More than once Austen had to step around razor-sharp ridges of granite and quartz. When she got to a level area, she thumbed the spectrometer on and let the instrument sample the air. She let out a low whistle at the results.
“Temperature’s shot up. It’s eighty degrees Fahrenheit in here. That’s easily thirty degrees warmer than at the surface.”
“The air, how is it different to the surface?” Lelache asked. “How much methane are we talking about in here?”
“A tenth of one percent. Doesn’t sound like much, but that’s several hundred times what it is in our atmosphere. A lot of jumps in the trace gases like hydrogen sulfide, too. But the big difference is the oxygen level. It’s normally almost twenty-one percent. Down here, it’s only seventeen percent. Without a respirator like the ones in our suits, you’d be looking at hypoxia within twenty minutes, maybe less.”
“I think I see something just ahead,” Navarro said, as he squinted forward through the mists. “Another wall, I think.”
They pressed on, passing rows of sharp-pointed stalactites that hung from the ceiling like rock-hewn daggers. Navarro was the first to come up to the next barrier – a rock wall punctuated once again by a heavy steel door with a slit window.
A new sign, this one rough and painted by hand, hung from the hatch wheel.
Navarro translated it. The words felt sour and tart in his mouth.
“Beyond here, you find Poison Cave,” he read. “Beyond here, you find death.”
Chapter Twenty
Lelache let out a short, contemptuous laugh. “Oh, so scary! Whoever wrote that did it to frighten weak-minded children.”
“I’m less sure of that,” Austen admitted. “But if this door’s here, then the miners went further in. We need to see what’s beyond.”
“This door looks odd,” Navarro remarked, as he gave the wheel an experimental turn. It shifted with a squeal, and then jammed. He held up one of his hands, showing the reddish powder coating his hardsuit’s gloves. “Look at that. Signs of corrosion all along the handle stem.”
“Maybe it’s been here a while.”
Navarro shook his head and jabbed a finger towards the door seams. “I don’t think so. The miners cut this quickly, with a hydraulically powered drill. High-pressure water. It would be fast, and reduce the possibility of an explosion. But it’s damned messy.”
“Wait, I see something,” Lelache said, taking a few steps over to the side. She came up with a metal can with a projecting nozzle. “Looks like this might be oil.”
Navarro gave the can’s lever a few squeezes. Sure enough, the nozzle began jetting black liquid. He directed this onto the base of the wheel, set the can aside, and tried again.
This time, the lock turned and the door opened with a nerve-rending moan of long-neglected hinges. A yellowish gas burbled out of the opening, causing Austen to pause. She took a breath, firmly grabbed hold of her nerves, and stepped through.
She heard the fan system inside her hardsuit kick up a notch. The faint smell of rotten eggs began to filter into her helmet, making her nose wrinkle in distaste. Around her, the cavern walls ran up into a mist-shrouded ceiling. Though the same type of rock as before, their surfaces now glistened, as if wet.
Two little red indicators began flashing in the corner of her helmet as the others joined her. The first read ELEVATED BATTERY USE. The second was more ominous: WARNING: FLAMMABLE CONDITIONS ENCOUNTERED. She ran the spectrometer again as Navarro closed the door behind them with a boom that echoed off the walls.
The mist had turned thicker, like ground fog. In the glare of their lights, the color shifted from pale yellow to the putrid greenish-yellow of an over-boiled egg yolk. Small particles drifted about in the air like grainy golden snowflakes, turning to mush where they touched a hard surface.
“What is this stuff?” Navarro asked, as he held a hand out to catch some flakes. They smeared into nothingness as he rubbed his fingers together.
“Particles of hydrogen sulfide,” Austen replied. “The methane and sulfur levels took a jump up again, as did all sorts of trace gases. Oxygen’s down another three percent as well.”
“Sulfide? That might explain the corrosion I saw on that last door.”
“It must be like summer in the tropics,” Lelache remarked. “I’m feeling a dull, moist heat through the joints of my suit.”
