Genesis Plague (2 page)

…NOW.

I
was never a huge fan of stuffing myself into a diving suit and
kicking around in the deep ocean, but if it had to be any place at all, the western
edge of the Pacific got my vote.

The black,
fourteen-foot Zodiac bobbed up and down on the surface of the Celebes Sea, halfway
between Manado on the northern tip of Indonesia and the southern edge of the Philippines.
The midday sun beamed down on the four of us in the boat, heating our skintight
suits to boiling.

A voice came through my
earpiece: “We doing this, or what?”

I turned my bulky dive
helmet to see Flint Reynolds sitting next to me on the edge of the Zodiac,
waiting to tumble backward into the water. He brought a gloved hand to his
helmet to scratch at his full gray and black beard, but his hand hit the face-shield,
and he frowned. The fully-enclosed helmets were hard to get used to when you
were usually just wearing a mask and rebreather.

Flint looked more like
an astronaut than he did a diver in his blocky helmet and his two big air tanks
strapped to his back. I suppose I looked like that, too, except without Flint’s
extra padding. The excess weight he carried around his midsection pushed
against the fabric of his suit, but it wouldn’t split since it was custom made to
fit his body.

One of the two people
sitting on the other side of the boat was pulling on his flippers and ignoring
Flint’s question. Pierre Jacques. He was a self-made billionaire and the guy
who organized the expedition, which explained the fancy gear. He was also a
treasure hunter, which was why I was on the boat at that moment instead of in the
university lab measuring amoeba replication rates. Pierre wanted to find a
dozen sunken chests full of Japanese gold that were supposedly waiting for him
a hundred and forty feet below our butts.

Treasure hunters didn’t
usually employ a team of scientists, but they did if they thought their gold
was buried on an active fault line that had been showing an increase in
activity over the last few months. More vents had opened along the Pacific
tectonic plate than our lab back in the States could record, and Pierre Jacques
needed a volcanologist like Flint down there in case a big fat chasm opened and
threatened to swallow him and his gold. I was tagging along because I had some
paid vacation accrued, and because I was secretly hoping to find something
wriggling near an underwater vent.

It wasn’t that
microbiologists like me typically went searching for that kind of rogue
employment, but it had been a quiet summer, and the price of gasoline kept
going up. And like I said, I wanted to get a close look at those underwater
vents.

Next to Pierre sat
Cassidy Baker, who outshined the sun in the sky. I wasn’t supposed to allow postgraduate
students from the university out on private jobs with third-party financiers, even
if Cass’s background in geochemistry was directly beneficial to my own goals – but
she insisted. When she insisted, well, I doubted there was a man on the planet
who could say no. Besides, the whole trip was her idea in the first place.

Her diving suit fit a
hell of a lot better than the rest of ours – a fact that Pierre had not failed
to notice. He couldn’t stop himself from staring when she had stripped down to
almost nothing before pulling on her suit. Later, I saw him shaking his head,
as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.

Cassidy was Pierre’s
connection to this whole shindig. Flint had been looking for an excuse to
pursue some of his theories on tectonic plate movement in the Pacific Ocean,
and Cass knew my desire to check out some of the new vents that had opened up
in the Celebes. She had somehow gotten in contact with Pierre and found out
about his treasure-hunting plans. When she first spoke with him, he had been on
the verge of calling the whole expedition off because his consultants advised
him about the potential instability along the tectonic plate line – exactly
where he expected the lost treasure would be found.

Cass said Pierre had
been exuberant to learn she could loan him a volcanologist for a few days to
advise him on his expedition. He also seemed completely undeterred – and was in
fact even more excited – to learn that the only “inconvenience” for this loan
was that he brought me and Cassidy as well.

I didn’t probe too much
about their connection. From the mercurial hints I could finesse out of her
along the way, she and Pierre had dated at some point in the past. Not that it
made me feel inadequate to know that she had gone from a billionaire to a lab
monkey, but, well, it made a guy think, you know?

