Roger laughed a deep laugh. “Watching horror movies out here would freak me out. You ever see that one where they’re out in the arctic and one of the dogs turns out to be a monster and then it turns out the monster can just look like whatever it wants to look like, so they’re not sure who’s a monster and who’s human?”
“I might have seen it once or twice, yeah.”
“Man, I could not watch that out here. I’d never sleep until the chopper came to take me home.”
“It’s a good movie,” Betty said, passing the joint to Roger, who took a drag. The Prospero splashed into the water beneath them, and she suppressed a shiver. “You ever stop to think about what’s actually down there? I mean, it could be anything. They say that under the sea is like…just…an alien world. We know very little about it. I mean, you know somewhere like the Mariana Trench…”
“The what?”
“The Mariana Trench. Imagine the Grand Canyon under the sea and you’re almost there. You could put Mount Everest in it and Everest wouldn’t show above the surface of the water. It’s insanely deep. Do you ever think about the kind of shit that could be living and growing down there? Hell, there could be an entire race of people down there that we’ll never see.”
Roger shivered. “Knock it off, man, you’re freaking me out. I’m now expecting that we’re going to see the Kraken or some shit coming up from the ocean.”
Betty coughed a laugh, watching the Prospero begin drilling into the water. “Chill out, man. All we’re going to find out here is fossils. Maybe some oil. That’s it.”
***
Another shudder ran through the control room, and several notifications popped up on Cameron’s computer screens. Jazmin hurried over, and peered over his shoulder. “What’s happening?”
“The Prospero’s broken through the obstacle we hit yesterday. Just…smashed through it like it’s an egg-shell. It…it seems like it’s hollow inside.”
“Hollow?”
“Yeah. Must be, like, a geode or something.”
“What’s a geode?” asked Claire, aware she was asking a dumb question in a room of geologists.
“You ever see those hollow rocks that have been cut open, showing a load of tiny little crystal stalactites and stalagmites inside?” asked Anna. “You usually get them in shitty gift shops or in those places that sell Tarot cards and vegetarian cookbooks.”
“Yeah.”
“Those are geodes. It happens when gas bubbles form in volcanic rocks. Put simply.”
“I got you. So the Prospero just found a giant one?”
Cameron was hurriedly scrolling and clicking through a load of windows and graphs on his computer screen. “Yeah, or an egg or a cyst or an abscess, depending on how gross you want to be. I’m going to begin excavation, see what we can bring up to study.”
“You can do that?” asked Jazmin, a little amazed.
“Yeah, I mean, there’d be no point in just smashing about in the ocean if we couldn’t bring anything up to study, right? I’ll bring up some samples, then Kurt and Bobby will pore through them in the lab. I’ll be there too, of course. Uh, you can come hang out too, if you like? I mean, if it’s all right with the Captain.”
Anna smiled. “Just make sure she’s home by eleven. It’s a school night.”
Cameron blushed and Jazmin laughed. She squeezed his shoulder gently to let him know not to be flustered by it, and he turned back to his work. He navigated through various windows, charts and diagrams at speed, finishing with adjusting some physical dials and switches on the console in front of him. “Okay. The excavator is bringing stuff up now.”
“Where does it dump whatever it brings up?” asked Claire.
Cameron was too occupied with the computer to answer, so Anna spoke up. “An internal chamber inside the drill carries rock samples up the entire length of the shaft. Once it’s there, we can unbolt a compartment and just pick up whatever we need, and then dump the rest of it.”
“What do you think it was that we broke through?” asked Jazmin.
“Ice. A layer of sediment. It’s too early to say. It’s rather dark down there, too, you know.”
“You think it could be Hadean rock down there?”
Cameron clicked a final checkbox on the computer and the drill ground to a stop before spinning in the reverse direction and telescoping back in on itself. “Well, we got samples. They’ll be ready for Kurt and Bobby to analyse in about twenty minutes. I’ll head down to the lab, too. Anyone else want to come?”
Jazmin smiled. “You know I do.”
