The 6th Extinction (26 page)

A promise is a promise.

Cutter followed Ashuu up the stairs.

As Mateo roughly grabbed Kendall’s shoulder and manhandled him away, he kept his eyes on Cutter’s back, picturing the scars that had so radically transformed the man—both inside and out.

Why did you bring me here?

He suspected the answer already.

And it terrified him.

11:56
P
.
M
.

Small fingers clutched Cutter’s hand as he descended the steps carved into the sandstone floor of the tunnel.

“Papa, we must hurry.”

Cutter smiled as his son dragged him faster, with the heedless abandon that only came with youth. At only ten, Jori found wonder in everything, his raw curiosity shining from every inch of his handsome face. He had his mother’s soft features and mocha skin, but his eyes were his father’s, shining a clear blue. Many a local witch doctor had touched the boy’s face, staring into those eyes, and declared him special. One Macuxi elder described his son the best:
This one was born to see the world only through cloudless skies
.

That was Jori.

His blue gaze was always open for the next wonder.

It was what drove the pair of them for this midnight hike through the subterranean tunnels. They were headed to the living biosphere he had established on the tepui—or rather
inside
it.

Most of these sandstone summits were riddled with old caves and tunnels, formed as the soft rock was worn away by eons of rain and running water. It was said the cavern systems found here were the oldest in the world. So it was only appropriate that these ancient passageways had become the forges for what was to come.

The bare bulbs running along the tunnel roof revealed a steel door ahead, blocking the way forward. Cutter stepped to the electronic deadbolt and used a keycard from around his neck to unlock it. With a quiet whirring, a trio of wrist-thick bolts wound out of the doorframe.

“Ready?” he asked and checked his watch.

Three minutes before midnight.

Perfect
.

Jori nodded, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet.

Cutter hauled open the door to another world—the
next
world.

He led his son onto the landing outside the hatch. Overhead a light misty drizzle fell out of the sky and down into the depths of the massive sinkhole before him. Their overlook jutted fifteen feet below the lip of that cylindrical hole. A corkscrewing wide ledge ran along the sinkhole’s inside walls, skimming from the plateau summit all the way to the base of the tepui. The hole was massive, three hundred meters across, but it was still a third smaller than its cousin, the giant sinkhole at the Sarisariñama tepui in Venezuela.

Still, this smaller confined ecosystem served his purposes beautifully.

The hole acted as an island within an island.

It was these same tepuis that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write
The Lost World
, populating these islands among the clouds with the living remnants of a prehistoric past, a violent world of dinosaurs and pterodactyls. To Cutter, the reality was more thrilling than any Victorian fantasy. For him, each tabletop was a Galápagos in the sky, an evolutionary pressure cooker, where each species struggled to survive in unique ways.

He stepped to the wall, festooned with a riotous growth of vegetation, dripping with dampness, soaked in mists. He gently pointed to a small flower with white petals. Its tendril-like leaves were covered by tiny stalks, each tipped with a glistening sticky drop.

“Can you name this one, Jori?”

He sighed. “That’s easy, Papa. That’s a sundew. Dro . . . dro . . .”

Cutter smiled and finished for the boy. “
Drosera
.”

He nodded vigorously. “They catch ants and bugs and eat them.”

“That’s right.”

Such plants were the foot soldiers in an evolutionary war up here, evolving distinctive survival strategies to compensate for the lack of nutrients and scarce soil found atop these tepuis, becoming carnivorous in order to live. And it wasn’t just sundews, but also bladderworts, pitcher plants, even some bromeliad species had developed a taste for insects on this island in the sky.

“Nature is the ultimate innovator,” he mumbled.

But sometimes nature needs a hand
.

As midnight struck, a soft phosphorescence bloomed along the walls, flowing from the top toward the dark bottom.

Jori clapped his hands. This is what his son had come to see.