She winked at me as she
made an adjustment to her tank control panel on her chest. Her winks were the
thing that started our whole experiment – you know the one where the teacher
dated a student and tried not to get banished from the professional realm?
Yeah, that one. It helped that she had gotten a late start on her postgrad work,
and at thirty-one was only nine years younger than me. That kind of situation
tended to go over a lot better than the one with freshman girls in college
dating their aging professors.

Despite her insistence
that we go with Pierre at the drop of a hat, I wouldn’t have agreed to leave
the lab if I didn’t think we could handle it. Cassidy was ten times the athlete
I would ever be. If she wasn’t worried, I wasn’t either. Hell, she was the
reason I didn’t need a custom-made diving suit, like Flint. Who knows where I’d
be without her?

“Okay,” Pierre said,
making the final adjustments on his gear. He gave his helmet a wiggle and made
sure it was on tight. Through the flat face-shield, I could see his calm,
tanned face. His crystal blue eyes studied each of us in turn. It was a face
made for magazine covers, as the magazine editors had discovered. It was nearly
impossible to visit the grocery store without reading a headline about Pierre’s
latest business endeavor. Below each headline was a close-up of Pierre, posed
in the same way each time: arms folded lightly over his chest and a gentle
smirk on his face which seemed to call you into the future with him.

“This will be the
greatest find of the century,” he continued. Flint grinned and rolled his eyes
when Pierre looked at Cassidy, who was patiently wearing her
“please-get-on-with-it” smile. I knew exactly what Flint was thinking: that we
hadn’t met a rich guy yet with too much time on his hands who didn’t love
making speeches. “But this is only the first stage of many,” Pierre said. “Today
we will confirm the wreckage of the
Antigua
, and we will catalogue as
many artifacts as we can.”

Pierre twisted his
helmeted head to look all around at the open ocean, as if searching for poaching
ships who would steal his find. The only vessel I could see was the
Wavecutter
,
Pierre’s one-hundred-foot research yacht, two miles to the east. In his
paranoia, he wanted the ship kept at a distance to throw off any potential site
thieves.

“At our predicted depth,
we will have slightly less than two hours to safely explore the wreckage,” Pierre
said.

“
If
we find it,”
added Flint. He said it in his own patented truthful-but-laid-back way that
made it hard to hate him when he said something harsher.

“We will, Dr. Reynolds,”
Pierre said, the cold light of determination flaring in his clear eyes. “I have
been searching for twelve years, and this is the year the
Antigua
is
found.”

He gripped his
face-shield with a gloved palm and rolled back off the edge of the Zodiac,
kerplunking into the smooth water.

Cassidy was the next to
go, graceful as always. She slipped into the water with barely a splash.

“You know,” Flint said
as he scooted back toward the edge of the boat, “I’m not sure this counts as a
romantic getaway for you two.”

“I didn’t realize it
was our anniversary,” I said. I could hear Cassidy laughing in my earpiece.

Flint grunted. “I think
I’m taking a vacation after this. A
real
one.”

“You have your gear?” I
asked.

Flint held up a black plastic
equipment case and knocked on it. Inside was his waterproofed seismometer and a
half-dozen tilt-meters, built to order for the expedition with money from
Pierre’s extensive research fund. Our lab could have never afforded such nice
toys on university coin.

“If we’re lucky,” Flint
said, “we can set up a string of these and use the data for next year’s grant. Maybe
I’ll even give you boys in the biology department a little piece of the money
pie.”

I shook my clunky
helmet. “Doesn’t matter to me. If we find that ship, I’m not going back to the
university. I’m going to Aruba.”

“I don’t think they’d
take you.”

“They will if my
pockets are full of gold.”

Pierre’s voice cut into
our helmets. “You are wasting valuable air.”

Flint grinned. “Play
time is over.” He held the briefcase to his chest and took a dramatically deep
breath, then rolled back off the Zodiac.

I looked at the
Wavecutter
,
waiting patiently on the horizon for our call once we returned to the surface.
Alone on the Zodiac, the sun sparkling brilliantly off the blue water, it was
easy to imagine never going back to San Francisco again. The work was drying up,
after all, and each new year was a desperate scramble for limited grant money.
Maybe it was time to give the rat race a break – time to rent Flint out as a
full-time volcanologist-for-hire and reap the benefits of consultancy.

