Origin (2 page)

She knew the body could be very old indeed – in 1991, a frozen mummified man had been discovered in the Italian Alps, and carbon dating had shown him to be well over five thousand years old. But this body was different. For a start, it was clothed in a material of a sort she had never seen before.

‘What’s he wearing?’ she asked Devane, who had spent his time examining the body while waiting for the team to arrive.

‘I’m not sure. Some sort of armoured textile, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems incredibly complex.’

‘Some sort of military special ops?’ Lynn asked Jeff Horssen, a data analyst who used to work for the US National Security Agency, a hotbed for secret military technology that the average citizen never saw.

Horssen examined the material, exceptionally well preserved by the ice. ‘Could be. They’re working on some really advanced cold-weather gear, I know that much. But this isn’t like anything I’ve seen.’

Lynn looked back to Devane; his expression said that there was more to come. ‘So what else?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know about
advanced
,’ he said with a curious mix of surprise and delight, ‘but how about
ancient
?’

The bewildered looks on the faces of his teammates delighted him even more. As the hot driller, Devane was used to taking ice core samples – thirty-centimetre wide sections of ice drilled down and recovered from up to a kilometre deep, showing ageing layers like the rings of a tree. Air pockets, perfectly preserved in the ice, could give climate information on the region stretching back tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. An expert on the subject, he merely pointed at the steep iced walls of the ridge.

Lynn followed his finger, and looked at the wall for several moments before realization dawned. ‘Oh my—’

‘Yes,’ Devane confirmed. The ice that had sloughed off from the main glacier body had left striations on the cliff face that were akin to an open ice core sample, the lines able to be read for miles across. ‘From my estimate of these readings, that man we’ve just found was buried here under the ice no later than forty thousand years ago.’

‘W
E’VE FOUND SOMETHING
down here,’ Lynn announced over the UHF radio to the teammates back at the Matrix base.

‘What?’ came the static-laden reply.

‘It’s a frozen body. Mummified. Potentially very ancient. And with some anomalous artefacts.’

‘Huh?’ Lynn could hear the confusion. ‘Like what?’

‘Things better not to discuss on an open line,’ Lynn decided. ‘We’re coming back to base.’

The UHF transmission was picked up by the National Security Agency’s Keyhole satellite, and transmitted directly to the supercomputers at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, fifteen miles south-west of Baltimore. Within fifteen minutes, it had passed through various levels of analysis; but on the orders of one man the message went no further, and was ‘lost’ for ever.

Stephen Jacobs clenched his fists in anger. They were so near completion!
So near!
He couldn’t let anything stand in the way of the organization’s dream. A mummified body buried in the Antarctic ice with ‘anomalous artefacts’? It could, of course, be nothing. But Jacobs also knew what else it might be, and such a discovery would cause too many questions to be asked, at just the wrong time.

He sighed. He would have to speak to his superiors. He could let nothing jeopardize the dream.

‘So just what the hell is it?’ asked Sam Maunders, a seismologist, when all team members were reunited back at the Matrix base – home, such as it was.

‘As far as we can tell,’ Lynn began as Devane started distributing cans of beer from the fridge, ‘it’s the body of a man – apparently the same as a modern human – which seems to have been buried in the ice approximately forty thousand years ago.’ She looked up as Devane slid a beer across the dining table to her, smiled in thanks and popped the lid.
What the hell
, she thought as she took a long pull from the can.
You don’t make a discovery like this every day
.

‘We found the body with what appears to be modern clothing,’ Lynn continued.

‘Like what? What do you mean?’ Maunders asked, fascinated. This was much more exciting than shifts in the ice, that was for sure.

‘Advanced arctic clothing, some sort of light yet highly insulating material.’

‘But what does it
mean
?’ asked Joy Glass, the lead computer analyst.

Lynn just shook her head. ‘At this stage, we don’t know.’

There followed wild speculation over what they had found, and the atmosphere was jubilant, excited, and just plain crazy. Despite their mission, a forty thousand year old mummy was simply far more exciting than gathering seismic data and carrying out oceanic modelling. It was potentially earth-shattering in its significance.

