“No surprise,” Hank said, pulling out his Nexus phone and clicking away in code. “I’ve got a strong suspicion that the boys from Strategic Explorations are all over this site. I did my homework on them. What Smith is to sadism, Chen is to diabolical genius. They make a great team. Ten to one they’ve figured out the Sheba map as well, and the Zawas boys aren’t far behind.”
Conrad stood up. “What makes you think that?”
“You’re emitting enough tracking signal to power a small radio station,” Hank said, peering down into his phone while shielding it from sunlight.
Conrad rubbed his arm with the needle tracks. “Might have shared that bit of intel with me earlier, Hank.”
“Didn’t want to make you feel conspicuous, and there’s no way to get rid of it without bleeding you dry. The signal will fade in a week or two on its own. Besides, if we can get the goons from Zawas and Strategic Explorations shooting at each other, the red-on-red conflict might save our asses.”
Conrad nodded. “And since both groups think we know more than they do, we’re safe until we get to the end. Unless, of course, this Chen guy already found the mines, in which case they’ll start shooting as soon as they see us. But that will let us know we’ve found what we’ve been looking for.”
“Exactly.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when a chopper rose from behind the volcano cone and darted across the crater.
“Looks like they spotted the Zawas brothers,” Hank said. “Better make a run for it before they spot us too.”
* * *
Conrad scrambled across a few meters of boulders and dropped into the bottom of a jagged crack in the earth — the zigzagging bridge across the abyss from the drawing in the old Mason’s journal. It was about three meters deep and getting deeper as it headed toward the impact cone.
He bolted down the dried-up runoff gorge, Hank close behind. The sandy floor was studded with oddly shaped rocks. He heard a high-pitched whine and looked up in time to see a rocket streak overhead. The distant explosion came a moment later, followed by the cackling static of automatic fire.
“Smith’s SE guys fired the rocket,” Hank reported. “Zawas and his troops fired back.”
“And we’re in the crossfire,” Conrad shouted over his shoulder. “Maybe this red-on-red idea of yours wasn’t so hot.” As he ran on, head down, his eyes picked up flashes in the riverbed below. “Hank, look. Gold dust. Hell, more than dust — nuggets!”
“C’mon Conrad, this is small-time. Let’s get to the dome before somebody wins up there.”
But Conrad was transfixed. He stumbled over a rock and fell to one knee. He picked up an egg-sized nugget. “Look at it, Hank! She didn’t even have to mine. No wonder we couldn’t find any trails, towns or mining camps around the crater.”
“I get it,” said Hank. “This isn’t a gold mine, it’s a gold farm. Now keep moving.”
They came to a pile of the odd stones that had built up near the edge of the dried riverbed. Each individual stone, upon closer inspection, vaguely resembled a foot or a hand. Cumulatively, they looked like a pile of body parts or shattered sculptures.
Conrad, surprised at his revulsion, spoke like a scientist. “Human anatomical shapes.”
“Statues?” Hank asked.
“No.” Conrad reached down and picked up a piece, which crumbled in his hand. “I’ve never seen statues like this before. Not made of such a fragile substance. How could you sculpt it?”
Hank carefully studied a chunk of it. “The rock isn’t indigenous to the area. Must have been brought in.”
“It wasn’t brought in,” Conrad said. “It walked in. These are fossilized somehow, like the bodies at Pompeii after the volcano erupted.” He held up what appeared to be a horribly mutated hand with a reptilian look to it and webbing between the fingers. “What the hell could do that to a living thing?”
“It's a transmutation,” Hank said flatly.
Conrad said, “Well, whatever morphed this poor bastard happened while he was alive.”
“Maybe it was the pulverizing force of your Great Flood,” Hank said.
Conrad wasn’t sure if Hank was being serious or poking fun.
“Not all of the water would have returned to the oceans,” Hank went on. “Some it had to go somewhere else. Like this crater and gorge, flowing into the deep recesses of the earth like a massive drain.”
