Oracle

by David Wood

  She felt Professor tapping her again. She could just make out his face, only an inch or two from his. He brought his hand close and pointed up. What was he trying to tell her? Swim back to the surface?

  No. Someone had just tried to kill them again. Not just a lone saboteur, but someone who could command the Explorer’s crew to throw Professor over and fire up the blowers. Whoever was behind it probably thought they had succeeded, that both Jade and Professor were dead. Better to let them go on thinking it.

  So what was he trying to say?

  He opened his mouth and allowed a single globule of air to escape. As it rose into the cloud, he pointed at it.

  Bubbles.

  With the blowers off, their air bubbles would rise to the surface where a keen-eyed lookout might divine their significance.

  Hoping that she understood what he wanted, she shrugged out of the tank harness and closed the valve on the manifold, shutting off the flow of air. Professor nodded, then pointed up again.

  Duh. Of course we have to go up. But what about people up there waiting to kill us?

  He must have heard what she was thinking, or read the question on her face, because he shrugged.

  One thing at a time.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  While half the crew scanned the murky water for any trace of Professor and Jade, the rest set about preparing for the recovery of the Moon stone. Dorion watched, not knowing whether to hope that the two lost souls would reappear. Hodges had insisted on running the engines for the full ten minutes of air that might be left in Jade’s tank, and once that was gone, they would certainly drown. But if, as Dorion suspected, time passed more slowly in close proximity to the Moon stone, then what seemed like ten minutes on the surface might only be one or two minutes on the bottom. But even if Jade and Professor did not drown, Hodges was waiting with an assault rifle from the ship’s small arms locker, ready to pick off anyone who surfaced.

  “It will take about twenty minutes for this cloud to dissipate,” Nichols said. “But the package is already secured to the cable. Once it clears, we can send a diver down and hook up a floatation bag. Then we can bring it up.”

  Hodges did not look particularly pleased with this assessment. Dorion recalled that the man’s mission in life was to destroy objects like the Moon stone, not bring them into the daylight. He was faintly surprised to hear Hodges say, “I don’t want to wait that long. Get your diver in the water now. He can follow the cable, so visibility isn’t a problem. I want to be underway within the hour.”

  Nichols looked ready to argue, but evidently thought better of it. He turned away to give the orders.

  “This is really happening, Paul,” Ophelia said, breathless with anticipation. “All our years of searching have finally brought us here. The power to see the future will be in my hands. I will be the new oracle, and I will use my sight to reshape the world.”

  Dorion gave a glum nod. He understood her eagerness, indeed he had felt the same way for many years, hoping, though perhaps never really believing that they would actually find what they sought. Now that it was almost in hand, and at an unimaginable price, he found himself unable to share her excitement.

  But this is the future I saw.

  He recalled the old story of Croesus, who had been told by the oracle of Delphi that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. When he was defeated in battle, he returned and demanded to know why the oracle had misled him. ‘A great empire was destroyed,’ the oracle had replied. ‘Your own.’ The story was part of the recorded history of Delphi, but it read like a parable. Knowledge of the future was a double-bladed sword, fire in the hands of a child. Worse, it was a mirror, revealing more about the desires of the person who looked for it, than certain knowledge of what was to come. Desire was the force that shaped the future, not dark matter. Ophelia would have the future she craved, regardless of whether she possessed the Moon stone.

  And what of me? What will my future be?

  That was something the Shew Stone had not shown him.

  It seemed only a minute or two had passed when the divers returned, their task accomplished. Even Nichols voiced amazement at how quickly they had finished, but Hodges curtailed the discussion with a terse growl. “Get on with it.”

  Nichols gave the order to start the compressors.

  “How long will this take?” asked Hodges.

  “That depends on how heavy the package is. We probably won’t need to fully inflate the tube to see some results. Might just be a minute or two.”

  Curious in spite of himself, Dorion moved back to the rail and peered down into the murky water, straining for some glimpse of the object that, even without fully realizing it, he had been searching for ever since that fateful day at CERN. The Moon stone. The original Omphalos.

  He had never stopped to think about its origin. He felt quite certain that the spherical shape facilitated the accumulation of dark matter particles, pulling them in the way a black hole draws in material to increase its mass, but where had the process begun? Was it a natural occurrence, perhaps a small concentration that had been present when the earth’s crust had formed? That was unlikely; at its formation, the earth would have been molten and anything as massive as the sphere would have promptly sunk to the earth’s core. Something from a meteorite perhaps; that made more sense. The ancients of Mycenae had recognized something special about the stone globe and venerated it without really understanding what made it powerful. Perhaps they had not been the first; perhaps it had been found somewhere else, moving around the ancient world from one conquering kingdom to the next.

  I wonder if Jade had a theory about that.

  “What’s happening?” Ophelia’s gasp brought him back to the moment.

  He expected to see the water boiling with air bubbles bleeding off the flotation bags or perhaps even glimpse enormous bladders rising into view through the silty water, but what he saw instead defied easy explanation. The water at the rear of the ship had risen up into a hump, like a wave or a swell, building but not breaking. The area of disturbance was only about fifty feet across, but already high enough that it had formed a sloping hill of water. Held in place by its anchors, the Explorer could not slide down the face of the disturbance, so instead the entire ship canted forward, nose pointing downslope. Dorion had to clutch at the rail to keep from tumbling across the deck.

