by E. E. Knight
They’d been in the Abyss for more than three hours. That was cutting it close. The crew of the Plato could arrive at any moment. They had to hurry.
She helped Borg up. Quickly, the two of them fixed the smaller line leading back to the platinum plates to the hand winch. Lara bent to operate it, then paused. Something nagged at her, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on it.
“What is it, Lara?” Borg asked.
She looked carefully about the chamber. Then she saw it. There were nine shafts cut into the top of the dome, so closely placed that the amount of sunlight streaming down each one should have been the same. Except it wasn’t.
Something—or someone—was blocking four of the shafts.
She drew her pistols.
Too late. Half a dozen men dropped down from the shafts, armed with shotguns and assault rifles.
“Drop your guns,” came a voice that sounded somehow familiar.
The Tomb Raider looked for its source, but saw only the men who were training their weapons on her and Borg. With a curse, she dropped her guns. The USPs clattered to the floor, now just so much impotent metal.
“Lie down,” said the voice. “Face down, arms out.”
Lara complied. Through the corner of her eye, she saw Borg obeying as well.
Méne came and stood with pistols to their heads while others handcuffed both of them. With Borg, the black-and-tans were forced to attach the cuffs to metal fittings intended for other uses.
“Clever trick with the boat,” the man with his gun to Lara’s head said in an Irish accent. “The Prime figured you’d shoot the donkeys.”
“The only asses I wanted to hurt were aboard the Plato,” she said.
She got a pistol-smack on the side of the head for that.
Footsteps entered the domed chamber from the tunnel. Lara raised her head from the ancient floor. She saw three people. She knew them all.
Heather Rourke, her arms behind her back, perhaps handcuffed … perhaps not.
Alison Harfleur, her left hand on Heather’s elbow, her right on the butt of a machine pistol dangling from a strap about her shoulders.
And Alex Frys.
He smiled at her. “Thank you for fetching the Prophecy Panels, Lady Croft.”
Now she recognized the voice she’d heard earlier, but she said nothing.
Ajay, meanwhile, let go of Heather and walked over to where Lara’s guns lay on the floor. She looked older than when Lara had last seen her, eight years ago. A bit more muscular. A lot more tan. Was she savoring the moment? Her expression was that of a student with the highest grades posted after an exam.
Ajay stooped and picked up Lara’s guns. “Very nice.” She extended the pistol, sighting between Lara’s eyes. “You always did insist on the best accessories, Lara. The best guns. The best friends. But why not? You could afford it, couldn’t you? Money was never a problem for Lady Croft.”
Frys glared at her. “Give me those, Alison. We don’t want any accidents.”
Alison thrust out her jaw, her eyes clear and hard as diamonds. “Croft is dangerous. She should be killed.”
“That is my decision, not yours. Give me the guns. Now.”
For an instant, the two-locked eyes, and Lara wondered who would prevail. But then Ajay held out her hands, and Frys took the pistols from her. He examined them for a second, then walked casually to the edge of the Abyss and tossed them over. “You won’t be needing these anymore,” he said.
Lara felt as if she’d just lost a favorite pet. Two of them.
Borg chose this moment to speak. “It is me, Alison. Nils. Don’t you know me?”
“I’m not likely to forget a freak like you,” Ajay sneered.
“That’s a fine way to talk to youf fiancé,” Lara said, still stung by the loss of her custom pistols.
“Fiancé? He told you we were engaged?” She seemed uncertain whether to be insulted or amused.
“We’d spoken of marriage several times,” Borg said defensively.
“Before your accident,” Ajay said. “And I never accepted your proposals.”
“I’m still the same man I was then.”
“Not from where I’m standing.”
Despite the millennia-old rocks beneath her body, Lara felt the world shift. She’d trusted Borg … and he’d lied to her. He and Ajay had never been engaged. She wondered what else he’d lied about.
Frys, meanwhile, turned to one of his men. “What are you waiting for, Sixty-one? Winch up the panels!”
