by David Wood
“But it’s leafless,” Aston said. “So maybe some new life form, one that shares the properties of both?”
“You want to name this one?” Syed said with a laugh. She looked up, scanned around until she spotted Sol Griffin. The man stood in the center of the cavern, staring around himself in wonder.
“Sol, is this the stuff? The greenium?”
He shook himself, tore his attention away from the walls. “No. No, the sample is definitely a kind of crystal structure, not like this. I’ve only seen photographs, but it’s embedded in the rock, not growing from it like this stuff.” He smiled, incredulous. “What is this stuff, Jahara? Sam?”
Both biologists shook their heads. “No idea,” Syed said.
She pulled a field microscope from her bag and lined it up with one of the thicker sections of glowing vine. She stared into it for several moments, adjusting focus, moving slightly left and right like a jeweler appraising a fine gem.
“They’re definitely organic but...” Her voice trailed off.
“But what?” Slater asked from behind Jeff.
“I’m not sure. Something isn’t right. Let me study them some more. I’ll need to take a sample back topside as well, of course.”
Aston keenly wanted a look with her instruments, but knew better than to disturb a scientist at work. His expertise lay elsewhere anyway. As Slater and her crew got footage of the others, chatting briefly with each member of the team, he explored. Firstly he went to the stream, drawn to water as his own natural element. It was icy cold, fast flowing, and clear as glass. He used a sample cup and caught some, held it up in the glow of his headlamp. He saw some particulate matter, but it looked mineral. Nothing else of much interest. Even so, he sealed the cup and marked it with a Sharpie, then tucked it into his satchel. His large bag with his wetsuit and other gear sat off to one side and he left it there while he went to investigate the shadowed caves around the edge of the larger cavern.
Along the left side from where they had entered, opposite the stream, five similarly sized caves went back into the rock. Aston entered the first one and found Dig O’Donnell inside, shining his light onto what appeared to be a bench carved out of the bedrock. There were alcoves in the walls that might have been used for storage of some kind. The space was almost certainly a deliberate dwelling.
“This is man-made,” Aston said, his stomach light with trepidation. “It has to be, right?”
“I don’t know,” Dig said quietly, clearly uncomfortable with the whole situation. He crouched, ran his hand along the edge of the bench.
“Looking for marks of tool use?” Aston asked.
Dig nodded. “It’s almost impossible to accurately judge the age of stuff like this, but if it is deliberately made, then some considerable effort has been put into it.”
“Especially without the aid of machine tools, which we can safely say weren’t around when these caves were occupied.”
Dig stood, took a deep breath. “Not human machine tools anyway.”
“You think...”
Dig turned to leave. “I don’t know what I think.”
Aston followed him into the next cave along and it had a similar layout, similar constructions. And the next. All five openings along that side of the larger cavern were undoubtedly deliberately made dwellings, though none contained any other signs of habitation.
Standing in the fifth one, Aston asked, “Did they take everything with them when they left?”
Dig shrugged. “You’re assuming they left.”
“Well, they’re not here now.”
“No, but perhaps they died.”
“Wouldn’t there be bones? Lost possessions?”
Dig nodded. “I suppose so. You know, I mentioned it before when we spoke, but it’s worth remembering there is a theory that Antarctica was once a far more temperate continent. Ancient climate change froze the polar caps of our planet, and that’s what created Antarctica as we know it today. It’s entirely possible we’re looking at the remains of an ancient civilization. Their bones may have long since turned to dust, leaving only the rock to mark their existence. Rock is, after all, about the only thing that lasts pretty much forever.”
Aston was about to question the truth of that when Slater spoke up from behind them. Jeff had the camera trained on them, capturing all the speculation. “How well backed by science is this ancient civilization theory?” Slater asked.
Dig laughed. “Well, there’s been precious little exploration here in our modern age. We’re no doubt the first to explore these caves since whoever carved them out, which could have been thousands of years ago, or tens of thousands, or even more. So there really isn’t any hard science, it’s all speculation.”
“Otherwise known as conspiracy theory?” Slater pressed.
“Of course. But you of all people should know that sometimes the legends are true.”
Before Slater could reply, a sharp crack and a cry of pain echoed to them from the main chamber. They ran together to see what had happened and found Jahara Syed sitting on the ground by one wall, rubbing her eyes. Terry Reid was standing over her, his muscle, Ronda Tate, crouched beside the fallen biologist.
Sol Griffin hurried over. “I’m the physician here, let me through.” He pulled a pack from his shoulder that Aston realized was a medical kit, and dropped it to the ground beside them as he crouched. He put a hand under Syed’s chin, tipping her face up into the light of his headlamp. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Syed looked at her hands, rubbed her fingers against each other in confusion, then shook her hands out. She took a deep shuddering breath. “I’m okay. I’m pretty sure I’m okay, anyway. I wanted a sample of the vine, so I tried to break a piece off, but it was far too tough. It kind of flexed and moved, but there was no way I could break it. So I tried a knife, taking a scalpel to it, but it didn’t even mark the surface. It’s like the stuff has an outer skin that’s... I don’t know, kind of glassy of something, but flexible. So I decided to try to chip a section away. I put a chisel to it, right where some seemed attached to the cave wall. As soon as I cut through it, it sort of... not exactly exploded, but then something flashed, and I felt something like an electric shock shoot through me. It sat me right on my ass.” She grinned sheepishly. “It hurt, but I think I was more surprised than injured. My hands are fine.” She turned them palm out for everyone to see. They appeared unmarked.
