by RJ Corgan
Dust swirled into her mask, kicked up by the team ahead. The itchy particles crept down her neck and chafed at the collar of her shirt. She was already sweating more than she had anticipated, as the exertion roasted her from the inside. Midway down the path, she came upon Carlos taking photographs of the route below. She used the opportunity to take a rest. Pulling out her flask, she offered him a drink.
“We’re under its shadow now.” Carlos declined the offer and pointed to Beta’s arc that obscured their view of the crater rim. “Until we get the transponder operational, we’ll be in a communication blackout while we’re down here, although we can still talk to each other via line-of-sight comms.”
Kea gulped down a mouthful of warm water. After swallowing it, she somehow felt more dehydrated than before. “If any of them are injured, getting them back up this way will be a nightmare.”
Carlos surveyed one of the boulders blocking the path. “We might be able to rig up something, but it’ll take a while.”
“What the hell were we thinking?” Kea blew out a long breath and stared down the length of the fracture into Masaya’s fiery halo. She knelt and scooped up a handful of rust colored sand. She swore. “Palagonite.”
“What’s that?” Ling appeared beside them and peered into Kea’s palm.
“The result of hydrothermal alteration,” Carlos explained. “These boulders were resting on a layer of rock that must have been altered by rainwater. If one toppled, it could have set off the rest like dominoes.” He shook his head. “When we first went down, the area appeared stable, at least as stable as anything else around here. Then again, that’s the thing with working around volcanoes. Everything seems fine, until it isn’t.”
“Tamaya, my best friend back home, is convinced we all have a death wish.” Kea muttered.
“I’d say it’s the opposite.” Carlos gestured at the lava below, the alien landscape on either side, and the swatches of the sky above. “You’ll never feel more alive than standing here. Every fiber of your being is alive. I wouldn’t trade a brief lifetime of this for any office job.” He shook his head. “To live a life of boredom, that is a death wish.”
“Saying things like that is all well and good,” Kea agreed, “until you fracture a patella while trying to have a pee in a crevasse.”
“We can only make our choices as best we can. Life always has other plans.” He laughed, “so does your bladder.”
Kea considered the apron of talus that swept down the fracture to the floor below. There was nowhere to have a bio break, and the lower regions of her body were starting to voice serious thoughts on the subject. The men, whenever they had needed a release, simply turned to the side of the path and ‘let fly.’ She had been hoping to make it down to Delta but had not thought it would take this long. She glanced at her wrist: three and a half hours since they left Beta level. “If you don’t mind, let’s carry on,” she urged, putting away her flask. “I want to still be of some use to them by the time we get down there.”
“YOU’RE DOING it wrong,” Maria complained.
“Jacob wants his bat guano,” Carter said, remembering the brief lecture the old codger had given them. “If he wants shit, I’m definitely going to give it to him.”
“Here, give me the sample bag.”
Carter noticed that Maria’s zoned out expression had been replaced by wide eyes, sweat, and irritation.
Perhaps Shona was more insightful than Carter had given her credit for. Dumping Maria into the deep end of a lava tube full of bat guano appeared to be enough of a distraction to dull the grief caused by her brother’s death. Plus, it got her off her phone.
After letting Maria fill the bags with guano from the pile, they followed the lava tube until it ended in a collapsed skylight. The late afternoon sunlight streamed down from above, casting long shadows on the rubble. The cave-in appeared to have happened recently, as clots of soil and vegetation were mixed with the fallen blocks.
If there were bats still in the tunnel behind this collapse, they weren’t getting out any time soon, Carter thought. In the sunlight, he spied a glint of something metallic in Maria’s hand. “What’s that?”
“Jacob gave it to me.” Maria held out the tiny object in her hand. The gold cross was fashioned with intricate whorls encrusted with bits of ash and pumice. “He said he found it one of the lava tubes.”
“European.” Carter squinted at the artefact. “Sixteenth century.”
“How do you know that?”
“I go to school and I learn things.” Carter turned the object over in his hands. “What’s this doing in a lava tube?”
“I think it belonged to a friar who was lowered down into the crater to find gold in the sixteenth century.” In response to his puzzled look, Maria countered, “I read books and I know things. I mean,” she faltered, “do audiobooks count?”
“Was it a history book? Nonfiction?”
Maria frowned. “Not exactly.”
Carter listened patiently as Maria recounted what she could remember about the friar’s descent. As she spoke, her eyes darted from one shadow to another. Carter fancied that she half-expected to find the skeleton of the missing monk lying within the tube’s recesses.
“The Spanish have been all over this region for centuries,” Carter cautioned. “And since Jacob moved the piece, it will be impossible to establish provenance.” Clearly Jacob only cared about his guano. Hating that he sounded like Indiana Jones, he couldn’t help muttering, “it belongs in a museum.”
What were the odds of finding something like this today, right after Maria heard the story? He chuckled as another thought occurred to him. “Is there any chance Kea told Jacob that you were listening to this story today?”
