Burial Ground (52 page)

Bradley stared at the violent images for a
moment before pressing on. Cobwebs swayed overhead and hung to
either side where they'd been severed. Potsherds littered the floor
amid a scattering of grains and gravel. Reaves stepped to his right
and directed the beam at a heap of bones at his feet. They were
disarticulated, shattered, and scattered in no discernible
order.

"They're human," Bradley said.

"This wasn't a burial," Reaves said. "This
was a willful desecration."

"Who would have done something like
this?"

"They did it themselves. We believe it was
part of a ritual designed to trap the evil spirits down here when
they sealed the kiva."

Bradley knelt and inspected the bones. There
was no residual blood or tissue, and the marrow had been scraped
out. He couldn't fathom the correlation to their project.

"That's not what I brought you here to see."
Reaves pointed the beam at the back wall, where a jumble of rocks
marked a shadowed orifice. He turned the Maglite around and offered
it to Bradley. "I'll let you do the honors."

Bradley took the heavy flashlight and
started toward the opening. He had to scale the fallen stones and
duck his head to enter. Fractured segments of bone guided him
deeper into the tunnel, which constricted around him, forcing him
to stoop.

"We found the rock barricade exactly like
you saw it," Reaves said from behind him, his voice made hollow by
the acoustics. "Not neatly unstacked, but toppled. We suspect it
was knocked down from this side, by something that desperately
wanted to get to the meat inside the main chamber."

"They buried live animals down here?"

"Just keep going," Reaves said.

Bones cracked under Bradley's tread and
threw uneven shadows across the stone floor. He ran his fingertips
along the wall, which had distinct ridges as though carved by
sharp, thin implements. The leading edge of the beam diffused into
a larger cave ahead of him. The faintest hint of the orange sunset
slanted through gaps in the low ceiling. It appeared as though a
rockslide had sealed a natural entrance. Motes of dust sparkled all
around him.

The ground was covered with piles of bones.
Entire ribcages. Cracked skulls. Shattered pelvises and femora.
Both human and animal. The mounds were tangled with hair and fur.
It looked like a bear's den.

Time had leeched the stench of fresh kill,
leaving the musty, mildewed smell of a crypt.

"At the back of the chamber," Reaves
whispered. "On the other side of the remains."

Bradley had to remove the handkerchief from
his face to balance on the bones. The flashlight beam swept across
the desiccated figures propped against the cavern wall, casting
vaguely hominid shadows onto the sandstone.

"They sealed them in here when they
abandoned the pueblo," Reaves said softly, almost reverentially.
"And shortly thereafter started building high up on the sheer
cliffs to the northwest."

"There are more than enough bones here to
assemble fifty skeletons," Bradley said.

He crouched in front of the only two intact
carcasses in the chamber. They were gaunt, their flesh mummified,
parchment skin stretched across knobby bones, cloaked in shadows.
He raised the flashlight toward their faces---

"Jesus!"

Bradley toppled backward onto the bones and
scrabbled away from the bodies.

"This is why the Anasazi fled Chaco Canyon,"
Reaves said. He clapped Bradley on the shoulder. "Like I said, you
wouldn't have believed me if I'd told you."

Two

Kilinailau Trench

South Pacific Ocean

176 km East of New Ireland Island, Papua New
Guinea

November 26
^th

11:58 a.m. PGT

Present Day

The deep sea submersible cruised over a mat
of gray lava pillows the size of boulders, twenty-two hundred
meters beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Far off in the
murky black distance rose the rugged rim of the Kilinailau Trench,
formed by the subduction of the Pacific tectonic plate beneath the
Bismarck microplate. Their movement resulted in a steady flow of
magma and geothermal heat from the Earth's molten core. Forty-five
hundred watts of HMI lights mounted on an array of booms, enough to
nearly illuminate an entire football stadium, turned the water a
midnight blue. Jagged crests of mineral and ore deposits appeared
at the extent of the light's reach, where they abruptly climbed
hundreds of meters back toward the sun.

After close to four hours of freefall in
absolute blackness and another two skimming the bottom of the
world, they had finally reached their destination.