“I think I want to give you a check over anyway,” Sol said. “We need to be certain. I’ll just run a few tests, okay?”
“Sure.”
The rest of the team drifted away, muttering to each other. Aston moved to the wall behind Syed, looking for where she had received her shock. A small section of vine lay on the floor, where she had successfully chipped it free. He touched it tentatively, but it was cool and inert, so he dropped it into a sample bag and handed it to the biologist. She smiled her thanks.
Turning back to the wall, Aston could see where she had chipped the small section free. The remaining end of the vine, standing a little free from the stone now, glowed with a hint of red. He frowned, trying to figure out what phenomena of natural plant activity might cause a reaction like that.
“Hey, you guys!” Slater called out. “I’ve found something.”
12
Alex Wong called a meeting of all Base Camp staff, because it was part of the job, not because he wanted to. These staff meetings were interminable, but they were required in his contract, so he did his job. What the hell he had done in some past life to deserve a job like this, he was at a loss to imagine. But, it paid the bills back home in Sydney, so he couldn’t complain. He preferred his post at the Sydney offices of SynGreene, but this temporary assignment and the associated salary boost was too good to ignore. Though it turned out that eight months was a lot longer in reality than it looked on the calendar. And he was only halfway through.
“So no one has seen Aaron Steele?” he asked the gathered staff. The whereabouts of the membe
r of the security team was the number one topic of conversation around the base. Where had the idiot gotten off to?
“I checked his bed in the staff dorm and it hasn’t been slept in.” Mitchell Boggs, a fairly recent hire, was nosy as hell. No doubt he took pleasure in checking up on Steele.
Wong frowned. “He didn’t come back from guard duty yesterday?”
“I don’t think so,” Boggs said. “At least, he didn’t report back. His card still marks him as on duty.”
Wong heaved a tired sigh. “So we know he went to his post, underneath, on time. But that’s it?”
“Yep. Is there any way he could have left? You know, quite a few people have complained about the isolation here and I know he really missed Crystal.”
“Crystal?”
“His fiancée.” Boggs’ leer undermined his tone of concern.
Wong nodded. “Right. But it’s not like there’s a bus service back to Cape Town for him to catch. So no, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t left. Did he seem especially, you know, depressed about it?”
“You mean suicidal?” The speaker was a woman whose name he couldn’t quite remember. He thought she hailed from somewhere in the southern United States.
“Exactly.”
“Nah, he was just bored, like the rest of us.”
A small man at the back, Timmy something or other, raised his hand. “Do you think he might have shared the fate of the last team?”
A flash of anger surged through Wong and he shot one finger up to forestall any more talk. “We don’t talk about that, even with each other. That’s not our job, remember? We guard and take care of stuff up here and have one person on rotation to the stone door down there. That’s it.”
This did not satisfy Timmy. “What’ll we do if the new team–”
Wong cut him off. “We do nothing. Not. Our. Job. That’s what that big unit Terry Reid and his guys are for. They’re the para-military people. We’re just a security firm. I mean, half of you were walking office blocks at night four months ago. SynGreene headquarters is almost literally a world away from this place. Most of this is entirely out of our jurisdiction.”
“Still, I wish we had a few of the military types up here, just in case.” Timmy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He met Wong’s gaze only for a moment before lowering his eyes to the carpet.
Wong couldn’t be bothered to carry on the pretense of a staff meeting. Aaron Steele going missing, after everything that had happened before, had him entirely on edge. “A bunch of us are armed and trained in the use of our sidearms. But we won’t need them. Get back to work, everyone. At least look busy, if you can.”
As his staff filed out, he poured himself a cup of coffee and wondered what might have happened to the other team. He knew more about the situation than most of the staff under him, but still precious little. He knew the team currently down below probably had no better chance of coming back up than the last one and it made him feel like a double-agent or a traitor of some kind. That didn’t sit well with him. His nerves couldn’t take these kinds of stresses. He was a corporate security guard exactly because he was about as likely to run into trouble in that job as he was in a supermarket checkout role. Actual threats made him antsy.
He jumped when the phone rang on the desk beside him, and he snatched it up. “Alex Wong.”
“Alex, Arthur Greene. How goes everything?”
Wong swallowed. The big boss calling like the man could read his treacherous thoughts from afar. “It’s all good,” he lied.
“How are our scientists doing?” If Greene had any suspicions about the state of affairs at Alpha Base, his tone, courteous if not friendly, belied them.
“They’re all down below, sir. On their second day of exploration. So far, no reports of any problems.” He didn’t need to mention Aaron Steele’s disappearance if the boss only asked about the science team.
“That’s good to hear,” Greene said. “Now, have you seen the latest weather report?”
