Origin

1

Lynn Edwards opened the base-camp door and stepped straight into a frozen hell.

‘Where did you last see him?’ she shrieked over the howling wind, panic in the eyes of the man before her.

‘The ridge!’ Stephen Laverty screamed back, pointing into the vast, ice-covered wilderness behind him.

Lynn looked over Laverty’s shoulder. The ridge was over four hundred metres away — not far in the real world, but out here on the Antarctic Pine Island Glacier, it might as well have been four thousand. What had he been doing there?

As if reading her mind, Laverty shouted to her, ‘He just went out to find a better site for his readings. But the ridge slipped, and he went down.’

It wasn’t time for recriminations, but the missing man should have known better. Lynn was the lead investigator for the NASA team that was investigating the rapidly melting glacier, and Tommy Devane was responsible for the hot water drilling that was a major part of that mission. The sites had already been painstakingly selected, but Devane had obviously wanted to explore further. In the Antarctic, Lynn knew such foolhardiness could prove fatal.

She sensed movement behind her, and turned to see four other members of her team join them. She nodded, and gestured at the ferocious landscape beyond Laverty. ‘Over there,’ she told them. ‘Past the ridge.’

‘What the hell was he doing over there?’ Sally Johnson wanted to know, to murmurs of general agreement.

‘We can argue about that later,’ Lynn yelled. ‘Right now, we’ve got to get him back.’ She turned to face the brutal Antarctic wind. ‘Now let’s go!’

Pine Island Glacier, otherwise known as the PIG, is one of the two largest glaciers that drain the West Antarctic ice sheet into the Amundsen Sea, a large ice stream that flows down the side of the Hudson mountains into Pine Island Bay. Satellite imagery has shown that it has undergone a noticeable acceleration in recent years, making it disperse more ice into the sea than any other drainage basin on the planet.

The team led by Lynn Edwards was tasked with gaining an understanding of the interaction of the ocean and the ice by taking complex sets of measurements and then modelling the results to give an overall ‘virtual’ image of the action of the entire glacier.

The PIG itself was in one of the most remote areas of the vast ice-bound continent, eight hundred miles from the nearest permanently manned research station. Lynn and her team had arrived just a week ago from the large US research base known as McMurdo Station, some thousand miles south. They had flown in a small Twin Otter aircraft and landed at the old Matrix base camp, which they had reopened.

The week had gone well, and Lynn had established the base camp quickly and efficiently with the help of her team of eight hand-picked scientists.

They had discovered the ridge on the second day. Just four hundred metres from base camp, the ridge rose over one hundred metres from the surface of the glacier in a long, pristine line across the frozen horizon. The drop-off at the other side — which Devane had apparently fallen down — was nearly three times that distance, a slightly angled cliff left by the action of the ice calving away.

The basic sameness of the bleak white scenery made navigation and assessment of distance an almost impossible task, and Lynn could only pray that Stephen Laverty would be able to lead them back to the place where he last saw Devane.

If he couldn’t, Tommy would be dead within the hour.

Tommy Devane adjusted his body, testing each limb in turn, then his neck. Nothing broken.

He sighed in relief, looking back up to the top of the ‘ridge’, which appeared to be more of a mountain when seen from this angle. He counted his blessings — his thermo-electric suit had cushioned the fall to a large extent — and then cursed himself aloud for being so stupid. He was a professional! What had he been doing?

He cleared his mind. Feeling sorry for himself wouldn’t help in any way, he knew that for certain. He also knew that, even though base camp was a mere four hundred metres away, if he couldn’t get back over the ridge, he would soon be dead. He looked up at the towering mountain above him, its sheer sides mocking his hopes. Fat chance. He wasn’t getting back up there without a lot of help.

He knew Laverty had gone to get help, but he also knew that there was always the haunting possibility that he would never be found.

Unwilling to give in to panic, he pulled himself to his feet and started to examine the ridge. The slope was almost sheer, with nothing but ice to hold on to. Instinct told him to continue along the ridge, try and find some way of climbing it, but his head told him to stay where he was. If Laverty led the team back to the point where he had fallen and he was no longer there, he would be in a world of trouble.

And so he would wait. He would wait, and—

What on earth?

