Ruins (24 page)

Scully caught only a glimpse of her partner's silhou-ette, but she knew with a dismay that made her chest ache that Mulder was running straight toward it, as if drawn.

Xitaclan ruins Wednesday, 1:31 a.m.

By the time Mulder reached meager cover, the ground had stopped swaying and hic-coughing beneath his feet. A few snipers took potshots at him, but most of them seemed concerned more with their own safety. Before the gunfire could pick up again, he took advan-tage of the stunned motionlessness around the ruins and ran on, taking shelter at the edge of the immense pyramid.

He felt dismayed at leaving Scully behind, a prisoner of—or perhaps "under the protection of"—Major Jakes and his commando squad. But she had told him to run, told him to get away. Her last words piercing through the volcanic tremors had cut him free, as if a leash holding him back had suddenly snapped.

If he could solve the mystery, find the answers that Barreio's guerrillas and the American soldiers both wanted, perhaps he could use it to gain Scully's freedom.

Now he plunged in a single direction, for better or worse. He knew that he, one man—unarmed, since Jakes had relieved him of even his handgun—could do little against two opposing military forces. Mulder hoped to approach the problem from a different direction, finding an unexpected solution from left field.

He needed to discover the secret of the great pyramid of Xitaclan. What had Cassandra Rubicon found there?

The abortive eruption and tremors had failed to pro-duce gushing lava and ash, but as Mulder staggered toward the abrupt edge of the sacrificial sinkhole, he came to a quick stop—and stared down, awestruck.

Somewhere deep in the basement of the Earth the ground had cracked, splitting open the bottom of the sac-rificial well. The limestone sinkhole had dumped its con-tents into a smoldering pit of volcanic heat—all the cold, quiet water of the cenote, the still depths that had cradled the sunken bodies of Cassandra Rubicon's team as well as the broken old archaeologist himself. As he ran, Mulder had watched the mushroom cloud of stinking steam pour into the sky as if from a boiler explosion....

Now the sinkhole lay empty, dripping and crackling, like a dry, wide-open mouth. Its limestone walls remained slick and lumpy. Steam still curled up with a sour biting stench of volcanic gases.

Mulder looked down into the gasping cenote, a pit into hell like the legendary entrance into Hades from Greek mythology. Deep below, he saw a faint glow. The haze of illumination was unlike firelight, unlike the smol-dering glare of volcanic heat. This seemed more of a cold glow, a shimmer that throbbed and pulsed like a beacon shouting silently into the bottomless shaft.

Scully had told him she'd seen a similar unsettling glow during her diving expedition, like distant heat light-ning, far below the depth where she had discovered the bodies of the research team. Phosphorescent algae grow-ing far from the touch of sunlight, she had speculated. As Mulder stared at the faint haze, watching the flickering light, he could not accept his partner's scientific explana-tion. This rising and falling glitter seemed too orderly, too regular, a pattern ... some kind of a signal.

He thought of the major's claim that the Xitaclan ruins were the source of some mysterious encrypted signal, a transmission whose code the U.S. military pre-sumably could not break.... But what if the transmission was not encrypted or encoded in any way, but simply in a language that Major Jakes could not understand, that no human had ever learned?

Vladimir Rubicon had gently chided Mulder for his imaginative interpretation of the carvings atop the tem-ple ... for his explanation that the wise god Kukulkan, who had come in a silver ship trailing fire, might have been an ancient astronaut, an extraterrestrial come to Earth at the dawn of human civilization. But now, observing the eerie glow deep down in the drained cenote, Mulder felt certain this must be some kind of SOS beacon.

Mulder saw the tangled ropes still lashed to the gnarled trees, dangling along the side of the now-empty sacrificial well. He stared down at the steep curving lime-stone walls. With the knobs and handholds and sloping ledges, plus the support of the old ropes, he could make the descent. Probably.

The glow called to him. He had to go down there. No question about it.

He grasped the ropes, wet and warm and slick in his palm. They must have been cooked like vegetables in the noxious vapors that had boiled up out of the sacrificial well—but the cables appeared undamaged. They would hold his weight... he hoped.