If it was true
, Lynn reminded herself as a scientist. They would need a lot more examination time, and a lot more resources to get to the bottom of the matter. She was all too aware of the damage done to ‘Ötzi the Ice Man’, the mummy found in the Alps, when it had first been discovered. The authorities had assumed that the body, discovered by a couple hiking in the mountains, had died in a climbing accident. They therefore weren’t trying to preserve and protect the body, they were simply trying to free it from the ice. As a result, they shredded his clothing, used his bow as a tool to prise him out, and even jack-hammered a hole through his hip.

Such mistakes were not going to be made with their own find; Lynn was determined to follow strict scientific procedure in the extraction and examination of the body. This attention to detail – even when the excitement of discovery threatened to overwhelm her – was what had put her at the top of her field.

Evelyn Edwards – known as Lynn to her friends – was exceptionally gifted, having graduated top of her class at Harvard and then clawing her way to the top of a still very much male-dominated field.

Her looks – although envied by many – had not made her academic life any easier. She had been a plain girl in her youth, and she sometimes wondered whether this was why she had followed such an academic path in the first place, but she had eventually blossomed into a beautiful young woman. She had smooth, olive skin that suggested something exotic in her ancestry, and thick dark hair that framed her bright, unusually green eyes. Her body was lithe and athletic, honed as the years progressed by regular early morning runs, gym work and kickboxing. But in the world of science, such looks often made people take her less than seriously; it seemed that people thought that women who looked like her couldn’t possibly be
intelligent
as well. She struggled against the odds, her natural talents overcoming the bigotry and highly opinionated views of her contemporaries, until she was one of the top research scientists at NASA.

But the qualities that made her excel in her profession made her a failure in her private life. Her marriage had lasted less than two years, and she knew that she had to shoulder much of the blame for that. It wasn’t Matt’s fault, not really. They had been deeply in love, and had been engaged and married within a very short period of time. Too short, as it turned out. Matt Adams was an American Indian tracker, a robust man who liked to live as one with nature, in tune with the ‘great spirit’. Lynn had been immediately attracted to his wild, carefree behaviour, had been enticed by his barely contained enthusiasm for anything and everything. He had truly known how to embrace life. And he had loved her with all his heart.

Lynn felt bad now when she thought of him, as she often did at the Pine Island Glacier, the name so close to his home reservation of Pine Ridge in South Dakota. She wondered if he was still there now, and what he would make of the recent discovery. No doubt he would be delighted – he had often told her about how American Indian myths suggested that the United States had been populated tens of thousands of years ago by a very advanced people.

She smiled as she thought of him, but soon cut the thoughts off and returned to the business at hand – a quality that was both a blessing and a curse.

She picked up the secure radiophone and put through the call to NASA headquarters. A message like this could only go right to the top.

The operator came on the line, and Lynn wasted no time. ‘Get me the Administrator.’

Samuel Bartholomew Atkinson was the Administrator of NASA, the ‘high chief of space’ as he was lovingly referred to by his staff.

His love of the cosmos stretched back to when he was just three years old, so his mother told him, and he had pursued a career in the stars with a passion that bordered on the ferocious. He was now in his dream job, and loved every minute of it. Sure, there were challenges, but what satisfaction was there in life without challenges? His position gave him a level of knowledge about the cosmos that would have scared his three-year-old self, but he valued that knowledge now above all else.

The message that had just come in from Evelyn Edwards was disturbing in the extreme, and he was going to have to play it up the line. He told Lynn that he would be back in touch within the hour.

His fingers dialled the number quickly on the secure phone on his desk, and Stephen Jacobs answered on the first ring.

Atkinson filled him in as fast as he could, but Jacobs stopped him halfway. ‘I know, Samuel. And I’ve already spoken to our friends.’

Atkinson seemed surprised. But then again, Jacobs was a man who was full of surprises. ‘And what did they say?’

Jacobs cleared his throat. ‘They say that it is definitely something to be worried about. There could be a connection, although there’s no real way of knowing before examination. But it is cause for concern. We need to contain the situation.’