The Basilisk Vent Field was a hotbed of
geological activity. Seawater that leeched through the silt was
superheated, suffused with toxic chemicals and minerals, and
funneled back into the ocean at more than seven hundred degrees
Fahrenheit through tall chimneys called hydrothermal vents. Seven
main chimneys, nicknamed black smokers for the noxious plumes of
water that poured out of them like the smoke from a tire fire, were
staggered across Basilisk. It was one such formation, a more recent
eruption named Medusa, that had summoned them more than a mile down
to where the pressure could crumple a man in tin can fashion. Over
the last twenty days, intermittent seismic activity had already
toppled two of the older chimneys and increased the ambient water
temperature by two degrees, which may not have seemed significant
to the average man on the street, but reflected a massive expulsion
of hydrothermal energy at nearly twice its previous rate. An
opportunity like this might not come along again.

The submersible
Corellian
, named
after the fictional manufacturer of the escape pod used by R2-D2
and C-3PO in
Star Wars
due to its striking physical
resemblance, slowed to zero-point-eight knots as it closed in on
the ridge. Its thirty-foot, twenty-eight ton body was primarily
fabricated from fiberglass and foam attached to a titanium frame
that served as housing for the rear thruster assembly, a series of
lights and cameras on forward-facing booms, and the two-inch-thick
titanium personnel sphere that accommodated a dedicated pilot and
two scientific observers. Patterned after the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution's Deep Submergence vehicle
Alvin
,
which had set the standard for nearly half a century, the
Corellian
had cost GeNext Biosystems more than thirty
millions dollars to build for its own personal use. Factor in the
cost of its mobile berth, the one-hundred-and-seventy-foot Research
Vessel
Ernst Mayr
and the salaries of the eighteen
scientific researchers and twenty-eight officers and crew, and this
was a two hundred million dollar private venture that amounted to
little more than deep sea prospecting.

"Medusa rears her ugly head," John Bishop
said. The pilot could have passed for a beach bum with his unkempt
blonde hair, deep tan, and lazy surfer drawl, but the former Navy
Seaman was all business when he assumed the helm. He eased back on
the throttle and watched through the foot-wide porthole as they
approached the hellish eight-story behemoth. The
Corellian
had been equipped with a thirty-six inch LCD screen that relayed
the footage from the digital video assembly mounted above the
window so that the pilot no longer had to press his face against
the reinforced glass to see where he was going, but Bishop was
old-school. His motto was
I didn't come all the way down here to
watch it on TV
.

Dr. Tyler Martin shifted his lanky six-foot
frame. His unruly chestnut hair fell in front of his brown eyes. He
tucked his bangs behind his ears and leaned back from the port view
window, where he had been watching the lava fields transform into
sharp crests that came to life with scuttling crabs and shrimp, and
turned to face the monitor. The digital clarity surpassed even what
he could see with his own eyes.

The live feed focused on the chimney, a
great branching trunk composed of anhydrite, and copper, iron, and
zinc sulfide precipitates. Black smoke poured out of various
openings reminiscent of the pipes on some bizarre Dr. Seuss
machination and roiled toward the sky. Six-foot tube worms that
looked like crimson tulips bloomed from chitinous tunnels,
filtering the hydrogen sulfide from the scalding water, which
fueled the chemosynthetic bacteria in their guts, the source of all
life in this strange ecosystem. White Yeti crabs snapped at the
worms while clouds of ghostly shrimp swirled from one toxic flume
to the next. Golden mussels and pale anemones staked claim to every
spare inch of space. An octopus squirmed away from their
lights.

"You guys ready to get to work?" Bishop
asked.

"Might as well, you know, since we're
already down here and all," Dr. Courtney Martin said. With her long
auburn hair and emerald eyes, it was nearly impossible to tell that
she and Tyler were related. His little sister snuggled up to the
starboard viewport, where she could use the control panel to her
right to manipulate the retractable armature. The monitor above her
head displayed footage from the camera affixed to its hydraulic
claw.

