Ruins

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “The gods punished Jappan for his indiscretion by changing him into a scorpion. From shame at his failure, Jappan hid under the stone where he had fallen from grace. But the gods wanted to rub it in, so they brought Jappan’s wife to the stone, told her everything about his downfall, and turned her into a scorpion, too.”

  He smiled wistfully at Scully, still hiding something behind his back. “But it’s a romantic story after all. Jappan’s wife, as a scorpion, ran under the rock to join her husband, where they had lots of little baby scorpions.”

  Vladimir Rubicon looked up at him, smiling. “Wonderful, Agent Mulder. You should, uh, volunteer to work at the museum, just like I do.”

  Scully shifted her position on the fallen tree, then brushed crumbs from her khaki vest. “Interesting, Mulder—but why tell that story now?”

  He brought his hand from behind his back, holding out the ugly smashed remnants of an immense black scorpion, its many-jointed legs dangling in jagged directions. “Because I found this under your pillow.”

  12

  Yucatán jungle

  Saturday, early morning, exact time

  unknown

  As they prepared to break camp in the morning, Mulder noticed that his watch had stopped. His first automatic thought was that sometime in the night their group had experienced an unexplained alien encounter. Then he realized that the time stoppage probably had more to do with the jungle muck than any extraterrestrial phenomena.

  Shucking his outer layer of wet and dirty clothes, he pulled on another set that would get just as filthy during the day’s trek. Mulder decided to wear his New York Knicks T-shirt, the one with the torn sleeve, since it didn’t matter if it stained or tattered further.

  Scully emerged from her tent, slapping at bug bites, her eyes droopy and half-closed from too little sleep.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” Mulder said.

  “I’m considering being reassigned to the Records Section,” she said, yawning and stretching. “At least those people have a clean, dry office and a vending machine down the hall.”

  She took a drink from her canteen, then dribbled water in the palm of her hand, splashing it on her face, rubbing it across her eyes. She blinked until her eyes cleared up, then waved away a cloud of mosquitoes. “I never truly appreciated the wonders of a bug-free work environment.”

  Fernando Aguilar stood by a tree, staring into a small shaving mirror. He held a straight razor in one hand. His ocelot-skin cap dangled from a broken branch within arm’s reach. He turned around to grin at them, his cheeks soaped up. “Buenos días, amigos,” he said, then went back to stroking his cheeks with the blade, his eyes half closed with pleasure. “Nothing like a good shave in the morning to make one feel clean and ready for the day, eh?”

  He flicked soapy stubble off the razor’s end with the precision of a professional knife thrower, splattering a white pattern across the ferns. “A secret, Señor Mulder: I mix my soap with bug repellent. It seems to help.”

  “Maybe I’ll try that,” Mulder said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Which way to the nearest shower?”

  Aguilar laughed, a loud, thin sound that reminded Mulder of the squabbling cries of howler monkeys that had kept him awake through the night.

  The local workers took down the camp, rolling up clothes and supplies into duffel bags, knocking down the tents and folding them into compact packages. They moved with remarkable speed, packed up and ready to go in no time.

  Vladimir Rubicon bustled about, pacing impatiently as he munched from a small bag of raisins. “Shouldn’t we be off soon?” Mulder saw bloodshot patterns around the old archaeologist’s bright blue eyes and knew that Rubicon hadn’t slept well, though he was apparently accustomed to such conditions.

  Aguilar finished shaving and wiped his now-glistening face with a bandanna, which he tucked into his pocket. He spun the ocelot-skin cap on one finger, showing off, then settled it firmly on his head. “You are right, Señor Rubicon—we should be off to find your daughter. It’s a long walk yet, but if we keep up a good pace, we can reach Xitaclan before nightfall tomorrow.”

  They set off again through the jungle. The quiet and solemn locals took the lead, hacking with their machetes, with Aguilar right behind to guide them.

