The mayan prophecy (Timeriders # 8) Read Online Free PDF Page A

definitely heard that term before. Somewhere. From someone. And not so long ago.
    Then, like a slap, it hit her.

Chapter 4
     
1992, Nicaragua
     
    Adam Lewis wiped sweat from his forehead, pushing the damp coil of a greasy dreadlock out of his face. His back was aching from the weight of his backpack. He eased off the shoulder straps, lowered the pack to his feet and straightened up.
    The track zigzagging up the steep mountainside was narrow – in places barely wide enough for a single llama. Barely wide enough for a goat. He turned his back to the vine-covered rock and looked out over the jungle. An undulating velvet green quilt, carrying pockets of morning mist like milky pools on a low-tide beach.
    He squinted at the morning sun, still hanging low in the sky, casting rays of light and shadow across the curves and dips of the landscape below. He could see a single twist of smoke curling up from a clearing down in the jungle, by the glinting thread of the river. He could see several small smudges of neon orange: the one-man vinyl tents of their camp.
    Adam grinned at the spectacular vista.
    To him it looked just like an alien landscape. It reminded him of the Rebel Alliance’s jungle homeworld, Yavin 4. He wondered how much cooler this view would be with the faint, ghostly image of the Death Star hanging like a Sword of Damocles in the blue sky.
    ‘Awesome,’ he whispered. He pulled out his camera and tookseveral snaps. Their guide had said early morning was the best time to get pictures like these. The low-angled sunlight, the velvet carpet of jungle, the combed-out strands of blue-grey mist.
    Professor Brian’s field trip had been an incredible experience for him thus far. An experience that beat the hell out of backpacking in Bali. Or serving cocktails to drunken fellow gap-year students in some remote Mediterranean beach bar.
    This was life-changing.
    They’d done several days on an archaeological dig at Machu Picchu, pulling artefacts out of the damp dirt. A flight up to Honduras then several more days paddling up the Río Coco in canoes, stopping at a couple of small villages along the way. The locals had swarmed out to greet their pale-faced visitors with an overwhelming generosity. Adam had felt just like every other western tourist must feel: like some stoic Victorian-era jungle explorer stumbling across some previously undiscovered tribe. Except for the fact that many of them were wearing tattered old Nike baseball caps.
    A trip of a lifetime.
    An expensive one, though. Mum and Dad had shelled out for it, but, as Dad had made perfectly clear, it was a loan, not a gift. That was the deal. One way or another he was going to have to figure out a way to pay them back later on this year or next. He figured he could earn some easy money writing some C++ library routines for that small gaming company that had approached him. What were they called? Electronic Art or something?
    He sat down on a protruding dried root-stump of a tree. It creaked beneath his weight.
    This field trip was an optional part of his palaeolinguistics course. Actually, Dad had suggested it was little more than a‘loosely related jolly’ than actually being in any way educationally beneficial. What it was, though, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Something he’d probably never get round to doing on his own.
    Character-building stuff. The beer-swilling morons he shared digs with back in Norwich wouldn’t appreciate that, of course. His pictures of Machu Picchu, Honduras, the Río Coco, the villages, would probably leave them perplexed. Or just bored.
    Adam, mate … you got yourself three grand into debt just to take pictures of moss-covered stones? Dude, you need to get a life.
    A lot of money, that. Three thousand pounds. Perhaps his knuckle-dragging flatmates were right: three grand might have been better spent in Ibiza, getting drunk and badly sunburnt with some of it left over to cover the living costs for next term.
    Sod it.
He