Devane’s eyes went wide as he saw the ghostly image, just a little further along the base of the ridge.

Could it be?

He shook his head, his eyes transfixed. It was a body, seemingly buried in the ice.

Wise move or not, he knew he would have to go and investigate.

2

Lynn and her team had finally arrived at the ridge. They skirted the edge, careful to avoid any calving ice, not wishing to go the same way as Devane.

‘Is this where you last saw him?’ Lynn asked Laverty, the lowered wind allowing them the luxury of communication without having to scream at one another.

Laverty nodded his head. ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ He pointed to the readout on his weather-proofed GPS. ‘As sure as I can be, anyway.’

Lynn nodded her head in return. ‘OK.’ She turned to the rest of the group. ‘Otis?’

A small, wiry man came forward. Otis Burns was the principal oceanographer on the team, and also the most accomplished climber. At a trim one hundred and forty pounds, he knew he was the obvious choice to go over the edge. He grinned at Lynn. ‘Rope me up, baby,’ he said with a wink.

‘Steady!’ Lynn called to the three team members who were belaying the rope over the edge of the ridge. ‘Slowly does it!’ She peered over as far as she could. ‘You see anything yet?’ she called to Burns, who was now at least a hundred feet down over the other side.

‘Nothing!’ came the voice from the frozen depths beyond. ‘I can’t see anything down there!’

‘OK, we’ll keep going,’ Lynn replied. ‘Keep—’

‘Wait!’ The cry was heard by the whole team, the tone unmistakable. Burns had found something. ‘I think I see something over to the west! I… Yeah, someone moving, right down below at the bottom!’

There was a pause, and the woman and two men holding the rope felt it move slightly, and knew Burns must be adjusting himself, swinging to face the person he had found. ‘Hey!’ they heard Burns shout. ‘Over here!’

Lynn waited for news, anxious. The next words from Burns surprised her more than she expected. ‘It’s him! He’s all right!’ There was a pause. ‘But he wants us to come down there after him!’

Lynn frowned. What the hell?

Two hours later, half the team was down with Tommy Devane, who had been secured in a new thermal suit and been given emergency rations, although he had almost refused them in his excitement. And when Lynn saw what he had discovered at the bottom of the ridge, she was not surprised in the least.

The body was only partly covered by ice, the glacial melt having exposed one half, perfectly mummified by the frozen conditions. It was the body of a man, modern in appearance. He was blond, short-haired and clean-shaven. He could almost have been one of them. Who was he? What had he been doing there? How had he died? How long ago? The questions tumbled through Lynn’s mind in quick succession.

She knew the body could be very old indeed — in 1991, a frozen mummified man had been discovered in the Italian Alps, and carbon dating had shown him to be well over five thousand years old. But this body was different. For a start, it was clothed in a material of a sort she had never seen before.

‘What’s he wearing?’ she asked Devane, who had spent his time examining the body while waiting for the team to arrive.

‘I’m not sure. Some sort of armoured textile, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems incredibly complex.’

‘Some sort of military special ops?’ Lynn asked Jeff Horssen, a data analyst who used to work for the US National Security Agency, a hotbed for secret military technology that the average citizen never saw.

Horssen examined the material, exceptionally well preserved by the ice. ‘Could be. They’re working on some really advanced cold-weather gear, I know that much. But this isn’t like anything I’ve seen.’

Lynn looked back to Devane; his expression said that there was more to come. ‘So what else?’ she asked him.

‘I don’t know about advanced,’ he said with a curious mix of surprise and delight, ‘but how about ancient?’

The bewildered looks on the faces of his teammates delighted him even more. As the hot driller, Devane was used to taking ice core samples — thirty-centimetre wide sections of ice drilled down and recovered from up to a kilometre deep, showing ageing layers like the rings of a tree. Air pockets, perfectly preserved in the ice, could give climate information on the region stretching back tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. An expert on the subject, he merely pointed at the steep iced walls of the ridge.

Lynn followed his finger, and looked at the wall for several moments before realization dawned. ‘Oh my—’

‘Yes,’ Devane confirmed. The ice that had sloughed off from the main glacier body had left striations on the cliff face that were akin to an open ice core sample, the lines able to be read for miles across. ‘From my estimate of these readings, that man we’ve just found was buried here under the ice no later than forty thousand years ago.’