He tugged, securing the knots firmly above, and low-ered himself backward over the edge, digging the heels of his shoes into the damp limestone. As he expected, he found sufficient lumps and footholds to assist his descent—but the drop seemed impossibly far down.

Straining his arm muscles, Mulder picked up speed as he gained confidence, making his way from ledge to ledge, working himself downward. He grasped the rough rope, but frequently used it only as a crutch and not for actual support.

Mulder's head began to spin from the foul odors hissing up from below like the fetid breath of a dragon.

He couldn't imagine how deep the sinkhole actually went. Luckily, the beckoning glow did not arise from the absolute depths, but only partially down.

Razor-sharp cracks of gunfire rang out across the air again. Mulder froze, plastering himself in the darkness under an overhang as the blasts reverberated in the hol-low chamber of the cenote, but he realized that no one had shot at him intentionally. The fighting had started again, now that the hidden assailants had recovered from their fear and confusion after the violent tremors.

"Guess I better pick up the pace," he muttered. He wasn't going to let anything as trivial as a minor Central American revolution distract him from learning what he needed to know.

Mulder dropped down to another ledge, and the color of the limestone changed from faded white to a darker, browner shade, stained with slimy residue. He was now below what had been the surface of the water.

Another shot rang out far above, and he heard thin voices in Spanish or the back-of-the-throat Maya deriva-tive the local Indians had spoken. He wondered if Fernando Aguilar and his native helpers had returned, bumbling into the conflict ... or perhaps Aguilar was somehow in league with Barreio and his Liberation Quintana Roo movement.

He and Scully now had another set of murder suspects. Evidently, Barreio's group of violent rebels might have cho-sen to assassinate a team of American archaeologists defil-ing their national treasures. The price of revolution.

But... if Mulder's suspicions about the fantastic ori-gin of this ancient Maya city proved to be true, then the relics of Xitaclan belonged to no nation on Earth.

It had always bothered him—why had the Maya people abandoned this lush, isolated site, and so many of their grand cities? Why had they built Xitaclan here at all, far from trade routes or rivers or roads? What had fos-tered the birth of their entire great empire? Why did the Maya develop such an interest in astronomical knowl-edge, calendrical cycles, planetary orbits?

The Maya had been obsessed with time and the stars, the passage of the Earth around the sun. They had kept meticulous track of days and months, like a child cross-ing off dates on his calendar in the month before a birth-day.

He had a feeling all the answers lay below, in the light.

Underneath the water's former surface, the cenote's ledges and outcroppings were thicker, knobbier, unweathered. He climbed down, his heart beating faster, his curios-ity burning.

Then he ran out of rope.

Mulder looked at the frayed end, the long dangling strands that clung to the cenote wall, all the way to the rim above. He had no choice but to continue downward, unaided.

The glow grew brighter around him now, colder. He sweated from the thick volcanic heat, the leftover steam, the sauna of vapors around him in the empty cenote pit. But the light grew whitish-blue and cold, pulsing through the surrounding rock. The walls seemed barely able to contain the energy seeping out.

Finally, working his way the rest of the distance, his fingers clenching slippery handholds and knobby out-croppings of limestone, Mulder arrived panting at a wide ledge, an arched opening ... exposing a smooth rectangle of metal.

More gunfire rang out in the night, but Mulder didn't hear it.

The alloy frame was encrusted and corroded, but remarkably clean after centuries of submersion in the cold cenote waters. The shape and appearance of the portal was unmistakable, and Mulder reached out to touch it, his fingers trembling.

The exposed opening was clearly some kind of door.

The door to a ship.

Xitaclan ruins Wednesday, 2:15 a.m.

The ancient metallic hatch opened with a drawn-out hiss-ing breath of equalizing air pressure—a sound, Mulder suspected, similar to what a feathered serpent might make just before it attacked....

Despite his desperate curiosity, Mulder turned away and held his breath, afraid of what toxins he might inhale inside the newly opened chamber. In other inves-tigations he had been overcome after catching a whiff of the noxious blood from decomposing alien figures. Whatever lay beneath the Xitaclan ruins had been entombed for centuries, and he had no way of knowing just what might lie inside this long-abandoned . . . craft?