Cutter had engineered the glowing gene of a jellyfish into the DNA of a ubiquitous species of orchid that grew upon this tepui, including instilling a circadian rhythm to its glow cycle. Besides the pure beauty of it, the design offered illumination at night for the workers who tended to this unnatural garden.

Not that my creations need much nurturing at this point
.

“Look, Papa! A frog!”

Jori went to touch the black-skinned amphibian as it clung to a vine.

“No, no . . .” Cutter warned and pulled the boy’s hand back.

He could understand his son mistaking this sinkhole denizen for its common cousin up top, a frog unique to this tepui. The native species found above,
Oreophrynella
, could not hop or swim, but had developed opposable toes for a better grip on the slippery rock surfaces.

But the specimen here was not
native
.

“Remember,” Cutter warned his son, “down here, we must be careful.”

This frog had a potent neurotoxin engineered into the glandular structure of its skin. He had culled the sequence of genes from the Australian stonefish, the most venomous species in the world. One touch and a painful death would soon follow.

The frog had few enemies—at least in the natural world.

Disturbed by their voices, it skittered farther up the vine. The motion drew the attention of another predator. From under a leaf, diaphanous wings spread to the width of an open hand. The leaf fluttered free of its hold on the stem, revealing its clever bit of mimicry.

It was part of the
Phylliidae
family, sometimes called walking leaves.

Only this creation didn’t walk.

Its wings fluttered through the mists, its tiny legs scrabbling at the air as it fell silently toward the frog.

“Papa, stop it!” Jori must have sensed what was about to happen. His son had a boyish affinity for frogs. He even kept a large terrarium in his bedroom, holding a collection of several species.

Jori moved to swat at the gently fluttering wings, but Cutter caught his wrist—not that the modified insect would do anything worse than sting the boy, but here was another teachable moment.

“Jori, what did we learn about the Law of the Jungle, about prey and predator? What’s that called?”

He hung his head and mumbled to his toes. “Survival of the fittest.”

He smiled and gave his son’s hair a tussle. “Good boy.”

Landing on the frog’s back, the insect sank its sharp legs through the toxic skin and began to feed. As son and father watched, those pale outstretched wings slowly turned rosy with fresh blood.

“It’s pretty,” Jori said.

No, it’s nature
.

Beauty was simply another way Mother Nature survived, whether it be the sweet-smelling flower that drew the bee, or the wings of a butterfly that confused a hunter. All of the natural world had one goal: to survive, to pass its genes on to the next generation.

Cutter stepped to the edge of the landing and stared down that mile-long drop to the bottom. Every tens of meters the ecosystem changed. Near the top of the sinkhole, it was clammy and cold; down at the bottom, hot and tropical. The gradient in between allowed for the creation of test zones, unique ecological niches, to challenge his works in progress. Each level was color coded, running from lighter shades above to darker below, each separated by biological and physical barriers.

Black was the deepest and most deadly.

Even under the glow of the orchids, he could barely make out the dark humid jungle that grew along the bottom, its loam enriched by the detritus that rained down from above. That patch of isolated rain forest made a perfect hothouse furnace—where his greatest creations took shelter, growing stronger, learning to survive on their own.

The native tribes of this region feared these mist-shrouded tepuis, claiming dangerous spirits lurked here.

How true that was now.

Only these new spirits were his creations, designed for what was to come. He stood at the edge, looking across the expanse of the sinkhole.

Here was a new Galápagos for a new world.

One beyond the tyranny of humankind
.

THIRD

HELLSCAPE

Σ

17

April 30, 10:34
A
.
M
. GMT
Queen Maud Land, Antarctica

“Where’s the damned sun?” Kowalski groaned.

Gray understood the big man’s frustration. He stood in the pilothouse of the massive treaded vehicle and studied the landscape beyond its tall windows. Though it was midmorning, it was pitch-black outside. With the moon already down, bright stars twinkled coldly across a cloudless sky. Occasional ethereal waves of brilliance rolled across the starscape, in hues of emerald and crimson, amid splashes of electric blue.