3

‘We’ve found something down here,’ Lynn announced over the UHF radio to the teammates back at the Matrix base.

‘What?’ came the static-laden reply.

‘It’s a frozen body. Mummified. Potentially very ancient. And with some anomalous artefacts.’

‘Huh?’ Lynn could hear the confusion. ‘Like what?’

‘Things better not to discuss on an open line,’ Lynn decided. ‘We’re coming back to base.’

The UHF transmission was picked up by the National Security Agency’s Keyhole satellite, and transmitted directly to the supercomputers at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, fifteen miles south-west of Baltimore. Within fifteen minutes, it had passed through various levels of analysis; but on the orders of one man the message went no further, and was ‘lost’ for ever.

Stephen Jacobs clenched his fists in anger. They were so near completion! So near! He couldn’t let anything stand in the way of the organization’s dream. A mummified body buried in the Antarctic ice with ‘anomalous artefacts’? It could, of course, be nothing. But Jacobs also knew what else it might be, and such a discovery would cause too many questions to be asked, at just the wrong time.

He sighed. He would have to speak to his superiors. He could let nothing jeopardize the dream.

‘So just what the hell is it?’ asked Sam Maunders, a seismologist, when all team members were reunited back at the Matrix base — home, such as it was.

‘As far as we can tell,’ Lynn began as Devane started distributing cans of beer from the fridge, ‘it’s the body of a man — apparently the same as a modern human — which seems to have been buried in the ice approximately forty thousand years ago.’ She looked up as Devane slid a beer across the dining table to her, smiled in thanks and popped the lid. What the hell, she thought as she took a long pull from the can. You don’t make a discovery like this every day.

‘We found the body with what appears to be modern clothing,’ Lynn continued.

‘Like what? What do you mean?’ Maunders asked, fascinated. This was much more exciting than shifts in the ice, that was for sure.

‘Advanced arctic clothing, some sort of light yet highly insulating material.’

‘But what does it mean?’ asked Joy Glass, the lead computer analyst.

Lynn just shook her head. ‘At this stage, we don’t know.’

There followed wild speculation over what they had found, and the atmosphere was jubilant, excited, and just plain crazy. Despite their mission, a forty thousand year old mummy was simply far more exciting than gathering seismic data and carrying out oceanic modelling. It was potentially earth-shattering in its significance.

If it was true, Lynn reminded herself as a scientist. They would need a lot more examination time, and a lot more resources to get to the bottom of the matter. She was all too aware of the damage done to ‘Ötzi the Ice Man’, the mummy found in the Alps, when it had first been discovered. The authorities had assumed that the body, discovered by a couple hiking in the mountains, had died in a climbing accident. They therefore weren’t trying to preserve and protect the body, they were simply trying to free it from the ice. As a result, they shredded his clothing, used his bow as a tool to prise him out, and even jack-hammered a hole through his hip.

Such mistakes were not going to be made with their own find; Lynn was determined to follow strict scientific procedure in the extraction and examination of the body. This attention to detail — even when the excitement of discovery threatened to overwhelm her — was what had put her at the top of her field.

Evelyn Edwards — known as Lynn to her friends — was exceptionally gifted, having graduated top of her class at Harvard and then clawing her way to the top of a still very much male-dominated field.

Her looks — although envied by many — had not made her academic life any easier. She had been a plain girl in her youth, and she sometimes wondered whether this was why she had followed such an academic path in the first place, but she had eventually blossomed into a beautiful young woman. She had smooth, olive skin that suggested something exotic in her ancestry, and thick dark hair that framed her bright, unusually green eyes. Her body was lithe and athletic, honed as the years progressed by regular early morning runs, gym work and kickboxing. But in the world of science, such looks often made people take her less than seriously; it seemed that people thought that women who looked like her couldn’t possibly be intelligent as well. She struggled against the odds, her natural talents overcoming the bigotry and highly opinionated views of her contemporaries, until she was one of the top research scientists at NASA.

