Atlantis: Devil's Sea Read Online Free Page A

operate in the dark, and he could hear switches being thrown and people moving, but nothing happened.
    “All power is down,” someone yelled.
    If primary and emergency generators were down, that left only one choice. Andrej threw the switch taking the reactor off-line from the generators and back to reactor power. “Power up as quickly as possible,” he ordered.
    The lights came back on along with instruments as the machines drew power from the reactor, but what the gauges told Andrej froze his heart. Whatever the black triangle was, it was drawing power from the core faster than the core could produce it. Andrej knew they had scant seconds before things became critical in an inverse way. The reactor wouldn’t be able to provide enough energy to the cooling systems, which meant there would be a point at which the entire system would reverse very quickly. The core, getting hotter, would produce more and more power until it reached critical mass and exploded.
    “Emergency shutdown!” Andrej screamed, knowing it was already too late. He slammed his fist down on the emergency reactor trip button.
    “Power spike!” someone yelled.
    Inside the reactor, power was doubling every second, faster and faster, until it was doubling every millisecond. Within four seconds, it reached critical.
    The last thing Andrej saw was the black triangle on the video monitor. The gold beams still sucking from the core, and when the water in the core exploded into steam it destroyed the fuel elements, sending super hot, radioactive gas outward, blasting off the roof of the containment building and blowing through the walls into the control room, killing everyone instantly.
    The white-hot graphite in the reactor caught fire, sending a radioactive cloud billowing into the air over a mile high.
    The fire burned for days, pouring forty times the radioactivity released by the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the atmosphere. Over five thousand tons of lead and stone were dropped by helicopters to both put out the fire and contain the radiation. In the process, many of the crews received fatal doses.
    Besides the black triangle, there was another strange aspect to Reactor Four: the lead and stone seemed to hit an invisible, hemispheric wall covering the core and piled up around it. The same with the concrete that was poured next. Still, they dropped the concrete, covering the clear shield completely.
    All of Europe was affected by the fallout, particularly in the north.
    The world outcry over the accident and the shabby construction of the reactor was intense. Only a handful of people in the highest levels of the Russian government had a copy of the transmission sent out by the monitoring equipment just before the explosion and knew what had really happened.
    Even while more cleanup operations were being run, a special unit was formed to monitor Reactor Four and the alien object within.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE P RESENT
    The Ring of Fire encircles the Pacific Ocean, stretching over nineteen thousand miles. It is delineated by the volcanoes and fault lines that are the surface evidence of the split in the crust of the planet deep below. From New Zealand to New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan, arching around to the Aleutians, down the west coast of North America to South America.
    The Ring is formed by tectonic plates, a theory that was relatively new in scientific circles, first postulated in the mid-1960s. The surface of the Earth, the lithosphere, is divided into nine major plates and a dozen smaller ones. The lithosphere floats on top of the mantle below. Generally, each plate delineated a continent; all, that is, except for the Pacific, which encompasses several plates. The boundaries between plates produce one of three types of effects. Where two plates were going away from each other, they produced ridges where material came up through the split. When one plate slid under another, a subduction zone occurred. Where two plates moved