He looked back at Lara. “Don’t pretend that you saw through my little charade,” he said. “Admit it: I had you fooled completely, didn’t I?”
“Where’s Kunai?” Lara asked in turn.
Frys smiled. “Many creatures in nature survive by imitating another. I used the name of a dead man, a ghost for you and others, like the police in Glasgow, to chase.”
“You murdered Kunai, took his identity. Is that it?”
“Tejo Kunai put the pieces of the Méne faith back together, and he’ll always be honored for it. But like John the Baptist, he was but a meteor presaging a greater light.”
Megalomania, even good-natured megalomania, gave Lara the creeps. Nor had it escaped her notice that Frys hadn’t answered her question. He seemed decidedly reticent on the subject of Kunai. She decided to change the subject.
“What about the panels? What do they do?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. The whole world will find out.”
“You are crazy. Insane.” It was Borg. “Listen to him, Alison. Can’t you see that he’s done something to you? Brainwashed you in some way?”
“Nobody has brainwashed me,” Ajay said. “You’re an idiot, Nils. You always were.”
“You loved me. I know you did.”
“I needed you. There’s a difference.”
Frys approached, his hiking boots expanding to fill Lara’s vision. “Our guests look uncomfortable there on the ground. Two-twenty-one, Forty, help them up, would you?”
Strong hands hooked Lara under the armpits and pulled her to her feet. Borg was likewise hauled erect. Alison’s cruel words seemed to have hit him hard. He looked as though he’d been physically beaten.
Frys checked the fit of Lara’s handcuffs, then returned to where Heather and Ajay stood. The journalist seemed dazed. She showed no awareness of her surroundings.
“What have you done to Heather?” Lara asked.
“Ms. Rourke has decided to join us,” Frys said.
“Is that true, Heather?”
No answer.
“You’ve drugged her,” Lara said accusingly. “Are you going to brainwash her like you did Alison?”
“I told you,” Ajay said. “Nobody brainwashed me.”
“I never figured you for the cult-joining type, Ajay,” Lara said.
“If your wit were as quick as your mouth, LC, you’d see the big picture.”
“And what’s that?”
“Alison,” Frys said. “Enough. We’ve got what we want. The panels are ours!”
The netting containing the panels had finally been winched to the edge of the Abyss. Two of the Méne maneuvered the netting onto solid ground and cut it open. Frys and Ajay knelt to examine them.
“Beautiful,” Ajay breathed. She turned to Lara. “How did you get them loose, Lara? I tried everything!”
“Obviously not everything.”
Frys gave each panel a loving polish with a piece of chamois before slipping it into in an empty crate produced by another of his minions.
Lara glimpsed motion behind Borg. He had extended his claw hand fractionally and was working to get the fingers into the links of his handcuffs. She had to cover the noise, provide a distraction. “Alex, was it worth killing your father over those?”
The leader of the Méne stiffened. “I didn’t kill him. He panicked and drove his car off a cliff. I would rather have waited until he died of natural causes … but the stars were coming round right, you see, and would not do s
o again in my lifetime. Sixty-one, Forty, the crate is ready.”
Lara didn’t want the subject changed. “The stars will be right for what?”
“To learn that now, you would have to join us,” Frys said.
“I might,” she said, “if I knew more.”
“Give it a rest, LC,” Ajay said. “You’re not fooling anybody.”
Borg quit working his mechanical hand, waggled the fingers at Lara. “Alison, you don’t belong with this circus,” he said. He took a step toward Ajay, but men with guns shoved him back … and into Lara. She moved to block their view as his claw hand began to explore her wrists.
At a signal from Frys, the men started filing out of the tunnel.
“Now what?” Lara asked. “Are you going to kill us?”
Before Frys could reply, the ting of Lara’s handcuff link parting echoed off the dome. Borg lifted his arms—
Ajay reacted faster than Lara would have given her credit for. She pivoted, extended her leg in a classic Tae Kwon Do kick, and connected with Borg’s chest.
Borg stumbled backward, his prosthetic arms wind-milling. Then he cried out as the floor dropped away beneath him, and he vanished into the Whispering Abyss.
