Excavation

The image of the cross crystallized in Henry’s mind, turning slowly before his inner eye.

Joan suddenly gasped behind him, pulling him out of his reverie. He twisted around. She faced his direction, but her eyes were not fixed on Henry. He followed the path of her gaze to his right elbow.

The beaker rested on the tabletop where Henry had placed it. His breath caught when he saw its contents.

“Henry…?”

The beaker no longer contained a pool of the raw metal. Inside, leaning against the glass side, was a crude copy of the Dominican gold cross. Roughly cruciform in shape, the detail was blurred. The Christ figure was no more than a blunt suggestion upon its surface.

Joan and Dale moved closer.

“Did you do that?” Dale asked.

Henry glanced at the man as if he were mad. He pointed to its sealed stopper. “Are you kidding?”

As they all watched, the cross seemed to lose some of its detail. The edges became less sharp, and the figure slid from the cross to pool at the bottom of the beaker. Still, the cross itself persisted in its general shape.

Henry tried to explain, “I was just thinking about it when-”

A sharp chime rang from nearby, loud in the small room.

They all turned to see the monitors waver, then blink into greyscale images.

“Maybe we’re one step closer to an answer,” Dale announced tacitly. He stepped back toward the bank of monitors.

Henry and Joan followed. Their eyes met briefly. Henry could see the consternation and something that looked like fear in her eyes. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and gave her hand a quick reassuring squeeze. She acknowledged the gesture by moving a few inches closer to Henry’s side.

With a final worried glance toward the cross in the jar, Henry joined the others at the monitors.

Dale stood bent over the keyboard, one finger tracing along the screen. Upon the monitor was an unearthly landscape, a rough terrain of oddly shaped peaks and valleys, as if someone had taken a black-and-white photo of the surface of Mars. “This is impossible,” Dale said. He pointed to a section of screen that magnified a corner of the landscape. “Look. The metal is actually an aggregation of tiny particles. See how they’re latched and interlinked.”

On the screen, the cross-sectional view revealed tiny octagonal structures hooked to one another by six articulated legs. Each miniscule structure was joined to its surrounding neighbors in a dense tetrahedral pattern.

Joan reached to touch one of the grey particles displayed on the monitor. “They appear almost organic, like viral phages, or something.”

The metallurgist grumbled, one hand indicating the general landscape across the rest of the screens. “No, definitely not viral. From the fracturing and internal matrix, the substance is distinctly inorganic. I’d almost say crystalline in structure.”

“Then what the hell is it?” Henry finally asked, growing irritated with the man. “Metal, crystal, viral, vegetable, mineral?”

Kirkpatrick’s gaze flicked toward the cross in the beaker, then he shook his head. “I don’t know. But if I had to guess, I’d pick all of the above.”

From the edge of the communication tent, Philip Sykes watched the sun begin to sink toward the mountains. This was the second day of his vigil by the collapsed ruins. What once had been a jungle-shrouded hill that hid the buried temple was now a cratered and broken ruin. Edges of toppled granite boulders and slabs from the temple jutted from the churned dark soil like exposed broken teeth.

If Philip had not gotten that call from Sam, informing him of the students’ discovery of a natural cavern system, he would have thought them all dead. For the past half day, the mound no longer shifted or sagged. The noise from grinding rocks no longer groaned up from the earth. The dig site lay as silent as a grave. The temple had collapsed fully.

But Sam had called.

Philip clenched a fist. A part of him wished the arrogant Texan hadn’t. It would have been easier to call them all dead; then Philip would be free to abandon the site, leave these cursed Indians to their black jungle. Every hour that Philip remained there he risked an attack from Guillermo Sala. Philip clutched his arms around himself as a chill breeze blew down from the mountaintop. Who would get there first-the rescue party called in by the pair of Indians or Gil’s henchmen returning to finish their work?

The tension ground at Philip’s nerves. “If only I could leave…” But he knew he couldn’t, not before the rescue tunnel was completed. Philip stared toward the jungle’s edge.

Nearby, the calls and low singing from the Quechan workers echoed up from the obscured work site on the far side of the mound. The looters’ tunnel had been excavated a full fifteen yards that day. Though the Indians still shot him dark looks and muttered sharp words, Philip could not fault their hard work. The crew had split into three shifts and dug with pickax and shovel all night long and into the day.