddenly annoyed again by his broken glasses. The impossibly bright lights blinded him further. He reached up to take them off, but a gloved hand firmly caught his wrist. The glasses were pulled from his face and dropped into a thick red bag stenciled with black biohazard warnings.
Through the muffled static of his ears, he could hear the ambulance driver barking commands into the radio over the roar of the engine. “Full decontamination protocol. Please confirm arrival bay.” A squawk of unintelligible electronic noise erupted from the dashboard speaker. “Understood. Will hold in the courtyard and await instructions.”
“Sir, tell me your name,” one of the masks said, the voice muffled through the filter of the mask.
“Nikolas.”
“Great. Do you know where you are?”
“I’m in an ambulance. In Thessaloniki.”
“Good, Good. My friends scanned you, and we don’t see any radiation on you currently, but we must take precautions to keep you and everyone else safe. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
They began a rapid-fire litany of standard triage questions, none of them touching on the excavation. Nikolas tolerated it for three blocks before finally cutting through. “My friends. My friends were in the pit.”
The second figure responded, “We know. The team will do the best they are able. Do not worry.”
Nikolas blinked, trying to focus his blurred vision on the speaker. That accent. It didn’t sound right. The face was completely obscured behind plastic and filters, but the cadence was bizarre.
“Yes. Ok,” he murmured, confused.
The paramedic squeezed his hand, “Yes. Good. Take courage. We are almost there.”
Take courage? Who says that? Also, the accent was definitely off. So was the word choice. The Greek was... absurdly, anciently formal.
Nikolas was an academic to a fault. He was regularly accused of being too rigid and formal in his own speech, but this was a completely different lexicon. A city paramedic simply shouldn’t talk this way. He knew Adam would skewer him for making such an elitist assumption, but he couldn’t help it—some of the syntax was almost Classical. The man was phrasing words like a text Nikolas would translate in a quiet library, not a conversation between first responders in a racing emergency vehicle.
“Where are you from?” Nikolas asked.
“From the wider world, xenos. Where are you from?” The voice still held that strange, melodic lilt, but the other paramedic didn’t even turn his head to look.
“Thessaloniki. I’m from here.”
“Good, good! Then you know, you will be mended well in the Asklepieion. Your friends are safe. Don’t worry.”
Asklepieion? And had he said ‘xenos’? Both of those terms were utterly archaic. Alarm bells went off in Nikolas’s mind. Did he have brain damage? Was he seeing things? He needed to focus. His friends needed help.
“How could you know? They were in the pit!”
But before he could get an answer, the ambulance screeched to a halt, jolting Nikolas against the restraints on the gurney. He was abruptly rolled out into the roundabout outside the hospital.
The courtyard inside the roundabout was a theater of chaos. Dozens of people were running in yellow and white suits, rolling huge negative-pressure machines across the asphalt. Others were frantically inflating a massive yellow decontamination tent that reminded Nikolas of a children’s bounce house. As the tent locked into its rigid shape, several technicians wheeled in aluminum carts of monitoring gear. Nikolas’s gurney was pushed right through the plastic flaps behind them.
Bright pen-lights pointed into his eyes. A technician with a pair of trauma shears began aggressively cutting through his clothes, slicing his shirt and jeans away. Pieces of each garment were immediately stuffed into separate, labeled evidence bags.
The technician then began swabbing his skin. “Sir, I need to get some samples from your ears and nose. Is that ok?”
“Yes. Yes.”
Cold cotton swabs invaded his nostrils and ears. Nearby, another figure began sweeping a long, cylindrical probe over his bare skin. He heard the telltale clicking of a Geiger counter, but no screaming noises. He decided that must be a good sign.
His thoughts swam back to Ani, Adam, and Sara. Were they buried alive? Could they have survived whatever happened? Would rescuers get to them in time?
It was then that a thought occurred to him. Radiation? That didn’t make sense. Historic city centers did not hold radioactive materials. For that matter, nothing in the trench could have exploded either. Had they hit an unmarked gas line? They couldn’t possibly.