Conrad could see it. “The countless bodies of an entire civilization.”
“Yeah,” said Hank. “Had to wash away somewhere.”
The characteristic whoosh of a hand-held surface-to-air missile split the air like the amplified sound of duct tape ripping.
“QW-1 infrared homing missile from the sound of it,” Hank reported. “Well within its five-kilometer range and below its four-kilometer ceiling.”
The first exploding sound was a sonic boom that shook the pile of stones before them, sending some bouncing to the ground where they shattered.
Then came another explosion, followed by the chunky thwack of dying machinery and the growl of a helicopter engine. A shiny object whirled out of control about ten meters overhead, and Conrad looked up to see the contorted face of the screaming pilot for just an instant before he disappeared and a nearby blast concussed the air.
A breath of flame licked over the top of the natural trench as Conrad raced Hank to the impact dome.
“This is it,” Conrad said, breathing hard. “What do you think we are going to find in there? Interior Petra? Lebeaux? My antediluvian Pillars of Creation?”
Hank said, “Blofeld’s lair in ‘You Only Live Twice.’”
Conrad stared at Hank. His deadpan humor seemed to come out at the strangest moments. “You sure you have a PhD?”
“I’m sure,” Hank said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Hank never expected to march into the Queen of Sheba’s city through a giant “gate of the gods” like those in Nimrod or Babylon with winged griffins. But he also didn’t think that he and Conrad would have to slither on their stomachs through a culvert into the pit of hell.
Hank dropped through the pitch black into a much larger space beneath the crater than he had imagined. Rappelling down his line, he looked up at the tiny hole he and Conrad had squeezed through. It was a pinprick of light now, a remote star in a cold universe.
“This is humongous,” Conrad whispered from the void. “It would take a massive amount of water to hollow out this much earth. Billions upon billions of gallons over many years. I’d hate to be down here in a monsoon.”
“Why?” Hank asked.
“Because this probably functions like some gigantic underground reservoir. You know, like the man-made ones under Hong Kong that collect all the runoff when hurricanes hit. That’s how they fare better with storm surges than Manhattan, which doesn’t have any. Can you imagine what’s collected at the bottom of this?”
“Yeah,” said Hank. “All the sins of the world, if your antediluvian theories are true.”
All the way down to the bottom of the pit, Hank scanned for any signs of Strategic Explorations’ men. But he found nothing.
“Where do you think they went?” Conrad said, as if reading his mind.
“Probably deeper into the mine,” Hank said, switching on his brights.
Metallic stalactites hung from everywhere in perfect natural elegance. It was like they were standing in the St. Peter’s Basilica of Nature, all the way down to the gilding on the columns. The black rock and gold ore together made the cavern a magnificent shrine.
“Rare earth minerals,” Conrad said in awe as he studied the protuberances.
“Something transmuted the living rock into liquid metal. I’m entering this as a prime candidate for the Queen of Sheba’s gold mines, AKA what history commonly mislabels King Solomon’s mines.”
“Or the inspiration for hell.” Conrad was pointing to a metal-splattered petro-form, just like the pile of anthropomorphic stones they had seen at the
bottom of the gorge. “Maybe what transmutes this black ore into gold also transmutes humans.”
That would be unfortunate, Hank thought. But it could explain a lot about the Queen of Sheba.
Hank and Conrad unclipped from their rappelling rigs and set out on foot to search the cavern. The walls were far beyond the reach of their puny lights, and all Hank could hear besides their steps was something like a whisper in the still air. It almost felt like the crater itself was breathing.
“Over here,” Conrad’s voice called out, breaking the silence.
“Keep it down,” Hank told him when he found him by a cavern wall. The wall was blackened with some sort of dank substance, sticky and decaying, refusing to reflect almost any light at all.
Conrad lowered his voice and said, “I’ve been in a lot of tombs and caves in my time, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Hank looked closely at the blackened goo that coated everything down here. It wasn’t oil or soot. It was something else, and it was trickling down the walls and seeping up from the rock floor.