Maria’s nostrils flared and her eyes narrowed, confirming Carter’s suspicions.
“I’m not the only one Jacob’s messing with,” Carter said, handing her the cross. “It’s a fake, gotta be.”
Maria squinted at him. “Who are you anyway? Why are you here?”
“I didn’t mean to be here. I was in Bluefields. Now that’s an interesting place.”
“If you’re after crack, yes.”
Carter nodded, surprised by her knowledge. However, nearly all the cocaine in Nicaragua’s capital could be linked to Bluefields Bay, as it acted as a distribution point for all the cocaine that was collected from the sea. “I was there studying piracy.”
“You get paid to study pirates?” In spite of herself, Maria was clearly intrigued.
“It’s for a master’s thesis. I’m exploring how to hide treasure in the 21st century and helping Kea out in the process.”
“Kea?” Maria narrowed her eyes. “What’s she got to do with pirates?”
Carter’s eyes lit up. “Bluefields is a name derived from a Dutch explorer in the 17th century working for the Dutch East Indian Company, named Blauvelt, who later used the bay as a center of operations. Even today, as you mentioned, the region is known for its rather unscrupulous dealing. As a modern-day den of iniquity, it makes an ideal place to hide treasure.”
Maria not-so subtly implored him to cease lecturing by letting out an anguished sigh. “Did you have any treasure to hide?”
“No, but Kea, on the other hand …” Carter trailed off, reluctant to divulge any further details. The whole escapade had strained his imagination. He hadn’t been convinced of the truth until the apartment he was renting in Bluefields was ransacked.
“I can’t picture Kea having piles of gold to stash, not on a geologist’s salary,” Maria commented.
“Even wealthy people don’t roll around on piles of gold all day like Scrooge McDuck,” Carter pointed out.
When Kea had first approached him, terrified that she was being hunted by a goon squad, he’d tried to reassure her that it was very unlikely. Employing a standing army wasn’t cost-effective, he informed her, and it was far more likely that the goons were hired for brief periods and even if they were after her, it wasn’t anything pers
onal.
Kea had seemed even more upset after their conversation.
Of course, when Carter later discovered that said goons had set his rental car on fire, he hadn’t felt very reassured either. He had, however, doubled Kea’s fee.
“She had a certain object that some people wanted back very badly.” He admitted.
“You buried it?”
“The idea that treasure has to be buried is a very old-fashioned construct.” Carter found himself warming to his subject. “Historically, most pirates didn’t bury their treasure, they’d much rather spend it on booze and women and burying it often requires killing the people who helped you bury it. Very messy. Besides, it’s difficult to hide a treasure chest of any size these days, with satellites and lidar that can locate disturbed terrain quite quickly. Thankfully, there are so many more interesting approaches with new technology …”
“Did any pirates ever die of boredom?” Maria lazily traced a finger across the wall of the lava tube.
“I’m fairly sure the penalty for sarcasm was a forced walk down a short plank.”
“So, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Did you manage to hide the treasure,” Maria pressed, “so whoever it was couldn’t find it?”
“We hid it, but we also gave them enough crumbs to find it. Unfortunately, their timing is terrible.”
The clack of a boulder tumbling to the ground echoed in the darkness behind them. Carter flashed his light down the tunnel, but he couldn’t see any movement.
“Do bats wear boots?” Maria asked.
“You two better come up here,” Jacob called through the skylight.
Carter and Maria scrambled up the debris, using tufts of grass and small roots to help pull them over the edge, which was thankfully snake-free. Jacob stood underneath the shade of a spindly tree. “We have company.”
Carter followed his finger. Downslope, half-hidden by brush, he saw a black SUV parked beside Shona’s truck. The men lounging beside it were clearly bored; however, that didn’t make the weapons they held any less threatening.
“My young girl,” Jacob said as Maria pulled out her phone. “Could I borrow that for a moment?” It wasn’t a question. He snatched the device out of her hands, opened the back, and removed the battery. “Unless, of course, you’d like to be whisked away by your squad of goons?”
In response to Carter’s puzzled expression, Jacob merely said, “Following Shona’s orders.”
“How are we supposed to get back?”
“Some of the park rangers are working not too far from here, they can give us a lift back to the parking lot. My pickup is there. I’m afraid it’s not quite up to some of this terrain, not like Shona’s.” Jacob shrugged. “Although, given what our little bird here has done, we may find getting back to be a bit of a challenge.”
Maria’s dark pout had turned into one of embarrassment.
“What did she do?” Carter asked.
Jacob patted the pocket on his shorts containing his phone. “Maria used Emilio’s Twitter account to post that her brother was murdered by the President by a rockfall. Looks like it triggered a number of riots across the country.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Anyone fancy dinner?”
Chapter 8
KEA CLUNG to the line as the world around her was obscured by a cloud of gas. The other climbers were taking longer than expected to move along the narrow ledge below her, so Carlos had asked her to sit tight while he shepherded them to the next station. She sat back in her harness, watching the updrafts lazily slip tendrils of gas through her outstretched fingers.
