Dragon Dreams

by Chris A. Jackson

  She snapped photos and turned pages.

  September 24th, his team boarded a ship at Palana, and sailed to Vladivostok, where they met Dr. Sagadeyev. The last entry read like the confession of a mother giving her child up for adoption. Learning the climate of the political landscape and the storm that was coming, Loktev had encased his journal in with the sample and sent them off to America with Sagadeyev's specimens. His hopes were to join them there one day, to discover the hidden treasure he had pulled from the earth.

  The last third of the book was blank.

  "Well, if this isn't a holy crap moment…" She closed the book with reverent care and placed it in a special acid-free plastic bag for storage. Simple exposure to air, dust and moisture would destroy it in time, though it was currently in excellent condition. The data was safe in the camera. She stretched again and looked at the clock. Ten thirty. Too late to call Hutch about this and her stomach was growling like a hungry wolf.

  She copied the photos from the camera to a flash drive, then backed them up on the photo setup's external hard drive as well. The files were too big to easily email, so she would just email him what she'd found and show him tomorrow. For now, she needed to eat.

  Aleksi removed her gown and stuffed the flash drive in her pocket, then vacuumed the dust from her hair, knowing she must look like a pastry chef after a food fight. Outside the dust barrier, she doffed her gloves, mask and safety glasses, washed her hands and face in the lab sink, grabbed her coat and bag, and headed for the door, dreaming of reheated pizza, Irish coffee, and the pages of the newly discovered treasure in her pocket.

  6

  The bracing cold air hit Aleksi like a five AM wakeup call. It had been a long day, but the excitement of the discovery and the blast of chill air shattered her fatigue.

  That and the noise.

  "New Year's Eve," she muttered with a shake of the head.

  Aleksi had few good memories of the holiday. People tended to drink too much, get way too friendly, and wake up in the morning regretting both. Consequently, she tried to avoid invitations, or claim that she had already been invited to other celebrations, then sit home and ignore the blaring music and loud voices cheering in the New Year.

  Tonight, however, with excitement still pounding in her head, the music blaring from the Law School residence halls seemed like a crowd of cheering spectators celebrating her find. She laughed at the notion, and stuck her hands in her pockets, lengthening her strides for home.

  Then her phone vibrated.

  "Damn." She'd turned it to vibrate and left in in her coat pocket that morning. She pulled off a glove and swiped the screen: two calls from her mother and a text from a local number she didn't recognize. "Double damn!" She hadn't called home since Christmas day. Well, that could wait until tomorrow; her parents were in bed by nine thirty. She pulled up the text and saw that it was from Lonnie Westinghouse.

  It said, "Where R U?" and was two hours old.

  She tapped in, "Sorry. Work. Sup?" and sent it. She stuffed the phone in her pocket, but only took a dozen steps before it vibrated again. She pulled it out without breaking stride; she had a date with an Irish coffee.

  "Party @ Dudley. Hutch is here."

  "Not much for NYE parties." She sent it, but then stopped. If Hutch was there, she could tell him about the journal she'd found. But drunk people, music, crowds… Before she could make a decision, her phone vibrated again.

  "He's in black tie! Can U say incriminating photos?" Lonnie had attached a picture of Hutch, drink in hand, tie hanging around his open collar. His mouth was open and he was gesticulating. A dark-haired young woman stood at his elbow, gazing at him as if he had just agreed to father her child.

  Aleksi smiled; she was starting to like Lonnie's sense of humor. She sent, "BRT! 10 min."

  She did an about face and stuffed the phone in her pocket. Harvard Yard was noisy. Students who had not gone home for the holidays were having a stereo contest. There were a few shouts and one obscene invitation, but she ignored them and just kept walking. Lehman hall, which held Dudley House Graduate Center and the Dudley Café, occupied the corner of the yard. She heard the music before she even cracked the door.

  It wasn't as loud as the battle of the stereos, but it was loud enough to make conversation a shouting contest. A big screen TV displayed Times Square in all its gritty splendor, but there were fewer people here than she would have expected. Long tables laden with junk food and alcohol lined one wall. Lonnie approached with a pitcher of sangria in one hand and two cups in the other.

