paper that had been shed like dry skin. He pored over it, and slowly he began to piece it together. He noted down what he could decipher, then interpolated some possible words into the text. What emerged was startling.
With this sky-st[one] comes a legend. It is [said] to be a force for great good, and a cure. But ev[il?] is drawn to it also. It has travelled through m[any h]ands [or maybe many lands], but its origin is thought to be Greenland […] where the evil began. HT, 16[??].
Could it be? Was the missing place name Brattahli?? Greg’s mind reeled. It was only a week since he had first had sight of Brattahli? on Google Earth. Before then, he was unaware of the ancient site. And maybe that was the rational answer — he was making an incorrect jump based on limited knowledge. How many places in Greenland started with those three letters? On Google, he did a place names search. It didn’t take long, and showed him that no modern town at least had a name beginning with the letters ‘Bra’. Nor were there any other ancient sites so entitled. It was not conclusive, but it was disturbing nevertheless. He lifted the stone from his lap and stared at it. It felt hot, and he could feel it pulsing in his grip. Hastily, he put it down on the workbench top. He tried to clear his head, rationalizing that he had just felt his own pulse. But the thought kept returning to him that this very stone could have been the meteorite that had impacted in the crater he had discovered last week. Or at least part of the original meteor, because the crater was larger than this small stone could have made. He began again searching Google Earth for smaller impact craters in the vicinity of the larger one. And on the same side of the fjord as the ancient settlement of Brattahli?.
It was the early hours of the morning before he took a break and rolled his wheelchair into the kitchen. He needed coffee to keep him awake. The last time he pulled an overnighter, he had been drinking red wine, and it didn’t help his powers of concentration. He made some of the real stuff in a cafetiere, balanced the hot jug between his insensitive thighs and rolled back to the computer. He depressed the plunger, poured the hot coffee into his mug and took a sip. The phone rang jarringly in the deep silence, and he almost spilled the mug into his lap. He wondered who was calling him in the depths of the night. Picking the cordless up, he heard the voice of June Piper, and she was excited. Before he could say anything about the meteorite, which sat, dark and mysterious, in front of him, she babbled out her news.
‘We’ve found something. It’s from your new impact crater site. Well, not exactly from that but around it. There are the fingers of some glaciers running down the valleys quite close, and Don sashayed down there on to the surface.’
Greg felt a pang of jealousy. Don Tremlett was the mountain goat who had replaced him after his accident. He did all the risky manoeuvres that had been Greg’s forte. He could just imagine him scrambling down on to the uneven and no doubt fissured surface of the glacier. As June pressed on, he idly moved his cursor hand on Google Earth, grasping the image and sliding it east, back over the fjord. One stretch of the satellite image had been taken in winter, and Greg could see a grey river snaking through ice just below where he had identified the crater. He followed it up and found the glacier terminus — a mass of shattered ice. Above it he could almost picture Don walking on the crumpled surface and finding a good point at which to bore down with his core sampler. June’s sharp tones alerted him to the fact that she didn’t know if he was still on the line.
‘Yes, I’m here, June. Just looking at the Google image. What did you find?’
‘That’s what I’ve been telling you. We found microbes — a species of bacterium in a spore-like state. They must have been under the ice for a long time, moving very slowly towards the terminus. Whether they are associated with your impact crater we aren’t sure yet. But we’re going to thaw them out in the lab and coax them back to life.’
‘Isn’t that a little dangerous? It sounds like the sort of doomsday scenario Michael Crichton would conjure up.’
June snorted. ‘You’ve been reading too much science fiction, and anyway Crichton’s dead. As for thawing out bugs, it’s been done before at Penn State, and nobody’s died yet. Look, I’ve got to go. We’re celebrating here, and Alicia has just waved a bottle of beer in my face.’