The thought made me
laugh. How many people like Pierre could possibly have a use for someone with
Flint’s credentials outside of the university system? Or mine, for that matter?
The private sector just didn’t have much need for an evolutionary
microbiologist outside of lecturing in a sterile classroom.

I foresaw many years of
post-graduate teaching in my future, and the thought of such a monotonous
existence carried with it a tinge of melancholy. Then I thought of Cassidy, and
realized that, as long as she was by my side, I didn’t really care what
happened.

I
barely felt the water envelop me as I rolled back off the edge
of the boat. It was like dropping down into an infinite tub of warm bathwater.
The sun glimmered through the surface above me, sending wavering shafts of
light piercing into the deeper blue below. Flint was swimming down, trailing
bubbles in his wake, and farther beyond, at the edge of my clarity, Pierre and
Cassidy swam side-by-side.

I did a final check on
the instrument panel on my chest and made sure my atmosphere levels were set
properly, then I kicked gently and followed after Flint.

The water was as clear
as an aquifer spring. I could just barely see the dim ocean floor a hundred
feet below. Pierre and Cassidy were about halfway there, kicking slowly in sync.
If they were having a conversation, the range of my helmet communication system
couldn’t pick it up.

“You back there, Paul?”
Flint asked.

I kicked gently to the
side to avoid the stream of bubbles floating up from his helmet.

“I’m here.”

“This was worth getting
certified. Thought you should know.”

I smiled. Cassidy and I
were already certified divers before this trip, but Flint was initially
resistant. After I convinced him we wouldn’t have to go into any caves, he
relented. Ideally, he would have already been on many other dives before
attempting one at this depth, but the guy took to it like a pro right out of
the gate. I knew him well enough from our years together at the university to
know he could handle a few basic equations when it came to depth and rate of
ascent.

Cassidy’s voice came in
over static in my helmet. “Paul.”

“I hear you.”

“You need to see this.”

I could tell she was
smiling, and I kicked a little harder. Flint moved at a steady pace, and soon I
was right beside him, heading down to the ocean floor. The bubbles from
Cassidy’s helmet obscured my vision until I reached her and Pierre, who floated
next to each other twenty feet from the sandy bottom.

Then the bubbles clear,
and I have an unobstructed view of the otherworldly landscape below.

A large crack ran along
the ocean floor, a dark fissure in the otherwise unbroken plain of sand and
silt. That far below the surface, it looked like a lunar desert extending into
the distance.

“What does the crack
mean?” Pierre asked.

“It means that even if
we don’t find the
Antigua
,” said Cassidy, “the trip wasn’t a total
waste.”

“I would disagree with
you there,” Pierre said. He kicked away from the group and headed east,
following the crack.

The fissure cut a
jagged line across the ocean floor. It was about four feet across at its
widest, and I could not see the bottom. The plunging rock walls were untouched
by algae or any other signs of exposure.

“This is a recent break,”
Flint said. “We must be right over an active zone.”

“Is it safe to be this
close?” asked Pierre.

“It’s not a vent site,”
I said with disappointment.

“Was that an answer?”

“It’s safe for now,”
said Flint. “If I catch a rumble, believe me, I’ll let you know.”

Cassidy raised her arm
in slow motion and pointed into the distance. “I see activity ahead.”

Her eyesight was better
than mine, but in the blue haze above the ocean floor I could dimly make out
the shimmering silver of bubbles roiling from a vent.

“I see something else!”
Pierre said quickly. “It looks like debris.”

He took off toward the
vent at high speed, kicking like an Olympic swimmer.

“Flint,” I said,
rotating to face him and pointing at the fissure. “Is this good enough for
you?”

“Yeah. I’m going to set
a couple tilt-meters at the edge of the break. You and Cass can check the vent
if you want. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You sure?”

“It’s what you came
here for, isn’t it? Do your thing, buddy.” He was already kicking down to the
sandy floor and opening the briefcase.

