Oracle

by David Wood

  “It may be much heavier,” Dorion said in a quiet voice, “to create that kind of relativistic effect…” He lapsed into silence as if unable to put his fears into words.

  “Maybe your watch is just running slow,” Nichols countered. “Anyway, we won’t know until we’ve tried.”

  “How will we secure it?” asked Jade.

  “Cradle sling. Probably two or three overlapping. We’ll clear away the surrounding matrix and then wrap it from the sides. Floatation tubes will add some buoyancy and make the crane’s job a little easier until we can get it to the surface. Should be a walk in the park.”

  Jade wasn’t quite so sanguine, but Nichols knew his business. “Let me set the slings.”

  “Have you ever done that before?” asked Nichols, skeptically.

  “No, but I’ve got the most experience of anyone here with an object like this. I know to treat it like a live wire.”

  Nichols frowned and then glanced at Ophelia as if asking her permission. Ophelia just nodded. Jade found that strange, but decided to chalk it up to Nichols simply being paranoid about the possible liability if anything happened to Jade during the procedure.

  “I’ll have one of my techs shadow you. We won’t try to lift until he checks your work.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Nichols nodded. “All right then. Let’s go get your Moon stone.”

  Two hours later, and with Professor’s chronograph synchronized to GPS time, Jade was back in the water. She wasted no time with further exploration, but went directly toward the bright orange flag that marked the Moon stone’s location. Using a small rock hammer, she went to work on the buildup of minerals that had accumulated around the sphere, vacuuming the residue away with a suction pump. The encrustation was softer than she had expected, as if the sphere had only been sitting there for a few years instead of more than four hundred. Perhaps, she thought with just hint of concern, the effect of time dilation close to the sphere was so strong that it had actually only been years and not centuries.

  Further digging soon revealed a dark orb, smooth and black as graphite, about two feet across, just as she had estimated. The color, or rather the lack thereof, was remarkable, and Jade wondered if it was also an effect of the dark matter field, absorbing light like a black hole. She would have expected the ancient craftsmen who made the Moon stone to use a silver metallic rock, but perhaps they had known what scientists would only discover thousands of years later—the moon only appeared to be a bright white light in the sky because of reflected sunlight. In reality, Earth’s satellite was as dark as the black volcanic sands that coated the beaches of her native Hawaii.

  Under the watchful eye of the salvage tech, Jade carefully wrapped four web-like cargo slings around the exterior of orb, securing them in place with titanium carabiners. She wasn’t worried about whether the reinforced nylon straps and the metal links would be able to bear the strain of lifting something that might weigh as much as a mid-sized car, but something—a prescient memory perhaps, or maybe just a bad feeling—told her that recovering the Moon stone would not go as smoothly as Nichols believed.

  She clipped the last D-ring in place and then turned around just in time to see the salvage tech kicking toward the top of the crater. Her brow furrowed behind her mask, but after a few seconds she saw him descending once more, this time trailing a thick cable that was attached to an enormous metal hook. He wrestled the unwieldy length of braided wire into place above the sphere and then handed the hook to Jade. The cable was surprisingly stiff and she had to plant her flippered feet on the floor of the excavation in order to get the leverage required to bring the hook close enough to grab the carabiners.

  The exertion left her arms feeling rubbery. She knew that she had probably been breathing a little harder too, using up her precious supply of air. According to her watch, she still had at least twenty minutes of bottom time, and if she ran out unexpectedly, she could always ditch her gear and make an emergency free ascent, but it probably wouldn’t come to that. They were nearly finished.

  With one hand on the cable, she turned to get more instructions from the tech diver but he was no longer in the crater with her. She looked up and spotted him, a dark speck moving beneath the enormous oval of the Explorer’s hull.

  Where’s he going?

  “Where is she?” Professor said. He sounded irritated, but Dorion thought perhaps he was trying to hide his concern. “She’s five minutes overdue.”

