Oracle (31 page)

Then, as the blast hit her like the spray from a fire hose, engulfing her in a storm of white violence, she knew that the answer was much worse.

“What are you
doing?” shrieked Dorion. “They’ll be killed.”

For just a moment, his shock at seeing Hodges, the man who had tried to
murder them more times than he could remember, was overcome by the immediacy of the peril Jade and Professor were now in.

Ophelia hushed him again.
“It was a tragic accident,” she said, as if reading from a newspaper obituary. “Jade made an unscheduled dive, not realizing that we were about to start another excavation. Dr. Chapman dove in to save her and was caught in the blast.”

For a moment, his mind refused to accept Ophelia
’s complicity in what was unfolding. “You’re working with…
him
?”

She gave him a sad look.
“It has to be this way, Paul. It’s the only way they’ll let us continue our research.”

Dorion still could not fully process this.

Hodges stepped close, his face a mask of cold menace. “Dr. Dorion, whether or not you continue to live is entirely inconsequential to me. If this is going to be a problem, you can join your friends down there.”

“
Paul, don’t think about it,” Ophelia urged. “I need your help. Don’t you see this is for the best? It was a tragic accident. That’s all.”

Dorion gaped at her. Had she actually convinced herself of the lie?

Nichols rejoined them and spoke directly to Hodges as if they were old friends. “That’s probably long enough.”

“
Any sign of them?”

“
No. If they do pop back to the surface, that is to say if they weren’t blasted into chum or buried in sediment, both of which are pretty darn likely, it won’t be until we shut the blowers off.”

Hodges looked skeptical.
“Could they still be alive down there? Ihara has a SCUBA tank.”

“
I suppose anything is possible. She was probably already well into her reserve. If she had more than ten minutes left, I’d be very surprised.”

“
Then keep the blowers running for ten more minutes.”

Nichols shrugged.
“You’re the boss.”

You
’re the boss
, Dorion thought. Professor had speculated that the saboteur who had tried to kill them with the submersible might actually be a member of the crew. Now the truth was revealed; not one member of the crew, but all of them.

Hodges had no doubt come aboard in Nassau. How did he escape the authorities in Delphi? The answer to that was obvious as well. Ophelia
’s brother, a member of the deadly Norfolk Group, had seen to that, springing the assassin from jail and putting him back on the hunt, but this time with a difference; this time, his orders were to keep Ophelia alive.

And Ophelia insisted on keeping me alive.

Like a complex equation suddenly resolving before his eyes, Dorion saw that he really had no choice in the matter. Jade and Professor were already dead. His continued defiance would not bring them back, and would accomplish nothing more than to cut short his own life. Ophelia was right. There was work to do, amazing work. He had glimpsed the possibilities of the future as if through a window. Now it was time to open the door and step through into an amazing new world.

“
A tragic accident,” he mumbled, and then turned to Ophelia and nodded.

Jade’s world vanished
in a tumult of white noise. The force of the blowers knocked her mask askew, flooding salt water into her eyes with a fury that felt like sand paper. She bit down on the SCUBA regulator mouthpiece, knowing that if she lost it, she was dead.

The struggle to simply stay alive consumed her thoughts, but some analytical part of her
brain, far removed from the now-dominant reptilian survival instinct, demanded an explanation. Why had
Explorer
turned on the Jacuzzi jets? Why had Professor fallen overboard?

Professor!

The blowers slammed her into the seafloor. The impact drove the breath from her lungs, and despite her best efforts, she felt the regulator explode from between her teeth. She flailed frantically in the total whiteout until she managed to snag the air hose and felt along its length until she found the mouthpiece. She struggled against the weight of the water pressing down from above. Farther away from the source, it was a little less like being under a rocket taking off, more like being under a waterfall, or being caught in the spin cycle at Pipeline. She couldn’t swim, but she could crawl, and just that tiny scrap of control brought her back a step from pure panic mode.

Professor!

He was still out there, drowning, maybe already dead.

She refused to accept that. And yet, unless she did something immediately, it would be true.

She crawled forward blindly, trying to fix his last position in her mind’s eye. She had been swimming toward him when the blowers had started up, maybe twenty yards away. If the blowers had driven him to the bottom as well, then she would find him somewhere along the straight line she was now moving.

But what if she couldn
’t keep a straight line? What if, in the blast from the
Explorer’s
props, she had gotten turned around, or Professor had been blown in another direction? What was to stop her from wandering around in circles, like the pilots of Flight 19, mere inches from Professor as he drowned?

If he was still alive, he had only seconds remaining. She knew that SEALs prided themselves on being able to hold their breath longer than anyone, but something told her Professor might not have gotten a chance to draw a good breath before going in.