Anna’s eyes remained locked on the Prospero as it spun back into its home position. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” asked Cameron.
“There. On the tip section.”
A white, claggy compound was smeared across the tip of the drill. It looked like the teeth had gotten a bad case of plaque, as if it had spun into a massive lump of discarded chewing gum at the bottom of the ocean. Anna felt her arm hairs rise, though she didn’t know why.
Cameron stood up to peer closer through the window. “I don’t know. It could be…some kind of chalk, maybe?”
“It looks too viscous to be chalk. It looks like…goopy resin.”
Cameron shrugged. “Whatever it is, it’ll need to be cleaned off before we try another excavation. Get Betty and Roger on it please, Captain.”
“I will. I’m going back to my office. I need to make a log of all this, because sure as shit no-one else ever bothers. Miss Flynn, you want to accompany me, or do you want to go to the lab?”
“You can call me Claire; and I’ll come with you. I have to see how your administration systems work if I’m going to be able to do a full report.”
“You sure? Don’t want to go and look at wet rocks instead?”
“I’m sure. Your office is warm and has coffee.”
“That it does. And Twinkies. Jazmin, why don’t you help out the boys in the lab today? We can get you on paperwork when things are a little more boring around here.”
“Sounds good to me, Captain.”
***
Cameron and Jaz were waiting in the laboratory when Kurt and Bobby arrived with the samples the Prospero had brought up. Kurt placed the large tray full of dust and rocks in front of them. “As you can see, it’s a pretty weird haul.”
The tray was full of wet sand, shellfish fragments, several chips of slate and four strange looking rocks. They were all roughly spherical and about the size of a grapefruit. An odd crystalline sheen covered their otherwise dull, brown surface; although this could just have been the laboratory lights reflecting on their dull surface. Cameron reached down and picked one up, tapping it with the knuckle of his right hand. “Geodes?”
Jazmin felt a strange gooseflesh. It was surely a coincidence, but it felt strange that they had been talking about geodes not moments before. “Is it normal to find that many so close together?”
***
Betty and Roger looked up at the white gunk embedded in the teeth of the drill. It had dried and hardened slightly so that it now just looked like chalk; or, Betty reflected, bird shit. “Fire hose should shift most of it. I hope it doesn’t come down to climbing out there with a scrubbing brush.”
“What do you suppose it is?” asked Roger.
“Chalk, I reckon. Or something goopy they hit down there. I’m sure it’s pretty normal, whatever it is.”
“You ever see Alien?”
“I think I might have seen it once or twice, yeah.”
“There were two engineers like us in that, right?”
“Right.”
SIX
Cameron picked up one of the geodes and shook it gently. “Something’s rattling in there.”
Bobby shrugged. “Maybe some crystals broke loose or something.”
Cameron pulled a face. “I dunno. It feels more…substantial than that.”
Jazmin reached down and picked up another. “Wow, it’s cold.”
Cameron sm
iled. “What did you expect? It’s been at the bottom of the ocean around the Antarctic since…well…how long do we think? Can we carbon date it?”
“Of course, we can,” said Kurt, almost offended. “I’ll just take a sample.”
“How long does carbon dating take?” asked Jazmin, wide-eyed, still feeling a little bit like this was all a dream, or happening to someone else. She felt like Dorothy, caught in a hurricane. “I mean, when we did it at college, it took a couple of days, but we had to send it off to another lab in Arkansas or somewhere. So, what do we do?”
Kurt had taken a small chip from one of the geodes, and scurried off with it and Bobby to the other side of the laboratory. “Probably two or three minutes,” he called over his shoulder. “We’re a little more high tech – and not to mention better situated – than Arkansas University.”
“I’ve never heard us called ‘better situated’ before,” muttered Bobby.
Cameron was prodding through the sand and shellfish fragments with his pen. “There’s a few leg segments and stuff here. Probably just dead matter from the surface of…whatever it was we punched through. Ice, I guess. There’s none of it here.”