  A flock of butterflies, a cloud of bright color and fluttering wings, burst from a clear pool beside a fallen tree. They looked like a spray of jewels flashing into the air, as bright as the numerous brilliant orchids that dotted the trees around them.

  Snakes dangled from branches, looking at them with cold eyes. Mulder wished he had taken more time to study the poisonous species in Central America. For safety reasons, he chose to avoid all the snakes.

  They had been on their way for no more than an hour before rain began to sheet down, warm and oddly oily. Rivulets trickled and pattered like streams from the scooped banana leaves, washing away spiders, insects, and caterpillars from above. The wet air seemed ready to burst with its newly released lush scents.

  Aguilar pinched the brim of his spotted hat so the water ran off in a spout. His wet ponytail dangled like a limp rag between his shoulder blades. He flashed a grin at Mulder. “You asked for the showers, Señor. It seems we have found them, eh?”

  Wet leaves, moss, and rotted vegetation clung to them. Mulder looked at Scully and Rubicon, whose clothes were spattered with green streaks, brown smears of mud, and clinging yellowed fern leaves. “We’ve certainly managed to camouflage ourselves,” he said.

  “Is that what we were trying to do?” Scully answered, brushing her khaki pants. Ever-present mosquitoes swarmed around her face.

  “I certainly wouldn’t be inspired to build towering temples and pyramids in an environment like this,” Mulder said. “It’s amazing to me that the Maya could have created such an enormous civilization here.”

  “At least the temples would have been dry inside,” Scully said, flinging water from her hair.

  Rubicon’s face showed a dreamy look. “Human ingenuity always surprises us when we look back through history. It would be so wonderful just to have five minutes in the past to ask, ‘Why did you do this?’ But we have to make do with tiny clues. An archaeologist must be like a detective—uh, an FBI agent of the past, to unravel mysteries where the suspects and the victims turned to dust a thousand years before any of us were born.”

  “I was impressed with the scientific and astronomical achievements the Maya made,” Mulder said, “though some people think their civilization may have had some help.”

  “Help?” Rubicon asked, distractedly pushing a leafy frond away from his face. “Uh, what kind of help do you mean?”

  Mulder took a deep breath. “According to Maya legend, their gods told them the Earth was round—quite an observation from a primitive people. They apparently knew of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which weren’t discovered by Western astronomers until around the nineteenth century. Must have had great eyesight, considering they had no telescopes.

  “The Maya also determined the Earth’s year to within one five-thousandth of its actual value, and they knew the exact length of the Venusian year. They calculated other astronomical cycles out to a span of about sixty-four million years.”

  “Yes, the Maya were fascinated by time,” Rubicon said, not rising to the bait. “Obsessed with it.”

  “Mulder,” Scully said, “you’re not going to suggest—”

  He swatted away a biting fly. “If you look at some of their carvings, Scully, you’ll see figures that are unmistakable—a towering form sitting in what has to be a control chair, just like an astronaut in the shuttle cockpit. Fire and smoke trail from the vehicle.”

  Amused, Rubicon countered with a story of his own. “Ah, yes. ‘Chariots of the Gods.’ Interesting speculations. I’m required to know all such tales and legends. Some of the stories are, uh, quite amazing. This is one of my favorites—you know that Quetzalcoatl, or Kukulkan as the Maya called him, was the god of knowledge and wisdom?”

&
nbsp; “Yes,” Mulder said, “he supposedly came down from the stars.”

  “Uh, supposedly,” Rubicon said. “Now, Kukulkan’s enemy was Tezcatlipoca, whose mission in life was to sow discord.” Rubicon slipped his glasses on his nose, though they were perfectly useless in the jungle rain. It seemed to be a habit of his, a required action for the telling of a story.

  “Tezcatlipoca came to an important festival disguised as a handsome man and called attention to himself by dancing and singing a magic song. The people were so captivated that a multitude began imitating his dance—uh, sort of like the Pied Piper. He led them all onto a bridge, which collapsed under their weight. Many people were hurled into the river far below, where they were changed into stones.”