Don’t think about that. Just find him.

She tried to straighten her mask, but in the relentless cascade, it was impossible to clear it of water. She gave up, visibility was nil anyway, and started crawling forward, sweeping out with her hands every few feet in hopes of snagging his inert form.

Too bad the Shew Stone didn’t show me this
, she thought mordantly. And yet, in a strange way, it had. It had shown her a future where she and Professor were preparing to make their last stand against a power-mad Ophelia Doerner. Ophelia had evidently taken that step, gone over to the dark side, which meant that the future she had seen had to be real.

And that meant Professor was alive and she was going to save him.

She kept moving, kept searching, refused to acknowledge the passing seconds, every one of which took Professor closer to oblivion.

Her groping hands found something, a rock like so many others she had found…no, wait. Her fingers were raw from searching and dragging herself across the reef. She couldn
’t tell what she was touching now, but there was something different about it. She found it again, grasped it, pulled herself close.

It had moved.
Definitely not a rock.

She was close enough now to make out a blur of color, the bronze hue of tanned skin.

It was Professor.

Frantic but now also hopeful, she drew herself closer, climbing his torso like a horizontal ladder over a crevasse, and found his face.
Unable to tell if he was conscious—she would not allow herself to think past that—she took the regulator from her mouth and pushed it between his lips.

Nothing.

She let go of the mouthpiece and instead pressed her own mouth against his, exhaling her breath into him.

He jerked, started coughing and thrashing, but she held fast, one arm wrapped around his neck, unable to do anything but ride out the spasms
as his body fought to purge the water from his lungs. Then, miraculously, she felt a tapping against her back.

She thrust the regulator at his face and this time he took it of his own accord. She felt more spasms, but after a few seconds, he was pressing the mouthpiece into her hands again. She took it, drew a shallow breath then forced herself to take another, this time deeper, filling her lungs.

Your turn,
she thought, handing it back to him.

With each hand-off, the coughing spasms eased until he seemed to be breathing normally. Jade had let go of his neck, but now had one arm wrapped around him, hugging him close as if he were the only stable thing in her universe.

Abruptly, the pressure holding them down eased and Jade felt her natural buoyancy return. The ominous rumble of
Quest Explorer’s
engines abated as well, replaced by the eerie calm of the still ocean. She looked up, half expecting to see total normalcy restored to the submerged depths, but everything remained shrouded in a dark fog of sediment.

She felt Professor tapping her again. She could just make out his face, only an inch or two from his. He brought his hand close and pointed up. What was he trying to tell her? Swim back to the surface?

No. Someone had just tried to kill them again. Not just a lone saboteur, but someone who could command the
Explorer’s
crew to throw Professor over and fire up the blowers. Whoever was behind it probably thought they had succeeded, that both Jade and Professor were dead. Better to let them go on thinking it.

So what was he trying to say?

He opened his mouth and allowed a single globule of air to escape. As it rose into the cloud, he pointed at it.

Bubbles.

With the blowers off, their air bubbles would rise to the surface where a keen-eyed lookout might divine their significance.

Hoping that she understood what he wanted, she shrugged out of the tank harness and closed the valve on the manifold, shutting off the flow of air. Professor nodded,
then pointed up again.

Duh.
Of course we have to go up. But what about people up there waiting to kill us?

He must have heard what she was thinking, or read the question on her face, because he shrugged.

One thing at a time.

While half the
crew scanned the murky water for any trace of Professor and Jade, the rest set about preparing for the recovery of the Moon stone. Dorion watched, not knowing whether to hope that the two lost souls would reappear. Hodges had insisted on running the engines for the full ten minutes of air that might be left in Jade’s tank, and once that was gone, they would certainly drown. But if, as Dorion suspected, time passed more slowly in close proximity to the Moon stone, then what seemed like ten minutes on the surface might only be one or two minutes on the bottom. But even if Jade and Professor did not drown, Hodges was waiting with an assault rifle from the ship’s small arms locker, ready to pick off anyone who surfaced.

“
It will take about twenty minutes for this cloud to dissipate,” Nichols said. “But the package is already secured to the cable. Once it clears, we can send a diver down and hook up a floatation bag. Then we can bring it up.”

Hodges did not look particularly pleased with this assessment. Dorion recalled that the man
’s mission in life was to destroy objects like the Moon stone, not bring them into the daylight. He was faintly surprised to hear Hodges say, “I don’t want to wait that long. Get your diver in the water now. He can follow the cable, so visibility isn’t a problem. I want to be underway within the hour.”

Nichols looked ready to argue, but evidently thought better of it. He turned away to give the orders.