“No wonder,” Austen said. “Moisture level’s up, and the temperature’s more than doubled. It’s like a sauna in here.”
“Disgusting. It looks and smells like gone-off soup in here.”
“Not gone-off soup,” Zhao said excitedly. “More like primordial soup. This atmosphere, this temperature – it’s what many paleobiologists believe the Earth to have had when life arose.”
They continued a short distance further. The terrain underfoot grew more rugged, and the glistening on the rocks coalesced into tiny pools of moisture that steamed and evaporated into vapor again. Austen called a halt as another indicator popped up on her faceplate.
“My battery’s down to below fifty percent power,” she announced. She had to raise her voice now over the whine of the suit’s fan motors. “Anyone else seeing that?”
“Just did,” Navarro said, and Zhao nodded agreement.
“It’s to be expected,” Lelache said. “Our suits are running hard to compensate for the poor atmosphere and high temperature. That means we must be close to the end of this journey.”
“How do you mean?”
“The miner’s hazmat suits couldn’t cope with these conditions more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes. They simply wouldn’t be able to go on for much further.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Austen said grimly.
Their surroundings continued to shift in subtle ways. Ways that began to play tricks with the eye. The damp walls threw up threatening shadows, and the rocks themselves began to change appearance. The greenish-yellow snowflakes coated the walls and floor. It smoothed them into something that looked and felt more like flesh than stone.
“Creepy,” Zhao whispered. “This whole place…it’s starting to look like we’re trudging through a creature’s lair. Or something’s body.”
“Merde, tu me gonfles!” Lelache cursed, making the younger woman flinch. “Such a ridiculous notion!”
“Sorry. I think I’ve seen too many American horror flicks.”
“You’ll be fine,” Austen said reassuringly. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
“Yeah,” Navarro added, “but if you see anything that looks like an upright leathery egg, don’t put your face near it.”
Zhao stared at him for a moment and then broke out laughing. She turned back and suddenly froze. Her laughter died out in a high-pitched squeak.
Her suit lights illuminated a dull gray object in the shape of an upright egg, sitting placidly on the floor ahead of them. Navarro came up closer, his mouth a set, dead line. He saw more of the ovoid things to either side, just as the ground made a slight rise ahead. He let out a breath in relief.
“Okay, you had me worried there for a moment,” he admitted. “Those are silicon nodules. Under rare conditions the metal sort of congeals into forms like this. Nothing’s going to hatch out of ‘em, that’s for sure.”
Austen joined him, looking critically at the closest nodule. She turned to look up the slight rise ahead. Her suit lights caught a flash of something as shiny as mica at the very edge of its range.
“There’s something up ahead,” she declared. “Come on.”
The top of the rise turned out to be a sharp narrowing of the cavern. Overhead, the roof sloped down until they could see it though the roiling mists of hydrogen sulfide. Those same mists parted for just a moment.
Suddenly, their voices jumbled as they attempted to talk over each other.
“Did you see–”
“What was that?
“Mon Dieu!”
“I think I saw–”
The cavern’s sulfurous f
og parted a second time.
They saw something that reflected their suit lights in a dazzle of color. Something as glittery and perfect as the facets of a diamond. Something so horribly fantastic that it could have haunted Lovecraft’s fevered brain.
Chapter Twenty-One
Later, when Austen had a chance to reflect, she realized that the first thing she saw at the end of the tunnel had been the least important.
But in that very moment, her eyes were riveted on one thing. The discovery of the most dazzling find in the history of paleontology riveted her attention. That, and the fact that what she saw spread out before her would be worth an incalculable sum of money.
The cavern ended in a wide, flat grotto. A little further on, the roof sloped down to about a dozen feet above their heads. Gray stone gave way to a ceiling made of watermelon-sized quartz crystals. Loops and curls of gold swirled among the crystals, terminating in bulbous metallic nodules.