  Rubicon grinned. “In another city Tezcatlipoca appeared with a puppet magically dancing on his hand. In their wonder to see this miracle, the people crowded so close that many of them suffocated. Then, pretending to be dejected at the pain and grief he had caused, Tezcatlipoca insisted that the people should stone him to death because of the harm he had done. So they did.

  “But as Tezcatlipoca’s corpse rotted, it gave off such a dreadful stench that many died from smelling it. At last, in sort of a commando mission, a series of brave heroes, one after another, succeeded in dragging the body out of town, like a relay race with a stinking cadaver, until finally their city was free of the pestilence.”

  They continued to slog along through the jungle. Rubicon shrugged his bony shoulders. “They’re all just legends anyway,” he said. “It’s up to us to listen to the stories and learn what we can from them. I’m not going to tell you which to believe.”

  “Everybody else seems to,” Mulder said quietly, but he did not bring up the subject of ancient astronauts again that day.

  13

  The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia

  Saturday, 1:03 P.M.

  Striding down the corridor of the East Wing of the Pentagon, Major Willis Jakes fell into his typical routine of spotting landmarks, memorizing the route so he could trace his path back under any circumstances.

  Normally he would have noted a broken tree, a rock out-cropping, or a gully in the barren highlands of Afghanistan, tromping through the fever-infested swamps of Southeast Asia, slipping into Kurdish territory in the northern mountains of Iran. Now, though, instead of wearing a camouflage outfit or a survival suit bristling with small weapons and resources, Major Jakes sported his full military dress uniform, neatly pressed and smelling of laundry detergent.

  Despite the amenities of civilization, he felt less comfortable this way.

  The halls of the Pentagon provided as difficult a challenge as any highland wilderness, though, because each corridor in the labyrinthine headquarters was symmetric and unmemorable. The giant building’s geometric shape made it easy to become disoriented and lost. One could emerge from a familiar-looking doorway out to a parking lot…only to find oneself on the wrong side of the immense fortress.

  But Major Jakes did not find it an insurmountable tactical obstacle. He looked at the succession of office doors, most of them closed, the interior lights shut off. On Saturday the Pentagon offices closed down, the civil servants and military personnel sent home for their routine weekend activities. Normal civilians worked their regular forty-hour weeks, filling out the appropriate forms, passing them from office to office for the appropriate stamps, signatures, and file copies.

  But for a career officer like Major Willis Jakes, the civilian timeclock meant nothing. He did not punch in or punch out when he went to work. His services were available on demand, all day long, all year long, whenever duty might call. He took his vacation and his relaxation time when circumstances permitted. He would have had it no other way.

  The fact that he had been called here on a Saturday for a high-level briefing meant that an important mission must be in the works. Before long, Jakes would find himself in some other far-flung corner of the world, performing another series of tasks clearly defined by his superiors. Serving rules he had sworn by, the major unquestioningly took actions his country would almost certainly deny.

  Jakes was tall and lean, clean-shaven, his skin the color of mahogany from deep Egyptian blood. His features were angular and Semitic, never rounded and soft.

  Jakes followed the office numbers to the end of the corridor and turned left, passing door after door until he reached another darkened room, nondescript, closed—apparently as vacant as the other rooms. He did not hesitate, did not double-check the number. He knew he was right.

  He precisely rapped three times on the wire-reinforced glass window. The name on the door said “A. G. Pym, Narratives and Records.” In the regular day-to-day activities of the Pentagon, Major Jakes doubted other workers ever called to visit the office of Mr. Pym.

  The door opened from inside, and a man in a dark suit stood back in the shadows. Jakes stepped into the dim room. His expression remained stony, emotionless—but his mind spun at hyperspeed, seeing details, sensing options, scanning for threats.

  “Identify yourself,” the suited man said, his voice disembodied in the shadows.

  “Major Willis Jakes,” he answered.