Jazmin pulled a face. “It’s still smeared all over the drill. Could you get a sample from there?”
“You want to try climbing out there to get some?” asked Cameron, distractedly. “If it’s not ice, then it’s just chalk or sediment. It’s not a big deal; and even if it is, we can just scoop down and get some more, right?”
“Sure. You’re the boss.”
“Anna’s the boss. I just should be the boss.”
“I guess so,” replied Jazmin, a little surprised by the venom in his voice.
“Any guesses before the final results are announced?” called Bobby from the other side of the room.
“Precambrian?” Cameron guessed.
“I’m gonna push the boat out and say Hadean,” said Jazmin, flashing a smile at Cameron.
“You really think they could be Hadean?”
“Well, we’re out here on the frontier, aren’t we? Anything’s possible.”
Kurt walked very slowly across the laboratory to them, never taking his eyes off of the small print out in his hands.
“Come on!” called Bobby. “Don’t keep us in suspense. What is it?”
Kurt shook his head. “I…something must have been corrupted. Or contaminated. Whatever. I need to take another sample.”
“Oh. Sure,” said Cameron, who had picked up another of the geodes and was studying it in his hand. “I’m going to crack this one open. Anyone object?”
“I do!” shouted Kurt. “These have been down there for…for a very long time. Who knows what’s inside? It could be toxic gas for all we know. Just…give me a moment. Let’s do the carbon dating first. Then we can…we can take an x-ray or something. Just, please, be patient. As Jazmin said, we are on the frontier here. What’s an extra fifteen minutes caution?”
Cameron was rattled by the outburst from the normally super calm geologist, and placed the geode back in the sample tray. “All right, Kurt. Anything you say.”
Jazmin sidled up to him. “Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him this on edge before. It’s like…super weird.”
The laboratory fell silent as Kurt carried out a second carbon dating test. The only sound was the whirring of the heating, and then the gentle buzz as the carbon dating machine printed out its results. Kurt snatched it and studied it intensely before slumping down into a chair. “My god.”
The others rushed over to him. Jazmin went to check Kurt was okay, while Bobby and Cameron snatched at the print out.
“Four point five six billion years old!” yelled Bobby.
“That’s insane. The Earth itself is only 4.56 billion years old,” said Cameron.
“Yes. This rock is from when the earth was still a molten mass,” said Kurt. “They shouldn’t be. I mean, they can’t be. Everything was just…molten. There’s just no way that a geode could have formed. It makes no sense. No sense at all.”
Jazmin was stunned. “So they’re not Hadean. They’re…”
“Chaotian!” finished Cameron. “Yes. The first era, from before the Earth’s surface had even cooled. You all realise what a massive discovery this is, right?”
“I realise,” Kurt muttered. “I just…don’t know what it means.”
The room fell into silence for a few moments as they all contemplated the significance of this discovery. If these geodes, these igneous rocks really were the age of the planet, it could change everything that mankind understood of its geology.
Cameron was the first to break the silence. “I want to X-ray one. See what we’re dealing with.”
Kurt nodded, picking up a different geode from the one he had carbon dated, and Jazmin noticed that his hand was still shaking a little. “Sure. I mean…we could. We should, right?”
Bobby and Cameron exchanged a look. They had never seen Kurt rattled by anything before. Seeing him like this was downright disconcerting. They both knew that they had stumbled across something big, but Kurt seemed to literally be in shock.
“I, uh, can do that if you like, Kurt. Why don’t you take a break?” asked Bobby.
“No, no. I’m fine. Sorry.”
Kurt placed the geode into the X-ray machine, and prepared the photography equipment. The room had once again fallen silent, magnifying every sound he made.
“This is a hell of a first day,” Jazmin’s voice came out in a hoarse whisper and she cleared her throat before continuing. “Everyone else on my course is probably cleaning test tubes or filing receipts for petri dishes. Here I am, on an experimental drilling rig, and it looks like we just turned our knowledge of geology on its head.”
Cameron chuckled, and Bobby punched her playfully on the arm. “You must be our good luck charm. To be honest, it had all been pretty dull until you showed up.”