  Hodges rounded on Nichols. “What’s happening?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this.” He stabbed a finger at Dorion. “Ask him. He’s the expert.”

  Dorion shook his head, but even as he did, he realized that perhaps he did know. “When Alvaro and Perez removed the stone from Teotihuacan, it triggered an earthquake that collapsed the tunnel and trapped Perez.”

  “So?”

  “That earthquake may have been caused by a gravitational anomaly. The dark matter field created by the sphere is just strong enough that any attempt to move it upsets the local gravity.”

  Nichols was dubious. “You’re saying that little ball of rock can create earthquakes?”

  “Or in this case, a tidal event. It is pulling the water toward it, causing a localized high tide.”

  “We caused it, just by trying to move the stone?” said Ophelia. “How is that possible?”

  “The orb has been sitting undisturbed for centuries, at equilibrium with its environment. If you have scales that are perfectly balanced, even a tiny grain of sand can upset the balance.”

  “Is it going to get worse?” Hodges asked.

  Dorion spread his hands. “I cannot say. I have never seen anything like this.”

  As if he had been eavesdropping, Lee staggered down the stairs from the bridge cursing loudly and, if Dorion was not mistaken, a little drunkenly as well. “What are you doing to my ship?”

  “It’s fine, Spencer,” Nichols said, though he sounded unconvinced of that himself. “Just an unexpected swell.”

  “The hell you say.”

  Hodge
s echoed the captain’s reservations. “If this keeps up, cut the damn thing loose. We’ll destroy it with explosives and that will be the end of that.”

  “No!” Ophelia almost screamed the denial. Dorion could not recall her ever sounding quite so desperate. “You must not. I forbid it.”

  Hodges appeared unimpressed by her outburst, and several of the crewman seemed poised to do as he had instructed, but before anyone could move, something erupted from the center of watery hill. Dorion spotted something that looked like an enormous black inner tube on the crest of the tidal bulge, and then, as if breaking through had somehow pierced an invisible membrane holding its shape, the water simply fell back into the ocean.

  The Explorer’s decks heaved back and forth as the ship strained against its anchors. Hodges cast a baleful glare in Ophelia’s direction, but after a few more seconds, the turbulence seemed to abate and everyone aboard the research vessel could clearly see the flotation airbag bobbing on the surface less than a hundred feet off the stern.

  “Reel it in,” shouted Nichols. “We’ve got it now.”

  There was a mechanical whirring as the slack was taken out of the lift cable, then without warning the deck lurched beneath Dorion’s feet. The cable hummed and the entire structure of the boom crane began to groan in protest.

  “It’s okay,” Nichols said. “This is normal.”

  Dorion detected a note of uncertainty in the man’s tone, as if his assurance was as much for himself as the rest of them. The noise grew louder, supplemented by the whine of the cable winch straining against the load, but at the end of the line, the giant pillow-shape of the flotation bag was rising perceptibly. After a few seconds, it cleared the wave tops and through the curtain of runoff, Dorion could see, nestled in the embrace of the cargo slings, a spherical object. The titanic tug-of-war continued, the crane creaking as if on the verge of collapse, the Moon stone rising inch by grudging inch higher above the ocean’s surface.

  “It’s a bit heavier than I thought it would be,” Nichols muttered, sounding even less confident than before.

  Dorion’s concerns however were easing by degrees. Every inch won would greatly reduce the overall load on the cable, decreasing the likelihood that it would snap. The possibility of some other catastrophic failure remained, but if the crane’s engineers had done their job correctly, the cable would be intentionally designed to fail before the framework supporting it gave way.

  The struggle reached a tipping point, figuratively speaking, when the load was brought above the level of the Quest Explorer’s main deck. Nichols gave the order to swing the boom over the deck and the anxious spectators cleared out of the way as the Moon stone was brought aboard the ship.

  The crane operator reversed the direction of the winch but despite the fact that the cable was being paid out in miniscule increments, when the burden finally touched the deck, there was a resounding thump, like the impact of a car crash.

  Dorion realized he had been holding his breath, and let it out in a long sigh. It was done. All the years of searching, all the sacrifice, had been leading him to this moment. For better or worse, they had found the prize. He glanced over at Ophelia and saw the same emotion writ large in her reverent gaze. Then, a flash of sunlight hit his face, momentarily blinding him. He raised a hand to shade his eyes, and saw that the sun was low in the western sky, its daily journey through the heavens nearly complete.

  That’s odd. Where did the day go?

  Jade’s last breath burned in her lungs as, clinging to Professor’s arm, they cautiously ascended through the gloomy waters toward what she hoped was the underside of the Quest Explorer’s hull. If they surfaced out in the open, they would be instantly visible to whoever had just tried to kill them, and she was pretty sure that was everyone on the ship’s crew.

