“You saw something happening to us didn’t you? A premonition?”
She shook her head again. “It was just a dream.”
“Jade, you must tell me what you saw. It’s important.”
Her gaze flitted from face to face. “I think we all died.”
Professor stood abruptly. “That’s it. We’re out of here now. Everybody, head back to the Sun stone.”
For once, Jade did not argue with him or challenge his decision. Nor did any of the others; even Acosta seemed to understand that now was not the time for questions. Professor oriented on the distant golden sphere, faintly glowing with the reflection of Shelob’s light, and headed out at a brisk pace. Jade, evidently fully recovered, matched him step for step.
“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.”
SIX
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.