“Eureka, Hank.” Conrad’s light hit on something further down the wall — a temple façade carved right into the rock.
Hank followed the wall to two thick and brooding pillars. The pillars held up a massive arch, through which he could see a small rotunda and two tunnels that presumably led to the mines.
“Your Pillars of Creation, Conrad?”
“No,” Conrad said, bathing the ebony columns with light. “These have no inscriptions. But maybe we’ll find them down below. I think we’ve found your ingress to the Queen of Sheba’s mines.”
Hank noticed huge gold hinges along the sides of the arch. “You see this, Conrad? I think there were doors here once.”
“Giant doors.” Conrad pointed his light to a massive bronze bolt on the ground just beyond the pillars. “Look at the size of that thing. It’s as thick as a tree. Must have been used to the lock the doors, to keep people out of the mines.”
Bending down, Hank wrapped both hands around the bolt as best he could and tried to lift it. But it wouldn’t budge. “This thing weighs a ton. I can only imagine the doors.” Hank then stood up and looked at the big bolt slider hole in the wall. An epiphany hit him, and it wasn’t a terribly pleasant one.
The doors that once stood here weren’t designed to keep something out. They were here to keep something in.
Conrad had already passed under the archway into the small rotunda beyond, and Hank decided to keep his epiphany to himself for now as they confronted the choice of two tunnels before them.
“Lady or the tiger, Hank?”
Hank looked at the tunnel to their left. It was a jagged crack, barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through. The tunnel to their right, on the other hand, was wide and smooth, the dirt packed with fresh bootprints.
The choice had been made for them.
“They beat us to the mines, Conrad.”
“The Queen of Sheba’s miners, or your friends Smith and Chen from Strategic Explorations?”
“Probably both. They’ll be waiting. It’s going to be ugly. Check your weapons.”
“Wait,” Conrad told him, and pointed his light up at a carving above the tunnel. “Hebrew inscriptions.”
“Can you read them, or do we need your girlfriend Sister Serghetti?”
“I don’t need her for this.” Conrad frowned. “It’s from Solomon, King of Israel.”
“What does it say?”
Conrad read it aloud. “Let us search out and examine ourselves, and turn back to the Lord.”
Hank saw something wrong on Conrad’s face. “What is it?”
“This is a verse in the Book of Lamentations, mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple,” Conrad said. “But Lamentations was written more than three centuries after the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. So this warning here is either lamenting something that won’t happen for hundreds of years, or it’s referring to something in the past that we don’t know about. Something that happened to the Queen of Sheba and her people.”
“Whatever, it’s a warning,” Hank said, unconcerned. “A monster myth. Like that sign over the gates of hell in Dante’s poem that says ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’”
“Something like that, Hank.”
Hank put on a brave face and grinned. “Then what are we waiting for? If we’re lucky, Smith and his goons are already extra crispy, and all the gold and XM here are ours for the taking.”
CHAPTER 15
As they made their way down the big tunnel, weapons at the ready, Conrad could practically hear the sweet, soothing voice of Serena Serghetti in his head, as if she were teaching a school of African children in God’s great outdoors.
Enter through the narrow gate, little ones. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
“Hank, maybe we’ve made a mistake,” he started to say when Hank cut him off.
“Shhh. Listen.”
There was a woman’s shriek in the distance, from somewhere deep and far below.
Hank bolted, and Conrad had to run to keep up with him, slaloming through shiny metal stalagmites to the lip of a gallery that spiraled down the side wall of an even larger subterranean structure.
Conrad couldn’t believe what he saw down below. He glanced over at Hank, who saw it too. Hank’s lips were moving, but if he said anything, Conrad didn’t hear him. He didn’t need to. Hank’s expression in the ghastly light was all he needed to see. Words could not have been more articulate.
Several stories below was some kind of cosmic lava pool. It reminded Conrad of the crater at Mount Nyiragongo, except it glowed an unnatural fluorescent purplish-red and crackled with shocks of energy.