He thought harder again, his memory still foggy. He tried to piece a timeline together. The team had arrived at the site. Adam was replacing the artifact. There had been some chatter. Sara’s scanner had flared. Then he’d woken up to Menelaos screaming through the phone at him.
“He’s clear,” declared one of the hooded figures, stepping back from a digital monitor. “Concussion. Some barotrauma and hearing damage, but no immediate danger. Let’s await the laboratory blood work to evaluate internal exposure. Move him to an isolation unit.”
---
Menelaos sat next to Nikolas, just outside plastic sheeting that surrounded his bed. The barrier was clear and Nikolas could see the standard hospital room around him. A heart rate monitor chirped regularly. He knew they wanted to monitor his vitals, but the wires attached to his chest were annoying.
The kindly old man looked at him worriedly. The doctors had finally let him in after a long, muffled shouting match in the hallway.
“Have we heard about them? Are they ok?” Nikolas asked, his voice strained.
As if on cue, a doctor stepped into the room wearing the most pristine lab coat Nikolas had ever seen. He had circular glasses and a smug smile on his face. “Your friends are safe for now. They are trapped in a hidden chamber underneath your excavation.”
“Thank Goodness!” exclaimed Meneloas, slumping in relief.
Nikolas froze. His ears were still ringing, but he was instantly struck by the doctor’s accent. It was the same bizarre, archaic speech pattern from the ambulance. The same hyper-formal syntax. Could this be the same person? More importantly, there was no chamber underneath their excavation. Sara’s scans were clear on that.
“But there was no layer underneath the floor. Our scans showed nothing underneath the floor of the room we excavated.”
“Worry not,” the doctor said, offering another smile, “the rescue teams have connected with them via cell service. They are shaken but otherwise unharmed.”
Nikolas searched his body for his cell phone before remembering his possessions had been removed in the ambulance.
Meanwhile, the older program chair had gotten out his cell phone, his older fingers clumsily trying to dial.
“Dear Professor,” the doctor interjected, putting his hand on Menelaos’ shoulder, “The rescue teams are using a local secure network for the first responders. Your phone won’t be able to reach them.”
“Oh, quite right, quite right,” responded Menelaos, slipping the phone back into his pocket. “Good, Nikolas, tell me what happened. On the phone, you said you’d found something before the collapse.”
“Yes, do tell,” said the doctor, crossing his arms.
Nikolas looked hard at the doctor. Why would a hospital physician care about the specifics of an archaeological find? Menelaos didn’t seem perturbed by the question.
“Well, we discovered the object causing the anomaly. An object made of bronze and another metal we’ll need to identify. Ani and Sara were investigating another anomaly on the other side of the room. They uncovered what appears to be a burial. We were getting ready to close the site and notify the ministry when the blast happened,” Nikolas recounted.
“So it was an explosion?” Asked the doctor, leaning in.
Nikolas narrowed his eyes, “Is there some reason you’re asking the questions?”
“Nikolas, stop being rude. The man is here to help.”
“I am adding specifics to your chart, fine sir. An explosion could mean any number of internal injuries we need to watch for.”
Nikolas opened his mouth to reply when there was a sudden announcement, “Veles, paging Doctor Veles. Code blue on the basement level. Code blue on the basement level.”
“Ah, that is me,” the doctor said, bowing slightly. “Before I depart, I thought you might want this back. It seems to have made it through the incident without any major damage. I have added my personal number to the digital registry, should you have need to reach me.”
He reached into his lab coat and handed Nikolas a smartphone, lifting up the plastic surrounding him briefly. It was Nikolas’s own device. The glass was intact, and the lock screen was lit up with a barrage of missed alerts and notifications, but when Nikolas pressed his thumb to the sensor, the phone refused to unlock.
“What extraordinary service,” Menelaos remarked, looking thoroughly impressed. “I have never heard of a hospital physician personally tracking down a patient’s effects like that.”