‘Yes, sir. Our next course of action?’

‘OK,’ Jacobs declared, ‘listen carefully. This is what I want you to do.’

The radio phone rang in the metal confines of the small base’s communications room. Lynn picked it up immediately.

‘Hey, Lynn,’ Atkinson said in his good-natured, friendly tone. ‘How you doing?’

‘Excited,’ Lynn confirmed. ‘Excited but ready to do this thing the right way. What do you recommend?’

‘You’re to remain on the base for the time being,’ Atkinson said. ‘We don’t want to compromise the site. We’ve got a specialist team already en route to your location. You are to liaise with that team, and offer them all the assistance you can. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Lynn confirmed. ‘ETA?’

‘Estimated time of arrival is 0700 tomorrow morning. Connecting to McMurdo, then on to you. Be sure to give them a warm welcome.’

‘We will, sir.’

‘And Lynn?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘This has been classified Ultra. Nobody else knows about this, and we want to keep it that way. Unless it’s through me, you are to cease communication with the outside world as of right now.’

Ten thousand miles away, in his private office in Washington DC, Atkinson replaced the receiver and rubbed his eyes. It was going to be a long night.

T
HE TEAM ARRIVED
as promised exactly at seven the next morning, landing in two identical Chinook AH-46 twin-rotored helicopters just fifty metres from the base, snow and ice spinning high up into the air from the powerful downdraught.

Six men from each helicopter quickly deplaned, heads down as they ran underneath the slowing rotors. Lynn had the door open for them, counting them in one by one. The pilots would come later, after securing the aircraft.

Nothing was said until the whole crew was assembled in the dining room, the largest of the rooms in the small Matrix base camp.

One of the men – Lynn noticed that they were
all
men – stepped forward. ‘Dr Edwards?’ he said, extending a large hand. ‘Major Marcus Daley, US Army Corps of Engineers.’

Lynn took the hand, shaking it firmly. ‘Army?’ she asked, surprised. She took a quick look at the others, spread out behind Daley in a fan formation. Definitely military. The air about them was unmistakable.

‘Hey, who else is gonna deal with an emergency operation thousands of miles from civilization? It’s us or you wait another two weeks for a civilian team. If the body’s uncovered already, you don’t want it decomposing.’

Lynn nodded her head, understanding. ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to seem rude, I just wasn’t expecting a military team. You’ve extracted bodies from the ice before?’

Daley nodded solemnly. ‘Soldiers die in frozen parts of the world all the time. And we never leave a man behind.’ He gazed into Lynn’s eyes. ‘Now take us to the body.’

Lynn had to admit that there was something to be said for military efficiency. By lunchtime, the army engineers had been shown the site, done a full reconnaissance of the area, and drawn up a detailed plan of action, which Lynn had quickly approved. It seemed they had indeed done this before.

Back at base, Major Daley sat with Lynn and Devane in the dining room, cups of strong hot coffee on the aluminium table between them. The two NASA scientists were taking Daley through the events of the initial discovery, and the major was asking questions and taking notes.

‘So since talking to Atkinson last night, you didn’t go back out to the body until this morning?’

Lynn exchanged looks with Devane, then shook her head. ‘No. Samuel ordered us to return here and stay until you guys arrived.’

Daley nodded. ‘Good.’

‘Why?’ Lynn asked, all too aware that her answer hadn’t been entirely truthful. After their meeting and discussion with the team the night before, she and Devane had descended the ridge again, documenting the find with high-definition cameras and taking detailed notes. Using their own specialized tools, they had even managed to shave some skin cells from the frozen body and cut some of the hair for later DNA analysis, as well as taking a small strip of clothing for radiocarbon testing. The unpredictable weather on this freakish continent could mean that the entire site could have been covered under several feet of snow by the time a specialist team turned up. The body could well have been lost for another forty thousand years, and Lynn was damned if she was going to let that happen. She felt uncomfortable admitting this to Daley however, and so the evidence they had gathered now rested in her personal backpack, stowed in her private cabin.