“This is really happening, Paul,” Ophelia said, breathless with anticipation. “All our years of searching have finally brought us here. The power to see the future will be in my hands. I will be the new oracle, and I will use my sight to reshape the world.”

Dorion gave a glum nod. He understood her eagerness, indeed he had felt the same way for many years, hoping
, though perhaps never really believing that they would actually find what they sought. Now that it was almost in hand, and at an unimaginable price, he found himself unable to share her excitement.

But this is the future I saw.

He recalled the old story of Croesus, who had been told by the oracle of Delphi that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. When he was defeated in battle, he returned and demanded to know why the oracle had misled him. ‘A great empire was destroyed,’ the oracle had replied. ‘Your own.’ The story was part of the recorded history of Delphi, but it read like a parable. Knowledge of the future was a double-bladed sword, fire in the hands of a child. Worse, it was a mirror, revealing more about the desires of the person who looked for it, than certain knowledge of what was to come. Desire was the force that shaped the future, not dark matter. Ophelia would have the future she craved, regardless of whether she possessed the Moon stone.

And what of me?
What will my future be?

That was something the Shew Stone had not shown him.

It seemed only a minute or two had passed when the divers returned, their task accomplished. Even Nichols voiced amazement at how quickly they had finished, but Hodges curtailed the discussion with a terse growl. “Get on with it.”

Nichols gave the order to start the compressors.

“How long will this take?” asked Hodges.

“
That depends on how heavy the package is. We probably won’t need to fully inflate the tube to see some results. Might just be a minute or two.”

Curious in spite of himself, Dorion moved back to the rail and peered down into the murky water, straining for some glimpse of the object that, even without fully realizing it, he had been searching for ever since that fateful day at CERN.
The Moon stone. The original Omphalos.

He had never stopped to think about its origin. He felt quite certain that the spherical shape facilitated the accumulation of dark matter particles, pulling them in the way a black hole draws in material to increase its mass, but where had the process begun? Was it a natural occurrence, perhaps a small concentration that had been present when the earth
’s crust had formed? That was unlikely; at its formation, the earth would have been molten and anything as massive as the sphere would have promptly sunk to the earth’s core. Something from a meteorite perhaps; that made more sense. The ancients of Mycenae had recognized something special about the stone globe and venerated it without really understanding what made it powerful. Perhaps they had not been the first; perhaps it had been found somewhere else, moving around the ancient world from one conquering kingdom to the next.

I wonder if Jade had a theory about that.

“What’s happening?” Ophelia’s gasp brought him back to the moment.

He expected to see the water boiling with air bubbles bleeding off the flotation bags or perhaps even glimpse enormous bladders rising into view through the silty water, but what he saw instead defied easy explanation. The water at the rear of the ship had risen up into a hump, like a wave or a swell, building but not breaking. The area of disturbance was only about fifty feet across, but already high enough that it had formed a sloping hill of water. Held in place by its anchors, the
Explorer
could not slide down the face of the disturbance, so instead the entire ship canted forward, nose pointing downslope. Dorion had to clutch at the rail to keep from tumbling across the deck.

Hodges rounded on Nichols.
“What’s happening?”

“
I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this.” He stabbed a finger at Dorion. “Ask him. He’s the expert.”

Dorion shook his head, but even as he did, he realized that perhaps he did know.
“When Alvaro and Perez removed the stone from Teotihuacan, it triggered an earthquake that collapsed the tunnel and trapped Perez.”

“
So?”

“
That earthquake may have been caused by a gravitational anomaly. The dark matter field created by the sphere is just strong enough that any attempt to move it upsets the local gravity.”

Nichols was dubious.
“You’re saying that little ball of rock can create earthquakes?”

“
Or in this case, a tidal event. It is pulling the water toward it, causing a localized high tide.”

“
We caused it, just by trying to move the stone?” said Ophelia. “How is that possible?”

“
The orb has been sitting undisturbed for centuries, at equilibrium with its environment. If you have scales that are perfectly balanced, even a tiny grain of sand can upset the balance.”

“
Is it going to get worse?” Hodges asked.

Dorion spread his hands.
“I cannot say. I have never seen anything like this.”

As if he had been eavesdropping, Lee staggered down the stairs from the bridge cursing loudly and, if Dorion was not mistaken, a little drunkenly as well.
“What are you doing to my ship?”

“
It’s fine, Spencer,” Nichols said, though he sounded unconvinced of that himself. “Just an unexpected swell.”

“
The hell you say.”

Hodges echoed the captain
’s reservations. “If this keeps up, cut the damn thing loose. We’ll destroy it with explosives and that will be the end of that.”

“
No!” Ophelia almost screamed the denial. Dorion could not recall her ever sounding quite so desperate. “You must not. I forbid it.”