Nikolas stared at the locked screen of his phone. He looked up at the empty doorway where the doctor had just vanished. The man’s accent still rang in his ears. Veles. That was Slavic, wasn’t it? Maybe he was from the Balkans with an accent he hadn’t heard. But the same accent as a paramedic?
“Why would I need to contact him?” Nikolas whispered aloud, the paranoia finally taking root. “If I needed a doctor, couldn’t I just ask a nurse?”
“Sure, sure. But I think given the circumstances, the hospital wants a doctor dedicated to your case.”
Two men entered the room. Both wore a suit and tie along with a surgical mask covering their nose and mouth. Each also wore a badge clearly stating: Hellenic Police – State Security Directorate.
The older of the two men stepped forward. He had short-cropped hair graying at the temples and a cleanly manicured goatee. “Dr. Nikolas Vardas? Can we speak with you? Professor, we’ll need you to step out.”
Menelaos bristled and stood. “I am a well-respected academic and senior official in this city. This is my employee, and I have explicit clearance from the Ministry of Culture to -”
“It was not a suggestion, sir. The Ministry of Culture has no oversight in matters of national security,” said the younger man. His tone was polite but firm. “Please step outside. We will speak with you shortly.”
Menelaos looked at Nikolas, helpless and suddenly looking far older than his years. “I’ll be right outside, Nikolas. Don’t worry.”
The two men waited for the old man to leave before pulling two stools next to the bed, just outside the plastic sheet. Nikolas, unsure of how the conversation would go, slid the phone underneath him and out of sight.
The older man started, “I am Senior Inspector Katsaros, and this is Inspector Stephanos. Doctor Veles updated us on your condition. We want to give you some time to rest, but given the seriousness of the situation, we need to speak with you for a few minutes. Will that be ok?”
“Yes, of course. Can you update me on my colleagues? Have rescuers reached them yet?”
Inspector Katsaros ruffled his brow. “Unfortunately, no. Rescue teams are not yet cleared to enter the hot zone. We don’t yet have a status on your friends.”
“But Doctor Veles, he said that you were in communication with them.”
“I think he likely told you what he thought best, as soon as we know their status. We have a local secure network, but we don’t have any signals that we can detect. There is too much interference in the area. I’m sorry I don’t have better news,” replied Katsaros, a confused look on his face. “Now, can you tell me what you found in the trench? Any possibility of an explosive device?”
“No, no. A strange artifact. Made of bronze and a silvery material. I would guess polished tin, but they had only just uncovered it. Also a burial, which was unexpected but wouldn’t be unheard of.”
Stephanos spoke up, “Any possibility that the artifact was a modern device, maybe unexploded ordnance?”
Nikolas thought for a moment. His memory was still foggy. He also was keenly aware of the potential trouble the team could be in for removing the artifact and replacing it. “No, no. Dr. Gable is the best excavator I’ve ever seen. He tracked stratigraphy down to the object. It was in situ. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes,” smiled Katsaros, “We use the same word in police work. What was the purpose of this excavation? Saint Demetrios is an active monastery. I’m sure it must have been excavated multiple times.”
Nikolas paused; should he mention the anomaly? He couldn’t recall who they’d told about it. Maybe Menelaos? There was deniability there. Faulty equipment, maybe. Either way, he decided on the safe answer, “It has been. We were testing a new scanning technique. Sara, one of our post-graduate researchers, has developed some new techniques with electromagnetic scanning. We were excavating to verify her results. It’s all quite standard.”
Stephanos looked up, eyes intrigued, “Anything interesting in the results? Metal? Abnormalities?”
Nikolas internally smacked himself; these were investigators, not idiots. “Yes. There was an abnormality in the general area of one of the objects we found. As I said, we wanted to verify the results.”
“Ok. And do you believe the artifact to be the origin of this abnormality?”
“I do. That much metal would likely interfere with our sensors.”
