“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 littered 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.
The mouth of the tunnel was, like everything else they had encountered in the cavern, round and worked smooth by its builders. The top of the perfect circle was at least twice as tall as Jade, easily large enough to accommodate even the Sun sphere. The discovery however was met with stunned disbelief.