by A D Davies
Dan joined them with the detonator switch. “Fingers in the ears, people.”
Again, they did as they were told. Dan dispensed with the usual countdown and hit the button.
The eruption tore through the sky, sending a plume of dirt upward at least twenty feet, which descended in a pebble-rich cloud and expanded over the bikes. Everyone stood, ears ringing, coated in a fine film of dust.
Harpal was the first to advance. “Next time, we check the wind direction.”
There was a time when Jules would have pointed out that he’d assessed the wind direction and would have said something if they were lying in the fallout zone. That the explosion sent the dirt towards them, and without much wind to speak of, it suggested there had been a change in the structure where they’d set the explosives, meaning the energy expanded outwards equally in all directions. When it slammed against an immovable object like bedrock, it reversed direction and added power to the upward drive.
Either that, or Dan used too much plastic.
They all dusted themselves off and followed Harpal to examine the results. Although still swirling with debris, it was clear there was more than rocks under the original hardscrabble layer.
Dan said, “They’ll be out to investigate soon. Best we have something to show for it when they arrive.”
“And if it’s the cops who arrive?” Jules said.
“Then we’re trespassing, and we’ll leave.” Professor Garcia counted off four fingers. “Trust me, I’ve been moved on plenty. No one wants to waste time on that kind of piddling paperwork.”
“And my parents can spring for a decent lawyer,” Bridget added then looked embarrassed as if she’d been bragging to the underprivileged.
Jules set about checking the hole. “Let’s just get on with it.”
The breach was wide enough to accommodate Jules, Dan, and Harpal all at once, with room to spare for Bridget if she wanted to squish up. Not necessary, of course, as they’d go single file. The particulate debris swirled and danced, obscuring more than four or five feet down, but a breeze funneling from below revealed they had broken through to somewhere hollow. Hollow, and deep.
Aided by Harpal, Bridget, and Dan, Jules hammered spikes into the ground and used them as a fulcrum to wrap around one of those old tree trunks, diverted at angles to avoid tangling with each other. As they slipped into harnesses, Tane remained at his post, ever watchful.
“Okay,” Charlie said after testing the comms. She handed Dan and Harpal the spare earbuds and kept one for herself. “Action dudes go first and check we’re in business. Then the brains can follow.”
“Which group am I in?” Jules asked. “Since I’m pretty much top of my class in both departments.”
“You keep Dan and Harpal company. Make sure they don’t screw up through bickering.”
Harpal was already testing his line. “I know that should offend me, but it’s fair.”
“Harsh,” Dan said. “But fair.”
With the lineup agreed, and the order sorted out, Jules, Dan, and Harpal equipped themselves with cramps, carabiners, head torches, gloves, and helmets. Charlie handed Jules the comms nodes that would allow them to remain in contact. They then made final checks before Jules donned a breathing mask like those used on a building site and crabbed backwards into the opening to descend first.
For the initial four feet, he was blind, glad of the filtered mask as the dust wafted and danced all around, making him blink the itch from his eyeballs. Six feet down, he set the first comms node here, ensuring a clear signal with the surface. The deeper he went, the clearer the air became, but also the darker it got.
After another ten feet, it would have been pitch-black if not for the flashlight. From what Jules could make out, the tunnel was more a fissure than a planned borehole. It looked natural to him, although it could have been hacked out using rudimentary tools over several decades. The intervening couple of centuries could have hidden the fingerprints of artificial construction. Lower, the passage narrowed so much, Jules had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The obstruction bent only inches, but it was enough.
On the other side, Jules examined what had delayed him and shone his lamp up at Dan’s incoming body. “Hey, big guy, you got a big knife or something?”
“Machete and a K-bar,” he answered. “Why?”
“Tree root. You’re gonna have to hack through.”
“Okay, wait up.”
“Nah, I’ll set up down below. Careful of the node.”