  She followed Professor’s lead, trusting his combat-tested instincts to guide them to where they needed to be. Although she was an experienced diver, and had dealt with more than her share of sticky situations, this was definitely his area of expertise, which became evident when Jade glimpsed the dark outline of the hull looming overhead.

  She broke the surface as cautiously as her urgency would allow and greedily sucked in breaths until the throbbing in her chest finally relented. Beside her, Professor did the same, while gingerly probing the back of his head.

  “What happened to you?” she whispered.

  “Someone sucker punched me. Barry, I think. Should have known better than to turn my back on him.”

  “I don’t think he’s working alone.”

  Professor nodded. “Well, I’m still seeing the world a little cross-eyed, but I think I’ll live.”

  “Good. What do we do now?”

  “Well, assuming that everyone on this tub is gunning for us—”

  “You think Paul and Ophelia are in on this, too?”

  He inclined his head. “Okay, maybe not them, but assuming that almost everyone on this tub is gunning for us, we have to stay out of sight. The good news is that they must think we’re already dead.”

  As if to underscore this supposition, they heard the noise of machinery moving on deck. The crew was moving ahead with the recovery of the Moon stone.

  “I’d like to wait until night fall, but that’s a long time to spend dangling our legs like shark bait.”

  Jade looked down into the water nervously; that thought had not even occurred to her.

  “So,” Professor continued, “What we’re going to have to do is shimmy up the anchor chain, and when no one is looking, sneak aboard. There are lots of places to hide on a ship this big, and unless I’m mistaken, they’re going to be otherwise occupied for the next hour or two.”

  “Do you think Paul and Ophelia are all right?”

  He shook his head, wincing as movement aggravated his injury. “Hard to say. I think maybe whoever’s running the show has explicit instructions to keep her safe. Remember how Barry pulled her aside last night, just before they tried to smash us with the submersible?”

  Jade nodded. “If they’re both safe, then maybe all we need to do is lay low until the ship returns to port. After that…?”

  Professor heaved a weary sigh. “After that, I just don’t know. Let’s get on board and worry about the rest as it comes.”

  As Professor had predicted, the full attention of the crew was fixed on the task of bringing the Moon stone to the surface. He barely made a sound as he climbed up the anchor line and pulled himself through the hawsehole on the starboard bow. Jade was not quite as stealthy, but she could have been banging a drum and still gone unnoticed. The air aboard the ship was filled with a discordant symphony of electric motors straining and metal groaning under tremendous stress.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Jade whispered as she cleared the hawsehole. Professor touched a finger to his lips and then motioned for her to seek concealment behind a stack of shipping pallets. The noise continued for several minutes, during which time Jade wondered if the ship was going to shake itself apart.

  “What time is it?” Professor asked.

  “Time for you to get a watch,” she retorted, in a misbegotten attempt to lighten the mood. She slipped the chronograph off her wrist and handed it to him, but did not fail to notice that both clock hands were close to the twelve o’clock position. “Is that right?”

  Professor glanced at the watch, as if that was all it took to confirm what he already knew. “According to this watch, and my body clock too, for that matter, it’s just after noon. But the sun is going down.”

  “We weren’t on the bottom that long.”

  “Nope. This is the time dilation effect Paul was talking about. Time is moving slower, relatively speaking, the closer we get to the Moon stone. Now that it’s on the ship with us, we’re all caught in the effect.”

  Jade squinted at the horizon. She could actually see the sun moving through the sky like a time lapse sequence or a video playback on fast forward. “Is that something we should be worried about?”


  A deep gonging noise reverberated through the entire vessel as the Moon stone was lowered to the deck. Jade waited for the vibrations to subside, but instead of dying down, the faint tremors seemed to increase in frequency until the deck plates felt almost electric under her feet.

  “I think,” Professor said gravely, “it might be.”

  Brian Hodges stared at the black stone sphere, still partially concealed by mesh slings and the deflating airbag, and felt an overwhelming sense of destiny. This artifact was an insult to everything he believed, mocking the tragic loss he had suffered with its very presence, and yet now he understood that he had made the correct decision in allowing Ophelia to proceed with her plans to recover it from the ocean floor. Now that it was aboard, he could deal with the threat it represented permanently.

  When he had joined the Norfolk Group, he had imagined that he would be striking a pre-emptive blow against fundamentalists and extremists who would use ancient relics to draw true believers to their jihads and holy crusades, the way Roman soldiers rallied around their battle standards. He never would have believed that some of those artifacts might actually possess supernatural attributes. Yet, here before him, was something infinitely more dangerous than a mere symbol, and he was the only person on earth who could do something about it. He slung the AR-15 rifle he’d taken from the ship’s locker across his back and headed for the stairs that led up to the bridge.

  Ophelia must have divined his intent. “Where are you going?”

  He ignored her, taking the steps two at a time, and burst into the control room where Lee and two other crewmen were huddled over a console. The master of the ship, his alcoholic flush deepened to a dark magenta by anxiety, looked up as if he had been expecting the intrusion.

  “Set a course for deep water,” Hodges said. “It doesn’t matter where. Just get us somewhere where we can deep six that thing.”