The rest of the team drifted away, muttering to each other. Aston moved to the wall behind Syed, looking for where she had received her shock. A small section of vine lay on the floor, where she had successfully chipped it free. He touched it tentatively, but it was cool and inert, so he dropped it into a sample bag and handed it to the biologist. She smiled her thanks.
Turning back to the wall, Aston could see where she had chipped the small section free. The remaining end of the vine, standing a little free from the stone now, glowed with a hint of red. He frowned, trying to figure out what phenomena of natural plant activity might cause a reaction like that.
“Hey, you guys!” Slater called out. “I’ve found something.”
12
Alex Wong called a meeting of all Base Camp staff, because it was part of the job, not because he wanted to. These staff meetings were interminable, but they were required in his contract, so he did his job. What the hell he had done in some past life to deserve a job like this, he was at a loss to imagine. But, it paid the bills back home in Sydney, so he couldn’t complain. He preferred his post at the Sydney offices of SynGreene, but this temporary assignment and the associated salary boost was too good to ignore. Though it turned out that eight months was a lot longer in reality than it looked on the calendar. And he was only halfway through.
“So no one has seen Aaron Steele?” he asked the gathered staff. The whereabouts of the member of the security team was the number one topic of conversation around the base. Where had the idiot gotten off to?
“I checked his bed in the staff dorm and it hasn’t been slept in.” Mitchell Boggs, a fairly recent hire, was nosy as hell. No doubt he took pleasure in checking up on Steele.
Wong frowned. “He didn’t come back from guard duty yesterday?”
“I don’t think so,” Boggs said. “At least, he didn’t report back. His card still marks him as on duty.”
Wong heaved a tired sigh. “So we know he went to his post, underneath, on time. But that’s it?”
“Yep. Is there any way he could have left? You know, quite a few people have complained about the isolation here and I know he really missed Crystal.”
“Crystal?”
“His fiancée.” Boggs’ leer undermined his tone of concern.
Wong nodded. “Right. But it’s not like there’s a bus service back to Cape Town for him to catch. So no, I’m pretty sure he hasn’t left. Did he seem especially, you know, depressed about it?”
“You mean suicidal?” The speaker was a woman whose name he couldn’t quite remember. He thought she hailed from somewhere in the southern United States.
“Exactly.”
“Nah, he was just bored, like the rest of us.”
A small man at the back, Timmy something or other, raised his hand. “Do you think he might have shared the fate of the last team?”
A flash of anger surged through Wong and he shot one finger up to forestall any more talk. “We don’t talk about that, even with each other. That’s not our job, remember? We guard and take care of stuff up here and have one person on rotation to the stone door down there. That’s it.”
This did not satisfy Timmy. “What’ll we do if the new team—”
Wong cut him off. “We do nothing. Not. Our. Job. That’s what that big unit Terry Reid and his guys are for. They’re the para-military people. We’re just a security firm. I mean, half of you were walking office blocks at night four months ago. SynGreene headquarters is almost literally a world away from this place. Most of this is entirely out of our jurisdiction.”
“Still, I wish we had a few of the military types up here, just in case.” Timmy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He met Wong’s gaze only for a moment before lowering his eyes to the carpet.
Wong couldn’t be bothered to carry on the pretense of a staff meeting. Aaron Steele going missing, after everything that had happened before, had him entirely on edge. “A bunch of us are armed and trained in the use of our sidearms. But we won’t need them. Get back to work, everyone. At least look busy, if you can.”
As his staff filed out, he poured himself a cup of coffee and wondered what might have happened to the other team. He knew more about the situation than most of the staff under him, but still precious little. He knew the team currently down below probably had no better chance of coming back up than the last one and it made him feel like a double-agent or a traitor of some kind. That didn’t sit well with him. His nerves couldn’t take these kinds of stresses. He was a corporate security guard exactly because he was about as likely to run into trouble in that job as he was in a supermarket checkout role. Actual threats made him antsy.
He jumped when the phone rang on the desk beside him, and he snatched it up. “Alex Wong.”
“Alex, Arthur Greene. How goes everything?”
Wong swallowed. The big boss calling like the man could read his treacherous thoughts from afar. “It’s all good,” he lied.
“How are our scientists doing?” If Greene had any suspicions about the state of affairs at Alpha Base, his tone, courteous if not friendly, belied them.
“They’re all down below, sir. On their second day of exploration. So far, no reports of any problems.” He didn’t need to mention Aaron Steele’s disappearance if the boss only asked about the science team.
“That’s good to hear,” Greene said. “Now, have you seen the latest weather report?”
Wong had, and that only contributed to his anxieties. “Yes, sir, I’m keeping abreast of everything. We’re ready for it.”
“Excellent. I’ll check in again soon, but you let me know if anything comes up that I should know about.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Greene.”
Wong returned the phone to its cradle, privately hoping he was ready.
13
Aston had been developing a bad feeling about this whole expedition since Griffin had found him at the aquarium, and nothing that had happened so far had eased the feeling. In fact, everything only made him more uneasy. Syed’s shock from a tough vine-like plant should really have been the peak of weirdness for the day, but he would never be that lucky. Of course Slater had found a dead body.
At first, Aston had expected it to be the missing guard, the one whose fidget spinner they’d found. But that disappearance and the associated blood smear remained a mystery. Slater crouched beside the remains, Jeff spotlighting the camera over her shoulder to capture it all. Aston hurried to be the first there, and squatted beside Slater in the gloom of the small side cave.
The corpse was a man, slumped back against the far wall like he’d slid down into a sitting position, as if exhausted. His legs were stuck out straight, arms resting limply on his thighs, head tilted to one side like he had passed out. His mouth hung open, the blackness beyond his teeth absolute in the contrasting shadows. What little remained of his flesh was yellowed like old leather, sucked tight to the bones of his face and hands, split and flaking like old scales. He had simply wasted away, it seemed, nothing in the caves to consume him. Perhaps not even the bugs one might find topside, Aston presumed.
“Judging by his clothes, I’d guess an early twentieth-century explorer,” he said.
Sol Griffin stood behind, palms on his knees as he leaned in to look. “Have we perhaps found the other member of the missing party? The partner of the man who originally brought that tiny sample of greenium out of here so long ago?”
Aston shrugged. It was as good a guess as any, but still, only a guess. His scientific mind wanted evidence.
“I see no injuries. Looks like he simply collapsed here,” Dig O’Donnell said. “You think he got lost and starved?”