Sanji panted with exhaustion, but called out encouragement in ragged gasps. “We are almost to the Dense Mass cavern. I do not think they will follow us in there. It is our only hope!"
The trio sprinted down the tunnel, looking like skipping children for all the fancy footwork needed to side-step the meandering silverbugs. Connell chanced another glance over his shoulder. The flashing rocktopi were gaining. Only twenty yards and closing fast, their curved platinum knives glistening like the foot-long teeth of some horrid, multi-colored dragon. The rocktopi seemed to have little trouble navigating the mindless mass of silverbugs.
A thrown rock blasted a silverbug off the wall beside Connell, hard enough to smash the platinum body with a shower of sparks. Had the rock found its mark, his brains would have felt the hot cave air. Connell focused his attention and redoubled his efforts. Adrenaline surged, the pain in his leg and back faded away under the rush. A strange thought burned unbidden through his mind.
This is what it feels like to be prey.
"I see it!” Veronica screamed, her voice a combination of total exhaustion and impending victory. “I see the cavern! We're almost there!"
The noise behind him grew louder. It sounded as if the rocktopi were only inches from his back. Fear gripped his body with vise-tightness, fueling his legs, pushing him forward. Rocks smashed into the walls on either side and bounced near his legs, missing his feet by inches. A ham-sized rock clipped his shoulder, nearly throwing him off balance, but he kept going.
Veronica stepped on a round silverbug body and her ankle bent outwards like a snapping branch. She screamed, stumbled, and started to fall. Connell reached down with lightning speed and threw an arm around her waist, pulling her roughly to her feet. She grimaced from the pain but would not quit. She covered the final twenty yards hopping on one foot to keep her balance as Connell carried her along.
Suddenly the darkness of the cave surrendered to the brilliant daytime-like light of the Dense Mass cavern. The image of something impossibly huge appeared before Connell, but he could focus only on taking one more step, one more step, one more step.
Veronica finally lost her balance on a loose rock and fell hard to the ground. Connell tried to catch her again, but only managed to fall himself, hitting the dirt with a whoof and a thud. He bounced once, rolled once, then lay on the ground sucking air, his eyes closed tight with terror, unable to rise one more time, too tired to even curl up into a fetal position.
He waited for the cutting to begin.
Chapter Thirty-six
The blows never came.
Connell opened his eyes, struggled to rise to one elbow and looked back; the rocktopi clustered at the tunnel entrance, a swarming mass of angrily stretching tentacles and sparkling crescent knives. The creatures glowed a steady, soft blue. They didn't follow, nor did they hurl anything his way.
Connell's lungs burned as if the rocktopi blades were already buried in his chest. A sudden spasm gripped his stomach; he rolled to his hands and knees just in time to hurl a puddle of useless bile onto the sand and dirt. He vomited one more time, then his breath came in heaving lungfuls as he tried to rise to his feet. Strong hands gripped under his arms and lifted him effortlessly.
"You okay, boss?” Lybrand asked as she supported Connell's weight.
"Yeah,” he said, wiping vomit from his chin. “I'll be okay in a second. Is everyone here?"
"Everyone made it,” Lybrand said. She looked back to the entrance where the rocktopi thronged as if held back by invisible bars. “Looks like you got here just ahead of the Christmas rush. Why don't they come in and finish us off?"
"Veronica thinks… this place is… religious,” Connell said between deep breaths. “Holy ground or something."
"Doesn't surprise me,” Lybrand said. “If this is holy ground, they sure know how to build one motherfucker of a church."
Connell looked at her with confusion, and she merely nodded toward the middle of the massive cavern. Connell followed her gaze.
It was the Dense Mass.
He'd expected the cavern's immense, mind-boggling size. Over five miles long and three miles wide. He'd known those dimensions, been prepared for them. He'd expected the faint sound of rushing water as well. Nothing, however, could prepare him for the vastness that spread before his eyes.
Or what it contained.
Giant. Monstrous. His brain scrambled for words to describe what he saw. It was so big the end of it faded off in the distance, invisible behind a light mist kicked up by the unseen water. A string of multiple artificial suns, just like the one in the kidney-shaped cavern, ran the length of the five-mile expanse. They illuminated the gargantuan object with a bluish tinge.
The rounded end soared some two thousand feet into the air, hundreds of stories tall, dwarfing any skyscraper ever built. A cylinder — smaller than the rounded end — stretched off down the cavern's distance. It spread on and on, so huge that it faded into the cavern's mists before he could make out the other end. But he knew at the other end sat a massive, rounded end identical to the one reaching up in front of him. He knew what was there because he'd seen the shape before.
The shape in the wall carvings. The thick Q-Tip. The dumbbell. The mystery of the caves, the rocktopi, the silverbugs… everything… suddenly cleared away as if a giant fan blew a shrouding fog free from their minds. The rocktopi's “Garden of Eden” wasn't a myth, wasn't a fable, wasn't primitive religion.
It was true.
And it was accurate.
As unbelievable as it was, the evidence towered in front of him, real and undeniable and massive beyond comprehension. The rocktopi were aliens after all. And their Garden of Eden?
It was the ship that had brought them to Earth thousands of years ago.
Chapter Thirty-seven
They stuck together, moving as quickly as they could. The Linus Highway lay on the ship's far side. To reach it, they had to hike around the ship, a trip of some four miles to the far end, then another mile and a half back up the other side. The ship sat in the cavern as if a custom-built trench had been dug for its mass. The middle shaft rested on the flat surface, while a large, curving section of the rounded “tip” lay unseen underground. The seemingly perfect fit reminded Connell of the Styrofoam packing surrounding a new stereo or VCR.
As they walked, the water's rumble grew louder. Soon they came upon the same thick river they'd crossed an eternity ago. Either they had crossed over it, or it had crossed under them. Here the river flowed across some kind of granite bedrock, not the limestone that dominated the mountain. Erosion took an obvious toll on the granite, but the water had carved only a shallow trail through the rock as opposed to the massive chasms the river left in limestone.
The river raged into a hull crack that spanned nearly 300 yards. Ancient changes in the river's course had carved trenches in the granite, bends and breaks and turns made and forgotten over the course of millennia. Each course change took a chunk out of the dead ship. The river acted like a slow and steady buzz saw. Each time the river changed course, the grit-filled water slowly ground away more platinum. Clanks and plinks constantly filled the air: the sound of gravel smashing into the edges of the hull, powered by the river's tireless current.
A large section of the thick shaft, undercut by the river, had fallen in upon itself who knows how many millennia ago. The ship's hull arced high up on either side of the 300-yard-wide break. At the top, perhaps 750 feet in the air, the two sides almost met.