“My career is over,” she murmured. “Not that it was much of a career.”
She tilted her head back and stared up, searching for the sun, but where the sky should be there was nothing but a bright haze. Her hands on the line trembled as she felt panic rise in her throat once more.
I should never have come here. I should have stayed on the ice where I belonged. What was I thinking?
“Focus on Daniela,” she reprimanded herself. “She needs you.”
Kea thought back to that first day at Masaya’s university, in the days before the Outpost had been built. The provost had found a desk for her in what resembled a broom cupboard and Kea had been wrist deep in receipts when she heard the soft knock on the door.
Daniela was standing in front of her, although Kea didn’t know that back then. Instead, all Kea had seen was a small woman framed in the doorway. Her age, backpack, bright eyes, and questioning tone made it clear that she was a student. Engrossed in the invoices, Kea had been uncertain how long the woman had been standing there.
When the student spoke again, her rapid-fire Spanish eluded Kea’s grasp of the language.
Beckoning for the woman to sit in the chair across from her, Kea had scrambled for the flashcards scattered across her desk. Finally plucking up the correct one, she had read off the card in Spanish, “Could you repeat that and advise me on your area of interest?”
Kea had activated the device in her ear as the woman repeated her question.
Unfortunately for Kea, the translation device was set at full volume. She had winced as the voice barked in her ear, then tossed it onto the desk.
“The dog does not require driver’s ed.”
“I don’t know about you,” the young woman had confided in perfect English, “but now I kinda want to see the dog drive a car.”
Kea had rubbed the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “They promised me this AI was the latest and greatest.”
The woman had extended a tiny hand. “I’m Daniela. Professor Martinez said you agreed to be my external examiner?”
Kea had considered for a moment. “You’re absolutely certain that you don’t have a dog with a learner’s permit?”
“Absolutely not. My mother would be very upset,” Daniela had smiled. “After all, if the dog drove the car, who would walk my father?”
A shout from Carlos brought Kea back to the present. She started moving downward once more, placing each step carefully, lest her movements knock rocks onto the other climbers below. It required interminable patience as the dust and ash acted as a lubricant, sliding out beneath her boots as if her soles were lined with ice.
Near the base of the talus slope, the path bifurcated to the east and west. Each path led down to an area where the debris met the wall. To accommodate this separation, the paramedics split into two teams. Her team would head west, toward the field station, if it still existed, while the others would accompany the remaining paramedics to the eastern rim.
Crouching, sliding, and stretching from rock to rock strained tendons and ligaments in her thighs that Kea never knew existed. She wanted to stop and catch her breath, but fear for Daniela and the others forced her to keep moving.
If Kea were completely honest with herself, what compelled her down the last twenty feet of the climb was the sight of Ling nearly at the base, knowing the woman would be first on the scene.
Which could end my career.
Have I always been this petty? She wondered. Or is Ling’s presence bringing out my worst self? Again.
By the time she reached the base of the rockfall, fatigue had sapped her remaining strength. A knot bunched up inside her right hamstring, caused her to limp out onto the plaza and stumble against a boulder to rest. Exposed to the cauldron, the heat was blistering. As long as she kept close to the crater wall, she did not have to don a proximity suit, however, it felt like she was walking on the surface of the sun.
The glare of the skylight was so bright, it seemed like the world only existed in two tones - the raging orange of the volcano’s churning heart that bled into her eyes even with her lids shut, and the sharp darkness that lurked within the shadows of the boulders strewn across the plaza. The rockfall had split the arc into two segments, effectively burying the middle. Half of Delta level had simply disappeared.
With growing unease, Kea saw that their
descent had sent a trickle of small rocks tumbling merrily down the fracture before plummeting into fiery oblivion.
Like sands in an hourglass, Kea thought, measuring the remaining time before Masaya swallows us whole.
Eager to dispel her queasiness, she looked for signs of activity at the field site. Unlike the tents on Beta where the team could overnight if needed, the station on Delta was little more than a recess hidden behind a massive, elongate boulder. The size of an overturned shipping container, the rock was wedged at the rear of the platform and tilted against the crater wall. When not taking readings of the lava or setting up equipment, the team sheltered for brief periods within the gap between the rock and the cliff face. The gap stretched over fifty feet in length and was wide enough to protect a handful of people from the lava’s searing heat.
Daniela might be in there, injured. If she was lucky.
The alternative, that she had fallen into Masaya, didn’t bear thinking about.
Kea thrust herself off the rocks and followed the rest of the team over to the shelter. From the movement inside, she could see that there were survivors and almost wept with relief. The narrow aperture forced her to hover behind the paramedics as they assessed the team. From her position, it was difficult to identify the victims, as darkness hid their name tags and masks obscured their faces. As her eyes adjusted to the stygian gloom, she was able to count seven figures.
That meant there are still two members of the party missing. Either they were on the other side of the rockfall or …