Hodges appeared unimpressed by her outburst, and several of the
crewman seemed poised to do as he had instructed, but before anyone could move, something erupted from the center of watery hill. Dorion spotted something that looked like an enormous black inner tube on the crest of the tidal bulge, and then, as if breaking through had somehow pierced an invisible membrane holding its shape, the water simply fell back into the ocean.

The
Explorer’s
decks heaved back and forth as the ship strained against its anchors. Hodges cast a baleful glare in Ophelia’s direction, but after a few more seconds, the turbulence seemed to abate and everyone aboard the research vessel could clearly see the flotation airbag bobbing on the surface less than a hundred feet off the stern.

“
Reel it in,” shouted Nichols. “We’ve got it now.”

There was a mechanical whirring as the slack was taken out of the lift cable, then without warning the deck lurched beneath Dorion
’s feet. The cable hummed and the entire structure of the boom crane began to groan in protest.

“
It’s okay,” Nichols said. “This is normal.”

Dorion detected a note of uncertainty in the man
’s tone, as if his assurance was as much for himself as the rest of them. The noise grew louder, supplemented by the whine of the cable winch straining against the load, but at the end of the line, the giant pillow-shape of the flotation bag was rising perceptibly. After a few seconds, it cleared the wave tops and through the curtain of runoff, Dorion could see, nestled in the embrace of the cargo slings, a spherical object. The titanic tug-of-war continued, the crane creaking as if on the verge of collapse, the Moon stone rising inch by grudging inch higher above the ocean’s surface.

“
It’s a bit heavier than I thought it would be,” Nichols muttered, sounding even less confident than before.

Dorion
’s concerns however were easing by degrees. Every inch won would greatly reduce the overall load on the cable, decreasing the likelihood that it would snap. The possibility of some other catastrophic failure remained, but if the crane’s engineers had done their job correctly, the cable would be intentionally designed to fail before the framework supporting it gave way.

The struggle reached a tipping point, figuratively speaking, when the load was brought above the level of the
Quest Explorer’s
main deck. Nichols gave the order to swing the boom over the deck and the anxious spectators cleared out of the way as the Moon stone was brought aboard the ship.

The crane operator reversed the direction of the winch but despite the fact that the cable was being paid out in miniscule increments, when the burden finally touched the deck, there was a resounding thump, like the impact of a car crash.

Dorion realized he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a long sigh. It was done. All the years of searching, all the sacrifice, had been leading him to this moment. For better or worse, they had found the prize. He glanced over at Ophelia and saw the same emotion writ large in her reverent gaze. Then, a flash of sunlight hit his face, momentarily blinding him. He raised a hand to shade his eyes, and saw that the sun was low in the western sky, its daily journey through the heavens nearly complete.

That
’s odd. Where did the day go?

Jade’s last breath
burned in her lungs as, clinging to Professor’s arm, they cautiously ascended through the gloomy waters toward what she hoped was the underside of the
Quest Explorer’s
hull. If they surfaced out in the open, they would be instantly visible to whoever had just tried to kill them, and she was pretty sure that was everyone on the ship’s crew.

She followed Professor
’s lead, trusting his combat-tested instincts to guide them to where they needed to be. Although she was an experienced diver, and had dealt with more than her share of sticky situations, this was definitely his area of expertise, which became evident when Jade glimpsed the dark outline of the hull looming overhead.

She broke the surface as cautiously as her urgency would allow and greedily sucked in breaths until the throbbing in her chest finally relented. Beside her, Professor did the same, while gingerly probing the back of his head.

“What happened to you?” she whispered.

“
Someone sucker punched me. Barry, I think. Should have known better than to turn my back on him.”

“
I don’t think he’s working alone.”

Professor nodded.
“Well, I’m still seeing the world a little cross-eyed, but I think I’ll live.”

“
Good. What do we do now?”

“
Well, assuming that everyone on this tub is gunning for us—”

“
You think Paul and Ophelia are in on this, too?”

He inclined his head.
“Okay, maybe not them, but assuming that almost everyone on this tub is gunning for us, we have to stay out of sight. The good news is that they must think we’re already dead.”

As if to underscore this supposition, they heard the
noise of machinery moving on deck. The crew was moving ahead with the recovery of the Moon stone.

“
I’d like to wait until night fall, but that’s a long time to spend dangling our legs like shark bait.”

Jade looked down into the water nervously; that thought had not even occurred to her.

“So,” Professor continued, “What we’re going to have to do is shimmy up the anchor chain, and when no one is looking, sneak aboard. There are lots of places to hide on a ship this big, and unless I’m mistaken, they’re going to be otherwise occupied for the next hour or two.”