  "Aleksi! You made it!" She wrapped her long arms around Aleksi without spilling a drop of the liquid. "Stash your coat and have some of the worst sangria in the free world!"

  Aleksi tried not to shy from the wobbly embrace. She liked Lonnie, but wasn't a hugger. After removing her coat, she reluctantly accepting one of the cups.

  "You going prematurely gray, or working with a plaster saw?" Lonnie lifted her glass in toast. Aleksi could tell this wasn't her first drink of the evening.

  "The latter." She sampled the sangria and stifled a cough. "Holy—"

  "The chem geeks made it. I think they used anhydrous ethanol and grape soda." She took a sip and grimaced. "Revolting, isn't it?"

  Aleksi took another careful sip and had to check her gag reflex before swallowing. "God, it's disgusting! I can't drink this."

  "I thought Russian's drank straight vodka."

  "We do, and it's way better than this."

  "That's okay. Just pour it back in and get whatever you like from the bar." She gestured toward the bottle-laden table. "Oh, and there's food, sort of. Come on."

  She followed Lonnie to the table and cringed again. There was a huge cooler of various beers, bottles of cheap wine, and a plethora of hard liquor and mixers. No Irish coffee tonight, she thought, looking at the decimated food table. There were half a dozen empty platters, several bowls of chips and dip, a vegie plate, and some chicken wings that looked radioactive. And so much for dinner. She filled a paper plate with tortilla chips, ladled on some kind of cream-cheese based dip, and took some wings, carrots, and celery.

  "No drink?" Lonnie looked at her like she was damaging the party. "Come on, Aleksi, let me pour you something."

  "Um, okay." She scanned the table and espied a familiar red and white label. After emptying her cup back into Lonnie's pitcher, she filled it with ice, then poured in a measure of Stolychnia and topped it with tonic. "Better?"

  "Much better." Lonnie wrapped an arm around her shoulders and, much to Aleksi's horror, steered her toward the crowd.

  "You, um, said Hutch was here?" Aleksi scanned the group but couldn't see anyone in a tux. She balanced her plate on her cup and tried a chip. The dip was loaded with herbs. She hoped they were the legal kind.

  "Yeah, somewhere. He's got law students swarming all over him." Lonnie leaned in close. "He dated a grad student over there a while ago, and she evidently talked to her friends about him. The women are circling like sharks."

  "Oh?" The thought of a bevy of female lawyers stalking Hutch struck her as amusing.

  She spotted him in the middle of a group of students, not all of them women, but most. Lonnie elbowed her way right in, something Aleksi could never have done, and touched Hutch's arm.

  "Look who I dragged in out of the cold!" Lonnie waved a hand at Aleksi and in an instant every eye in the group was on her. She stood there with a plate of chips in one hand and her plastic cup in the other, a deer in the headlights.

  "Aleksi! Wow!" He grinned and waved her into the group. "Everyone this is Aleksi Rychenkna, my newest grad student. Aleksi, this is…well…just about the whole law review. We've been talking about the lawsuits over the pipeline project. It's a legal nightmare."

  "Oh, sure. Hi." She took a sip of her drink to mask her discomfort at being the center of attention, however brief.

  "Is that plaster dust?" Hutch stepped over and reached up to touch her hair. "Tell me you didn't just get out o
f the lab."

  "I…Oh! You won't believe what I found." Aleksi suddenly remembered the journal and her reticence vanished. "One of the samples isn't from Bratskoe Vdkhr. It's from Kamchatka! Some digger named Andriy Loktev found it at the base of the Nalychevo volcano."

  "What?" Hutch nearly dropped his plastic cup. "After all that paperwork, we took the wrong sample? That's impossible!"

  "I thought so, too. All the cover documents said it was one of Sagadeyev's four samples, but I found a journal under the first layer of plaster on the biggest one. I photographed the whole thing and read a little. He put his specimen on the ship with Sagadeyev's at Vladivostok when he found out what was happening back in Moscow. He worked for The Imperial Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and was afraid the revolution would destroy his work. They changed the cover documents instead of adding a whole new shipment manifest."