But the qualities that made her excel in her profession made her a failure in her private life. Her marriage had lasted less than two years, and she knew that she had to shoulder much of the blame for that. It wasn’t Matt’s fault, not really. They had been deeply in love, and had been engaged and married within a very short period of time. Too short, as it turned out. Matt Adams was an American Indian tracker, a robust man who liked to live as one with nature, in tune with the ‘great spirit’. Lynn had been immediately attracted to his wild, carefree behaviour, had been enticed by his barely contained enthusiasm for anything and everything. He had truly known how to embrace life. And he had loved her with all his heart.

Lynn felt bad now when she thought of him, as she often did at the Pine Island Glacier, the name so close to his home reservation of Pine Ridge in South Dakota. She wondered if he was still there now, and what he would make of the recent discovery. No doubt he would be delighted — he had often told her about how American Indian myths suggested that the United States had been populated tens of thousands of years ago by a very advanced people.

She smiled as she thought of him, but soon cut the thoughts off and returned to the business at hand — a quality that was both a blessing and a curse.

She picked up the secure radiophone and put through the call to NASA headquarters. A message like this could only go right to the top.

The operator came on the line, and Lynn wasted no time. ‘Get me the Administrator.’

Samuel Bartholomew Atkinson was the Administrator of NASA, the ‘high chief of space’ as he was lovingly referred to by his staff.

His love of the cosmos stretched back to when he was just three years old, so his mother told him, and he had pursued a career in the stars with a passion that bordered on the ferocious. He was now in his dream job, and loved every minute of it. Sure, there were challenges, but what satisfaction was there in life without challenges? His position gave him a level of knowledge about the cosmos that would have scared his three-year-old self, but he valued that knowledge now above all else.

The message that had just come in from Evelyn Edwards was disturbing in the extreme, and he was going to have to play it up the line. He told Lynn that he would be back in touch within the hour.

His fingers dialled the number quickly on the secure phone on his desk, and Stephen Jacobs answered on the first ring.

Atkinson filled him in as fast as he could, but Jacobs stopped him halfway. ‘I know, Samuel. And I’ve already spoken to our friends.’

Atkinson seemed surprised. But then again, Jacobs was a man who was full of surprises. ‘And what did they say?’

Jacobs cleared his throat. ‘They say that it is definitely something to be worried about. There could be a connection, although there’s no real way of knowing before examination. But it is cause for concern. We need to contain the situation.’

‘Yes, sir. Our next course of action?’

‘OK,’ Jacobs declared, ‘listen carefully. This is what I want you to do.’

The radio phone rang in the metal confines of the small base’s communications room. Lynn picked it up immediately.

‘Hey, Lynn,’ Atkinson said in his good-natured, friendly tone. ‘How you doing?’

‘Excited,’ Lynn confirmed. ‘Excited but ready to do this thing the right way. What do you recommend?’

‘You’re to remain on the base for the time being,’ Atkinson said. ‘We don’t want to compromise the site. We’ve got a specialist team already en route to your location. You are to liaise with that team, and offer them all the assistance you can. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Lynn confirmed. ‘ETA?’

‘Estimated time of arrival is 0700 tomorrow morning. Connecting to McMurdo, then on to you. Be sure to give them a warm welcome.’

‘We will, sir.’

‘And Lynn?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘This has been classified Ultra. Nobody else knows about this, and we want to keep it that way. Unless it’s through me, you are to cease communication with the outside world as of right now.’

Ten thousand miles away, in his private office in Washington DC, Atkinson replaced the receiver and rubbed his eyes. It was going to be a long night.

4

The team arrived as promised exactly at seven the next morning, landing in two identical Chinook AH-46 twin-rotored helicopters just fifty metres from the base, snow and ice spinning high up into the air from the powerful downdraught.

Six men from each helicopter quickly deplaned, heads down as they ran underneath the slowing rotors. Lynn had the door open for them, counting them in one by one. The pilots would come later, after securing the aircraft.

Nothing was said until the whole crew was assembled in the dining room, the largest of the rooms in the small Matrix base camp.

One of the men — Lynn noticed that they were all men — stepped forward. ‘Dr Edwards?’ he said, extending a large hand. ‘Major Marcus Daley, US Army Corps of Engineers.’

