Alena bit her lip for a second, studying the engraved stone. “But these writings may well be ancient, and we have no way of knowing what they were like a couple thousand years ago.”
Ridge nodded. “Yeah, but you’re probably right.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Good. For some reason, I’m really spooked by the idea of them being able to write,” Ridge said. “So, back to my question. What do you make of it?”
Alena looked up at the grotto. “Possibly a burial chamber, but there’s no way to tell. The engravings could be story art, like cave paintings, though that doesn’t feel right to me. Without more research and at least some translation, we can’t know.”
“What about worship?” Ridge asked.
“The thought had occurred to me,” Alena replied. “If people did live here alongside the sirens at some point, they wouldn’t be the first predators to be worshipped by the humans they preyed on.”
“A lovely thought,” Ridge said.
Alena smiled. “Hey, you asked.”
“And on that note, I’ve got to get back topside. You coming? I’ve got a lot to show you.”
Alena frowned. “A lot of what?”
Ridge gestured at the rock. “There’s plenty more where this came from.”
Alena took that in, then turned to one of the sailors taking pictures. “I want this rock.”
The man, a heavily muscled Latino with bright, intelligent eyes, turned his camera toward the carvings she had been looking at.
“No, not a photo,” she said. “I want the rock itself. Please have it brought back to the Hillstrom.”
The sailor hesitated, bulky camera in his hands reminding Alena of crime scene photographers.
“I know it’s not your assignment,” she told him, “and I’m not making it your assignment. But I am tasking you with making certain that it gets done. Handle it for me, please.”
Alena spoke to him politely and as charmingly as possible, but she also made sure that he knew that it wasn’t a request.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Satisfied, she nodded to Ridge, and the two of them started to pick their way across the rockfall toward the other side of the grotto as the low surf rolled in around them. In the clear blue water, she would have seen any sign of movement, and the creatures would not come into the shallows while the sun still shone. Still, as they crossed, she treaded carefully on the rocks.
“Watch your step,” she warned Ridge.
“Oh, I’m watching. No way am I putting even a toe in.”
It couldn’t have been any later than three p.m., so night was still hours away, but as they moved into the cooler shadow of the rock face, the presence of darkness unnerved her. The last time she had encountered these things — they had called them Bio-Form CMA-2 then, the CMA standing for Carnivorous Marine Amphibian — the sirens had left skeletons arrayed on the sandy shore of a South Pacific island as if to frighten people away. Some of those skeletons had been her friends, taken the day before, right out through the wooden hull of their research ship — an attack that young David had barely survived. Bio-Form CMA-2 had stripped the flesh and muscle from their bones in a single night.
These things — the ones the people from the Antoinette had christened “sirens”—would be Bio-Form CMA-3. She wondered how long they had been here, reproducing in the warren of watery caves in the subterranean heart of the island, until the outer wall of the chamber collapsed and freed them to spill out into the ocean. She could not believe that any single generation of a species could survive thousands of years, though David had suggested that volcanic activity might have woken them from some hibernating slumber.
Not that it mattered much to her how they managed to be alive. Alena wanted the sirens dead. If she could preserve one for study, and the Department of Defense could intuit or reverse engineer some deadly, controllable biowar effort from the creatures, that would be on their heads. For her own part, she knew she had to exterminate the things, to keep anyone else from dying like Harry Oliver and the others had, all those years ago.
David, though, wanted them dead for an entirely different reason. Ever since his first glimpse of Bio-Form CMA-2, he had suffered from terrible recurring nightmares of drowning, during which he felt the presence of the things in the water. In his dreams he never saw them, but knew they were nearby, about to tear into him, and in those dreams he would hope to die from drowning before they touched him.
“This way,” Ridge said. “You need a hand?”
Alena glanced up the steep, rough slope that would take her to the top rim of the grotto, where she spotted Tori Austin and Agent Hart watching her team at work.
“I’ll race you,” she said, not knowing whether to be pleased that Ridge thought her fit enough to make the climb, or to grumble about having to make it.
You can decide when you get to the top, she told herself, depending on how your knees hold out.
But her knees were just fine, and they made the climb in a handful of minutes. Tori and Agent Hart greeted them at the top, and then Alena turned to Ridge.
“All right,” she said. “What’ve you got?”
Ridge stepped right up to the edge of the rim — which, here, sloped upward toward the back wall of the bowl — and gestured below. Alena followed his lead and noted with surprise that crude steps led downward. Once they might have been more substantial, before time and the elements had worn them away. The steps led down into the bowl.
And it truly was a bowl, sloping inward toward the center. The front of the grotto, where the oceanward wall of the chamber had collapsed, was only about twenty feet across. But that represented merely the opening in the bowl. The bowl itself stretched a good eighty feet from side to side. Twenty feet down from the rim, the slope began. But at its center — at the bottom of the bowl — there was only open space. A fifty-foot-wide drop into darkness, because far below the bowl itself was the yawning mouth of a massive cave.
Ridge pointed toward the grotto opening, where the waves rolled in and out.
“Notice the water level there,” he said. “The tide’s coming in slowly, and right now the surf is fighting an uphill battle to get into the sub-chamber.”
“The cave,” Alena corrected.
Ridge nodded. “Exactly. It rolls up into the grotto, then back out. But when the tide gets higher, the water reaches the mouth of the cave and pours into it. Not long ago, let’s say less than a century, but maybe even less than that, the water had no way of getting in or out. There was this upper bowl, and then the lower cave, the sub-chamber.”
Alena looked at him. “We’ve established all this, Paul.”
He smiled. Ridge did not smile often. He started carefully down the worn steps toward the bowl below and waved for her to follow. Alena hesitated. She trusted her balance and her own feet, but not those stairs.
“I’ve already been down here,” Ridge reassured her. “Just watch your step and you’ll be fine.”
Warily, Alena started down. She risked a glance at the Navy personnel who had set up on the bottom shelf of the bowl. They had sunk anchors into the rock and were playing out ropes for the descent team, who had gone over the edge and lowered themselves partially into the sub-chamber — down in the dark where the sirens would be waiting out the sun — and it struck her how much courage that had to have taken.
Of course, none of them had ever seen the creatures.
But Tori and Agent Hart had. Alena glanced up at the rim and saw that they were not following her and Ridge down to the bowl.
“You two aren’t coming?” she asked.
Tori shook her head. “I got you here. I don’t need to get any closer.”
Alena smiled. “I don’t blame you.”