"How close can you get us?" Tyler asked.

He dimmed the screens that displayed their
GPS data and bathymetric maps to better see the monitor for his own
armature.

"Close enough to count the hairs on a crab's
ass."

Bishop smirked. He had logged more than four
thousand hours in this very submersible over the last three years
and took his job so seriously that he even catheterized himself
prior to launch so that nothing would distract him from his duties.
He maneuvered the
Corellian
with such fluidity that it
seemed like an extension of his body, an exoskeleton of sorts.

"Take us up about thirty feet," Courtney
said. "You see where the chimney forks like a cactus? Right there
by those two vents where all the smoke's coming from. That work for
you, Ty?"

"Perfectly," he said.

He fiddled with the armature controls,
flexing the elbow, testing the clamps. Satisfied, he used it to
pinch the handle of his collecting device, a tubular bioreactor
that looked like an industrial coffee dispenser, and drew it out of
its housing beneath the sphere.

"Sonar's registering seismic activity,"
Courtney said. "Looks like a swarm of mini-quakes."

"It's been like that for the last three
weeks," Bishop said. "It comes and goes."

As Bishop watched, several of the fluted
pipes broke away from the chimney and tumbled toward the sea floor,
dragging crabs and anemones with them. There was a flicker of light
as magma oozed out of the ground and immediately cooled to a gray
crust.

Courtney bumped him from behind, knocking
him forward against the glass. Three of them in that diminutive
metal ball was like keeping a trio of goldfish in a wine glass.
With the rounded walls racked with equipment and monitors of all
kinds, it barely left room for them to squat on top of each other
in what amounted to an uncomfortable, padded pit. There was barely
space for them to kneel. The air was damp and sweaty. Fortunately,
that was one luxury they had in abundance. There was enough oxygen
for forty hours, while their dive was timed for only ten. Of
course, that wouldn't matter if the sphere breached. The pressure
would compress the titanium shell and the equipment, with them
right there in the middle, into a metallic tomb the size of a
basketball.

Three

My Son Ruins

69 km Southwest of Da Nang

Quang Nam Province, Vietnam

March 12
^th

9:46 a.m. ICT

Seven Years Ago

Dr. Brendan Reaves shoved through the
overgrowth of fan-leafed dipterocarps, palm trees, and conifers and
stepped out into a small clearing, if it indeed qualified as such.
The blazing sun reached the moldering detritus in slanted columns
that stained the early morning mist like penlights shined through
the dense canopy. Before him stood a knoll upon which a stone
linga
, a symbol of the worship of Bhadresvara, the local
variant of the Hindu god Shiva, had been erected. The sculpted red
stone was furry with moss and shrouded by a proliferation of vines
and grasses, most of which had been ripped away and lay in brown
tangles at its foot. Four identical life-size faces of Shiva had
been sculpted to mark the cardinal directions of the compass on the
three-foot-tall pedestal. The diety's slender face tapered to a
point at his chin, where a garland of snakes encircled his neck. A
crescent moon framed his braided hair, which was coiled into a
conch shape on top of his head. His flat eyes, of which there were
three, stared indifferently into the jungle. Excavated dirt and
stones ringed a dark opening in the base of the hill.

He wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow
and tried not to think about whatever was crawling on his skin
beneath his damp khakis. The assault of the insects had begun the
moment he stepped out of the rental Jeep at the Mỹ Sơn ruins,
arguably the crown jewel of the Champa Empire, which ruled Central
Vietnam from the fourth through fourteenth centuries. Phuong Dinh,
a former student who had been with him on the Chaco dig, had been
waiting at the A1 temple as she had said she would be, leaning
against what little remained after it was shelled during the war,
the first rays of dawn caressing her tan skin and making her rich
ebon hair glimmer with reddish highlights. She had smiled so
broadly when she saw him that he couldn't help but reciprocate. She
was no longer the shy and unassuming girl she had once been, but a
confident woman, now a colleague, whose dark eyes lit up when she
bounded down the slope and gave him a hug. He remembered the splay
of freckles dotting the bridge of her nose.