Lynn took the hand, shaking it firmly. ‘Army?’ she asked, surprised. She took a quick look at the others, spread out behind Daley in a fan formation. Definitely military. The air about them was unmistakable.

‘Hey, who else is gonna deal with an emergency operation thousands of miles from civilization? It’s us or you wait another two weeks for a civilian team. If the body’s uncovered already, you don’t want it decomposing.’

Lynn nodded her head, understanding. ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to seem rude, I just wasn’t expecting a military team. You’ve extracted bodies from the ice before?’

Daley nodded solemnly. ‘Soldiers die in frozen parts of the world all the time. And we never leave a man behind.’ He gazed into Lynn’s eyes. ‘Now take us to the body.’

Lynn had to admit that there was something to be said for military efficiency. By lunchtime, the army engineers had been shown the site, done a full reconnaissance of the area, and drawn up a detailed plan of action, which Lynn had quickly approved. It seemed they had indeed done this before.

Back at base, Major Daley sat with Lynn and Devane in the dining room, cups of strong hot coffee on the aluminium table between them. The two NASA scientists were taking Daley through the events of the initial discovery, and the major was asking questions and taking notes.

‘So since talking to Atkinson last night, you didn’t go back out to the body until this morning?’

Lynn exchanged looks with Devane, then shook her head. ‘No. Samuel ordered us to return here and stay until you guys arrived.’

Daley nodded. ‘Good.’

‘Why?’ Lynn asked, all too aware that her answer hadn’t been entirely truthful. After their meeting and discussion with the team the night before, she and Devane had descended the ridge again, documenting the find with high-definition cameras and taking detailed notes. Using their own specialized tools, they had even managed to shave some skin cells from the frozen body and cut some of the hair for later DNA analysis, as well as taking a small strip of clothing for radiocarbon testing. The unpredictable weather on this freakish continent could mean that the entire site could have been covered under several feet of snow by the time a specialist team turned up. The body could well have been lost for another forty thousand years, and Lynn was damned if she was going to let that happen. She felt uncomfortable admitting this to Daley however, and so the evidence they had gathered now rested in her personal backpack, stowed in her private cabin.

‘OK,’ Daley announced. ‘We’ll go ahead with phase one of the plan at fifteen hundred — extraction of the body. We’ll get it into one of the pressurized refrigeration units on board the first Chinook and then we’ll all extract by twenty-two hundred tonight.’

‘What?’ asked Lynn, shocked. ‘We’re all extracting? What about our mission?’

Daley disregarded her concerns completely. ‘You’re now part of a major scientific find, Dr Edwards,’ he said charmingly. ‘Your mission has changed.’

True to his word, Daley ensured his team had the body out and loaded by that evening.

His men were so efficient, Lynn couldn’t help but be impressed. They extracted the body with an almost loving care. Lynn and Devane watched fascinated as more and more of the ancient corpse was revealed. The strange clothing continued downwards, ending in some sort of cold-weather boots. And then there was something else, something metal buried next to the body.

Lynn moved forward to have a closer look but was gestured back. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Edwards,’ Daley said with gruff impatience. ‘These extraction tools we’re using are dangerous. Please remain in the safety zone.’

Disappointed but not surprised, Lynn moved back. Daley hadn’t wanted her there at all but she had argued her case thoughtfully. The army guys, no matter how experienced they claimed to be at such work, were unfamiliar with the unique conditions on the Pine Island Glacier, and Lynn told him clearly that they would need expert advice if they wanted to ensure no harm was done. Seismic anomalies, sudden moves in the ice, changes in air current — any could precipitate dangerous ice falls, or worse.

Daley had capitulated but only wanted a maximum of two people to help. Lynn was happy she would be able to observe the extraction but regretted that the majority of her team would be unable to share in the excitement.

It was clear that there was no excitement of discovery for Major Daley and his team. They approached the job professionally, no more and no less. And by ten o’clock that night, the body was on board the first helicopter as promised, the army engineers along with it; whilst on the second aircraft, Lynn sat with her NASA team, watching the small Matrix base as it disappeared into the swirling mist beneath them.

5

Lynn looked out of the window, down at the dark, near freezing waters of the Drake Passage, the small area of ocean between the Southern and Atlantic Oceans that separated Antarctica from South America.