  Dorion leaned out over the rail and peered down into the depths, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on down in the excavation. There was little to see, but Dorion had learned how to spot the rising bubble of the divers’ exhalations. “They do not appear to be out of air.”

  Professor shook his head. “She’s got a reserve, but the whole point of a reserve is that you don’t use it. You keep it, well, in reserve. For emergencies.”

  “If there are relativistic effects from the Moon stone, as I believe there must be, then time is passing more slowly for Jade. To her, it may seem like only a few minutes have elapsed.”

  Professor made a growling noise, as if acknowledging the possibility but drawing no comfort from it. Dorion knew that no further explanation was required. He was used to people looking at him blankly when he tried to explain even the simplest aspects of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, but he knew that Professor was already well versed in the subject. He still didn’t know exactly what subject Chapman was a professor of, but he was one of the few people Dorion had ever met, outside of CERN, whom he considered to be an intellectual peer.

  “Someone’s coming up,” shouted a crewman, and both Dorion and Professor hastened to the edge to watch the diver rise into view. Dorion felt a twinge of disappointment when he saw that it was the salvage technician that had gone down to supervise Jade. Barry joined them on the dive platform and helped the man climb aboard and shed his gear.

  “Where’s Jade?” Professor asked.

  “Just finishing up,” the diver said. He turned to Barry. “Now is as good a time as any.”

  Something about the man’s tone, or perhaps it was the look in his eyes, resonated with something in Dorion’s memory. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but he knew that he had glimpsed this moment before. No doubt it was part of the same vision that had led them to this spot. He had not told the others everything he had seen while holding the Shew Stone. So much of it had seemed irrelevant or just completely unimaginable, and just as with his earlier premonitions at CERN, sometimes it took a trigger to bring one of those memories to the forefront of his consciousness. That was what he was experiencing now, but only as a vague feeling of foreboding.

  Something bad was about to happen.

  He was still thinking that when he saw Barry nod to the diver. In a smooth, almost nonchalant motion, the Chief Mate hefted one of the diver’s oxygen bottles and swung it like a baseball bat. There was a loud clank as the aluminum cylinder slammed into the back of Professor’s head.

  Professor crumpled, dazed but still clinging to consciousness. Dorion felt similarly stunned by the brutal attack. He drew back, a purely reflexive movement, and looked about for some avenue of escape. No one moved to block him. Instead, Barry deftly picked up a heavy weight belt and wrapped it around Professor’s waist. The latter seemed to grasp what was happening, but his efforts to resist were slow and ineffective. Barry got the belt buckled and then gave Professor a hard shove that toppled him over the edge of the platform where he vanished with a small splash.

  Dorion ran. He sprinted up the gangplank to the main deck where Ophelia, Nichols and several other crewmen were looking on.

  “Ophelia,” he shouted. “They just—”

  His cry fell silent as he caught sight of the familiar, but almost forgotten, face of Brian Hodges, standing with the others.

  Ophelia stepped close and placed a hand on Dorion’s arm. “It’s all right, Paul. You’re in no danger.”

  Dorion gaped. His mouth work
ed but he couldn’t find any words.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Ophelia continued. “This is the way it has to be. You’ll see.”

  She turned her head toward Hodges and gave a nod.

  Hodges returned the nod and then directed his attention to Nichols. “Do it.”

  Dorion felt paralyzed. Do it? Do what? This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.

  Or was it?

  The memories of an uncertain future broke free from the place where he had, in utter disbelief, locked them away, and flooded through him.

  It was.

  The Quest Explorer’s engines roared to life, and the ocean beneath the ship began to boil.

  Jade heard a splash, not an unusual sound on a dive site, and looked up at the outline of the hull. Something was coming down. No, not something. Someone. The outline of the rapidly falling figure was distinctly man-shaped, but something looked wrong about it. The man wasn’t kicking with his fins or trying to reach the guide line. He was simply sinking, and fast. Someone had fallen overboard.

