While extremophiles in general were capable of surviving everywhere from beneath the frozen Antarctic ice caps to the fiery heart of a volcano, it was the facultative thermophilic branch, those that thrived with intense heat and pH levels, but could survive lower temperatures, that intrigued him. Most people weren’t even aware of their existence, yet these bacteria were part of their everyday lives. They were used in the manufacture of detergents and perfume, in food processing plants, and to clean up oil spills. There was even a species called thermusaquaticus, discovered in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park, that produced an enzyme called Taq I, which made it possible using restriction fragment length polymorphism technology to create human genomic fingerprints, the kind used in forensic science to match DNA and solve crimes. This enzyme could copy billions of strands of DNA in just a few short hours. That one species alone had already generated more than two billion dollars in royalties for the company that held the patent, which was where GeNext came into the picture. The race was on between biotech firms to harness the power of these bacteria. Research teams were being dispatched all across the globe, to the highest mountaintops, the densest jungles, and in Tyler’s case, the deepest oceanic trenches, in the name of progress and profit.
He manipulated the armature to position the bioreactor, which would allow him to maintain the proper temperature and chemical concentrations while agitating the sample to prevent sedimentation, directly into the black smoke.
“Come here, little guy,” Courtney said. “Stick that head out just a bit farther.”
Tyler glanced over Courtney’s shoulder at her monitor. She had nearly coaxed one of the long worms out of its tube and into a collection bin similar to his. The worm owed its scarlet coloration to the presence of hemoglobin, the very same constituent of blood that flowed through human veins. Courtney was peripherally involved with the creation of a synthetic blood substitute, another multi-billion dollar industry. With shortages in blood banks and the dwindling number of donors, artificial plasma would save hundreds of thousands of lives, and while there was legislation in place to prevent the cloning of human blood cells, there were no such restrictions for this odd invertebrate.
He tilted the bioreactor and allowed the smoke to flow directly up into it.
With a lurch, the Corellian canted nose down. A screen of bubbles flooded up across his line of sight.
“What was that?” Courtney asked.
“The water temperature just shot up nearly two degrees,” Bishop said. “Sonar confirms we’ve got ourselves a trembler.”
“It felt like we were hit by a truck.”
“Strap on your seatbelts, kids. These quakes can make maneuvering a little dicey.”
Tyler’s screen filled with black smoke. He lost sight of his armature and the controls became unresponsive. The submersible swung sideways and collided with the chimney, slamming him against his viewport. Through the superheated water, he watched a fissure race across the width of the smokestack.
“Oh, God.”
The crack expanded and a black cloud billowed up against the glass. A curtain of bubbles cleared his porthole and he saw only a column of churning black water where the hydrothermal vent had once been. Where was the rest—?
Something slammed into the submersible from above, driving them down toward the ocean floor. Chunks of the shattered chimney rained past them on the monitors.
The thrusters whined as Bishop fought to reverse their rapid descent with the weight of the upper half of the chimney lodged against their hull.
“Come on, baby,” Bishop said.
The jagged sea bed raced toward them. They were going to impact head on. The ground cracked like an eggshell, only the crevices glowed red. Magma poured out of the earth. As soon as it met with the water, it began to darken and issue bubbles and ebon smoke. Rock formations crumbled and toppled into the lava in slow motion.
They were going to die.
“Come on, baby. Come on!”
Tyler pressed his hands against the glass as though he could prevent it from shattering or melting in the burbling cauldron. He heard screams and vaguely recognized them as his own.
His armature swung across his view, whipping the bioreactor past like a lure on a fishing line.
Another thud against the submersible from behind. The personnel sphere swung upward toward a mile of empty water and he was thrown away from the window. Courtney slammed into him, pounding his back against a rack of equipment. He wrapped his arms around her and tried to shield her with his body.
They were going to die.
He was certain that at any moment the sphere would collapse in upon itself. Would he feel it when his body was compressed to nearly the atomic level?
