The agony was a spike driven so deep Mercer felt the hammer was going to explode from his abdomen. He roared as pain flooded his nervous system, nearly short-circuiting his brain. Donny kept up the pressure, screwing the wooden handle into Mercer’s flesh, tearing the ballistic material of his fatigues and ripping into his skin. Perversely, his own blood lubricated the handle, allowing Donny to jam it deeper into the wound.
He was slowly being skewered.
Mercer let his legs collapse from under him. The handle tore from his back with a wet sucking sound. He rolled away from Donny as fast as he could. The wound left a trail of blood dappled on the stone. He got back to his feet in time to meet Randall’s charge, barely able to parry the hammer swing. He continued to backpedal, exchanging ground for the moments he needed for the worst of the pain to abate.
“Bet that felt good,” Donny taunted. “It’ll feel even better when I shove this thing up your ass.”
Mercer smiled around the agony. “You should buy me flowers or candy first.”
“In a minute I’m going to hammer that grin from your face and make you swallow your teeth. After that you’re gonna beg me, Mercer. You’re gonna beg me to let you die.” Donny wiped at his brow, smearing his hair dye across his forehead. “You still think you’re better than me?”
Mercer glanced around and saw something that gave him the start of a plan. “I have a better barber, that’s for sure.”
“You ain’t nothing. All that money, all them people talking about how good you are. It don’t mean shit down here. Here it’s just you and me. You think that Ph.D. of yours is gonna save your life?”
“No. The fact that you’re a goddamned moron is going to save my life. I came here with fifty Special Forces soldiers. While you’re bragging about how tough you are, they’re sweeping the tunnels. They should find this room in about two minutes.”
It was clear Randall hadn’t considered Mercer’s backup. His eyes narrowed. “Then I’ll kill you in one.”
Behind Mercer was a set of black iron stairs that spiraled to the scaffolding surrounding the top section of the oracle. Even as Donny was making his last threat, Mercer was in motion. The stairs were tight, a narrow corkscrew that made it impossible to mount more than two steps at a time. The confining structure shook as Donny raced after him.
Around they went, climbing ever higher. Halfway to the top, the oracle was close enough to the stairs for Mercer to reach out a hand and touch. He almost stopped running when he looked closer at the mysterious machine. The oracle was an enormous clockwork mechanism. Tiny brass gears and ratchets covered the oracle’s surface. Openings allowed him to see inside the device. Within the oracle was a complex collection of pistons, springs and cogwheels that drove plates on the surface. Some of the gears inside the machine appeared to be twenty feet in diameter, like something out of a factory.
That’s how they did it. The oracle was a model of the earth’s tectonic plates, the huge slabs of solid rock that glided on the planet’s liquid mantel. Somehow the builders had known about plate tectonics and crustal displacement long before it was discovered by Western science. Tisa had said that the plans for this machine were centuries old even before they were brought to China five hundred years ago. Meaning the designers had had generations to observe the earth’s movement, extrapolate how that motion would affect other regions and create a machine that could accurately predict future geological events.
As he moved past the globe’s equator he noted the Hawaiian Islands were sharp cones jutting from the near featureless plain of the Pacific basin. A cylinder half filled with mercury projected from the central island. It had to be Kilauea, Mercer realized, the volcano that had been erupting on Mauna Loa for years. The mercury must represent the volume of lava that belched from the volcano over a certain amount of time. Near it was another, smaller mercury vial. It was Loihi, the newest island in the Hawaiian chain. Mercer knew that the top of this volcano was still deep underwater. Craftsmen must be able to add to the oracle, he thought, when new discoveries about the earth were made.
He quickened his pace, climbing up the Pacific side of the oracle. There were the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Strait. He could see the rift valleys that crossed Alaska. Small brass armatures kept the miniature plates together but could allow them to shift suddenly if there was a significantly sized earthquake.
Mercer reached the top of the stairs at least one story ahead of Donny Randall. The platform ringing the oracle wasn’t nearly as wide as he’d hoped, and the wood scaffold was old and water seeping from the cavern roof had rotted it in places. He’d planned on waiting at the head of the stairs to ambush Donny, but there was hardly enough space on the landing to stand and nowhere to swing the sledgehammer. The scaffold was hemmed by rock on one side and a tall but rickety railing overlooking the globe on the other. The lights blazing off the oracle’s facade were blinding.
Donny reached the last twist in the spiral stairs. He paused, watching the landing, and once he was satisfied that Mercer couldn’t attack, he came all the way up.
“Two minutes for your rescue, huh?” He was slightly out of breath from the six-story climb.
“Among other things I’m an eternal optimist,” Mercer panted. He stayed well back from Donny on the circular catwalk, needing the space to think how he was going to get out of this.
Below them, at the top of the oracle globe, the gold sheets that covered the Arctic Ocean had been removed for maintenance. Looking down was like looking into the guts of a mechanical monster. Massive wheels turned slowly inside the oracle, driving ever-smaller cogs and gears, transferring the tremendous geothermal energy of the mountain redoubt into the finite movements of the delicate surface mechanisms, each capable of infinitesimal shifts along fault lines and tectonic plate boundaries. The interior of the oracle was as complex as an antique pocket watch but a thousand times its size.
Donny skulked forward, his hammer dangling by his waist. Mercer wasn’t fooled. Randall could have the sledge in position for a strike much faster than he could. Mercer continued to back away, keeping one eye on his opponent and one on the model world below them.
Randall suddenly lurched, halving the distance between them, his hammer arcing back and forth. When it struck the cavern’s stone wall sparks shot from the steel head; when it hit the wooden railing, splinters flew. Mercer timed his counterattack when Donny was at his full extension and his shoulder was exposed. He darted forward, ramming with the hammer rather than swinging it. While his strike lacked Donny’s power, it did connect. Donny grunted and he had to lower his hammer. Mercer tried for another hit, but Donny had already recovered. He swept aside Mercer’s thrust and twisted his upper body so he could drive his elbow into Mercer’s ribs.
Mercer went down. Randall tried to stomp on his head. Mercer rolled and the blow missed. Donny’s foot exploded through the wood floor and vanished up to his ankle. Mercer was just able to slide out of the way as Donny swept his hammer at him again. He couldn’t prevent Randall from yanking his foot from the shattered floorboard.
They fought their way around the ring of scaffold. Their hammers flew in furious strikes and the sound of their battle resonated across the cave. But neither could gain an advantage. Mercer was quicker than Randall, but the few glancing blows he’d inflicted only seemed to make the big man more determined. Donny seemed indefatigable. And as Mercer tired, he knew it would only take one mistake to lose the hammer dance.