They seemed to be flying very low, and she found herself wondering where they would be landing for refuelling. The Chinook’s range couldn’t be much more than a thousand miles, which would put them over Chile or Argentina. Were there any US military airfields in either of those two countries? Or perhaps, given the sensitive nature of their cargo, they were going to refuel in mid-air, negating the need to land anywhere before re-entering the United States.

Her reverie was interrupted by Harry ‘Truman’ Travers, the lead seismographer for the now-abandoned mission. ‘At least we’ll get to see our families sooner than we thought,’ he said with feigned enthusiasm.

The rest of the team murmured agreement, including Lynn, although she was acutely aware that she had no real family to return to. She was an only child, her parents having died in a car crash not long after she was born. She had been raised by her grandmother but this wonderful woman had also been taken tragically, just two years ago from cancer. Without a husband or children of her own, there was no one.

She was glad when Sally Johnson changed the subject. ‘So what do you think will happen to us?’

Horssen grunted, his intelligence background giving him an insight into such situations. ‘Simple really,’ he said. ‘They’re either going to put us on parade, wheel us out in front of the world media and put the spotlight on us in a big way.’ He paused.

‘Or?’ Devane finally asked for all of them.

‘Or we’ll be quarantined, kept out of sight. Depends on how sensitive the government decide the finding of the body is. Because this is exactly the sort of thing the government would cover up.’

The man who had been posing as Major Marcus Daley looked across the dark sky at the tail lights of the second helicopter, flying low across the waves.

There were some aspects of his job he liked, and others he didn’t. As it happened, this was one he liked. Many men would have baulked at what he was about to do, but he never considered any other option. It was cold-blooded, of course, but he simply didn’t care. His actions would benefit and protect the organization. And the dream.

He pulled the small metal box out of his cargo pocket, checking the flashing light.

He looked once more across the ocean to the second Chinook, his finger on the button, waiting for the right time.

‘It’d be nice to know where we were going at least,’ Devane announced, stretching his body out in the small, cramped seat.

He had read Lynn’s mind, as she stared again out to sea, wondering exactly the same thing. Screw it. ‘I’ll go and ask the pilot,’ she announced, unbuckling her belt and rising from her own cramped seat. It was something to do on the long flight, at least.

Grabbing her backpack, she moved down the small aisle, bumping knees with her teammates. ‘You can leave that here, you know,’ Otis Burns joked. ‘We’re not going to steal it.’

Lynn blushed, knowing Burns was right. And yet she felt strangely protective of the backpack’s contents, especially now that all the other evidence was with the US Army.

‘What can I say?’ she joked back. ‘I’ve got trust issues.’

She turned back down the aisle and was at the cockpit door in just two more steps. She knocked once, then again. There was no answer.

‘Hello?’ she said, knocking louder. She shouted and knocked again, louder and louder. Still no reply.

She felt for the handle, turned it. The door opened slowly, and Lynn stepped forward into the cabin.

Her eyes went wide, and the breath caught in her throat at the sight that greeted her.

Commander Flynn Eldridge — who had given the false name of Daley to the scientists — adjusted his position, straining to see the second helicopter just five hundred metres off the starboard side, its lights tiny specks in the distance.

He checked the time on his watch, then double-checked the navigation coordinates.

He looked to the aircraft’s navigator. ‘Here?’ he asked for confirmation.

The navigator nodded. ‘Here.’

Eldridge nodded back, and pressed the button.

‘There’s nobody flying the helicopter!’ Lynn yelled in terror.

Upon entering the cabin, Lynn had been greeted not by the sight of pilot and navigator as expected but by a completely empty space, except for a single, flashing green light on the control board.

‘We’re being flown by remote!’

The whole team was instantly in uproar, tearing up out of their seats, heading for the cockpit to look for themselves.

And then Lynn saw the flashing green light increase in speed, until it stopped.

And turned to red.

Five hundred metres away across the Drake Passage, Commander Flynn Eldridge and his team watched with detached professional interest as the black night sky lit up next to them in an immense fireball.

They saw the circular, expanding ball of fire hang in the air for seconds, struggling to stay up, before it plummeted down towards the icy sea below.

Eldridge nodded in satisfaction.

Job done.