Jade mentally began assembling a shopping list of equipment she would need in order to dive. Professor could help her with that; the former SEAL had been her dive-master in Japan, and had a lot more expertise in the water than she. Maybe his intrusion would prove fortuitous after all.
The camera view swung around to show the top of the shaft, and after a few more minutes of maneuvering, the robot lowered itself into the tunnel and began descending. Jade found herself straining to catch some glimpse of what lay at the bottom of the long shaft, but it remained an impenetrable black dot at the center of the screen.
A spot of illumination appeared at the center of the darkness.
“Does anyone else see that?” Jade asked.
“Could be the light reflecting off water,” Professor suggested.
As the robot continued deeper, past the opening leading back to the chamber where the group was watching and down into parts of the shaft that had not been revealed by Dorion’s muon detectors, the spot of brightness grew more intense. Meanwhile, the tunnel walls became more irregular. It was still too perfectly vertical to be naturally occurring, but it seemed to Jade as if the craftsmen who had carved out the passage had gradually lost interest in maintaining perfect symmetry.
“Fifty meters,” Hodges reported. “This sucker is deep.”
The descent went on for several more minutes until, just as the cable was almost played out, the robot reached the far end of the passage. The source of the reflection however remained maddeningly indistinct; a bright spot directly below. Hodges tried moving the camera, but the bright spot continued to dominate the screen. The glare made it impossible to tell how much deeper the source of the reflection was.
“End of the line,” announced Hodges.
Jade turned to Acosta. “You’ve got to let me go in.”
The administrator gave her an astonished look, but she was ready for him. “I know what I’m doing,” she went on. “I have the equipment and will assume all the risk. I won’t touch anything or take a single step without consulting with you first. You have to let me do this Dr. Acosta. It’s the only way to know what’s down there.”
Acosta wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Isn’t there any way we can send the robot deeper?” he asked Hodges.
“I’d need more co-ax. But I’m not sure that would make a difference. It looks like a straight drop, and if that’s water down there, Shelob won’t be much use.”
Jade let Hodges’ verdict sink in a moment, then instead of repeating her plea, she said simply, “I’ll go get my gear.”
This time, Acosta did not even try to stop her.
FOUR
This is why I love being an archaeologist. Jade squirmed through the hole and looked down into the dark void. The LED headlamp she wore showed nothing that Shelob’s light had not already revealed, but that was about to change.
She placed her hands — now covered in fingerless gloves with an extra layer of reinforcement in the palms — against the smooth tunnel walls and pulled herself the rest of the way through, trusting the belaying rope secured to her climbing harness to keep her from taking the fast way down. She wriggled around until her feet were braced against the wall and then squeezed the brake release handle on her rappelling descender. The close confines of the tunnel kept her from making dynamic bounds, but the descent into the unknown was no less exhilarating.
She could make out Shelob at the bottom of the shaft looking like some kind metal drain screen. Four of its legs were stretched out, quartering the passage and holding the robot fixed in place, while the other four had retracted in close against its body. There was more than enough room for Jade to slip between the outstretched appendages, but she wasn’t ready to do that just yet.
She continued letting out rope — what little was left of it — until the sole of one of her hiking boots touched the robot’s slim central body. She tested her foothold, then let out a little more rope until all her weight was resting atop the robot. Something moved at one end of the body, presumably the camera turning to look at her.
She unclipped a small Motorola walkie-talkie from her belt and keyed the transmit button. “Can you hear me up there?”
Under normal conditions, the radio would have been useless, the signal blocked by the surrounding rock, but her signal didn’t have to reach the men in the chamber above. The receiving unit was wired into Shelob’s electronic guts, and the message would make the rest of the journey via the coaxial hardline.
Hodges’ voice sounded from the speaker. “Loud and clear.”
“Are you sure this thing can hold my weight for the next pitch?”
“Better than any of the climbing gear you could use to set your belay.”
That assurance didn’t fill her with enthusiasm, but she wasn’t about to turn back now. She peered down into the darkness below, noting the shiny spot almost directly underneath the robot. It was easier to judge the distance with her own eyes. “I think it’s only fifty feet or so to the bottom. Can’t tell if it’s submerged or not. I’m going to set the next rope.
She unlimbered a coil of Kernmantle climbing rope from her shoulder, laying it carefully atop the robot’s thorax, and then went to work rigging a second belay, using the robot as her anchor. When she had checked and double-checked her knots, she shifted the rope into one of the gaps and let it fall. There was a faint rustling sound as the line uncoiled, and then just a second later, a dull thud as most of it landed on something solid.
“No splash,” Jade said into the walkie-talkie. “Looks like we don’t have to worry about swimming. I’m heading down.”
There was a jumble of conversation — she heard Professor warning her to watch out for spiders — but Jade focused her attention on the task of unclipping from the first belay and switching to the one she had just rigged.
Because she was making a rope-only descent into the unknown, she proceeded more cautiously this time, slowly letting out the rope and keeping her eyes on what lay below. Once past the fixed body of the robot, she had a better view of her destination, but what she saw defied both expectations and explanations.
The source of the reflections appeared to be a large polished metal object — Jade assumed it was a mirror — positioned right below the shaft. She could see her rope trailing off one side. Her original estimate of fifty feet looked to be right on the money and after dropping half that distance, she was able to make out more detail about the cavern into which she was descending.
The shaft appeared to drop right into the middle of a stadium-sized hollow. The chamber extended in every direction further than her light could penetrate. Aside from the mirror — or whatever it was — the only evidence that the cave was not merely a natural formation was the uniformly smooth floor, which likewise seemed to go on forever. There was nothing on the floor, no altars or statues, nothing at all to hint at the purpose this sealed-off vault had once served.
She was close enough now to see her reflection in the polished surface below, a weird blob stretched out from the focal point as if she was looking at the back of a spoon. The mirrored surface was convex, curving downward in every direction. The ancients might conceivably have used it for diffusing sunlight and illuminating the rest of the cavern, Jade knew, but it would only have been useful when the sun was directly overhead, and once the pyramid was built, it would have served no purpose at all.
Jade continued sliding down until she was almost touching the reflector. Up close, she saw that she had been wrong about the object. It wasn’t just a convex mirror; it was a perfect sphere.
She recalled the discovery made at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent — a strange and unexplained collection of spherical orbs, ranging in size from about two to five inches, covered in iron pyrite to give them a gold-like sheen. This object was considerably larger, easily ten feet in diameter, and although Jade was no metallurgist, she was fairly certain that the metal surface was not “fool’s gold.” It was the real thing.