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inspection. She opened each up in turn.
    ‘Oh, oh,’ she said excitedly as the eighth reading appeared. ‘This looks promising.’ A jumbled swathe of sonar reflections showed up strongly, like a handful of tiny diamonds cast across black velvet. ‘Wow, it looks like some of the readings we got from Atlantis, remember? Like buildings buried under the silt.’ She zoomed in. While the objects were scattered, many of them revealed regular, clearly artificial shapes. ‘The place looks trashed, though. It’d take a massive earthquake or a tsunami to scatter everything that widely.’
    ‘Or people.’ They exchanged looks. ‘How deep is it?’
    ‘It’s at . . . whoa, a hundred and fifty feet. So it’s not from the same period as the original site.’ Nina brought up the GLUG program on her laptop, entering figures. The map changed, sea level falling still further. ‘ Definitely not the same period. If this is right, then . . . about one hundred and thirty-five thousand years ago.’ She turned to face Chase, eyes wide. ‘Jesus, that would completely re-write everything we think we know about pre-history. According to current theories, humans didn’t even leave Africa until at most seventy thousand years ago.’
    ‘Maybe it’s not humans,’ Chase said with a grin. ‘Maybe aliens built it.’
    Nina frowned. ‘It’s not aliens, Eddie.’
    ‘Yeah, you say that now, but when we find a crystal skull . . .’
    ‘Can we be serious, please?’ She magnified the sonar image still further. The image pixellated, but individual objects were still discernible, strewn across the sea floor. ‘We have to check this out. As soon as we can.’
    ‘It’s about five miles away,’ said Chase, comparing the image’s GPS co-ordinates to a chart. ‘Bit of a trudge to get the boats there and back.’
    ‘We’ll move the ship.’
    ‘I don’t think Branch’ll like that. You had a hard enough job getting him to let us use the plane.’
    Nina gave him a determined grin. ‘I dunno. I’m feeling pretty persuasive today.’

    With very poor grace, even after the promise of another payment to cover the unplanned use of fuel, Captain Branch did eventually agree to move the Pianosa to the new site. It took a couple of hours to bring the pontoons back aboard and get the vessel under way, but after that it didn’t take long to reach its destination. Once anchored, the crew reassembled the floating dock while the IHA team prepared for the dive. Nina had used the transit time to explain why she had changed the mission so drastically; both Gozzi and Bobak were startled by what she thought she had discovered, but quickly became caught up in her enthusiasm.
    Chase was more pragmatic. ‘We can’t stay down there too long,’ he said as the team went through the involved process of donning their deep suits. ‘There’s only a couple of hours before sunset. It’ll be darker anyway because we’re deeper, but any daylight’s still better than none.’
    ‘This’ll just be a preliminary dive,’ Nina assured him. ‘I just want to be sure there really is something down there. If there is, we’ll dive again tomorrow morning, and if there isn’t . . . well, we’ll go back to the original site.’
    ‘Bet you won’t find a bit of old net as interesting now, will you? Okay, arms out.’
    Nina raised her arms. Like the other divers, she was wearing a modified drysuit, metal sealing rings encircling her shoulders and upper thighs. The ones round her legs had already been connected to the lower body of the deep suit, which Bejo was supporting from behind. She shifted uncomfortably as Chase mated the watertight rings on her arms to their companions in the heavy suit’s shoulder openings, then closed its polycarbonate front section around her and shut the latches one by one.
    ‘Oh, I hate this bit,’ she muttered as Chase picked up the helmet.
    ‘Be glad you never wore the old model,’ he said. ‘The helmet was even smaller.’ He had