Wong had, and that only contributed to his anxieties. “Yes, sir, I’m keeping abreast of everything. We’re ready for it.”
“Excellent. I’ll check in again soon, but you let me know if anything comes up that I should know about.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Greene.”
Wong returned the phone to its cradle, privately hoping he was ready.
13
Aston had been developing a bad feeling about this whole expedition since Griffin had found him at the aquarium, and nothing that had happened so far had eased the feeling. In fact, everything only made him more uneasy. Syed’s shock from a tough vine-like plant should really have been the peak of weirdness for the day, but he would never be that lucky. Of course Slater had found a dead body.
At first, Aston had expected it to be the missing guard, the one whose fidget spinner they’d found. But that disappearance and the associated blood smear remained a mystery. Slater crouched beside the remains, Jeff spotlighting the camera over her shoulder to capture it all. Aston hurried to be the first there, and squatted beside Slater in the gloom of the small side cave.
The corpse was a man, slumped back against the far wall like he’d slid down into a sitting position, as if exhausted. His legs were stuck out straight, arms resting limply on his thighs, head tilted to one side like he had passed out. His mouth hung open, the blackness beyond his teeth absolute in the contrasting shadows. What little remained of his flesh was yellowed like old leather, sucked tight to the bones of his face and hands, split and flaking like old scales. He had simply wasted away, it seemed, nothing in the caves to consume him. Perhaps not even the bugs one might find topside, Aston presumed.
“Judging by his clothes, I’d guess an early twentieth-century explorer,” he said.
Sol Griffin stood behind, palms on his knees as he leaned in to look. “Have we perhaps found the other member of the missing party? The partner of the man who originally brought that tiny sample of greenium out of here so long ago?”
Aston shrugged. It was as good a guess as any, but still, only a guess. His scientific mind wanted evidence.
“I see no injuries. Looks like he simply collapsed here,” Dig O’Donnell said. “You think he got lost and starved?”
“Seems entirely possible,” Sol mused.
Aston noticed something hanging around the man’s neck and reached out a finger to lift it from inside the ancient jacket. A small, black Bakelite cylinder on a thick string emerged, with a silvery lens on one side. A small ring stuck out from the underside.
“What is that?” Slater asked.
“It’s an old explorer’s light from the days before batteries,” Aston said. He pulled the ring at the bottom firmly and a chain came with it. The unit made a soft whirring sound and a light glowed into flickering life, then dimmed again. “Still kinda works! The chain winds an interior mechanism, creating an electric current that lights the bulb.”
“A Dynamo lamp,” Dig said. “That is a real treasure! May I?” He reached out a hand.
Aston carefully lifted the device over the corpse’s fragile head and handed it over. As he did, he noticed the dead man’s jacket had a cut right through in the center of the chest, which had gone unnoticed at first glance.He gently lifted the side of the jacket open and saw a glint of black. Using just his thumb and forefinger, he delicately tugged on it, removing the item from between the man’s ribs. It was cool to the touch. But it was the artifact’s strange appearance that chilled him to the bone.
“It’s a knife,” he said, voice low with concern. “Looks like flint, but blood red, almost black.” He held it up for the others to see.
The Dynamo lamp forgotten in his other hand, Dig reached out to take the knife. “Primitive design, stone age method of construction by the looks of it. See how the edges have been worked?” He held it out so they could get a better look. “How could something like that be down here?”
“Perhaps another member of his team carried it here,” Anders Larsen suggested. �
�And I guess they had a disagreement.”
“Now we know he didn’t starve to death,” Terry Reid said, his voice echoing from the mouth of the small cave.
“Seems unlikely that a twentieth-century explorer would carry such an anachronistic weapon,” Sol said.
“Yet here it is,” Larsen said quietly.
“But I’m not sure it is the partner of the guy who got out with the greenium,” Dig said. “We’d have to study his possessions more, but it’s entirely possible this guy is from another expedition altogether. There had been a lot of activity in Antarctica back in those days, and lots of folk didn’t make it back. If they got lost down here, I can see why they never returned.”
“What about the color?” Reid asked. “Blood red flint. You ever seen anything like that?”
Dig nodded. “Yes, but only in one place, a long damn way from here.” He turned the blade over in his hands, his eyes taking it in. “Heligoland, an island in the North Sea. Red flint was so coveted that people risked their lives to recover it.”
“Why?” Sol asked. “Is it superior to regular flint?”
“No. Some think it was treasured for its rarity. Others believe it was valued because people believed it come from Doggerland.”
“Doggy who?” Reid asked.
“Doggerland,” Aston said. “It was a land mass that connected Britain to the rest of Europe. It flooded about eight thousand years ago.”
“Some call it ‘Britain’s Atlantis,” Dig said. Aston rolled his eyes but Dig didn’t notice. ‘
“Was it real?” Reid pressed.
“Oh, it was definitely real. Fossils and artifacts have been dragged up from the seabed. Mammoths, prehistoric tools and weapons. There are plenty of legends surrounding it too. The Nazis and even some factions within Russia shared some far-fetched legends about it.”