  “Yes, Major,” the shadowy man answered, remaining out of sight. He extended his hand, holding a silver key. “Use this to unlock that door in the rear of the office,” he said. “Take the key and close the door behind you. It will lock by itself. The others are waiting for you. The briefing is about to begin.”

  Major Jakes didn’t thank him, simply followed the instructions, opening the back door to find a half-lit conference room. Banks of fluorescent lights alternately flickered white or remained dark. At one end of the wall hung a white projection screen.

  Three men dressed in suits and ties sat in chairs, while another man fiddled with the carousel of a slide projector. Major Jakes had never seen any of the men before, nor did he expect ever to see them again.

  A man in a charcoal-gray suit with wire-rimmed glasses said, “Welcome, Major Jakes. Right on time. Would you care for some coffee?” He gestured to an urn in the back of the room.

  “No, sir,” Jakes said.

  Another man with a maroon tie and a jowly face said, “We have some Danishes, if you’d like those.”

  “No, thank you,” Jakes answered the man.

  “Okay, we’re ready, then.” A young man fiddled with the projector. A glare of yellow-gold light splashed in a square across the screen, unfocused.

  While curiosity was not part of his duty, sharp attention to details and an unfailing memory remained crucial to his work.

  The last man, who had steel-gray hair and a white dress shirt, leaned back in his chair, rumpling the brown suit jacket draped behind him. “Show the first slide,” he said.

  “Major Jakes, please pay attention,” said the man with the maroon tie. “All of these details may be important.”

  The slide-projector operator focused quickly to show a satellite image of a dense jungle, in the middle of which a circular area had been absolutely flattened, a crater excavated with almost perfect symmetry. The ground around it looked like slag, glassy and molten, as if someone had stubbed out a gigantic cigarette there.

  “This used to be a private ranch in Mexico. Do you have any idea what might have caused this, Major Jakes?” the man in the charcoal suit asked.

  “A daisy cutter?” Jakes suggested, citing one of the fragmentation bombs used to knock down trees in the jungles for the purpose of clearing helicopter landing pads. “Or a napalm burst?”

  “Neither,” said the man with steel-gray hair. “The scale is half a kilometer in diameter. Our seismic sensors revealed a sharp pulse, and our distant radiation detectors pinpointed a significant rise in residual radioactivity.”

  Major Jakes perked up. “Are you suggesting this is the result of a small nuclear strike?”

  “We can think of no other explanation,” the second man said, straightening his maroon tie. “A tactical nuclear device, such as an atomic artil
lery shell, could provide such a precise yield. This type of ordnance was recently developed by our nation and, we presume, by the Soviets, in the final years of the Cold War.”

  “But who could have used such a weapon in Central America, sir? What would have been the provocation?”

  The man with steel-gray hair, who seemed to be the leader of the meeting, laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back against his suit jacket. “There is no small amount of political turmoil in this portion of the Yucatán. We know of numerous terrorist acts, minor squabbles with a small group of militant separatists—but we feel that an action such as this would be beyond their meager capabilities. There are also many rival drug lords in the area whose tactic of choice has been to eliminate their rivals through the use of assassination—car bombs and the like.”

  “This is no car bomb, sir,” Major Jakes pointed out.

  “Indeed not,” said the man in the charcoal suit. “Next slide, please.”

  The slide-projector operator clicked to a higher-resolution image that showed the trees knocked down, the edge of the crater almost perfectly circular, as if a fireball had arisen so quickly that it vaporized the forest, turned the ground to glass, and then faded before the surrounding forest fires could propagate.

  “Our working assumption is that at least one and possibly many more of these tactical nuclear warheads have trickled out following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. In the chaos of the breakup of the socialist republics, many of the sovereign states laid claim to the nuclear stockpiles left behind by the central Communist government. Many of those warheads have been…misplaced. That ordnance has been on the open market for international thugs and terrorists. It’s the only thing we know of that could have come close to that kind of high-energy devastation. Such a device could have come from Cuba, for instance, across the Caribbean Sea to the Yucatán Peninsula, and from there to the drug lords in this area of Mexico.”