A few minutes of searching located a small hole that allowed the drone to slip inside. The latest treasure wasn’t crates with empty beer bottles but a pair of rusted SCUBA tanks. Not a good sign for someone. At least this time there were no remains.
“How many people have died in this damned lake?”
Shay rubbed her neck, taking off the goggles and letting her eyes adjust once more to the daylight. The evidence piling up suggested the only thing people found in Lake Toplitz was nothing but trouble.
Her satellite data showed one more location of interest to the right. Searching the entire bottom of the lake might take days, if not weeks even with all her fancy tech, and that only increased the chance that some annoying asshole would show up with a huge team of divers and an entire navy of drones. Things had a way of happening like that when hunting for artifacts.
Shay trooped over to the truck and looked inside at a crate resting in the back that had a false bottom. Her weapons were stored inside there to avoid suspicion. She weighed her odds. A small arms defense of her site was one thing, but the area was frequented by tourists, and they tended to report things going boom to local authorities.
The harsh reality was that puttering around the bottom of the lake to find the fucking treasure could end as successfully as every other attempt had throughout the decades. Minus the lake becoming her last resting place, an important distinction.
Even worse for her chances to have a lucrative career as a tomb raider, Shay had to consider the possibility she might have interpreted the data wrong.
Damn it. Maybe my gut was off. One more thing for the list I won’t be sharing with Peyton. Screw his better business model, whatever the fuck it is. I still have one decent chance.
Shay started maneuvering the drone to the last of her three likely locations. She let out an exasperated growl and walked back to the edge of the lake. “Fuck giving up,” she muttered as she put the goggles back on.
She moved the drone to another location, revealing another tangle of rotted logs and vegetation, liberally covered by sediment. This time her metal scout had an easier time sliding through the logs. There was a wide access point, more than large enough for a certain sexy tomb raider to don the scuba gear and follow the drone’s path if there were anything worth recovering.
Shay slowed the drone. The sunken logs formed a navigable underwater maze, but their stability looked questionable. She didn’t want to bump anything and risk collapsing the whole thing, burying any treasure down there for another few decades. Minutes passed as she piloted the drone through the maze to the lakebed, turning left, a sharp right, straight ahead, left again. Her lips were pressed together in a thin line as she concentrated, taking in every detail.
“Wait… what do we have here?”
Four metal lockboxes lay half-embedded in the mud, two small, two large. The larger two were cracked open, the reflected gleam of the light on gold bars, even obvious through the AR goggles.
“This is promising. Very promising.” Shay allowed herself a grin.
See, Peyton. Never doubt the gut.
Not an artifact but still gold. Even a single gold bar makes the trip worthwhile, despite what she’d said to Peyton. “One little hiccup,” she muttered.
There was no convenient way to grab more than a few at a time, given their weight. Each bar would weigh twenty-seven pounds, the standard four hundred troy ounces. The two smaller lockboxes didn’t appear large enough to contain any gold bars, but that only made her heart race faster and a wider grin spread across her face.
The boxes couldn’t fit gold bars, but they could fit a few pieces of magical pins.
Shay kept exploring the small pocket in the log maze with the drone to make sure she wasn’t overlooking anything but there was no more to be found. “Four boxes, four chances.”
She piloted the drone until it was out of the maze again, even though it took excruciating minutes. The fewer things in her way once she hit the water, the better.
The tomb raider pulled off the goggles, blinking her eyes and headed back toward the truck. It was time to put on her diving gear and grab herself some treasure.
Shay took slow, deliberate breaths as she headed toward the log maze, slowing down her heart rate and getting ready for the dive. She was going to make it out of the operation with some serious gold, and if she really got lucky, she might find the pin.
Even though each gold bar was worth over half a million dollars, it still wouldn’t be enough to make her reputation in the high-tier tomb raider community. She needed that pin. The gold would be a nice consolation prize though.
Her high-pressure diving suit was rated up to four hundred feet, giving her more than enough of a margin of error since the lake bottomed out at just over three hundred. Even though the suit wasn’t any bulkier than a normal wet suit, its stiffness limited her movements. She had a good hour of air in her tank, with several more tanks in the truck if she needed to make more trips.
Confidence filled her as she swam toward the entrance to the log maze. That confidence vanished as she approached where her drone had entered. She flipped her light on and off just to be sure. There was no doubt.
Shit. Seriously? I thought you wanted me to the find the treasure, universe.
The logs had shifted during her swim from the surface. She groaned and tilted her head up and down, looking for some other access point. Nothing. The lockboxes were there, beneath the annoying ass logs, with gold bars at the minimum, if not a damned magical artifact.
I’d take fighting off twenty mercenaries