“Nils!” Lara hurled herself backward, twisting as she dove after Borg. She saw him falling beneath her, clutching at his chest, tumbling as he fell. By clasping her hands to her sides, turning her body into an arrow, she caught up to him, grabbed a strap of his harness just as they struck the wall. They bounced off, but Lara kept her grip. Borg seemed to have been knocked unconscious by the impact.
Biting back the pain, Lara pulled Borg’s chute open from the back, then let go so her shoulder wouldn’t be dislocated when it opened. She heard it flutter open with a crack. Then she bounced off the wall again. Somehow, despite the blinding pain, she got her own chute open.
God, she hurt.
This descent made the last one seem like a picnic. She bounced off the wall again, and her chute folded and seemed unlikely to open again properly; perhaps part of it had caught a piton and ripped. She fell fast, but in a tight spiral. Too dark to see the walls … like falling in a nightmare.
The nightmare ended with a painful jar when she struck bottom. She fell onto something that felt like a soggy mattress. She untangled from her chute, found one of the stolen chemical lights in her pocket, lit it, held it up as she stood shakily. Her left leg was stiff and wobbly, but it held her up. At least nothing seemed to be broken.
Bulbous structures, each with a single round entrance, clung to the walls. She saw one of the huge beelike insects emerge from one opening, and instinctively reached for her empty holster.
Then she saw her guns. They lay one beside the other near a mound of insect debris. She took a step toward them, and the flying thing launched itself at her with an angry buzz.
P-kooof!
From above, a metal spike drove through the huge insect, carrying parts of arthropod with it as it plunged into the litter-covered ground. Lara looked up to see Borg drifting down, an avenging cybernetic angel on nylon wings.
He landed and came out of his chute with the facility of a commando.
Lara, meanwhile, made it to her guns. They were both in one piece, a testament to H&K’s rugged engineering.
“Nice shot,” she said.
“Nice save,” he complimented her in turn.
An angry humming from all around quieted them. Lara stood with pistols ready, but nothing emerged from the hive to attack.
They stood in a trash pit: pieces of broken nest mostly, pressed material that looked like attic insulation. Among the nest fragments were bones and parts of animal carcasses, old and desiccated. Above the garbage layer, whole nests ringed the bottom of the Abyss. The noises of insects moving about in them, like the scratchings of a thousand mice behind the wainscoting of a decrepit old house, made Lara eager to get away before more killer insects emerged.
“Is your VADS system still operational?” Borg asked in a whisper.
Lara checked the inventory screen on the tiny hard drive that controlled the device; fortunately, it too had survived the fall. “I think so. But I’d rather not have to shoot our way out. I used most of my fancy shells on that wooden staircase. As for what’s left, the illumination rounds might not penetrate their chitin, and the rubber bullets might just bounce off. That leaves armor piercing, and I’ve only got twenty-four of those, plus a couple of reserve clips in my holsters. I never entirely trust technology.”
Borg looked back up the shaft of the Abyss. “I do not think I could climb out of here again.”
Lara shook her head. “Me, either. But there may be another way out. Do you feel that?”
“A breeze!”
It flowed past them as steadily as though it came from a ventilation duct. Holding up her chemical light, Lara followed it. The floor of the Abyss sloped away under an overhang. The breeze was strongest here. She crouched, took a look under.
Another rounded tunnel, silted up with the dirt and dust of ages, sloped down. The wall was covered with fossilized barnacles and mussel shells. Had some long arm of the Pacific once extended this far beneath the Andes? “Looks like this is our best bet,” Lara said.
“Do we have enough light?” Borg asked.
“Don’t like full-dark spelunking? Don’t worry. I have lots of these glo-sticks. We’ll die of thirst before we run out of light.”
“I don’t want either to happen. I will trust you to get us out of here alive.”
“Then you’re going to tell me what really happened between you and Alison. We might not be down here if you’d told me the truth to begin with.”