  "Quinton is going to have a coronary." Hutch shook his head and took a healthy swig of his drink. "I want to see these pictures, Aleksi. What is the sample, anyway?"

  "I've got them on a stick." She balanced her plate on her cup and pulled the jump drive out of her pocket. "And they're not fossilized. Or, at least, I don't think so. The sample was buried in a pyroclastic ash deposit. He only found it because a tooth was exposed by erosion."

  "A tooth? What kind of tooth?" Hutch turned to the rest of the group, whose attention in their conversation had waned. "Anyone have a computer?"

  "Uh, sure." One of the law students dug in his bag and pulled out a tablet. "Whadaya need?"

  "Mind if we look at some pictures with it?" At the raised eyebrows around the group, he rolled his eyes. "Work pictures."

  "Oh, sure. Just don't delete anything, okay?" The student booted up the tablet, logged in, and handed it over.

  "No problem. Thanks!" Hutch steered them toward two lounge chairs away from the crowd and they sat. While he inserted the stick and pulled up the files, he asked again, "So, what was this tooth?"

  "There's a sketch in the journal, about two thirds back. Loktev thought it was a carnivore, but he didn't have much more information. He didn't want to excavate through the ash cast in the field, so he encased the whole thing in plaster. He was going to take it all to St. Petersburg and work on it there, but that never happened." She balanced her plate on the arm of her chair and munched a chip. Her empty stomach grumbled at the mixture of junk food and alcohol as she watched him flip through the photos. "There!"

  "A canine! Holy crap, look at that! Is this to scale?"

  "I don't know. The journal is about six by eight, but I didn't cut down to the sample itself. I knew you'd want to see this before we did any more." She watched Hutch resize the photo to match the dimensions of the journal. The sketch of the curved canine was about an inch long, but only showed the portion that was exposed from the ash. The detail of the sketch was excellent, and there were two different views. "Carnivore?"

  "Looks more like a primate tooth. I've seen macaque canines like this, and baboon even bigger." He squinted at the Cyrillic notes. "What does this say?"

  "He describes the recurve edge of the tooth. He says it's sharp, like a razor."

  "That does sound more like a male macaque. Big cats and bears have peg teeth." He chuckled. "Sorry, I know you teach comparative zoology; I'm just being a prof."

  "No problem." She wasn't about to tell him that she didn't need a lecture on vertebrate morphology. "But there's no way it's a macaque. Flip forward a few pages. There. He's got sketches of the cranial section with all the alluvial deposit removed. The ash formed a cast like the ones at Pompeii. It's probably less than an inch thick. The shape is all wrong and it's too big."

  "Hmmm." He sipped his drink and frowned. "You're right. We should image the whole thing and get a full body picture, but…" He leaned back and looked at her. "I'd love to study this, Aleksi, but we have to tell Quinton what we've found before we do anything else."

  "Oh." Aleksi realized that he was right. They weren't even supposed to have this sample. "You think he'll want it back?"

  "Probably. This isn't what we were looking for. And even if the museum did let us keep it, we've got no funding, and you've got a dissertation to work on."

  Aleksi could see it in his face; there was interest, but reluctance, too. She bit her lip; she was more interested in this sample than all of the Ursus data. It was an unknown. It might be a dead end, but they would never know if Quinton took the sample back. Then a thought occurred to her, and she heard herself speaking before she could stop.

  "What if we could get funding from the MCZ to work this up?"

  "It would still take time, Aleksi, and your dissertation proposal is due, not to mention your comp exams. You can't do it all."

  Her mind raced. "How about this: we ask Quinton for permission and money to do a basic workup on the sample, just imaging and clean up, maybe some DNA work if we can get it, just to identify what we've got. I'll continue on the workup of the Ursus samples until we know what this one is. If it's something I can use for my dissertation, I'll apply for a grant, and you bring Bob into the Ursus project for his dissertation. It's mostly genetics, anyway; he'll love you for it. I'll help him with the grunt work, and he can do the DNA isolation and PCR on this sample when we have something ready for my proposal."

