Oracle (7 page)

“
We’re going to have to Jumar out of here,” she said, referring to the mechanical device used for ascending a fixed rope. The Jumar worked on a principle similar to the rappelling devices they had used to come down, with a spring-loaded brake that allowed it to slide up a rope but not back down, and attached loops to use as steps. Because the device could only be advanced a foot or two at a time, climbing out of the cavern was going to be a time consuming process, especially for the less experienced members of the team.

He shook his head.
“No time for that. I’ll go first. Once I’m up, I can pull the rest of you up one by one. It will go a lot faster.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Listen, I’m not saying I believe in psychic visions or anything like that, but in your dream, how exactly did we,you know…get dead?”

She looked away.
“You’ll laugh.”

“
Probably, but tell me anyway.”

She pointed ahead toward their destination, now just twenty yards away.
“That thing.”

“
The Sun sphere?”

She shook her head, but before she could elaborate, Professor caught movement in the corner of his eye. He turned toward it just in time to see a dark spindly shape, trailing a pair of loose
serpentine threads, drop from the ceiling. There was a gonging sound as it impacted against the top of golden orb and slid off the far side, out of view.

Professor stopped dead in his tracks, stunned speechless. Shelob, the anchor for the rope that would get them out of the cavern, had just fallen out of the shaft. Now they were stuck here, at least until Hodges could rig something else up. He held the walkie-talkie up and keyed the transmit button.

“Brian, your robot just burned in.”

No reply.

Duh!
The robot had also been relaying the radio signals through the coaxial cable which had evidently broken or come unplugged. Now they were stranded and incommunicado.
It never rains
…

Jade
’s hand clamped tight against his forearm. Her other hand was again pointing at the golden sphere…No, at something scuttling out from behind it.

“
That,” she said in a grave voice, “is what I saw.”

Jade had experienced
déjà vu before, but nothing like this. When she’d come to, she had been unprepared for the shock of seeing Professor and the others alive and uninjured, when she had, only moments before, watched them die… and died with them.

And now, it was all happening, just as it had in her…dream?

No way. No way was that a dream. I saw the future. I don’t know how, but I did.

Paul Dorion knew, too.

I’ve seen you before. It was in a dream, I think.

Now his bizarre manner during their first meeting made a little more sense. He hadn
’t been attempting to flirt and failing miserably; he had been serious.

She was going to have a long talk with Paul Dorion, if, of course the robot spider shuffling toward them didn
’t kill them all first.

“
What the hell?” Professor took a step toward the robot. “I can’t believe it’s still working. That was a fifty foot drop.”

Jade grabbed his arm again and pulled him back. She again felt the surreal mental dislocation of déjà vu, except this time instead of the sensation that she was reliving a moment, she was acutely aware of the differences between her premonition and what was happening.
“No. Keep away from it.” She turned back to the other three men. “Get back. You don’t want to be anywhere near this thing.”

The robot kept advancing, its eight legs moving with a steady mechanical rhythm. It was less than ten yards away and moving directly toward them. There was nothing particularly menacing about its movements, but Jade remembered all too clearly what would come next. Except this wasn
’t how it had happened.

This isn
’t how it happened.

We were just starting to climb when it dropped down on us and then there was a flash….

“It’s going to blow up!”

“
That’s crazy,” countered Professor. “It’s a computer on legs, not a walking IED.”

“
I think you should take her word for it,” said Dorion, unexpectedly. “She has lived this before.”

Wonderful,
thought Jade.
Leave it to the creepy guy to back me up.

Professor wisely yielded to her exhortation and the group retreated together, running all the way to the Earth stone. Shelob could not keep up, but a backward glance showed its single head-lamp, steadily getting brighter with its approach.

Acosta seemed to remember that he was supposed to be in charge. He turned on Professor. “What is happening to the robot? Why is it chasing us?”

“
It’s in autonomous mode,” Professor said. “It came unplugged. Maybe its default program is to come find us. But it can’t hurt us and it certainly isn’t going to blow up.”

“
Why did it fall? Is it malfunctioning?”