Bishop stood on top of them and piloted the craft straight up. At least they were headed in the right direction, but if he didn’t level it off quickly, the engine would stall and drop them down to their deaths.
“Come on, baby!”
Slowly, Bishop righted the Corellian fifty meters above where Medusa had once stood. All that remained now was a jumble of rubble sinking into the molten abyss. The black smoke no longer funneled but exploded from the crater. Ribbons of magma spread across the field below them. The entire topography had been dramatically altered in less than a minute.
Another shudder and an expulsion of bubbles and scalding water propelled them toward the surface.
The dysfunctional robotic arm hung lifeless in front of Tyler’s viewport.
The bioreactor was still clamped in its hydraulic pincers.
Five
6 km North of theBilbao Ruins
Escuintla Department, Guatemala
December 9th
2:29 p.m. CST
Four Years Ago
Bradley didn’t see the crevice until he was nearly upon it. After close to half a day of battling his way through the seemingly impregnable forest of ceiba and kapok trees on a path that barely qualified as an animal trail with the weight of his pack on his back, he nearly collapsed to his knees in relief. Roland Pike appeared unfazed by the exertion. He merely set down his rucksack, returned his GPS unit to the side pouch, and removed the hydro bladder, which he passed to Bradley before taking a long drink himself. The branches of the canopy overhead were woven together to hide the sky, save for one shifting gap through which the gray cone of Mt. Fuego rose over them like a thorn prodding heaven’s gut. An intricate network of climbing ropes had been strung around the trunks and up into the branches where carabiners glinted through the leaves. The remainder of the ropes, hardly distinguishable from the vines, trailed down into the ground, where a lightning bolt-fracture in the limestone coursed through the detritus. A faint clamor of clattering tools and muffled voices echoed hollowly from below.
A dozen eight-foot-tall obsidian statues surrounded them. The branches of the lower canopy had been cut back and the moss had been scraped away to expose the identical black volcanic stone sculptures. Elaborate headdresses adorned the crowns of their skeletal faces, beneath which they wore collars made of bells. All of them had been turned so that they looked down upon the hole, as though keeping eternal watch. In the email he had received with the pictures of the site, Reaves had identified this disturbing character as Ah Puch, the Mayan god of death, who ruled their version of hell, Xibalba.
His exhaustion replaced by a growing sense of excitement, Bradley shed his burden and walked to the edge of the fissure. A cool breeze gusted up into his face, chilling the sweat that matted his prematurely graying hair. Vines and roots cascaded down through the opening in a vegetative waterfall that reached nearly a hundred feet down to the placid black water. A ring of lights had been affixed to the rock walls of the pit and directed toward the middle, where they hardly penetrated the deep lake, which was part of an underground river system that extended for hundreds of kilometers through a honeycomb of impassable tunnels in the strata. Several men-made-shadows by the fierce halogens stood on the rocky ledge of the pool amid stalagmit
es nearly as tall as they were. Portable generators provided a humming drone barely distinguishable from the whine of the mosquitoes that had followed them from the Mayan ruins at Bilbao.
Bradley smiled and turned back to Pike, who had already hauled up the harness and held it at the ready.
“You want to go down there, or should I make some sandwiches first?” Pike asked through a faint smile that looked unnatural on his ordinarily impassive face. The diffused sunlight washed out his features and whitened his hair. His blue eyes stood out like amethysts stomped into snow.
“I was debating a siesta, but since we’ve come all this way…”
Bradley clapped his longtime associate on the shoulder and slipped his legs into the harness. Once it was tightened to his satisfaction, he again approached the sharp-edged orifice. With a glance back at Pike, who nodded his readiness, Bradley took hold of the rope and stepped out over the nothingness. He twirled in slow circles as Pike belayed him down into the earth. Flies buzzed around his head and the roots brushed at him as he dropped in smooth increments. Soon, the ragged hole above him was a faint scar of shadow against what little he could see of the domed ceiling through the tube of roots, which swayed gently on the planet’s breath. It grew more humid as he descended, yet it smelled more like a mountain stream, crisp and cold, than a guano-riddled sinkhole under the primal jungle. The lights became brighter and words spoken in Spanish resolved from the din.