Conrad asked in a hushed tone, “Is that the classified stuff you weren’t supposed to talk about?”
“Dark XM… Chaotic matter… Pick your name,” Hank said. “It’s only been theory until now. I saw it in Afghanistan, but I had no idea what it was at the time.”
Now and again a tesla-like bolt would streak out of the throbbing mass, and in the toxic light they saw what appeared to be demonic shapes at the side of the pool.
Devil figures.
“What the hell?” Conrad asked.
Hank replied, “You got that right.”
“What are those things?”
“Mercs from Strategic Explorations,” Hank told him. “They’re kitted out in the latest in extremo-ware. I’m guessing the tall one is Smith and the short one is Chen. If you get a chance to kill them, do it. Apparently, you get a drive-on right through the pearly gates to the top level of heaven.”
Conrad could see how the asbestos clean suits, oxygen hooks and guns at the waists and hanging off the shoulders conspired to make the mercs look more mythological than human.
Now, through the strobing light, Conrad watched in horror as the tall one Hank said was Antoine Smith gestured to two of his guards, who pushed a helpless African woman, hands tied and legs flailing, into the pulsating pool.
“Did you see that?” Conrad almost shouted in Hank’s ear. “Who was that woman? Where did they nab her?”
Hank shook his head. “Some villager from somewhere.”
Conrad said, “It almost looked like a sacrifice.”
“Yeah, to science,” Hank said. “They’re testing the effects of dark XM on humans, and we’ve already seen what that looks like.”
Conrad looked down at the bubbling cauldron. For a ghastly moment, the woman’s shape flashed green in the sludge, and then a wispy vapor rose upward like a spectre.
Conrad trained his M16. “Those bastards die.”
“Not yet,” Hank cautioned. “If you miss, they get us. They get us, they get out of here with dark XM. Ergo, end of world. So let’s pick our shots carefully.”
At that moment, the short guy — Chen — took out his phone and began tapping intently on it. His face glowed in blue and green.
“He’s making a call?” Conrad said. “Can he even do that down here? What do you think, pizza delivery or instructions from Dr. Evil?”
“No, he’s opening the Ingress app,” Hank said, pulling out his Nexus.
“More games?”
“This ain’t no game, Conrad. Take cover. When he resonates that thing, it could go bad.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t understand how or why it works, but I do understand what’s about to happen,” Hank explained. “We’re in an Anomaly.”
“A what?”
“A transdimensional vortex where exotic matter meets chaotic matter. In nature they’re kept apart. Think of it as dry ice hitting water. Look.”
Conrad watched as a glowing shield enveloped Chen and Smith at the edge of the black lake.
“You’re seeing something that’s usually visible only to scientific instruments like the Ingress scanner,” Hank told him, like this freak show was some great honor.
Chen deployed a resonator. The dark XM lava pool erupted. Dark matter rose into the air, grasping to take living form. Order and disorder tore at each other. For a brief instant, large tentacles of chaotic matter lashed out everywhere, while lightning blasted from the resonator.
Small clusters of XM drifted from the portal and burst in the air, leaving glowing flecks of plasma on the rotunda and wall. A flying drop sizzled past Hank, who watched as the spattered substance disappeared, leaving a smudge of gold.
So the dark XM creates the gold. We found the philosopher’s stone.
“Get ready for a fight, Conrad. They’re about to find out that we’re here.”
CHAPTER 16
Before Conrad could hear Hank’s last word, a shockwave rocked the caverns. Conrad ducked for cover as the great XM pool erupted, its limbs of dark energy writhing. Exotic goo whipped out from the chaos, splattering him across the face. He expected it to burn like acid, but it didn’t. It simply tingled. Then he felt something like a pebble in his mouth and spit it out into his hand.
It was a tooth.
It had fallen out. He felt another spasm in his gums, and now a second tooth fell out, dropping loosely to the ground.
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