“Pierre,” I said as
Cassidy and I swam after him, “don’t get too close to that vent. We don’t know
how active it is.”

“It’s just bubbles,” he
said indifferently, still kicking strongly.

“Bubbles which come out
of that vent hot enough to boil your skin.”

I could see the debris
he spotted next to the vent: a piece of beaten timber protruding ten feet out
of the ocean floor at an angle. Several darker shapes dotted the ground nearby.

“You brought us along
to tell you when there might be trouble,” Cassidy said. “I’m telling you now to
let me look at that vent before you get too close.”

Pierre muttered
something that sounded like a curse in French, but his kicking slowed and he
allowed Cass to overtake him. The area around the stream of bubbles was a
raised mound of rock cracked open as if hit by a sledgehammer. Bubbles roiled
out of every crevice, propelled upward with the force of a strong Jacuzzi jet.

“This is brand new!” said
Cassidy, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice. “Paul, come look at
this! No organisms have had a chance to move in yet, but hopefully there are
more vents like this all along the plate-line. We might still find a
creepy-crawly or two.”

“There has to be
something
alive nearby,” I said. “The heat from these vents makes them a natural gathering
spot for organic life.”

“But not this shallow,”
said Cassidy. “The type of life you’re talking about usually thrives near
deeper vents.”

“Yeah, but any vent at
this depth could be reached without special equipment, and I could stay
underwater for an hour with each descent.”

She spun slowly to face
me. “You really want to spend the next year of your life swimming around these
vents?” she asked. “Seems like something your old girlfriend would be more
interested in.”

Flint chuckled over the
headset. “You really know how to take the wind out of his sails, Cass.”

I was about to defend
myself when I stopped. The truth was that in my excitement I
had
been
thinking about Maria. Her fascination with deep-vent habitats had been
infectious during our time together. For more than a year, I had deviated from
my primary study of the effect of bacteriophages on the early stages of human
evolution. Instead, I focused on helping her find new deep-sea organisms that
survived largely by chemosynthesis. Down there in the depths of the ocean,
without sunlight, converting carbon dioxide and methane into organic matter was
the only way to survive.

Near the end of our
relationship, she went on a solo dive near Tamu Massif off the coast of Japan.
She discovered a new order of small cephalopod mollusk she dubbed the “glowing
octopus”, based on the luminescent bacteria that live in its eight arms and
suction cups.

Maria became as much of
a celebrity in marine biology as one can become in that field after discovering
a new complex animal, and a cute one at that. She even changed her last name
from Guerrera to the more silvery Fontaine before she published her bestselling
book about the discovery.

The name-change was not
the final nail in the coffin of our relationship, but it was, for reasons I
still don’t quite understand, one of the things I liked to bring up the most
during our frequent arguments toward the end.

“This is it,” Pierre
said in a whisper, breaking my tainted reverie. I had been so excited about the
vent, and then so distracted with my thoughts of Maria, that I hadn’t been
paying attention to the main goal of the expedition.

Pierre circled the
protruding beam of wood like a caveman who was seeing fire for the first time.
His gaze drifted down to the dark spots buried in the sandy ocean floor – wreckage
from a long-lost ship.

“I wouldn’t jump to any
conclusions just yet,” I said.

“Can we excavate?” he
asked, still in a whisper.

“I thought we were here
to catalogue,” said Cass.

“Can we excavate?!” he
repeated with more force. “Is the vent safe?”

She slowly approached
the streaming bubbles next to the wreckage, checking the temperature of the water
with the control panel on her chest.

“Flint, you getting any
readings back there?” she asked.

I turned to look back.
Flint was a tiny figure in the distance, crouched on the sandy bottom next to
the slender black fissure.

“Minor quivers, Cass,”
he said, “but well within the norm for being on the border between two plates.
I’m recording everything.”

“We’re safe for now,”
she told Pierre.

“Then today is the day
we make history,” he said. He slowly kicked toward the surface, moving upward
at a gentle pace to avoid decompression sickness. “I will call the
Wavecutter
.
In a matter of hours, you will never have to ask for grant money again.”