  "And if this turns out to be a dead end?"

  "Then we send it back to MCZ basement, and I've only lost a couple of weeks."

  "You're sure you want to do this, Aleksi? I mean the workload…"

  She flipped the tablet to the page that displayed Loktev's sketch of the entire sample prior to encasing it in plaster and showed it to him. "I'm sure."

  "Holy…" his eyes widened at the sketch. The outline was vague, but its sinuous shape and long forelimbs were clear. "What the hell have you dug up, Aleksi?"

  "I don't know." The warm glow of discovery filled her like a drug. "But I want to find out."

  "There you are!"

  Both of their heads came up at the accusative cry. A dark-haired woman strode toward them, flipping open the buttons of her voluminous fur coat. Beneath, she wore a deep blue evening gown that plunged at the neck, and a glittering necklace of blue and white stones. Her hair was coifed into an intricate pile of curls, and gems to match her necklace dangled at her ears. Her eyes flashed at Hutch with more fire than her jewelry.

  "Dwayne Hutchinson, you ditched me!" She shrugged out of her coat and flung it at a chair.

  "Persephone!" Hutch stood, looking apologetic. "Sorry. You seemed to be having a good time, and something came up."

  Aleksi stood and started to back away, but the woman's eyes pinned her like an insect in a collection before they snapped back to Hutch. This was Hutch's ex-wife? She'd seen her picture on the Internet while researching Hutch, but never dressed up for a formal party. If the jewelry was real, it could have financed Aleksi's college education. What was she doing here?

  "Something came up? What could come up on New Year's Eve, Hutch, but another party?" She flung a hand at the room full of graduate students. "You got a better offer and left me hanging with a bunch of stuffy academics."

  "Actually, Aleksi here was working this evening, and found something interesting." He reached for the tablet as Aleksi stood there stunned. He was using her as an excuse. The computer slipped from her numb fingers, and he flipped to the page with the drawings. "See?" He held it for her to see.

  "Working?" Persephone looked first at Aleksi, then down at the screen. "Nobody works on New Year's Eve. What are you trying to…"

  As she peered down at the screen, Hutch caught Aleksi's eye and mouthed, "Sorry," with a cringe and a shrug. Aleksi looked away. She didn't like being used as an excuse. Then Persephone's eyes widened, and her voice changed.

  "Oh my! That's…" She bit her lip and cocked her head, peering at the illustration. "That's something. It's all in Russian, too. What is it?"

  "We don't know yet." Hutch took the tablet back, though Persephone seemed reluctant to let it g
o. "The journal was hidden in a specimen unearthed about a hundred years ago. It was buried in an ash deposit in Kamchatka. Aleksi wants to find out what it is."

  "Aleksi…" Persephone pinned her again with those intense eyes and smiled with perfect teeth. "Well, since Hutch is too big a boor to even introduce us, I'll do so myself." She held out a hand. "I'm Persephone Terris. I assume you're one of my ex-husband's students."

  "Yes." Aleksi shook her hand, one of those finger-only greetings that always seemed fake to her. "I am."

  "And from the look of the dust in your hair, he wasn't lying about you working." Persephone brushed her hand on her dress as if she's been contaminated. "You poor dear. Hutch, how could you make her work on New Year's Eve?"

  "Oh, he didn't. I just…like to work." Aleksi bit her lip, wondering why she was defending Hutch after he used her as his excuse.

  "You like to work?" Persephone looked at her as if she'd grown horns and a tail.

  "Some people enjoy working, Persephone." Hutch's tone stated clearly that this was an old argument. "She's got a dissertation project and her comps to do this semester."

  "Oh, all right. I'm sorry." Persephone waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. "Well, you came here to work, and I came here to party, so have fun. I'm sure someone in Cambridge isn't working!" She snatched up her coat and flung it on. "But next time you invite me to a party, I expect you to stay there with me."

  "I'm sorry, Persephone. I should have told you when I left."

  "Yes, you should have." She glanced at Aleksi, then back to Hutch. "Goodnight."