Bell looked over at Murphy and Murphy did a Groucho Marx with his eyebrows to say, okay, here comes the good stuff, old buddy. The top secret stuff they’d been denying from day one.

Orr punched a few more keys, a series of images appearing on the screen. Nothing earth-shattering, yet extraordinary all the same. Video of the creatures that lived in the lake down below, things unknown to science and others thought long-extinct: colonies of multi-hued jellies that looked like living bubbles, gigantic crabs and sea scorpions, undulant tube worms, bioluminous fish shaped like basketballs, and an immense albino squid-like creature that pulled away into the darkness. Orr didn’t call the latter a sea monster, but it certainly fit the necessary criteria.

He punched another key and somebody gasped.

They were seeing the city.

The vast underwater city that was supposedly built by a pre-human intelligence eons before man dropped out of the trees and lost his prehensile tail.

It was incredible.

The first image showed what seemed to be ruins of some sort—arches and broken domes and leaning spires, an assortment of rising and falling shapes encrusted in marine deposits. The next series of images showed monoliths and obelisks, trench systems and fragmented walls that looked like an incredibly elaborate series of barrow tombs capped by megalithic structures.

Orr kept punching his keys and here was the city itself as seen by Gundry’s hydrobot, the free-roaming robotic submersible that the cryobot had released on the bottom. It was impossible to get the entire structure in the frame because it seemed to go on forever and there was no way the hydrobot could have pulled back far enough to pan it and still illuminate it with its lights. So what they saw were portions of it, but enough to stitch the whole nightmare architecture into a common whole. It was an enormous honeycombed labyrinth composed of rectangles and towers and arches and spheres all welded together, intersecting and overlapping. A cyclopean profusion, something that looked like it had grown that way rather than been built, and also something that looked curiously machined and geometrically profuse.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Murphy said.

Something about it made Bell’s skin crawl and his scalp go tight, filled his mind with drifting phantasms and weird, distorted memories that he could not honestly understand. Flashes and glimpses that told him he had seen this all before, but not how or when.