After gathering worms from a third and fourth pool, she retraced her steps and made her way back up the series of narrow ledges she’d descended from the surface. She’d nearly reached the top when the ground began to shake. The shaking was almost imperceptible at first, but it increased so rapidly that she was already on her hands and knees by the time she realized what was happening. Her eyes widened in horror as she watched the individual particles of grit and sand begin to vibrate, then flow like water beneath her. At the same time, bits of rock tumbled down past her, small at first, then larger. Without thinking, she began scrambling up the ledge on her hands and knees. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself carried down over the shelf behind her, her arms and legs flailing helplessly at the loose rock as she tumbled into the seething depths.
Then, just when she thought she would never reach the top, the trembling suddenly stopped. For a moment she didn’t move. She held her breath, unwilling to let herself believe that the earthquake was over. One second passed, then another. Slowly, she rose to her feet. She’d made it. She’d survived. She’d faced the worst Slag had to offer and she was still alive!
At least, that’s what she told herself—right up to the moment the explosion knocked her off her feet.
Liz saw the flames through the mist even before she reached the ground station. Tobias was standing in front of the duroplast igloo in his orange survival suit. The wind whipped clouds of dust around him as he watched the shuttle burn. A large boulder, which the quake had shaken loose from the face of the ice sheet, had tumbled down the slope and knocked the shuttle onto its side, rupturing one of its fuel tanks.
“Lassiter and Cantrell aren’t going to like this,” he said as Liz approached. “It’s going to cost the Consortium way too much money.” He gave her a wry wink. “Of course, now they can’t order us to come back early, can they? Not with their only shuttle burned to a crisp.”
“At least, you’re okay,” Liz said. She squinted up at the green-tinged flames licking into the darkness above them.
“I was inside the igloo,” he said. “If I’d been out here, I’d probably be toast.”
Fortunately, the autopilot had landed them far enough from the igloo that the structure hadn’t been destroyed by the explosion, though one side was blackened and appeared to have been flattened by the concussion.
Like Tobias, Liz assumed that Superintendent Cantrell would be boiling mad over the loss of the shuttle, but when they reached him on the com-link built into the igloo’s management console, neither he nor Advocate Lassiter reacted with the anger she expected.
“Oh, my…” Advocate Lassiter said. “We didn’t plan on anything like this. This is… well, we really didn’t expect anything like this.” With the interference in the upper atmosphere, his image wavered at times, distorting his features, but there was no mistaking the nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“I warned her,” Cantrell said, coming into view behind him. “I told her the surface was unstable.” He stooped down to scowl at Liz over Lassiter’s shoulder. “You knew the risks. You knew what you were getting into.”
“Look, we’ll be just fine,” Liz said, raising her voice over the static. “When the mining ships get here, you can send down another shuttle to pick us up. In the meantime, we’ll just get on with our investigation.”
“Yes. Yes, of course…” Lassiter said, wringing his hands. “Everything will be fine. I’m sure we’ll work something out.” He tried to smile, but with the erratic twitch he’d developed, he couldn’t quite pull it off.
“I wonder what that was all about,” Liz said after they’d broken the connection.
Tobias shrugged. “I don’t know, but I expect we’ll find out.”
Liz frowned, but when she could think of no satisfactory explanation for the behavior they’d witnessed, she turned her attention to the specimens she’d brought back from the crevice. “Wait until you see these worms,” she said as she dumped them into a stainless-steel tray filled with runoff from the ice sheet. “You aren’t going to believe the performance they put on.”
The worms immediately formed several small bundles, similar to what she’d seen outside. They even radiated the same patterns of light that slid smoothly from one worm to the next, but despite her repeated efforts, they refused to respond to her voice.
“The luminescence could be some kind of automatic response,” Tobias suggested. “Like the chemical signals bacteria pass to each other, or the pheromones insects use when their nest is under attack.”
Liz scowled down at the worms. “I could have sworn they were responding to my voice.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t know… maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part… wanting to believe that the Anunnaki had actually been here, that we were going to find some kind of proof in the worms’ DNA.”
“I don’t know about the Anunnaki,” Tobias said. “But it’s clear someone tinkered with the DNA of at least some of Slag’s life-forms.”
“Really? Up on the ship, you said that was just a theory.”
“True, but while you were out talking to your worm friends, I was busy scraping slime off the rocks back behind the igloo, and it turns out that the algae have an extra chromosome that lets them generate the free oxygen they release into the environment. To me, it looks synthetic.”
“Synthetic?”
Tobias nodded. “Normal chromosomes evolve by trial and error. They have lots of different genes that participate in all sorts of metabolic processes, not to mention bunches of superfluous nucleotide pairs that do nothing at all. This chromosome has none of that. No extra genes, not a single unnecessary nucleotide pair. It’s all business—like it was especially designed for one job, and only one job. A job, which, by the way, doesn’t provide the algae with any survival advantage at all. Nature just doesn’t work like that. The chromosome has to have been engineered.”
“Then it had to be the Anunnaki, right? I mean, who else could it have been?”
Tobias laughed. “For me, the real question is why? Why would anyone want to modify the ecology of a hellhole like Slag.”
“Maybe the worms’ DNA will tell us something,” she suggested. “If they evolved a symbiotic relationship with the algae, they could be the key.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but—”
He was interrupted by a series of loud beeps from the management console on the far side of the igloo.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, glaring across the room. “That’s the third alarm since we landed.”
Crossing to the console, he seated himself in front of the monitor and brought up the display for their environmental systems. “We’re running out of ferric chloride for the air scrubbers,” he said. “We’ll need to switch over to the backup tank.”
“I can do that while you’re looking at the worms,” Liz volunteered, anxious for him to get on with his analysis.
As Tobias returned to the worms, she slid into his chair and began working her way through the menus for the environmental systems.
“Uh-oh,” she said under her breath. She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing as she studied the numbers on the screen. “I think we have a problem.”
Tobias, who was sliding samples of worm DNA into his portable gene analyzer, looked up. “A problem?”
“We’re already using the backup tank. Apparently, the survey crew switched over before they left, and no one bothered to send down a replacement. I guess they figured they weren’t coming back.”
Tobias came back across the igloo and leaned down to peer into the monitor over her shoulder. “So that’s why Lassiter and Cantrell were so nervous.”