  Without a second thought, Jade let go of the cable and started swimming for the distant shape, even as she saw the current grab hold and start to pull him away. The Gulf Stream hit him like a stiff wind, dragging him away but without enough force to slow his downward plunge. She could see that the man was moving, struggling, but none of his efforts seemed to reverse his awful trajectory.

  Kicking furiously now, her fins propelling her through the water like a rocket, she could make out more detail. The man wasn’t wearing a wetsuit, definitely not a diver….

  Oh my God. It’s Professor.

  At that instant, an ominous rumble filled her ears. She glanced up just in time to see a plume of white froth erupt at the stern of the Quest Explorer.

  Disbelief and rage vied for primacy in Jade’s mind. What were they doing up there? With a diver in the water and a man overboard, they had fired up the mailbox blowers. Were they insane?

  Then, as the blast hit her like the spray from a fire hose, engulfing her in a storm of white violence, she knew that the answer was much worse.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “What are you doing?” shrieked Dorion. “They’ll be killed.”

  For just a moment, his shock at seeing Hodges, the man who had tried to murder them more times than he could remember, was overcome by the immediacy of the peril Jade and Professor were now in.

  Ophelia hushed him again. “It was a tragic accident,” she said, as if reading from a newspaper obituary. “Jade made an unscheduled dive, not realizing that we were about to start another excavation. Dr. Chapman dove in to save her and was caught in the blast.”

  For a moment, his mind refused to accept Ophelia’s complicity in what was unfolding. “You’re working with…him?”

  She gave him a sad look. “It has to be this way, Paul. It’s the only way they’ll let us continue our research.”

  Dorion still could not fully process this.

  Hodges stepped close, his face a mask of cold menace. “Dr. Dorion, whether or not you continue to live is entirely inconsequential to me. If this is going to be a problem, you can join your friends down there.”

  “Paul, don’t think about it,” Ophelia urged. “I need your help. Don’t you see this is for the best? It was a tragic accident. That’s all.”

  Dorion gaped at her. Had she actually convinced herself of the lie?

  Nichols rejoined them and spoke directly to Hodges as if they were old friends. “That’s probably long enough.”

  “Any sign of them?”

  “No. If they do pop back to the surface, that is to say if they weren’t blasted into chum or buried in sediment, both of which are pretty darn likely, it won’t be until we shut the blowers off.”

  Hodges looked skeptical. “Could they still be alive down there? Ihara has a SCUBA tank.”

  “I suppose anything is possible. She was probably already well into her reserve. If she had more than ten minutes left, I’d be very surprised.”

  “Then keep the blowers running for ten more minutes.”

  Nichols shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  You’re the boss, Dorion thought. Professor had speculated that the saboteur who had tried to kill them with the submersible might actually be a member of the crew. Now the truth was revealed; not one member of the crew, but all of them.

  Hodges had no doubt come aboard in Nassau. How did he escape the authorities in Delphi? The answer to that was obvious as well. Ophelia’s brother, a member of the deadly Norfolk Group, had seen to that, springing the assassin from jail and putting him back on the hunt, but this time with a difference; this time, his orders were to keep Ophelia alive.

  And Ophelia insisted on keeping me alive.

  Like a complex equation suddenly resolving before his eyes, Dorion saw that he really had no choice in the matter. Jade and Professor were already dead. His continued defiance would not bring them back, and would accomplish nothing more than to cut short his own life. Ophelia was right. There was work to do, amazing work. He had glimpsed the possibilities of the future as if through a window. Now it was time to open the door and step through into an amazing new world.

  “A tragic accident,” he mumbled, and then turned to Ophelia and nodded.

  Jade’s world vanished in a tumult of white noise. The force of the blowers knocked her mask askew, flooding salt water into her eyes with a fury that felt like sand paper. She bit down on the SCUBA regulator mouthpiece, knowing that if she lost it, she was dead.