He inserted another of Charlie’s comms relays and went on, ignoring Dan. He didn’t work for LORI and didn’t take orders. Besides, time was of the essence, so waiting for Dan to move the root was out of the question.
After a further ten feet, he touched floor.
Only, it wasn’t the end of the shaft, but a sudden change in the angle of approach. Jules let the rope’s slack out and tossed it around to let it drop farther. It was no good. It coiled around near his feet.
“Hey,” Jules called back up the shaft as he fitted another comms node. “It evens out here. Gotta walk.” He dropped a couple of glow sticks but didn’t wait for an answer.
The tunnel was still steep, but he negotiated it simply. While he had let his free running and gymnastic practice lapse since settling down into a regular-person life, the muscle memory of balance and the reaching out with his senses, feeling his way, swept back to him. Like his ability to retain any and all academic learning, once he’d mastered a physical skill, it was only ever dulled, never extinguished.
The light strapped to his head showed the walls smoothing out, growing more regular. Like a mine shaft.
We’re onto something. Might be a shield, might be digging out ore. Could be the foundations of a building they never built.
He drove onward. Blood flowed faster through his veins, thumping in his chest and his head, and he found himself speeding up. He could control this, if he chose, but he chose not. He was the first human being to walk this path in centuries. And if Toby or the kook were even half-right, there was something to discover. Something denied by the landowners. Something a foreign power believed could benefit them…
The tunnel ended. A vast openness engulfed him. Even though he couldn’t see much farther than the flashlight beam, it was obviously a cavern, spanning several hundred feet if not more.
Jules emitted a hoot which echoed back at him.
“Ha!”
He pulled off his pack and took out one of Charlie’s dwarf arc lights. She had allocated them one each, partly because of the bulk and partly in case one person fell and damaged them all.
As he extended the legs and found a suitable spot to wedge it, Jules again couldn’t fail to be impressed with Charlie’s aptitude for improving on existing technology. She’d make a fortune if she entered a more commercial field. But from what Jules could gather without indulging in quid pro quo heart-to-hearts, she lived with a healthy family of three children and earned enough to maintain a nice house in Greenwich and keep her wheelchair-bound husband mobile and pretty much independent. It was only the lure of what they were searching for today that clenched around her and dragged her on these jaunts.
With the scrabbling footfalls getting closer, Dan and Harpal having surmounted the offending tree root, Jules braced himself. He cracked on the arc light and took in the sight.
From dusting off a two-inch piece of porcelain buried for a thousand years in a desert, to breaking through ancient doors powered by his mother’s DNA-activated bangle and confronting a millennia-old acropolis the size of a city, those represented the two extremes of Jules’s treasure-hunting-come-archaeology life to date. Not forgetting perpetual motion orbs, volcanic networks linked around the world, or the discovery of ancient humans who pre-dated Australopithecus. But not every revelation in archaeology needed to be extreme to be spectacular.
What Jules now gazed upon in the glow of a single arc light made him question why he could have thought a “normal” life was right fo
r him.
Chapter Fifteen
Toby Smith had long resigned himself to the fact his finest physical days were behind him. All he could do was present himself with dignity and purpose and emphasize his assets. He’d always brought value to the institute he founded after learning several of the most long-held beliefs about ancient man were misunderstood at best, intentionally withheld at worst.
But key to this was dignity.
He loved this work, although he loved having finished this work more than the act of detecting such discoveries, precisely because of the position in which he now found himself: dangling from a rope twenty-some feet below the woman who co-founded LORI as she offered gentle encouragement regarding the application of the descender.
It was all well and good knowing how to do something, but lack of practice rendered Toby into a gibbering infant. He could scuba dive and abseil, but the technique of squeezing that stiff piece of metal in the pulley system, the ropes under his bum shooting by as he dropped in increments, took several minutes to grasp once more.
Below, Sally Garcia descended with an aptitude he envied, while above, Bridget only made a couple of disparaging grunts of impatience before her manners kicked in.
