Over time, the erratic movement mesmerized Johnny. He watched for what seemed like thirty minutes, only to find he had, in fact, sat for four hours. Yet he thought he saw a pattern developing; the manner in which certain levels turned, stopped, expanded, and then spun again in the opposite direction. Certainly some arcane mathematical problem was at work as if, yes, as if the obelisk attempted to solve itself.
As he watched, his mind discerned that pattern. He could not put that pattern into words, he could not explain what he saw or why, but he grew convinced he understood the puzzle, and that soon an entryway would be revealed.
But where would it open? Closer to one of the enemy armies?
Reverend Johnny exited the command vehicle to find Jon Brewer. One last sprint remained.
Each of the three combatants dispatched scouts to circle the obelisk, doing so from a distance armed with sniper rifles and binoculars. The groups traded fire here and there, but no one risked a full scale engagement, at least not before a way through the final obstacle could be found.
Brewer stood at the front of their camp watching the obelisk rotate, stop, turn, rotate again. Reverend Johnny paced behind him, back and forth and mumbling.
“Soon, I can feel it coming, soon,” the Revered assured yet again; he had been making such assurances for nearly an hour.
Jon’s mind wandered. “It feels like it’s getting colder” and he waved his arms side to side to generate body heat. “Maybe because we’ve been stuck here for hours now. All that moving must have helped keep us warm. Exercise and all. It would be nice to get moving again.”
“I am not responsible for the machinations of this infernal contraption; I am merely sensing a purpose to the otherwise-”
“Sir!” Fink ran toward Brewer shouting, “Scouts report entrances have appeared in two spots around the object!”
As the words left Fink’s mouth, Jon saw a force of Wraiths break away from their main group and hurry toward the obelisk. He turned the other direction and saw the Vikings sending a similar party forward.
He shouted, “Damn it! We’re going to have to fight our way inside!”
“I think not, General,” Reverend Johnny stopped pacing and pointed.
All the turning and stopping, reversing and turning again, came to a halt. The puzzle had, indeed, solved itself. A huge black hole of a doorway opened directly in front of the human army camped on the plain of ice.
General Brewer commanded, “Entry team! Let’s go!” He turned to Casey. “Captain Fink, you stay outside with the troops. If you don’t hear from us in about an hour, or if you have reason to believe we’ve failed, follow us in. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Sir! Good luck, Sir.”
Three dozen well-armed soldiers mustered at the front of camp. General Brewer and Reverend Johnny led them toward the opening in the obelisk. That opening stood tall enough to accommodate a Goat-Walker and wide enough to fit eight lanes of traffic.
As they approached, the massive gate made Jon feel puny; insignificant, like Jack finding the castle after climbing the beanstalk.
They formed two columns and jogged inside. The soft glow of the midnight sun faded as they followed the huge corridor. However, hundreds of pinpricks of light flickered to life on the dark walls, like stars on a night sky, providing just enough glow to illuminate the passage.
Boots thumped on a solid floor but despite the height of the ceiling and a hallway that stretched forward seemingly forever, no echo sounded.
“Cold in here,” Johnny remarked as his breath exhaled in white puffs.
“Listen,” Brewer held a hand aloft and the column halted. “Do you hear that?”
A rumble…deep and low as if machinery worked somewhere in the distance ahead. Jon thought he felt a vibration in the wall…
…Outside, Captain Casey Fink waved his arms and walked the same circular path over and over wearing a track in the snow both in an effort to generate body heat and as a result of nerves. He alternated his attention from the obelisk to the Wraiths off in the distance to his left, to the Vikings off in the distance to the right, and then back to the strange contraption ahead.
At that moment, the puzzle started again. A thick ring near the top rotated, then one at the bottom in the opposite direction, then a pair in the middle, one slower than the other.
The door through which Brewer, the Reverend, and their men had entered disappeared…
…The corridor trembled and the soldiers rocked back and forth. They moved-the entire passageway moved-with mild g-force pushing them toward a side wall.
A slab of black slid out and blocked the passage ahead. Another did the same behind, this one catching a soldier at rear of the column, shoving him into some unseen groove leaving behind his arms and rifle while the rest of him disappeared, either pulverized or carried off.
Groans, mumbles, and curses from the men. Jon suddenly felt more claustrophobic than he had during the entire trip on the submarine; he feared the roof-or perhaps the walls-would suddenly slam together and crush his entire team.
“Dear Lord, we are spinning! The levels are moving again!” Reverend Johnny shouted the obvious.
Brewer shouted back, “It’s a trap! All this way for a trap!”
Johnny said, “No, no that’s not right. It’s a puzzle, General! A giant puzzle box made of levels and rings. A combination spinning and turning to different solutions, one that showed us the path. Another to…to…”
Their movement stopped with a heavy thud as if something locked into place. Every man in the entry team including the Reverend and General Brewer slammed against the wall and fell to the ground, gear scattering and legs wobbling.
An eruption of noise burst into the hall.
Clang. Smash. Pop. Bang.
Over and over again, a sound of grinding, whirring, hissing, machinery.
Johnny staggered to stand, retrieved his heavy machine gun, and gawked at the flood of light now filling the tall corridor as he finished his thought, “Another to let us in.”
Brewer regained his feet but struggled to regain his senses.
The passage opened to chaos incarnate. The heart of the enigma.
His mind fought to decipher the sight. Huge, inextricable, alien. He took the vision in bits and pieces in an attempt to digest the whole.
Jon looked up and saw a ceiling so very high above, a ceiling cluttered with piping, gears, tubes, and pillars, some running along the roof, many more hanging down to various heights. Everything moving, pumping, sliding, and rotating.
He stood on a ring made of some kind of cream-colored metal that traveled the circumference of the massive round chamber, stretching off to either side. Ahead, that ring ended at a short drop off where another ring waited, then another, then another, terraced and descending into the bowels of the structure, each crowded with gears, cranks, wires, pipes, blocks of stone with pulsating veins, and spinning top-like gadgets, and glass balls with electronic explosions inside and huge corkscrews and stretching springs.
A city-sized machine.
Jon watched a massive gear as tall as a small skyscraper roll along the lip of one of the rings, matching its teeth to notches in the floor.
A gargantuan pendulum swung from the shadows, swooped through the mass of machinery, and then disappeared again on the far side of the incredibly huge chamber.
On the concave walls, long cylinders jetted forth and connected with arcane sockets, some several times larger than a man. Spinning drill-like extensions darted out for unknown reason. Giant rock balls rolled in oversized gutters.