“When you say that much metal, could there have been something else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Any reason to believe that the object may have been explosive? That the object was irradiated?”
Nikolas thought about the artifact. It swapped between being magnetic and completely inert. The amount of energy it would take to either magnetize or demagnetize an object that size was enormous. It couldn’t possibly be a weapon. None of it made sense. But would they know if the object was giving off radiation? Sara’s equipment almost certainly would’ve been affected beyond just readings. He had to think.
“Nikolas?” Katsaros prompted.
“No, I don’t think so. Sorry, I was thinking. Since radiation was only discovered recently in archaeological terms, it isn’t something we test for if we aren’t expecting it. I guess it is possible though.”
“Possible, can you explain further? What era was this artifact from? Could it have been a bomb?” Stephanos asked.
“Again. No bombs. The area we were investigating was from the early Byzantine era.” Nikolas began, his mind racing. Could it be a bomb? Surely not. He was in strange territory here.
He took a breath before answering, “If someone in antiquity had found an object that was irradiated, they would have avoided it or attributed some other significance. Most likely, this material would have caused radiation sickness if it is as serious as you say. Is it possible? Sure. Unlikely though. There would be a historical record of unusual disease. And how was the radiation not detected earlier? Aren’t there scans done for this sort of thing?”
Katsaros laughed, “Kind of like you, my friend, we wouldn’t expect a radiation leak in the center of Thessaloniki.”
The laugh quickly released the tension that had been building in the room.
Katsaros continued, “Any resistance to your excavation? It’s unlikely, but at this stage, we need to rule out anything we can.”
“No, no resistance,” Nikolas said. He was deeply uncomfortable, knowing they had planned to fudge their paperwork. Wanting to lighten the mood, he continued, “An old woman yelled at Adam yesterday for digging in a churchyard.”
Both investigators laughed, “I think the yia yias yell at everyone for everything. But we may go ask her anyway. Lastly, we will need all of your scans and data. If you happen to have the computers, unfortunately we will need those too.”
The phone given to him by the doctor pressed into his side opposite the investigators. They hadn’t asked about it, but he wondered if they would want access to it. As if the device knew how nervous its presence made him, the phone buzzed into his side. Nikolas prayed with everything he had that the detectives wouldn’t notice or would mistake it for the hum of medical monitors.
“Yes, of course,” he responded. “Unfortunately, Ms. Bennett’s laptop was at the site. I’m not sure that it survived the incident. But when I am back in my lab, I am happy to give you anything you need.”
“Not to worry, Dr. Vardas. Rest up. We’ll get back to you when we need more information.”
“Ok, goodbye then,” Nikolas said awkwardly, before adding, “Can you get the nurse to page Dr. Veles? I’d like to speak to him. He was called to the basement.”
Both investigators gave him a strange look. “Sure, we’ll make sure they call him,” Katsaros said, “but there’s no basement in this hospital.”
As the two men turned and stepped out of the room, speaking in hushed tones, the phone buzzed three more times into his side. Nikolas pressed his arm tight against his ribs, smothering the vibration until they were well out of earshot.
Before he could even begin to process any of it, Menelaos rushed back in.
“Nikolas, I have already lodged a complaint with the police. This is an outrage.”
“It’s ok, Menelaos, really. There’s been an explosion in the city center. They need to investigate.”
“Ok. Yes. I guess you’re right.”
The phone continued to buzz into Nikolas’ back. Unsure what else to do, Nikolas blurted out, “I think I’m rather tired. Menelaos. Thank you for being here, but I’d like to get some rest.”
The old professor looked slightly hurt, but smiled at him, “Of course. Get some rest. Have a nurse call me if you need anything. I’ll go supervise the police at the lab. We don’t need those barbarians destroying anything.”
As soon as he was alone, Nikolas took out the phone. Oddly, his thumbprint suddenly worked and the phone unlocked.
He had several messages and two missed calls. All from Adam and Ani.