“I know. I am ashamed.” His expression took on a hang-dog look in the light of Lara’s glo-stick. “But I thought of Alison as my fiancée, please know that. I loved her very much.”
“How do you feel now?”
“I … don’t know. But I still believe she is in this man’s power somehow.”
Lara remembered Ajay’s intent face, her cold blue eyes, as she delivered the kick that sent Borg over the edge. “Nils, you have a lot to learn about women.”
16
As he waited in the sun atop Ukju Pacha for the helicopter to arrive, Alex Frys, the Prime, reflected on his triumph. Words that had not been spoken since men hunted mastodons would soon be chanted. Rites performed, offerings made.
The world transformed.
It bothered him that Croft and the Norwegian were dead. Croft, anyway. The Norwegian was worth more as spare parts, as an auto broker might say. But the deaths were his responsibility, and though he did not shirk at killing, the Prime preferred live converts to dead heroes.
Tejo, dear Tejo, if only you’d not insisted…
If the Prime stood up and walked about thirty meters farther into the ruins, he’d be at the spot where he first met Professor Tejo Kunai. He’d been, what was it, sixteen? Doing college work already on the Amazon headwaters ecosystem, thanks to his father, who was doing fieldwork that summer here at the Ukju Pacha ruins. Kunai had been setting up a clinic on the river and had taken a few days off to visit the ruins and gather botanical samples. The professor had been darkly handsome, with bright, intense eyes that blazed out like Rasputin’s from his thickly bearded face.
His father had been lonely. In those days, the Peruvian archaeologists were busy preserving the tourist mecca of Machu Picchu, and his father’s friend and sometime collaborator Von Croy was somewhere in Southeast Asia. Alex had introduced the Old Man to Dr. Kunai, something his father forgot in his later years, and they had formed a strangely complementary triumvirate. Kunai spoke of flowers and native medicines handed down for generations, the Old Man gabbled on and on about a lost civilization that might explain everything from the legend of Atlantis to Noah’s flood, and he, with schoolboy enthusiasm, couldn’t wait to put in a word about the strange animal species found in this isolated reach of the Andes eastern slope.
When Professor Frys spoke to Kunai of some tran
slations of ancient texts from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula that mentioned a holy plant bestowed on the Méne by forgotten gods, Kunai could hardly contain himself. He’d heard native legends about a plant granting immortality. They rushed out and gathered specimens by lantern light.
Thus the first domino that would lead to the Old Man’s death had gone down on the table.
At the end of the summer, Alex had gone back to school. He kept in loose contact with Kunai, swapping occasional postcards. It was gratifying to know a celebrity, even if Kunai’s name was only recognized in humanitarian circles. They did not meet again for a decade.
The Old Man had retired from fieldwork by then, and Alex was a doctoral candidate in biology.
Kunai, who had taken a long-distance avuncular interest in Alex’s schooling, came to England for a conference, and after a courtesy visit to the Old Man, invited Alex to join him for dinner one night. There, over bottles of sherry—the surgeon’s sole remaining Portuguese affectation—Kunai related a fantastic story.
Over the past decade, he’d devoted every spare minute to running down legends about the Méne. He’d learned a great deal and was on the verge of acquiring far more knowledge. He’d finally tracked down the family of a gentleman who had sailed with Captain Cook to the South Seas. On Easter Island, this sailor had acquired—some said stolen—a curious clear crystal from a native priest. Six months ago, Kunai had tried to purchase the crystal, sight unseen, but the family, suspicious, had refused to sell it, or even to show Kunai their ancestor’s collection of South Seas artifacts. Apparently, there had been an ugly scene, one that made it impossible for Kunai to approach them openly again. But Alex could do it. Would he, as a favor to his old friend, use his university credentials to pose as a researcher seeking to examine the old artifacts for a scholarly article?
Kunai’s eyes blazed across the dinner table; it was impossible to resist such passion. If Alex had asked any questions about the ultimate objective of the visit, he’d since forgotten. But he did consult his father. After a roundabout conversation, making up a story about a possible trip back to Peru, Alex asked him about the Méne.