A buzzer sounded, and a small orange LED lit up indicating that the X-Ray was processed, and the resulting image was ready. Kurt took it, nervously rubbing his beard with the other hand, and clipped it up to the light box so that everyone could see.
“That’s a fucked up looking geode,” said Cameron.
They had all expected to see that the potato sized rock was mostly hollow, with the inside of the “skin” covered in small, crystalline formations. Jazmin had seen a hundred geodes in her time, in museums, laboratories, gift shops…she knew exactly what was supposed to be there. What was actually inside looked like something from a horror movie. “Is that a…?”
Bobby squinted up closer to the lightbox. “It’s a weird mineral formation. It looks like…well, it looks like a tarantula.”
Jazmin felt her arm hairs rise as she saw what the lab assistant was looking at. She could make out what looked like legs, although if it were a tarantula, it was pretty squashed up in its little cocoon.
Bobby gestured across the X-ray with his pen. “Abdomen, thorax, legs…”
“Pareidolia,” said Cameron. “Your brain is finding meaning in random patterns; it’s no different to seeing faces in the clouds.”
“I see it, too,” said Jazmin. “It looks like a spider.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s crack the damn thing open, then. It’ll just be a weird igneous rock and, well, it’s probably not even Hadean. I mean, I don’t know what it’ll be, but to find a rock that’s theoretically possibly older than the planet is enough for me.”
Bobby turned to Kurt. “Do you want to crack it open? It’s your laboratory, so we’ll go with what you say.”
“I think we should.”
Cameron grabbed disposable gas masks for them all, and they soon surrounded the selected geode. Kurt steadied it and the chisel in one hand, holding a mallet in the other. “Ready?”
“Ready,” whispered Jazmin.
The hammer gently tapped down four or five times before the outer shell of the geode cracked neatly around the circumference. Kurt slowly pris
ed the two halves apart. A shimmer of crystal around the inside of the shell showed that it was a geode of some kind, but this was not what any of them noticed first.
There was no dead space inside the geode, where gas had once been. Instead, out tumbled a lump that was definitely and undeniably a cramped, fossilised spider.
Cameron excitedly picked it up, not even stopping to pull on latex gloves. “Look at that! That’s…it’s a fucking spider!”
Jazmin felt her stomach turn. She wasn’t good with spiders at the best of times. Antediluvian ones were a whole other ball game. “But…spiders didn’t evolve until the early Cretaceous. And those are spiders. Tarantulas like this one didn’t come along until…”
“Tarantulas have been found in the Triassic,” interrupted Kurt. “But, this rock is at least Hadean. And if this all tallies up, this will change everything we know about the evolution of life on this planet.”
SEVEN
At the end of a long day in the laboratory, and despite Jazmin’s gentle deterring, Cameron insisted on walking her back to her room. He also kept mentioning that they could go back to his rooms if they didn’t feel like sleeping, which Jazmin found more than a little grating after the third time. She said, truthfully, that she was dog tired, and would see him in the morning. She was terrified that he was going to try and lean in for a kiss at her doorway, but he didn’t. She couldn’t quite work out if he actually liked her liked her, or if he was just a dork and completely awkward around girls.
She wanted to call her mother in London, but it was seven in the evening on the rig, which meant it would be six in the morning with her. A little early for a social call. She decided to take a quick nap, and then call her and go get something to eat, but as soon as her head hit the pillow, the jet lag and the excitement of the day knocked her out like a punch.
***
Cameron retired to his room, and burnt his way through a four pack of coke and a few hours playing on his PlayStation before finally crashing out for the evening, his head filled with questions as to what the day’s discoveries – if they were true – would mean. The other three geodes had all been X-rayed, and they too, contained what looked like spiders. One, maybe two, could be chalked up to pareidolia – the scientific term for seeing faces in clouds and tree bark – but not four. Something momentous had occurred in Tempest Outpost’s Laboratory, and he couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to have seen it.
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