His eyes stung from the fumes still rising from vol-canic cracks in the unseen floor of the cenote. He hoped the ground didn't spasm again anytime soon.

But hearing the faint popcorn sound of gunfire above even louder than the dripping echoes trickling down the curved limestone walls, Mulder knew he could not spare any time or energy to worry about his own safety. He had to get his answers, and then get back to Scully.

For that, he needed to go inside.

He planted his foot one step through the doorway, feeling the solidity of the floor. The entrance corridor was smooth-walled and womb-like, the walls a polished metallic substance that absorbed the light and reflected it back.

Mulder could not see any source to the glare. It was a blinding harshness, clearly designed, he thought, for eyes adapted to the light of a different sun.

The Maya had never been skilled metalsmiths, had no smelting capabilities to create the materials he saw around him. He proceeded farther down the corridor, as if drawn. The walls hummed with a high-pitched throb-bing sensation, like alien music. He felt it deeply within his bones, his teeth, the back of his skull. Mulder wanted to tell someone, share his amazement. But that had to wait until he escaped again.

He recalled a far more mundane scenario out at the jogging track near FBI Headquarters, when he had fin-ished a long, exhilarating run, the second time he had encountered the man he came to call "Deep Throat." When Mulder had questioned him about alien visitations, hard evidence of conspiracies locked away in secret gov-ernment vaults, Deep Throat had given his usual answers that weren't answers.

"They're here, aren't they?" Mulder had said, sweat-ing from his run, demanding to know.

With his calm, unassuming smile and his knowing voice, Deep Throat had raised his eyebrows. "Mr. Mulder, they've been here for a long, long time."

But could it have been as long as thousands of years?

Now Mulder stepped deeper down the armored cor-ridor, exploring the remains of what must be an ancient derelict, the ship of an alien visitor who had landed—per-haps crashed—in the Yucatan Peninsula centuries and centuries before, here at the birthplace of the Maya civilization.

"Talk about illegal aliens," Mulder muttered.

The winding passages opened up, revealing dark, half-collapsed chambers, what had been other metal-walled rooms. Where corroded alloy plates had tumbled to the floor, the holes had been repaired with pieces of carved stone. Little of the original ship itself remained, barely a metal framework patched up with limestone blocks.

Mulder imagined Maya priests entering the "sacred" pyramid long after the alien visitors had vanished, still attempting to be caretakers but not knowing how. Generations and generations of awestruck visitors would have worn the floor smooth.

Perhaps the missing equipment and girders had been cannibalized from the main structure to be used in other Maya temples ... or perhaps they had been stripped and destroyed by treasure seekers ... or cast away by reli-gious zealots such as Father Diego de Landa.

A sense of wonder engulfed him, coursed through his veins as he continued to explore. Never before had he seen such overwhelming evidence, such incredible remains of an extraterrestrial construction.

The corridors in the derelict ship reflected the same blueprint that Mulder had encountered while moving through the labyrinth of the pyramid above in his search for Vladimir Rubicon the day before. Up there, Mulder had explored the dark tunnels until stopped by the strange sealed passage. Perhaps, he thought, it was an upper entrance to the entombed ship.

Mulder wondered if the craft itself had crashed, plowing a crater in the middle of the jungle. When the local, uncivilized people had come to investigate, Kukulkan, the "wise god from the stars," had taught them immense knowledge, fostering the birth of a great civilization.

He ran his fingers along the gaps in the metallic walls, touching the polished limestone. More than anything, he wished Vladimir Rubicon could have lived long enough to see this.

Over the millennia the Maya—or later treasure seek-ers—had stripped the derelict to the bone, leaving only this skeleton of the original ship. But it was enough. Mulder knew this proof could not be denied.

If only he could bring Scully down here, where she could see.

With a pang he hoped she was still all right, that Major Jakes had at least protected her against a resur-gence of the guerrillas, as a hostage if nothing else.

If only he and Scully could get out of here alive. She had told him once before, during their frantic escape from the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, "Evidence is worthless if you're dead."

He came to an ascending, spiraling ramp, and fol-lowed the bright, pulsing glow steeply upward. He had no idea how deep underground he still was.