They were not birds.
Bishop had no doubts about that. In fact, even though he was having a hard time believing it, he knew exactly what they were.
In the preceding three years, to prepare for battle with the renegade geneticist Richard Ridley, the individual Chess Team members had participated in an accelerated educational program that included introductory courses in several scientific disciplines. Bishop recognized the animal species, even though most people, thanks to more than a century of erroneous conclusions reinforced by Hollywood movies, would not have.
The creatures he saw, in that momentary flash of the glowstick, were velociraptors.
The cave was full of dinosaurs.
35
Rook gazed in disbelief at the lake and the surrounding area. Although he had read Livingstone’s account and heard Aleman’s confirmation of the surreal phenomena associated with the alkali lake, the reality surpassed his wildest expectations. The lake wasn’t blood red, exactly. In the burning light of the morning sun, it was brighter, with a variety of hues ranging from orange to pink. The opaque surface had the appearance of a terrazzo mosaic, or perhaps a stained glass window in a cathedral, shot through with whitish cracks. At the shore, the natural brown of rock and soil was coated a sulfur yellow in both directions, as far as he could see, and at the cusp where water and earth met, there was a darker band that phased between yellow, green and black. Scattered throughout were shapes that were easily recognizable as birds and other small animals, dead and perfectly fossilized.
“This is like something from a Star Wars movie,” he told Queen. “The prequel trilogy, I mean, with all the CGI effects. I didn’t think I’d ever see anything like this on Earth.”
Queen shrugged. “Didn’t watch them. Looks a little like New Jersey, to me.”
As strange as the immediate landscape was, the real surprise was that Lake Natron was not the lifeless hell pit Rook had imagined it to be. Although there was no evidence of animal life nearby — unless, of course, one counted the petrified remains, just a short distance away, the lake transitioned to a less shocking hue of muddy green and reflected blue sky. Flocks of flamingos stood in the shallows, bobbing their heads down to scoop up mouthfuls of algae rich water.
“Didn’t watch Star Wars?” Rook shook his head in mock-despair. “Well that might explain why you don’t seem to appreciate my witty pop-culture references.”
Humor was his defense mechanism. He had cleaned up and changed clothes on the long flight half-way across the world, but he still felt the memory of blood on his hands. Mulamba’s remains now rested in a sealed body bag aboard Crescent II, which was parked a short distance away. The plane was perfectly camouflaged, as its digital skin projected an exact image of the terrain beneath it, or the jungle behind it. Billions of tiny color cells shrank and expanded to create the image — a technology based on the chromatophores of the common squid. From a distance, or from above, it was invisible. The area surrounding the lake was uninhabited, so there was little chance of someone stumbling across the aircraft.
“Could be that they aren’t as witty as you think.” Queen’s tone was sharp enough that he knew she wasn’t merely being playful. Queen, he knew, had her own way of dealing with loss.
“Touché. So, here we are. What do we do now?”
“Visual recon. We walk the shore until we find the footpath Livingstone described.”
“Livingstone said the path was exposed when the lake water receded. It might be underwater now.”
“Might be,” she replied. Rook got the sense that she wasn’t interested in enumerating all the factors that weighed against them in the search. She cocked her head sideways, listening to a voice inside her head, then added. “Aleman says he can set up a program to discriminate manmade artifacts that might not be visible to the naked eye.”
A second pair of glasses would have doubled the effectiveness of the search, but Rook refrained from making the irrelevant observation. They didn’t have a second pair, so what was the point of saying it? Instead, he fell into step beside her and respected her evident desire for quiet.
They headed south along the western shore. The squat misshapen cone of Ol Doinyo Lengai — the mountain Livingstone’s Masai bearers had named the Mountain of God—smoldered in the distance, churning up natrocarbonatite lava, which reacted with water to give the lake its unique properties. There was no danger from the ongoing eruption, but from time to time, they could feel the ground beneath their feet vibrate with pent up seismic energy.
Without the glasses, Rook knew his contribution to the search would be minimal at best, so he spent most of the trek studying the terrain, looking for clues that might not be visible to Aleman’s software. He tried to see this bizarre landscape as Livingstone might have, or even as the Ancients who laid the path would have. He decided they would not have gone about their choice randomly. A path suggested permanence, a well-traveled connection between the surface world and the cave entrance. Time might have obscured the path itself, but the builders would have chosen the path of least resistance. The hills and mountains they would have chosen to circumvent would not have changed nearly as much, even with the passage of many centuries. That was what he told himself at least. It was something to keep him occupied while Queen brooded.
As they traversed a salt flat with the texture of partially melted ice cream, something caught his eye. There, amid the irregular pattern of mineral mud turned to stone by the passage of time, were a series of depressions, spaced out a couple of feet apart. Each was slightly longer than his hand and looked remarkably like…
“Footprints!”
Queen came over for a closer look. “You’re right. Someone walked through this mud when it was wet.” She paused, listening to Aleman again, and her eyebrows went up in surprise. “These footprints could be over a hundred thousand years old,” she said in an awed voice.
“Get out. Seriously?”
She nodded. “Fossilized human footprints have been found here that date to 120,000 years ago. I don’t know if these are the same ones, but they could be.”
“So these could be the footprints of the Ancients? Maybe this is the footpath Livingstone was talking about.”
“It’s worth checking out.” She stood beside the prints and then began walking toward the lake’s edge, sweeping her gaze back and forth slowly for the benefit of Aleman’s computer program. She stopped with the toes of her boots almost touching the water.
“Careful,” Rook advised. “One touch will turn you to stone.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she replied without looking back.
“Maybe not, but why take the chance?” He winced even as he said it. Queen wasn’t the kind of person to back down from a dare. “I just mean, touching it probably isn’t a good idea.”
“Aleman says this might be the place.”
“Uh, oh.”
She turned, smiling at him. “Ready to get wet?”
They did not actually have to touch the corrosive and poisonous water. Their drysuits and full-face diving masks formed an impermeable barrier between their skin and the deadly lake, but how quickly the vulcanized rubber would degrade on contact with the highly alkaline water was anyone’s guess. She decided it was best not to trouble Rook with that little detail.
Because there was no predicting what sort of specialized equipment the Chess Team might need while in the field, Crescent’s cargo hold was filled with gear and weapons to meet a broad spectrum of operational challenges in conditions ranging from arctic to undersea.