“Makes sense.” Carter took a step, hit something bulky, and went sprawling. Macha yowled and leaped clear.
“What was that?” Ashwood asked. “You okay, cuddles?”
“I’m fine. I just fell over something.” In the darkness he felt the object which had tripped him. “It’s a pack. Feels like mine. If it is …”
He dug at the fabric-covered lump. The pull-tights and straps were all as he remembered them. So were the wonderfully familiar contents: cans of fruit juice, a big box of waterproof matches, a small 35mm camera. He shoved them all aside until his fingers closed around a hard plastic tube.
The beam from the small but powerful flashlight lit their surroundings. He located Ashwood, then Igor. They were still in a cavern, but the walls were close, the ceiling low. They were no longer at Nazca.
Igor was beckoning. “Over here.”
While Carter held the light the guide recovered his own pack. It lay next to those belonging to their captors.
“We’re back,” he declared unnecessarily, his companions having already reached the same conclusion independently. “We will make our way downriver to Puerto Maldonado, where I intend to buy your cat the biggest fish to be had in the central marketplace.”
“Do you guys hear something?” Ashwood whirled.
A familiar but now ominous hum was rising from the ovoid.
“Dammit!” Carter turned his light to his left. A few whorls of color were beginning to amalgamate within the transmitter’s depths. “They’re coming after us!”
“Well, do something!” she yelled.
“What? I don’t know how to turn it off!” He and Igor surrounded the device, both men hesitating helplessly before its inscribed but otherwise featureless surface.
“Get your cat.”
Carter looked around. There was no sign of Macha. “She must’ve run outside!”
Any second now swirling colors would engulf the ovoid, there would be a flash of intense whiteness, and a dozen or so armed and angry Contisuyuns would appear to confront them. He did not think they would be given another chance to escape.
Ashwood was screaming. “Do something! Knock it over, break it!” She picked up a fist-sized rock, ran toward the transmitter, and heaved her missile. It bounced off the polished material without affecting it noticeably.
Maybe a bigger one, Carter thought. There were several large stones lying on the floor of the cave near their packs. He took a step toward them.
Macha, it developed, had not run outside. Instead, she had stayed close by. Too close.
He stepped on her tail.
Emitting a jaguar-sized yowl, she sprang as far away from him as she could, to land atop the pulsing ovoid. There she turned, bristling, her claws digging at the surface of the transmitter as if it were some primordial ancestral scratching post.
As she did so light brighter than the sun filled their eyes. It was accompanied by even a louder yowl. The last thing Carter saw was a large ball of fur flying across the cave as the transmitter shattered.
He did not lose consciousness. An acrid smell filled his nostrils as the force of the explosion knocked him down. Rolling over to aim his flashlight, he saw that the transmitter had burst like an egg struck by a slug from a .44. Smoke curled from its exposed innards. Further inspection revealed that what had once been ancient, complex instrumentation had been fused into a mass of runny, silver-hued slag.
Igor had hit the ground hard. Now the guide was sitting up and holding his head. There was a lot of blood, but as Carter knew from his work with special-effects people, head wounds always bled a lot.
“I will be all right,” Igor mumbled. “It is not deep.”
Ashwood had found her own pack and extracted a second flashlight. Now she played the beam over the ruins of the ovoid.
“This sucker’s not gonna be sendin’ nobody nowhere for a long time. We’re safe.”
“I stepped on Macha’s tail,” Carter told her. “You saw what happened after that. She jumped on top of the transmitter and started pawing around. Crossed some circuits somehow … I don’t know.” He helped Igor bind his undershirt around his forehead. “You’re okay?”
She nodded. “I was farther away than you guys when it blew. Notice the silence?”
With a start Carter realized that the explosion had been soundless. It seemed to him that like the build of a certain actress he knew, such a thing defied various natural laws, but then so did the transmitter itself.
They found Macha lying stunned but apparently otherwise intact at the base of the far wall, her fur smoking slightly. The cat responded to Carter’s presence with a couple of uncertain meows. She offered no resistance when he picked her up. Slowly she began to preen herself.
“Our packs are intact, as are those our captors left behind.” Igor knelt and began rummaging through his own. “We should have enough supplies to get us back to the Pinipini. If no one is waiting for us there we can build a raft and float back down to the Alto Madre de Dios. Once there we can make our way to Shintuya.”
“What then?” Carter wondered aloud. “We’ve been invaded. Sure it’s a small invasion, but that doesn’t seem to bother Pucahuaman and his people. We don’t know what kind of surprises they can spring on the rest of the world.”
“We’ll notify the authorities when we get to Cuzco,” Igor replied.
“Yeah, that’ll take care of it,” Ashwood commented derisively.
The guide looked back at her. “I am not stupid enough to think they would listen to us for a moment if we told them the truth. What I will tell them is that we discovered an important archaeological site at Nazca and that it is being looted by armed foreigners.” He looked confident. “That will get a reaction faster than anything else.”
They took what they wanted from their captors’ packs and stuffed them into their own. Only then did they pick their way back outside.
The jungle humidity dampened Carter’s skin but not his spirits as he and his companions emerged into the sunlight. Their surroundings were achingly familiar: the line of sun-dappled trees which marked the edge of the selva, the overgrown paving stones under their feet, the ancient wall of Paititi with its still indecipherable petroglyphs stark against the gray stonework. Nothing had changed in their absence. He remembered what Igor had told them about how the local Indians feared the site. As recent events had proven, such ancestral terrors had more than a little basis in fact.
“Let’s get movin’,” Ashwood said briskly. “It ain’t gonna get any cooler standin’ here, an’ the sooner we make it back to civilization, the sooner we can see to it that our friendly visitors from Contisuyu don’t do any serious damage.” She struck out in the lead, toward the path that led back to the river.
They had traveled a good ten yards when something enormous came screaming out of the sky to land with a colossal whump in the jungle less than a quarter mile away.