Twenty-four hours ago, he had been the keynote speaker at a biotechnology symposium in Stockholm when Reaves had called. Pike had motioned him to the side of the stage, and after a moment of whispered conversation, they had simply hurried out of the hall, leaving behind a packed house of the world’s greatest scientific minds to blink at each other in confusion. Two hours later they had been on the corporate Challenger 300 Super Midjet, streaking toward the southern hemisphere. A Land Rover had been waiting for them at the airport in Puerto San José, and had whisked them through the pre-dawn fog to the old ruins.
They had caught a break on this one. An archaeologist from the University of Liverpool in England, who had been restoring the statuary in Monument Plaza at the Bilbao ruins, had discovered the Ah Puch ring almost by chance and had posted pictures of it on the university’s website. Reaves had recognized it as potentially more than just a random creation in the middle of the vast forest and had gambled that there was greater significance. The statues had been arranged as though they were guarding something, not simply forced to stare at each other for eternity, which was contrary to the more traditional motif of posting them to face outward. While Reaves had guessed wrong in the past, most notably on expensive digs in the raised peat bogs of central Ireland and in the Godavari River basin of India, he had at least learned from each failure. Both of their previous findings had been discovered in the ruins of societies that were historically notorious for instances of cannibalism, and that had abruptly abandoned primitive meccas at the height of their prowess. The revelation that both of them had been spurred to flight shortly after verifiable volcanic events—in the case of the Anasazi, the eruption of the Sunset Cone in 1150, and for the Champa, the surge in activity in the Haut Dong Nai volcanic field mere kilometers from Mù S¡n—allowed him to narrow their focus even more. Of course, advances in technology helped, as well. When Reaves located an area of interest, all they had to do now was send an aircraft fitted with remote sensing devices over the treetops. The multispectral imaging equipment collected the signals and translated them into three-dimensional digital elevation and digital terrain models that showed every detail of the ground, right down to the individual blades of grass, and below. If there was anything buried in the soil, be it ancient ruins reclaimed by the earth or a mass burial site, the sensors would detect it and create detailed representations. And while nothing of greater importance than the Ah Puch statues had been detected aboveground, something intriguing had been visualized forty-two feet below the surface of the subterranean pool, something that caused Bradley’s pulse to race and his palms to dampen on the cord as he was lowered down into the blinding field of light.
“I was starting to think you weren’t going to make it in time,” Reaves called up to him.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Bradley dropped below the convergence of the spotlights. Reaves’s silhouette resolved from the shadows to his left as he leaned out over the water, grabbed Bradley’s harness, and hauled him over to the rock ledge. “Have you seen it yet?”
Reaves flashed a devious smile. His wet suit still glistened with beaded water.
“So you’re sure it’s one of ours?” Bradley asked. He stepped out of the rope seat and heard it zip up away from him while he readjusted his cargo pants.
“Without a doubt.”
There was a splashing sound behind him. Bradley turned to see a scuba diver breach the surface. He couldn’t recognize the man for the mask and the mouthpiece, but he did recognize the acetylene torch he clutched to his chest.
“There’s no way we’re getting it out of there without cutting the chain,” the man said. Bradley finally identified him as Barrett Walker, a young geologist they had lured away from the United States Geological Survey for his field experience. “That boulder it’s attached to is wedged down there pretty tight. We’d need a crane—”
“Cut it,” Bradley said.
Walker grinned, shoved the regulator back into his mouth, and dove back under the water. Bradley watched the dark pool until what looked like a distant star flared into being. The digital elevation model had shown a human form pinned to the bottom, its arms sprawled beside its head. A length of chain was wrapped around its torso and legs.