  The struggle to simply stay alive consumed her thoughts, but some analytical part of her brain, far removed from the now-dominant reptilian survival instinct, demanded an explanation. Why had Explorer turned on the Jacuzzi jets? Why had Professor fallen overboard?

  Professor!

  The blowers slammed her into the seafloor. The impact drove the breath from her lungs, and despite her best efforts, she felt the regulator explode from between her teeth. She flailed frantically in the total whiteout until she managed to snag the air hose and felt along its length until she found the mouthpiece. She struggled against the weight of the water pressing down from above. Farther away from the source, it was a little less like being under a rocket taking off, more like being under a waterfall, or being caught in the spin cycle at Pipeline. She couldn’t swim, but she could crawl, and just that tiny scrap of control brought her back a step from pure panic mode.

  Professor!

  He was still out there, drowning, maybe already dead.

  She refused to accept that. And yet, unless she did something immediately, it would be true.

  She crawled forward blindly, trying to fix his last position in her mind’s eye. She had been swimming toward him when the blowers had started up, maybe twenty yards away. If the blowers had driven him to the bottom as well, then she would find him somewhere along the straight line she was now moving.

  But what if she couldn’t keep a straight line? What if, in the blast from the Explorer’s props, she had gotten turned around, or Professor had been blown in another direction? What was to stop her from wandering around in circles, like the pilots of Flight 19, mere inches from Professor as he drowned?

  If he was still alive, he had only seconds remaining. She knew that SEALs prided themselves on being able to hold their breath longer than anyone, but something told her Professor might not have gotten a chance to draw a good breath before going in.

  Don’t think about that. Just find him.

  She tried to straighten her mask, but in the relentless cascade, it was impossible to clear it of water. She gave up, visibility was nil anyway, and started crawling forward, sweeping out with her hands every few feet in hopes of snagging his inert form.

  Too bad the Shew Stone didn’t show me this, she thought mordantly. And yet, in a strange way, it had. It had shown her a future where she and Professor were preparing to make their last stand against a power-mad Ophelia Doerner. Ophelia had evidently taken that step, gone over to the dark
side, which meant that the future she had seen had to be real.

  And that meant Professor was alive and she was going to save him.

  She kept moving, kept searching, refused to acknowledge the passing seconds, every one of which took Professor closer to oblivion.

  Her groping hands found something, a rock like so many others she had found…no, wait. Her fingers were raw from searching and dragging herself across the reef. She couldn’t tell what she was touching now, but there was something different about it. She found it again, grasped it, pulled herself close.

  It had moved. Definitely not a rock.

  She was close enough now to make out a blur of color, the bronze hue of tanned skin.

  It was Professor.

  Frantic but now also hopeful, she drew herself closer, climbing his torso like a horizontal ladder over a crevasse, and found his face. Unable to tell if he was conscious—she would not allow herself to think past that—she took the regulator from her mouth and pushed it between his lips.

  Nothing.

  She let go of the mouthpiece and instead pressed her own mouth against his, exhaling her breath into him.

  He jerked, started coughing and thrashing, but she held fast, one arm wrapped around his neck, unable to do anything but ride out the spasms as his body fought to purge the water from his lungs. Then, miraculously, she felt a tapping against her back.

  She thrust the regulator at his face and this time he took it of his own accord. She felt more spasms, but after a few seconds, he was pressing the mouthpiece into her hands again. She took it, drew a shallow breath then forced herself to take another, this time deeper, filling her lungs.

  Your turn, she thought, handing it back to him.

  With each hand-off, the coughing spasms eased until he seemed to be breathing normally. Jade had let go of his neck, but now had one arm wrapped around him, hugging him close as if he were the only stable thing in her universe.

  Abruptly, the pressure holding them down eased and Jade felt her natural buoyancy return. The ominous rumble of Quest Explorer’s engines abated as well, replaced by the eerie calm of the still ocean. She looked up, half expecting to see total normalcy restored to the submerged depths, but everything remained shrouded in a dark fog of sediment.