“
I don’t know. Brian is the expert.”

Jade felt her grip on the strange premonition slip away, exactly like a dream on waking.
The door to whatever it was she had experienced was closing, and yet her sense that the robot was dangerous remained.
Maybe Prof was right. Maybe I do have a phobia.

The one image she could not shake was the flash, and the oblivion that followed.

She turned to Professor. “Give me the walkie.”

He passed it over.
“You won’t get a signal out,” he warned.

“
I’m not trying to.” She keyed the mic and held it down. “Is it my imagination, or did that thing just perk up its ears?”

“
It’s your imagination.”

Jade flung the radio toward the approaching robot.
“Get down.”

“
Hey!” Professor stifled his protest. “What exactly was that supposed to—”

There was bright flash and an imperceptible moment later, the blast hit them. A wall of energy—heat and force—slammed into them. If the men had not heeded her advice, they would have been knocked down, and likely shredded by pieces of shrapnel and chips of stone that
surfed the leading edge of the shock wave.

The blast resonated through Jade
’s body, pummeling her intestines. Her ears rang with the noise of the detonation, and she felt particles of debris stinging her exposed skin. For a moment, she wondered if she had delayed too long, given the warning too late. Was this her premonition coming true after all? Were they all dead?

A cough broke through the shrill constant pinging noise, and then she heard confused mumblings. Someone was alive…
she
was alive.

She raised her head and looked around. The cavern seemed darker, and not just because Shelob
’s light had been extinguished. The flash had momentarily overloaded her retinas and now everything was shrouded in a pinkish haze.

She saw the others. They were all intact, covered in a fine layer of dust, bleeding from minor cuts just like her, but there was no evidence of serious injury. Professor recovered faster than the others—it probably wasn
’t his first explosion—but, his expression was no less shocked than hers.

“
Impossible,” he said, or at least that was the word his lips formed. Jade couldn’t tell if he had spoken it aloud. His eyes met hers. “Are you okay?”

He must have shouted because she heard that. She nodded and he immediately turned his attention to the others. She joined him, verifying that no one was seriously hurt, rousing them all. When they had finished, he turned back to her.

“That was a bomb.”

“
No kidding.”

He shook his head.
“No, I mean a real bomb. High explosives. Probably C4.”

“
Does it matter?”

“
You knew the robot would follow the walkie-talkie signal. Was that another premonition?”

“
No. It was a hunch.”

“
Well, either way, it saved us.” He gripped her arm as if trying to squeeze his revelation into her. “Jade, this was an attack.”

“
You think Hodges is working for…them?”

Even though he must have already believed that, her statement seemed to catch him off guard.
“It doesn’t make sense. The Dominion killed his family.”

She could see the gears turning in his head, running through scenarios that might explain how his partner had been turned. What if the story about his family was a lie, planted to ensure that he would be accepted into the Myrmidons? What if he was a sociopath, so driven to support his secret masters that he had willingly sacrificed his loved ones?

“We’re not going to figure it out down here,” she said. “We have to find another way out.” Without waiting for an answer, Jade turned to the other men. “We’ll go the edge of the cavern and skirt along it until we can find the other entrance.”

“
What if there isn’t one?” asked Acosta, a nervous quaver in his voice.

“
There has to be. That Spaniard found a way in.”

“
And never got out. What if it’s sealed?”

“
Then we dig. What we’re not going to do is give up. Got it?”

The men nodded, and she noted that while Acosta and Sanchez looked thoroughly beaten, the physicist seemed eager, almost triumphant.

Jade reminded herself to have to have a long talk with Paul Dorion.

After the initial
shock of the explosion wore off, the enormity of the task before them settled upon the group with the weight of the earth that separated them from freedom. No one spoke. They all just trudged forward into the open endless darkness. Even the discovery of another huge sphere—this one made of a granular stone that might have been granite or gabbro, and almost as tall as Jade herself—failed to buoy anyone’s spirits.

“
Jupiter or Saturn?” Sanchez asked with all the enthusiasm of a grocery clerk asking about a bagging preference.