“Easy,” Charlie said again. “Use your feet too.”
“Yes, thank you.” Toby had been half-walking, half-falling with each depression of the release lever, and now regretted accepting the remaining ear-bud unit.
But after Dan exclaimed that everyone had to get down there right that minute and see what they’d found, Toby got swept up in Bridget’s whirlwind of forward motion. She’d been the one to push them, fumbling the grips and pulleys in her haste. That was the main reason Charlie insisted she go down last; the girl needed to calm herself lest she make a mistake.
By the time Toby touched down on the angled shaft, Sally was already gone. He disentangled himself and unclipped the carabiner but kept the leg harness on. He didn’t relish the climb out, but Charlie would set up a pulley system so it wouldn’t be like urchins climbing out of a chimney.
He picked his way through the steep tunnel, holding the rope between his hands as he went. He just hoped what they found was neither physically huge nor symbolic. He’d considered the possibility it was an affectation, a monument to the Guardians or a sigil, something to carry before them like a Roman aquila. If they’d been in the thrall of larger-than-average humans, or pushed the notion that giants of folklore marched beside them in spirit, their prize might still turn out to be too big to extract the way they came in.
It was a significant downside to this type of fringe science.
“Oh, my golly gosh!” Sally exclaimed up ahead.
Toby sped up, his legs feeling like a windup toy let loose. This was the culmination of months of work, of three failed expeditions, and the most important find he could remember. Even more so than those history redefining moments he’d experienced with this team, or even the world-threatening use of ancient machines, this would decide the future of the Lost Origins Recovery Institute. Toby needed to satisfy Alfonse that his investment bore fruit, or it would be the last such funding he extended them.
He reached the end of the tunnel.
Bridget hadn’t been this jazzed in years. Yes, she got most of her thrills through the deciphering of language, of codes and maps. The action dudes explored the physical, she analyzed what they brought her, and sent them on their way. Yet, there was nothing quite like being there. Getting her hands and feet and face filthy as she trod the path others had walked.
She could feel the history.
As her feet touched solid ground and she progressed a couple of car lengths behind Toby and his unsteady flashlight, the walls vibrated. They all but spoke to her.
Perhaps it was through being cooped up so long, trying to learn economics at a higher level than she was ready for, or cared for, that resulted in her heightened senses. Sat in a classroom, a dorm room, or a lecture theater, listening to someone drone on about the nebulous ways countries attempted to drive their GDP and how much of it was guesswork based on historical analysis of markets…
Not real history, she’d once opined after a few too many beers.
Her fellow students, either the offspring of some financial master of the universe, like her, or an aspiring financial master of the universe desperate for daddy’s approval, looked at her like she was a moron. Her alternative notions—based on genuine history, on real civilizations that had thrived and bloomed for centuries longer than the United States or the British Empire had existed—found her labeled a socialist or a communist, sometimes interchangeably. That no one could make up their mind about what her ideas made her, she despaired at their stupidity and ceased trying to explain that she was neither of those things. And nor were the economic models of various stages of the Roman Empire (they had several over the centuries), nor Alexander the Great, nor Cleopatra’s Egypt. They were just different from the systems used broadly across the West today. But, in the pocket universe of ivy-league schools, it seemed anything other than strict adherence to free market capitalism, and the notion it was individual mistakes that led to boom-and-bust cycles, got a person labeled as an other.
Socialist.
Communist.
And even explaining the true meaning of those words fell on deaf ears.
Not modern capitalism = socialist. Or communist. Or something bad. Because, like, who cares?
Yet, since Bridget was only ever interested in facts and evidence, she refused to back down. And that made her life miserable, despite acing her classes.
Her begging to quit had made Dad angry, but Mom had been insightful enough to see the truth. Their daughter was being destroyed by the culture at the college, by attitudes encouraged by the institution’s curriculum. Dad, in the end, agreed to give her time. Bridget would find her way, eventually.