This dramatic storm of the aurora australis—the southern polar lights—had chased them across the frozen expanse of Queen Maud Land during their overnight trek. The fierceness of the display reflected the severity of the solar flare that compromised satellite communication across Antarctica. Each dazzling dance of the aurora reminded Gray how isolated they were out here.

He studied the terrain for some clue to where they were going. After abandoning Karen and the other researchers at the lone remaining Halley module, Gray and his team had headed east in the large vehicle, trundling across a flat sea of snow and ice. According to the dynamic map display above the pilot’s station, their path paralleled the distant coastline. But out the window, there was no sign of sea or ocean, just a frozen world of white and blue. The only feature that broke up the monotonous landscape rose to the south of their position. A line of black craggy peaks poked out of the ice, marking the tops of buried mountains. Razor-sharp, the crags looked like a row of fangs and were in fact named Fenriskjeften—or the Jaws of Fenris, named after the mythic Nordic wolf.

Conversation drew his attention back to the control deck behind him—and to their host, Stella Harrington, daughter of the reclusive professor they were headed to meet.

“We actually designed our CAAT after the prototype built by DARPA,” Stella explained to her avid pupil.

Jason stood next to her at the helm station, looking at a set of schematics for their strange vehicle. He plainly could not get enough information about their unique mode of transport.

Or maybe it was his teacher.

In her early twenties, Stella was the same age as Jason, with a pixie blond cut, stunning green eyes, and curves that showed even through her heavy wool sweater and thick polar pants. She was also whip-smart, holding a dual master’s in botany and evolutionary biology, a challenging match for Sigma’s resident computer genius.

“I remember seeing a video of that DARPA prototype,” Jason said. “It was one-fifth this size. Can you still travel over water in this larger craft?”

“Why do you think it’s called a Captive Air
Amphibious
Transport?” Stella teasingly rolled her eyes. “Each individual tread of the belts is made of a buoyant foam, allowing us to travel over both land or sea. And out here, that’s important.”

Jason frowned, glancing out to the frozen expanse. “Why do you need to be amphibious out here?”

“Because we use the CAAT mostly—” She suddenly stopped, perhaps knowing she was speaking too freely.

It had been that way since they boarded. Any conversation was laced with gaps and silences. She still hadn’t told them what sort of trouble her father was in, only that he needed their help.

She looked away, her voice lowering guiltily. “You’ll see.”

Jason didn’t press the matter.

“But the CAAT is still useful over the ice,” Stella continued more confidently. “We can get her up to eighty miles an hour on flat terrain, and her length allows us to forge narrow crevasses.”

Jason studied the schematics. “The vehicle reminds me somewhat of Admiral Byrd’s snow cruiser, the big polar truck built just after World War II. Are you familiar with it?”

Gray remembered seeing a picture of that fifty-foot-long polar truck, capable of carrying a small plane on its back. The photo had been found in Professor Harrington’s files that had been recovered from DARPA’s servers.

“I . . . I am,” Stella said, again speaking tentatively, as if she were walking on thin ice. “My father believed the CAAT could serve a similar role.”

Jason nodded. “Makes sense.”

The kid cast Gray a surreptitious glance. Gray suddenly realized Jason had been quietly testing Stella, using information from her father’s files to see how open she would be with them.

Maybe he wasn’t so moonstruck after all.

“How many people can this CAAT hold?” he asked.

“We’re specked to carry a twelve-person team, including the bridge crew. But in a pinch, we could squeeze in another six or seven.”

It was why they had to abandon Karen and the others. Gray had seen the cramped quarters down below. It seemed the vehicle’s engine and mechanics took up most of the available space. The crew’s quarter held a tiny mess hall and bunkroom, and Stella had come with a full complement of British soldiers, all armed, expecting they might run into trouble. There was no way the CAAT could carry Karen and all twelve of her fellow researchers.