Burial Ground

they had finally reached their destination.

The Basilisk Vent Field was a hotbed of geological activity. Seawater that leeched through the silt was superheated, suffused with toxic chemicals and minerals, and funneled back into the ocean at more than seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit through tall chimneys called hydrothermal vents. Seven main chimneys, nicknamed black smokers for the noxious plumes of water that poured out of them like the smoke from a tire fire, were staggered across Basilisk. It was one such formation, a more recent eruption named Medusa, that had summoned them more than a mile down to where the pressure could crumple a man in tin can fashion. Over the last twenty days, intermittent seismic activity had already toppled two of the older chimneys and increased the ambient water temperature by two degrees, which may not have seemed significant to the average man on the street, but reflected a massive expulsion of hydrothermal energy at nearly twice its previous rate. An opportunity like this might not come along again.

The submersible Corellian, named after the fictional manufacturer of the escape pod used by R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars due to its striking physical resemblance, slowed to zero-point-eight knots as it closed in on the ridge. Its thirty-foot, twenty-eight ton body was primarily fabricated from fiberglass and foam attached to a titanium frame that served as housing for the rear thruster assembly, a series of lights and cameras on forward-facing booms, and the two-inch-thick titanium personnel sphere that accommodated a dedicated pilot and two scientific observers. Patterned after the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Deep Submergence vehicle Alvin, which had set the standard for nearly half a century, the Corellian had cost GeNext Biosystems more than thirty millions dollars to build for its own personal use. Factor in the cost of its mobile berth, the one-hundred-and- seventy-foot Research Vessel Ernst Mayr and the salaries of the eighteen scientific researchers and twenty-eight officers and crew, and this was a two hundred million dollar private venture that amounted to little more than deep sea prospecting.

'Medusa rears her ugly head,' John Bishop said. The pilot could have passed for a beach bum with his unkempt blonde hair, deep tan, and lazy surfer drawl, but the former Navy Seaman was all business when he assumed the helm. He eased back on the throttle and watched through the foot-wide porthole as they approached the hellish eight-story behemoth. The Corellian had been equipped with a thirty-six inch LCD screen that relayed the footage from the digital video assembly mounted above the window so that the pilot no longer had to press his face against the reinforced glass to see where he was going, but Bishop was old-school. His motto was I didn't come all the way down here to watch it on TV.

Dr. Tyler Martin shifted his lanky six-foot frame. His unruly chestnut hair fell in front of his brown eyes. He tucked his bangs behind his ears and leaned back from the port view window, where he had been watching the lava fields transform into sharp crests that came to life with scuttling crabs and shrimp, and turned to face the monitor. The digital clarity surpassed even what he could see with his own eyes.

The live feed focused on the chimney, a great branching trunk composed of anhydrite, and copper, iron, and zinc sulfide precipitates. Black smoke poured out of various openings reminiscent of the pipes on some bizarre Dr. Seuss machination and roiled toward the sky. Six-foot tube worms that looked like crimson tulips bloomed from chitinous tunnels, filtering the hydrogen sulfide from the scalding water, which fueled the chemosynthetic bacteria in their guts, the source of all life in this strange ecosystem. White Yeti crabs snapped at the worms while clouds of ghostly shrimp swirled from one toxic flume to the next. Golden mussels and pale anemones staked claim to every spare inch of space. An octopus squirmed away from their lights.

'You guys ready to get to work?' Bishop asked.

'Might as well, you know, since we're already down here and all,' Dr. Courtney Martin said. With her long auburn hair and emerald eyes, it was nearly impossible to tell that she and Tyler were related. His little sister snuggled up to the starboard viewport, where she could use the control panel to her right to manipulate the retractable armature. The monitor above her head displayed footage from the camera affixed to its hydraulic claw.

'How close can you get us?' Tyler asked.

He dimmed the screens that displayed their GPS data and bathymetric maps to better see the monitor for his own armature.

'Close enough to count the hairs on a crab's ass.'

Bishop smirked. He had logged more than four thousand hours in this very submersible over the last three years and took his job so seriously that he even catheterized himself prior to launch so that nothing would distract him from his duties. He maneuvered the Corellian with such fluidity that it seemed like an extension of his body, an exoskeleton of sorts.

'Take us up about thirty feet,' Courtney said. 'You see where the chimney forks like a cactus? Right there by those two vents where all the smoke's coming from. That work for you, Ty?'

'Perfectly,' he said.

He fiddled with the armature controls, flexing the elbow, testing the clamps. Satisfied, he used it to pinch the handle of his collecting device, a tubular bioreactor that looked like an industrial coffee dispenser, and drew it out of its housing beneath the sphere.

'Sonar's registering seismic activity,' Courtney said. 'Looks like a swarm of mini-quakes.'

'It's been like that for the last three weeks,' Bishop said. 'It comes and goes.'

As Bishop watched, several of the fluted pipes broke away from the chimney and tumbled toward the sea floor, dragging crabs and anemones with them. There was a flicker of light as magma oozed out of the ground and immediately cooled to a gray crust.

Courtney bumped him from behind, knocking him forward against the glass. Three of them in that diminutive metal ball was like keeping a trio of goldfish in a wine glass. With the rounded walls racked with equipment and monitors of all kinds, it barely left room for them to squat on top of each other in what amounted to an uncomfortable, padded pit. There was barely space for them to kneel. The air was damp and sweaty. Fortunately, that was one luxury they had in abundance. There was enough oxygen for forty hours, while their dive was timed for only ten. Of course, that wouldn't matter if the sphere breached. The pressure would compress the titanium shell and the equipment, with them right there in the middle, into a metallic tomb the size of a basketball.

Three

My Son Ruins

69 km Southwest of Da Nang

Quang Nam Province, Vietnam

March 12^th

9:46 a.m. ICT

Seven Years Ago

Dr. Brendan Reaves shoved through the overgrowth of fan-leafed dipterocarps, palm trees, and conifers and stepped out into a small clearing, if it indeed qualified as such. The blazing sun reached the moldering detritus in slanted columns that stained the early morning mist like penlights shined through the dense canopy. Before him stood a knoll upon which a stone linga, a symbol of the worship of Bhadresvara, the local variant of the Hindu god Shiva, had been erected. The sculpted red stone was furry with moss and shrouded by a proliferation of vines and grasses, most of which had been ripped away and lay in brown tangles at its foot. Four identical life-size faces of Shiva had been sculpted to mark the cardinal directions of the compass on the three- foot-tall pedestal. The diety's slender face tapered to a point at his chin, where a garland of snakes encircled his neck. A crescent moon framed his braided hair, which was coiled into a conch shape on top of his head. His flat eyes, of which there were three, stared indifferently into the jungle. Excavated dirt and stones ringed a dark opening in the base of the hill.

He wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow and tried not to think about whatever was crawling on his skin beneath his damp khakis. The assault of the insects had begun the moment he stepped out of the rental Jeep at the M? Son ruins, arguably the crown jewel of the Champa Empire, which ruled Central Vietnam from the fourth through