The Covenant of Genesis

vacuum pump to clear away the layers of sediment and vegetation that had built up over millennia.

‘What is it?’ Nina asked. She switched off the thrusters and swam the last few metres to join them: stirring up the bottom would wipe out visibility and cost them valuable time. The deep suits could operate underwater for longer than traditional scuba gear, but still had their limits - and on an operation like this, time was money. The research vessel anchored a few hundred metres away, the Pianosa, was privately owned, other clients waiting to use it after the IHA.

Gozzi aimed a light at what had been exposed. ‘It’s a net!’ said the Italian.

‘It is,’ Nina said in awed agreement. ‘Wow, this is incredible!’

Chase, hanging back, was less impressed. ‘Ooh. A net. Just like the thing that found this lot in the first place.’

‘Eddie,’ Nina chided. ‘This isn’t exactly a nylon drift net we’re talking about here.’ She reached out with a gloved hand, gently brushing sand off the crudely knotted strands. ‘Looks like they wove it from the local rainforest plants. Palm strands, maybe?’

‘Or vines,’ said Bobak in his strong Polish accent. ‘Strangler figs, perhaps. There are many on the islands.’

Gozzi dug a finger into the grey sediment. ‘The mud must have buried it and stopped it from rotting. Could have been caused by a tsunami, or a volcanic eruption.’

‘Mark the position,’ Nina told them. ‘If it’s a fishing net, they would have kept it close to the shore.’ She checked the little display in her helmet to get their exact depth. ‘Ninety-eight feet. If I put that into GLUG, I’ll be able to work out exactly how long ago this spot was last above water.’ She saw a yellow mesh bag on the ground nearby. ‘What else have you found?’

‘Stone tools, we think,’ Gozzi told her. He pointed to a spot behind Chase. ‘We found them there.’

Chase turned in place. An orange-painted stick marked where the other divers had been working. Near it, a little mound of round-edged stones stood out above the sea floor.

He looked back at Nina, who was using a smaller version of the vacuum pump to clear silt away from the net. Quickly becoming tired of watching her work, he swam to the stones, the deep suit’s neutral buoyancy letting him hover just above them. ‘Anything under these?’

‘I don’t know, we didn’t look,’ said Gozzi.

‘Mind if I do?’

‘Wait, you want to do some actual archaeology?’ Nina asked, amused. ‘I guess my influence is finally rubbing off on you.’

‘Nah, it’s just that if you’re going to keep oohing and aahing over a bit of old net, I’ll need something to keep me occupied. It gets boring just watching out for sharks.’

Bobak spun in alarm. ‘Sharks? Where are sharks?’

‘There aren’t any sharks, Gregor,’ said Nina as Gozzi suppressed a laugh. Still, Bobak surveyed the surrounding waters with deep apprehension before finally returning his attention to the find.

‘We have catalogued there,’ Gozzi said. ‘Go ahead.’

‘If you find anything, tell us,’ Nina added.

‘If it’s just some stone knife, then yeah, I’ll tell you,’ said Chase. ‘If it’s a pirate treasure chest, I’m keeping that to myself !’ Quickly scanning for sharks or other potentially dangerous marine life - despite his earlier jokiness, part of his job was to look after the rest of the team, a responsibility he took very seriously especially where Nina was concerned - he prodded at the nearest rock with his spear gun. Satisfied that a moray eel or similarly nasty surprise wasn’t going to spring out, he pulled the stone free of the sediment.

While the exposed end had been smoothed off, the rest of it was flat-faced and hard-edged, reminding him of a large brick. Putting it aside, he aimed a light into the new hole. It was sadly lacking in pirate treasure, or even stone knives: nothing but thick sediment and the chipped corners of more blocks.

He extracted another brick, which came stickily free of its home of untold centuries like a bad tooth from a gum. A couple of colourful fish came to investigate the resulting hole, but like Chase they too were disappointed to find only more bricks.

‘No treasure chest?’ Nina asked as he rejoined her.

‘Narr, me hearty. Didn’t find anything except some old bricks.’

Nina exchanged shocked glances with the other two archaeologists, then slowly faced Chase. ‘You found what?’

The brick sat on a table in Nina’s lab aboard the Pianosa. Slightly over a foot in length and about five inches to a side in cross-section, slightly curved, there seemed little remarkable about it.

Except for the mere fact of its existence.

‘It’s a brick,’ said Chase, not for the first time since Nina, Gozzi and Bobak had raced past him to the pile of stones. ‘What’s the big deal?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Nina, turning round the Apple laptop on which she had been frenziedly working to show him. On its screen was a map of part of Indonesia and the Java Sea, Sumatra and its myriad surrounding islands on the left side. ‘This is the sea level today, right?’

‘Okay. And?’

She zoomed in on one area. ‘This is us, here. The depth of the site is ninety-eight feet below sea level. But if I wind back time to show the last time the site was above sea level . . .’

The program she was using was called GLUG, for Global Levels of Underwater Geology - its full name contrived after the developers had come up with the jokey acronym. Using the most up-to-date radar and sonar maps, the program allowed members of the IHA and its sister agencies to see the topography of the entire planet, above or below the waves, with an accuracy previously only available to the best-equipped militaries. But GLUG could do more than simply show things as they were in the present: using data gleaned from geological and ice- core surveys, it could also raise or lower the sea level on a map to match that at any point in the past . . . or, by a simple reversal of the algorithm, list all the times when the sea had been at a specified level.

Which Nina had done. ‘This is what Indonesia looked like when the sea level was ninety-eight feet lower,’ she said. As Chase watched, the map changed, new islands springing up around the coast. She pointed at a yellow marker on the edge of one of the freshly revealed land masses. ‘See? That’s the dig site, right on the coast - sixty thousand years ago.’

Chase scratched at his thinning, close-cropped hair. ‘So? I thought that’s exactly what you were trying to prove, that early humans spread along the coastlines way back when. The whole Palaeolithic migration hypothesis thing.’

Nina gave him a surprised smile. ‘You’ve been reading my research?’

‘Hey, I don’t spend all my spare time watching action movies. Okay, so sixty thousand years ago, Ig and Ook used to live here, catching fish and making bricks. Isn’t that what you expected to find?’

‘More or less - except for that.’ She lifted the brick. ‘You know when the earliest known bricks date from?’

‘A week last Tuesday?’

She smiled. ‘Not quite. The earliest known fired bricks were found in Egypt, and dated from around three thousand BC. Even plain mud bricks only date from at most eight thousand BC. Kind of a gap between that and fifty-eight thousand BC.’

‘What if it’s more recent? Maybe it fell off a ship.’

‘You saw how rounded the exposed parts of the other bricks were. That’s not centuries of erosion, that’s millennia.’ She turned the anachronistic object over in her hands. Though battered, its surface still retained the vestiges of a glaze, suggesting a relatively advanced and aesthetically concerned maker. Neither concept fitted well with a Palaeolithic origin.

She put down the brick. ‘I think we need to expand the survey parameters.’

Chase raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh, you do, do you?’

‘Hey, I’m the Director of the IHA. It’s my job to decide these things.’