“Oh, my golly gosh!” came Sally’s delighted cry, barreling up the passage.
As Toby’s light bobbed and pulled ahead, Bridget adopted the same pace. Her momentum made her steadier, her feet finding the fastest path. Within seconds, she’d caught up to Toby, but neither slowed. Toby actually sped up, the bright portal ahead glowing brighter, the three dwarf arc lights illuminating what lay beyond as if the sun had descended below ground.
“It’s incredible, come on!” the professor shouted.
The glare from the arc lights filled Bridget’s vision. She blinked spots away as she stepped out into what appeared to be a cave. Stalactites hung from a roof maybe fifteen feet over her head, a virtual dome of rock and seeping mosslike vegetation. The ground was strewn with rocks, the far wall about an average swimming pool length away, and the action dudes were exploring what Bridget could only think of as—
“It’s a graveyard.” Professor Garcia could hardly breathe, her panting like a marathon runner being interviewed after breaking the finishing line tape, overawed to have won. “It’s everything I need to justify my work. Every asshole who ever made fun of me online or to my face or in peer review…” She faced Bridget with her expression as bright as the arc lights. “They can suck it!”
Toby was equally stunned, and she’d never seen Jules flowing from one feature to another so swiftly. He even seemed to be smiling. Dan and Harpal, too, raced from one find to the next.
Bridget had to see more.
She followed the faint slope of the floor up to her left, checking the first plinth—what looked like a rectangular stone box the size of a socialite family’s dining table. Upon this, the sculpture of a giant human skeleton was carved into the surface, a 3D bas-relief that would have been nine or ten feet stood upright.
“The detail is extraordinary,” Bridget said.
Garcia swung one leg up, pushed with her hands and one knee, and climbed onto it. She braced on the flat surface and her palms hovered over the statue in repose.
“Here,” Toby called.
Bridget switched attention to him. He’d located an alcove in the wall, a horizontal cu
t-away where another carved skeleton lay. This one was smaller than the figure Garcia was fussing over, but a good eight feet long, armed with a real sword and a dull, metal shield.
Toby, with gloved hands, probed the shield, then came away with a shake of the head.
“Who carved these?” Bridget mused.
“They weren’t carved.” Garcia brushed the statue’s femur with her fingertips, the leg bone three times thicker as well as longer than an equivalent human. “They’re fossilized.”
Bridget squinted closer. “That’s not how fossilization works. You need to die in mud, then as the flesh and bones rot, minerals seep in to replace the gap where the bones were. That’s why it’s so hard to find them—”
“I know how fossilization works, young lady,” Garcia said. “But I also know the difference between a carving and a bone.”
Bridget examined the join between the arm and the surface on which it lay.
Jules said, “She’s right.” He’d come up beside Bridget without her noticing. “It’s like someone pulled the fossils outta the ground along with a chunk of the rock they were fused into. These days, we can separate dinosaur bones from the surroundin’ hard stuff, but I bet back then they couldn’t.”
“So they hauled it out complete,” Toby picked up from him, lost in wonder. “They sculpted the base into a grave plate of sorts.”
Sally Garcia scrambled about, wide-eyed, and jittery. “Yes, yes. That’s what this is!” She mounted the giant skeleton as if she planned to ride it out of there and leaned over so she drew face-to-face with it. The skull was at least twice the size of hers, maybe more. “Hello, my friend. I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
“Doesn’t make it actual giants,” Bridget said. “Like, the legends or anything like that. The bones could be animals, then a malformed skull fell or placed alongside.” She hated to be the only one showing an iota of scientific analysis, but having been out of the game so long, she was determined to cling to every rung of this ladder. She couldn’t simply accept the fantastical without firm proof. “These could just be mutated humans, too. Jules… you’re the logical one. Can you please apply your brain to what we’re seeing?”