“
Hopefully Saturn,” Jade replied, trying to sound upbeat. “That would mean we’re close to the edge.”

They could no longer see the golden orb at the center. Without a light source, it had been swallowed up completely, though Jade suspected that even if it had been illuminated, it would have been a pinprick
of light. The chamber was that vast.

“
Do you think this cavern is natural, or did they dig it out?” She had hoped to engage Sanchez or Acosta with the question, but Professor answered first.

“
Probably a little of both. They found a natural cave and made it bigger. Unless I’m mistaken, we’re not under the pyramid any more. That might explain how the entrance we’re looking for remained hidden for so long.”

“
If it even exists,” mumbled Acosta.

“
It exists,” Jade insisted. “They had to have a way to get those spheres in here.”

Professor seized on her assertion.
“Jade, about the spheres. When you tried to move the Earth stone—”

“
Please. Let’s talk about something else.”

“
That’s not what I meant. Were you able to move it at all?”

She shook her head
. “I don’t think so. As soon as I tried…”

Professor nodded.
“It was more than just contact. We were all close to the spheres. I’m sure I must have touched them at some point. It was only when you tried to move it that something happened. And it didn’t move.” Jade realized he was looking at Dorion.

The physicist shrugged, but Jade again sensed that he was intentionally holding back.
“If we are dealing with some kind of dark matter field, it would affect the density of the object, making it more massive than it would appear.”

“
Which raises a lot of questions about where these spheres came from in the first place, and how the ancients were able to move them into position.”

“
I don’t know about dark matter,” Sanchez said, finally warming up to the discussion. “But the spheres themselves are very reminiscent of those found in Costa Rica.”

Jade nodded, making the connection. Although spherical representations were mostly absent from Mesoamerican cultures, there was one significant exception. The river valleys of Costa Rica were litte
red with enormous stone spheres, more than three hundred of them, the largest of which measured over six feet in diameter. The spheres were unquestionably artifacts of a human civilization, but beyond the fact of their existence, little was known about them. Most scholars attributed them to the extinct Diquis culture which vanished with the arrival of Spanish colonists, but their purpose and the means by which a primitive culture had successfully crafted nearly perfect spheres using only stone tools remained a mystery. UFO enthusiasts often pointed to the spheres as evidence of alien visitation, while others speculated a connection to Atlantis. Given her own recent adventures, Jade could not completely discount either idea. Indeed, an Atlantean connection might explain why the Dominion—assuming that’s who Hodges was working for—had taken an interest in the investigation at Teo.

“
That’s a long way to roll a stone,” Professor remarked. “Costa Rica is fifteen hundred miles away, and there’s a lot of rough country in between.”

“
They would not need to transport the stones,” Sanchez countered. “Just the people with the skill to make them here.”

“
Or it could be the other way around,” said Jade. “Maybe the people who made these spheres went south when Teotihuacan was abandoned. It’s worth looking into…when we get out of here.”

As if responding to the forcefulness of her statement, the floor of the cavern began sloping up in a gentle curve
, which abruptly became a wall. The stone was smooth, clearly worked by hand, but completely unadorned.

“
It would seem we’ve reached the end of the universe,” Professor remarked.

Jade gestured to the right.
“Let’s start orbiting and see where it leads.”

No one objected and the trek resumed, this time following the cavern perimeter. The chamber was so large that it felt like they were walking in a straight line, and without any other points of reference, there was nothing to suggest that they were not.

“Really makes you appreciate the vastness of space,” Professor said.

Jade thought he was probably just trying to fill the silence, but she welcomed anything that distracted from the ceaseless thud of their footsteps on the stone floor.

“I am more awed by the work that went into carving out this chamber,” replied Sanchez. “It must have taken decades, even if there was an existing cavern. I would imagine some of the material removed was used in the construction of the pyramids.”

“
They may have discovered this cavern while mining for obsidian,” suggested Acosta, warming to the topic.

Jade listened with mild interest to the discussion until, without any real warning, they found what she was looking for.