Alex turned. “What? Tired, need a break?
“Not at all. In fact, I’m totally invigorated.” Cate waved an arm about. “See this? All of this? It’s my life’s work. So, no, I’m not asking for a picnic, just a minute or two now and then, and maybe you can share a little more of what you know.” Alex ignored her, and she folded her arms. “You wouldn’t even be down here if not for me.”
Alex turned, his expression hardening for a moment. “Maybe. Look, I know we have different objectives. But as soon as we find the submarine, then you can spend a little time on exploration — provided it’s safe. Okay?
“No, Alex.” She smiled flatly. “This is both my objective and my passion. All my life I’ve dreamed of this, ever since I was that kid lying on a muddy bank somewhere. How can I pass it by?” She shrugged. “I can’t. You go find your missing submarine; it’s your job. But for me, my job is this… paradise.” She waved an arm about again. “You go, I’ll be fine. Swing past on the way back.”
“Oh for Chrissake.” Alex rubbed a hand up through sweat-slicked hair. “Cate, down here is nothing like you’ve ever known. It’s not the Everglades, it’s not the Congo, or even the Amazon, and it sure as hell isn’t a paradise. It’s hell for human beings — everything down here wants to eat you. I can’t begin to…”
She held up a hand. “I know, I know.” She shrugged. “I’ll be careful.”
Alex stared at her for a few moments. He pulled one of his Ka-bar knives from a sheath at his back, and handed the seven-inch black blade to her.
“I can’t promise I’ll be back. So stay silent, keep your head down, and… good luck.” He turned and left.
Cate stood open-mouthed for a moment, not really expecting him to simply leave. “Wow.” She stuck the blade on her belt. “Thanks, and you still owe me a drink.”
He was already gone.
Cate had used the knife to sharpen the stalk of a dried frond into a multi-purpose spear, walking stick, and probe, and used it to carefully move through the thickening fronds. Perspiration ran down her face and stung her eyes. She had pulled the wetsuit down and tied its arms around her waist. Her white t-shirt was already stained and stuck slickly to her from the rivulets of sweat that streamed from her.
She stopped and lifted her canteen to her lips. It was only a third full. Not good, as she was losing a lot of fluid. She’d need to find water soon, as drinking the brackish pond-soup was out of the question. She felt confident, as she’d been in jungles before, and one thing a place like this wasn’t short of was drinkable water — you just need to know where to look. She pushed through another frond barrier and grinned.
“Oh wow.”
There was a small lake, around a hundred feet across, with an algae-covered island about forty feet out at its center. Heavy fronds overhung the water’s edge, and there was the soft purr of insect wings beating furiously as they hovered over the surface.
“I’m in heaven,” she whispered and squatted on the bank, pulling herself into a small ball and gripping her knees. A smile of wonder on her lips, she was content to just stay idle and watch as a scene straight from prehistory played out in real time, just for her.
She stayed motionless, letting her eyes move along the bank. On the far side, there was a fallen tree trunk, and a shiver of movement caught her attention. Crawling along its top was a reptile — no, not a reptile — the breath caught in her throat. It was something far more fantastic.
The creature turned in her direction, staring with ruby-red eyes. It was about six feet long and had a stiff sail along its back. It was mottled green and brown, and expertly camouflaged. Its hide wasn’t scaled, but instead was pebbled and leathery, and it ended in a box-like head that looked like it was made of solid bone. Powerful jaws hung open, and were studded with needle-like teeth.
“Dimetrodon,” she whispered. “But you guys were as big as rhinos. Are you a juvenile?”
She squinted, concentrating. The creature didn’t look young. “Perhaps you’ve shrunk.”
Dwarfism maybe, she thought. The same thing happened to mammoths when they were trapped on islands. Over many millennia, they grew smaller to fit their environments. The last vestiges of the great beasts were in Crete, where the population was all under four feet tall, she remembered. This is an entire world down here, but a small one.
Giants in the water, but maybe everything else had shrunk to accommodate their smaller landmass. “A world of tiny dinosaurs.” She grinned, feeling safer by the second. “But big frogs. Hey, I can live with that.”
The Dimetrodon slipped away. Damn, she thought, watching for a few moments for it to reappear. Eventually, she turned back to the pond. The water was dark and didn’t look inviting in any way, but she longed to see what was below the surface. There was occasional movement as the pondweed swirled, meaning something was moving beneath the algal blanket.
Cate tried to imagine what sort of creatures there could be, her imagination fired by the previous monstrous tadpole. There’d been bony fish around for hundreds of millions of years, and primitive air-breathing lungfish and their lobe-finned variants since the Paleozoic period.
The pond surface swirled and flipped only half a dozen feet from the bank where she crouched. She desperately wanted to get a glimpse of what was in the water. After all, she had ditched Alex Hunter to observe this world, so…
She lifted her sharpened stick, looking at its end, thinking, justifying. She could spear one — just one — all in the name of science, she convinced herself. She got slowly to her feet and walked carefully down the bank.
She placed one foot in the water, and paused, looking up to check her surroundings. She frowned. The small island at the pond’s center seemed closer — now only about twenty feet from the bank. She watched it for a moment. A large bug alighted on it, and then flew away. Everything was still and quiet. An optical illusion or I’m just tired, she thought.
Cate placed another foot in the water, and stared down, frowning again. It was no use, the darkness made even the shallow water difficult to see. She pulled her flashlight, flicked it on, and pointed the beam down. She crouched.
Life, lots of it. Things whirled and whizzed past her circle of light. There were crustaceans, but unlike anything she had ever seen living or from any fossil record. Long bodies, spines on their backs, and jagged claws held out stiffly before them. A tiny eel wriggled past, and then something like a salamander with a wedge-shaped head momentarily investigated the light before twisting away.
Cate stood slightly bent over and leaned out further. From the new angle she could see something bumping along in the shallows. She moved quickly, spear poised, but then smiled and turned to toss the spear up onto the bank behind her. She bent over to scoop up the creature.
“Hello, beautiful.” She grunted from the weight and turned the foot-and-a-half long thing around to look into its face. It was some sort of tortoise, with a bony head and heavily clawed toes. Its shell was oval and the huge plates overlapped almost like giant scales that had been welded together into its armor.
“Hmm, Pleurosternon, maybe, or something new?” The thing hissed in her hands, its beak snapping at the air. “Easy there, fella. I’m not going to eat you.” She looked at the patterning on its back — more like wood grain than the usual tortoise coloring. Tortoise were long-lived creatures, and as everything else here had a nice coating of moss and algae, the tortoise’s shell should too.