Sitting smack in the middle of the grotto’s floor lay a dinosaur’s skull, one as big as an automobile engine. A fringe of red crystals dotted the lower jaw like a strange ruby goatee. Bared conical teeth, ear and eye sockets, the rest of the cranium – all reflected the blue of a winter Montana sky in the hardsuit lights.
As if that wasn’t enough to do a tap-dance on the eyeballs, the skull lay surrounded by a carpet of other massive bones. More dinosaur remains, to Austen’s eyes. Whether femur or claw, jaw or fang, each fossil gleamed golden, as if electroplated. A treasure of ancient remains lay spread out before them like a veritable pirate’s hoard.
“Tell me I’m not the only one seeing this,” Navarro whispered.
“Believe me, you’re not,” Austen whispered back.
“But…how? I don’t mean the bones. Sometimes fossils are found jumbled together in beds of rock. Yet the gold…and the blue material on the skull…”
“That must be turquoise. During the eons that bone turns to stone, turquoise can be deposited by the right chemical processes. The mineral simply forms around and penetrates into the structures that made up the skull.”
“And the gold?”
“I don’t know! Another geochemical process maybe, or a biochemical one.” She looked to Zhao, who still looked worried. Rather than obsess over the riches before them, her eyes scanned the rest of the cavern. “What do you think, Amy?”
“Hm? I don’t know about the gold, but I can tell you that these bones came from the Cretaceous period. The last age of the dinosaurs before they were wiped out.” She pointed to a couple features, then to the skull. “That’s a Parasaurolophus leg. A horn from a Triceratops. And that skull…look at those teeth! It has to be a meat-eater. Maybe a young Tyrannosaurus.”
“The preservation on it is remarkable,” Austen breathed. “And as for the…additions, I don’t know what to say. Amazing, I guess. Invaluable. Priceless.”
Lelache added two final words.
“No. Dangerous.”
That sobered everyone up. Before they could ask what she meant, Lelache went on.
“I know men. They want power, and they want riches. The order does not matter. No one would leave such riches untouched. Unless they were unable to remove them.”
Austen shook off her feelings of excitement with difficulty. Lelache, while a killjoy of the first order, had a point. Wonder had to take a back seat to caution.
Finally, she pried her eyes away from the rich pickings of dinosaur remains. Both the very end of the roof and the floor merged together into a flat, teal-encrusted wall of stone. Yet even as she peered at the wall, she realized that the blue-green color leached out of the wall and along the nooks and crevices of both the floor and ceiling.
Different shades of either azure or emerald wound through the matrix of quartz crystal or gold-encrusted bones. It shimmered in the swirls of mist and clung to the outcroppings of rock. Her skin goose-pimpled as she realized what she was looking at.
“Biofilm,” she said aloud. “There’s a biofilm covering the rear wall of the cavern, and it’s all along the roof and floor just ahead.”
“Ah, oui,” Lelache breathed. “I should have seen it earlier. Silly me.”
“It’s alive,” Zhou said. “And it shouldn’t be down here.”
“Biofilm?” Navarro asked. “I’m not following you.”
“It’s a syntrophic consortium of microorganisms,” Austen said, before Nick’s confused look made her start over. “It’s a…like a community of related microbes. Bacteria form a colony that’s held together by extruding a slimy external matrix. Different strains of blue-green cyanobacteria are known to do this, so it’s not unknown.”
He snorted as if trying to hold in a laugh. “So you’re saying it’s slime…with a pedigree.”
“You could say that,” she agreed. “Probably the best known example of a biofilm is the dental plaque that forms in your mouth when you don’t brush.”
“Ugh.” Navarro turned serious as he ran his tongue around inside his mouth. “Could this be the source of the bugs that killed the miners and the villagers around the Karakul?”
“I’m thinking that it’s a prime suspect.”
“But how could that be?” Zhao asked. “The microbes in this film…it’s adapted to a completely different atmosphere. Outside of this chemical and temperature zone, it would probably perish.”
