Free Oracle by David Wood, Sean Ellis Page B

smooth, clearly worked by hand, but completely unadorned.
    “ It would seem we’ve reached the end of the universe,” Professor remarked.
    Jade gestured to the right. “Let’s start orbiting and see where it leads.”
    No one objected and the trek resumed, this time following the cavern perimeter. The chamber was so large that it felt like they were walking in a straight line, and without any other points of reference, there was nothing to suggest that they were not.
    “Really makes you appreciate the vastness of space,” Professor said.
    Jade thought he was probably just trying to fill the silence, but she welcomed anything that distracted from the ceaseless thud of their footsteps on the stone floor.
    “I am more awed by the work that went into carving out this chamber,” replied Sanchez. “It must have taken decades, even if there was an existing cavern. I would imagine some of the material removed was used in the construction of the pyramids.”
    “ They may have discovered this cavern while mining for obsidian,” suggested Acosta, warming to the topic.
    Jade listened with mild interest to the discussion until, without any real warning, they found what she was looking for.
    The mouth of the tunnel was, like everything else they had encountered in the cavern, round and worked smooth by its builders. The top of the perfect circle was at least twice as tall as Jade, easily large enough to accommodate even the Sun sphere. The discovery however was met with stunned disbelief.
    “ I guess now we know why the Spaniard didn’t leave,” Professor said, his voice barely above a whisper.
    Just a few steps into the passage, the perfect symmetry was marred by a wall of loose dirt and rock that could only be the result of a catastrophic cave-in. A second entrance to the cavern did exist, just a Jade had known it would, but it would do them no good. The way out was completely blocked.

SEVEN
     
    Hodges admired the precision with which the soldiers of the Mexican Army deployed across the Teotihuacan archaeological preserve, establishing a secure perimeter. Because it was after hours—nearly midnight in fact—there were no tourists to evacuate, only a small staff of guards and caretakers who had been quickly escorted away. None of the soldiers had ventured near the Pyramid of the Sun or made any effort to establish contact with him. He wondered if any of them had the faintest idea what was going on at the center of the ancient city, or more precisely, under it. They had arrived swiftly, seemingly within minutes of his decision to make the call and take pre-emptive action, just as the protocols demanded.
    When he had joined the cause, just a few short weeks before, he had secretly wondered if those protocols were not overly alarmist in nature. An Alpha level event seemed about as likely as an alien invasion or a zombie apocalypse. Even when Chapman had warned him that Jade Ihara had a way of finding “weird stuff,” even when he had secretly wired an improvised explosive device into Shelob’s thorax, he had not believed things could escalate so quickly, or that he would be at the center of the storm.
    He would never have believed that he would have to make a decision that would result in the deaths of five people.
    He had joined the cause to save lives, not take them.
    The sound of another helicopter approaching snapped him out of his dark mood. He watched from the shelter of the passage entrance as it passed over the outer cordon and settled to the ground nearby, so close that he had to blink away the grit stirred up by its rotor wash. He saw that it was a civilian bird, not one of the UH-60s used by the Mexican troops. He took a moment to compose himself, and then headed out to meet it.
    Hodges didn’t recognize the face of the man who stepped down from helicopter, but he knew his name—Andres Gutierrez, oil billionaire and the second wealthiest man in Mexico—and he knew, in a general sense who the man was. All