by Rick Chesler
“Yep. Salt,” he says. “And warmer than I was expecting. Could be there's some hydrothermal activity down there.”
“In a sedimentary cave system?” Fi asks. She doesn’t do much to disguise her disdain. I don’t think she likes Brendan all that much.
“Depends,” I say, feeling the need to defend my fellow scientist. “The upper part of the system is sedimentary, but if this body of water is deep enough, it could just be overlaying a geologically active zone. It isn’t unheard of.”
“But that would mean it could be thousands of feet deep.”
I shrug. “It could be.”
“How long do you think it has been isolated from the surface?” Nik asks.
Again, I shrug. “I don’t know. They were fracking Jurassic shale, so in theory, we could be looking at, what, one hundred and sixty million years?”
Marcus lets out a low whistle. “One hundred and sixty million? Are you serious?”
“Well, I’m not a paleobiologist… but yeah, we could be.”
“So, if anything is living in there, it could have been cut off from the rest of evolution for nearly two hundred million years?”
“Yeah.”
“If anything is living in there,” Fi says.
“Actually, the chances of there being something in there are pretty good,” says Brendan. “If the presence of bacteria indicates this system is still biologically active, there's no reason why not. Samples from other such isolated bodies of water indicate that life is quite capable of thriving independently of the outside world. Take Lake Vostok, for example. They went looking for bacteria and found fish.”
“You think there might be fish in there?” Marcus says.
“Could be.” Brendan grins, and I can’t help smile. His enthusiasm is infectious. “Who knows?”
Predator X is available from Amazon here
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Excerpt