“I would tend to agree,” Lelache said, as she stared at the far wall, a strange look burning in her eyes. “Yet nature always manages to pull something new out of her chest of surprises.”
“We need to take a sample to bring back,” Austen said firmly. She surveyed the scene carefully for a moment. “The biofilm on the floor might be too risky to sample. In order to get to it, we need to walk under a hanging curtain of the same stuff just above.”
She shone her light up to where she meant. Sure enough, the blue-green film hung like a wet drape from a rime of quartz. Austen cast around a bit more until deciding on the next course of action.
“Nick, I think I just found a use for those strong hands of yours,” she said. “Or to be precise, a use for your long reach.”
“Sure, whatever you have in mind,” he said agreeably, as she went to his pack and pulled out a sampling pipette. Austen attached a suction unit and sample jar to the pipette’s rear end.
“There’s an isolated patch of the biofilm growing around a stalactite just ahead of us,” she said, as she handed him the device. “It’ll be a stretch for you to reach, but it’s safer than walking a few meters forward and then stepping into a pool of the stuff.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
Navarro edged forward to get a better look at the structure Austen was referring to. In a moment, he spotted the conical wedge of crystal projecting from the ceiling. Twin rivulets of yellow and green circled the crystal, one made of gold wire, the other of the unknown biofilm.
Even with his better height and reach, the sample spot was too high. He moved to one side and tested the stability of a long, flat slab of rock nearby. Satisfied, he stepped up and tried to reach once more.
Nearby, Zhao and Lelache knelt, peering forward into the grotto. The younger woman pointed at the closest deposit of bones. Her voice still held tightly leashed excitement.
“See the pitting?” she said. “It’s acting like a phototrophic biofilm.”
“Then like you said, it shouldn’t be down here,” Lelache responded. “By definition, it would need sunlight, and we’re too far underground for that.”
“Yet it’s acting like that type of substance,” Zhao insisted. “Just like some forms of cyanobacteria excrete acids that could pit bone or rock, maybe this biofilm does the same thing. In fact–”
“Yes?”
“Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the turquoise and gold here. This variation of the bacteria might deposit these from the underlying substrate. Imagine what that might be worth!”
“Indeed,” Lelache said, her eyes narrowing. “I wonder.”
Zhao’s b
reath caught in her throat. Her eyes went wide in fear as they locked onto the grotto’s rear wall. The young woman’s voice husked out in a harsh whisper.
“Did you…did anyone just see something move?”
PART THREE: THE ORGANISM
Chapter Twenty-Two
Austen turned to look back, puzzled at the woman’s words.
“Moving?” she said, incredulous. “There’s no animal life down here.”
“I’m telling you, I thought I saw something move,” Zhao insisted. On the back wall.”
“Your mind is chasing phantoms,” Lelache scolded. “An easy thing when one is surrounded by mist and shadow.”
Navarro ignored the byplay. Steadying his footing atop the slab of rock, he reached up again with the sampling pipette, thumb ready to press the suction unit’s motor switch.
“There!” Zhao said, pointing to the far wall. “It moved again!”
“Very well, what did you see?” Lelache asked. Her voice dripped with skepticism.
“It was like a wave…only it moved right to left along the wall.”
“That could be the shadow from–” Austen began to say, as she turned back around.
Her words died in her throat.
On the far wall, beyond the gilded dinosaur remains and the gold-laced quartz ceiling, she saw a twitch out of the corner of her eye.
Austen was used to seeing strange, unbelievable things under the glass eye of the microscope. Or within the ghostly confines of an electron microscope’s scanner. Her nerves hadn’t been prepared to see something as bizarre with the naked eye.
The entire rear wall of the grotto rippled. The green surface of the biofilm undulated like the surface of an algae-choked pond after a stone had been dropped in with a plunk. Zhao’s gasp and Lelache’s murmur of amazement sounded in the confines of her helmet, so she knew that this was no trick of the eye.
The Devil’s Noose Page 10