Greg pictured the gorgeous Alicia in his mind and wondered if June had got her into bed yet. He had tried and failed. He wished the team good luck and rang off. Greg felt totally dissociated from that world out there, where at this very moment scientists were getting paralytic because they had found a bacterium. All he had was a mug of rapidly cooling coffee and an empty room. Tired of looking for craters, and depressed at being in London when all the action was in Greenland, he returned to Googling Sol Invictus, Bassianus and Elagabal. He flipped from site to site, and after a while the information began to repeat itself, as it frequently did on the net with one site pirating another. Then something caught his eye. A site describing the sun god Elagabal said he was the ‘god of the black stone’. He clicked on this highlighted text and found himself reading about the Baetyl — a black stone venerated as the house of God. There was a quote from the historian Herodian suggesting the stone came down from Zeus. The clincher was the final sentence, which Greg read out loud.
‘In the third century, the stone was believed to be a meteorite.’
Greg knew that the stone lying on the bench in front of him couldn’t be that very stone, if it had come down in Greenland. But if the original stone was lost, who’s to say that some crank wasn’t seeking a suitable substitute? A crank like V. A. Bassianus, for example. It was a little scary that, since the man’s email and Greg’s rebuff, Bassianus had gone silent. Suddenly, the warehouse conversion didn’t feel so safe. A wave of exhaustion rolled over Greg, and he hunched over in his chair. He felt a tingling sensation in his left toes and sighed, reaching out to close Google Earth. Before he managed to hit the keyboard, though, he suddenly pushed himself upright. How could he have had any sensation in his toes? He was a T2 paraplegic. He shook his head, guessing he was more tired than he thought. He was having delusions now. The meteorite still lay on his workbench, and he picked it up, hefting the weight in his hands.
Then it happened again. He felt something in his right foot this time. It was like weak radio signals beaming in from outer space, almost lost in the background wash of white noise. But this time he knew it was real. He needed something stronger than coffee to deal with this, so he tucked the meteorite down between his thigh and the side of the wheelchair and flicked the switch to motor into the kitchen and get a bottle of wine. When he returned, there was a man standing in the middle of the room. He was tall, well muscled and looked quite at ease. His hair was thick and dark, slicked back from a bronzed forehead. His eyes were pale blue and steady.
‘Who the hell…?’ Greg stopped his wheelchair abruptly, and the tyres squeaked on the wooden surface. The man smiled with a lopsided grin that had no doubt charmed many a woman and held out his hand.
‘Greg Janic? My name’s Bassianus.’
Greg’s mind was racing. He couldn’t figure out how the man had got in, and done it so quietly. Then he felt a draught on his neck. Half turning in the chair, he saw that one of the windows that looked out on to the street was open. If Bassianus had come in that way, he was as good a climber as himself. As he once had been. Greg’s apartment was three floors up. He went to move the switch on the arm of his chair so that he could swing out of the room and escape. Maybe he could barricade himself in the bedroom. But the man was too quick for him. Bassianus strode over to him, reached behind the chair and pulled the battery leads free. Greg was disabled all over again. He thought briefly of the bottle that was nestled in his lap, but Bassianus must have thought of it, too, and he gently lifted the wine away from Greg and placed it safely on the workbench.
‘Now, Mr Janic, please may I have what I have come for? Just give me the stone, and I will be on my way. No harm done.’
Greg waved a hand at the shelves on the other side of the room, where his display of meteorites was arranged. ‘Help yourself.’
Bassianus sniggered and shook his head. ‘I’ve already had a look, Mr Janic. The one I want is not there. I want the sacred stone you stole from me on eBay.’
Suddenly, the man surged forward and pushed Greg’s wheelchair roughly back until it was under the open window. Greg felt his legs tense even as the air whooshed out of his lungs with the force of the crash against the wall. His head pitched forward on to Bassianus’s chest. The man grabbed him by his hair and pulled his head cruelly back. He thrust his contorted, red face into Greg’s, all appearance of the urbane man draining away from his features to be replaced by a wild and uncontrollable beast.
‘Where the fuck is it, you miserable cripple? Tell me before you go out that window.’
Greg kept his mouth shut, even as he felt the back of his neck forced over the sill of the window. His head sang as the blood rushed to it, and the night sky hung above him, the stars mocking his terror. The struggle was all too brief and one-sided.
DS Dave Skye leaned out of the window and looked at the body of the man that lay sprawled out on the
