Fragment

10:08 P.M.

“Quentin, save the rest of the ROVs for daylight, OK?” Nell said. “Let’s concentrate on lighting and time-lapsing the field specimens till morning.”

Quentin triggered the outboard lights for the cameras that would continue shooting a frame of the plant specimens exposed outside every thirty seconds through the night.

“God!” she said as she ran replays of the time-lapses from the last forty-five minutes. She looked out the window and saw that some of the specimens had already been stripped, uprooted, and replaced with something else.

“Hey, what’s that?” a NASA technician asked.

A strange hum buzzed in the air.

The entire lab seemed to vibrate and then rock gently back and forth.

“Probably a tremor,” Quentin said. “The military said they noticed low-level seismic activity in the island a few days ago.”

“Hang on, folks,” Andy warned.

Nell grabbed the edge of the lab counter and looked out the window, at the trees quivering at the jungle’s edge.

Dante felt the rumble before he heard it. At first he thought the entire cliff was falling, but then he realized it was only the slab he was clinging to-separating from the cliff with a slow crumble. He lunged sideways, finger-locking a crack with his left hand and swinging up to catch a dead-point with his right, simultaneously edging a hold with his left foot. It was the most incredible dyno he had ever made-but he didn’t care, because he was terrified.

Flakes of rock rained down around him, and he realized the last protection he had set was fifty feet below-he needed to get to that ramp above, fast.

The cliff-gliders grew bolder. They lightly grazed his shoulders, back, and heels as he climbed, flittering around him in greater numbers like flying crabs swarming over the cliff face. “Hang on, bro,” he said to himself nervously.

The humming stopped.

Andy sighed. “Now I know what an earthquake feels like.”

“OK, it’s over,” Nell said, hopefully.

Briggs came through the hatch from Section Three. There was a serious look on the chief NASA technician’s face.

Cliff-gliders

Megatriops hemapteryx

(after Joel, Revision of the Notostraca of the World)

“Hey, Briggs. Is there any way I can run down to Section One and get my Mets cap? I think I left it down there.” She smirked at him.

“That’s very funny, Nell. That would be a ‘no.’ So, now we have earthquakes?”

“Not too bad, so far.”

“Yeah, sure.” Briggs glared at her. “Bring on the mudslides and hurricanes!”

Dante began to suffer from forearm pump as the fingerwork bulged his arms and weakened his grip. He tried shifting more of the weight to his feet, and finally, painfully, he reached the crack and wedged himself in. He shook out his arms in the womb of rock and then set some protection, overcamming it into a hole above him, and hooking it in with a locking ‘biner.

He was not confident about bivouacking on the rock face- sleeping here did not seem like such a great idea, after all. Crawling deeper into the crack, he discovered a vertical crevice that shafted into the roof like a ladder, straight to the overhang at the top. He felt a surge of hope. If this was as clean as it looked, he could reach the top in fifteen minutes.

He decided it was time to transmit, using the camera’s night vision mode. He turned on the SeaLife walkie-talkie and called in.

Every three and a half minutes Peach nibbled a peanut M amp;M as he played the twenty-sixth level of Halo 5-when suddenly he caught a signal icon blinking in a corner of his monitor.

He clicked the icon as though he were blasting another alien, and the raw feed of Dante’s camera suddenly filled the screen, muddy and crackling: “I’m here on Henders Island, about a hundred meters from the top of the cliff. Do you guys hear me? I hope your walkie-talkies are on, man…”

Peach looked around for his walkie-talkie but couldn’t find it.