“The body isn’t just bound in chains as we initially thought,” Reaves said. “They’re also coiled around a rock the size of a file cabinet. My guess is they somehow lassoed her with the chain and rolled the rock down through the opening up there in the jungle floor, dragging her right along with it.”
“‘Her’?”
“The pubic bones and sciatic notches seem to think so.”
With a whizzing sound, Pike plummeted down toward them before effortlessly halting his progress. He swung over to the ledge and slipped out of the harness.
A rush of bubbles popped on the pool, making the surface appear to boil. The ghostly light faded from below and a dark shape slowly rose toward them.
Bradley was so excited he could barely think straight, let alone speak. He realized he was holding his breath when he saw sparkles in his peripheral vision.
Walker spit out the regulator when his head crested the surface.
“Someone want to give me a hand with this thing?”
Bradley threw himself to all fours and reached down into the water as Walker paddled toward them, cradling the skeleton in his arms.
“The chain’s rusted solid,” he said. “I just cut the whole thing away from the boulder. I didn’t want to risk the integrity of the body by trying to cut it off down there.”
The two locals they had hired to help rig the lines and run the lighting cursed in Spanish and scuttled back into the shadows when the light caught the remains. Reaves and Pike knelt to either side of Bradley and helped raise the skeleton out onto a flat section of limestone.
All of the flesh had long since dissolved, leaving the stark white bones tenuously articulated by knots of cartilage. The left foot was gone, as were the fingers on the right hand. The ribs were cracked and rust-stained where the chain constricted the chest. A single loop was tightened around the neck. The legs and pelvis displayed only minor remodeling: a healed spiral fracture of the left lateral malleolus, and periosteal deformities where the outer sheath of bone had been peeled slightly away from the medial femoral condyles and greater trochanters. There was mild reversal of the normal lumbar curvature and exaggerated cervical lordosis, which combined suggested a markedly hunched posture.
But, as with the others they had found, it was the head that immediately drew their attention. The fora
men magnum, the hole in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passed to the brain, was widened and elongated, and patterned with a faint network of stress fractures that reflected slow but steady outward force. The cranial sutures were abnormally deep and clearly defined. And the teeth…the alveolar sockets into which the roots plugged had ossified into sharp hook-like protuberances.
“The centipede, Shiva, Ah Puch,” Reaves whispered. His brow furrowed as he pressed the pad of his index finger against one of the pointed growths. A bead of blood swelled from the skin as he drew it away. “They believed these people were the physical manifestations of their most vengeful gods, sent from the fiery heart of the Earth to punish them.”
Bradley looked up into Reaves’s face. The anthropologist’s eyes grew distant and he could see Reaves mentally struggling to grasp an elusive thought. His lips moved silently with some inner dialogue. After a long moment, an expression of calmness washed over his face. The corners of his lips curled up into a smile as he met each of their eyes in turn.
“I think I’ve deciphered the pattern.”
Bradley could only pray Reaves was right. He returned his attention to the mouth of the skeleton on the ground before him.
It was like looking into the jaws of a shark.
Six
Kilinailau Trench
South Pacific Ocean
176 km East of New Ireland Island, Papua New Guinea
November 26th
4:32 p.m. PGT
Present Day
Dr. Courtney Martin had never been so happy to see the sun in her entire life. She thought she was going to die down there, and by all rights, would have were it not for Bishop’s almost superhuman maneuvering. They should have known better than to proceed into the Basilisk Field with the level of seismic activity and the unstable nature of the ridge, but the temptation had just been too great. When would anyone ever have that kind of opportunity again? Her hands still shook, even after hours of trying to steady her nerves as the Corellian slowly floated back to the surface. Or maybe it was the excitement of realizing that despite everything that had happened, she had managed to secure a prime example of Riftiapachyptila, the tube worm that now resided coiled in the canister she lugged at her side down the hallway away from the submersible hanger.
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