Colony by Benjamin Cross (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

Callum shook his head. “No, it’s bone.” He turned it again, exploring the splintered end. Then, slowly, he turned his head to face Lungkaju. “It’s old bone.”

2

The object was no longer than twenty centimetres, half that wide and a couple of centimetres thick. The intact end curled upwards into a lip, while the other end had been snapped off into a point and splintered by the best efforts of Fenris.

Callum ran his fingers over the pattern etched into the face of the shaft. The mesh of intertwining strands had been chiselled with such finesse that even a modern-day sculptor would have struggled to replicate it. The harder he looked, the less he could believe that the item in his hand was ancient, and yet the more certain he became.

As he inspected the bone more closely, he could make out traces of paintwork. The recesses had once been blacked out and the ridges painted gold. There was also a strange brownish hue to the broken end.

Lungkaju was peering intently at the item.

“I don’t suppose you’ve lost this, have you?” Callum asked.

He smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know what is this thing.”

“Can Fenris take us to where he found it?”

Lungkaju took the item, flipped it over in his palm and nodded affirmatively. “This is archaeology?”

“It just might be.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” Callum answered, noticing the traces of resin on the bottom surface. “But it looks like the tip of a ski.”

Steam trailing from his back, Fenris bounded in between the fallen pillars of rock. Collapsed with age and moss-encrusted, they littered the valley floor beside a wide stream channel.

“Water flowed here once,” Lungkaju said, jogging to keep up.

“Yes, it did, but not for many years by the look of it,” Callum replied. “It’s what archaeologists call a palaeochannel. An ancient riverbed.”

“A palaeochannel,” Lungkaju repeated. “You speak a strange language, Doctor Ross.”

The channel rounded a bend and descended sharply. Callum could see that the rockface revealed up ahead formed a foothill to the Hjalmar Ridge. If it hadn’t been for the previous fortnight, he would have found it strange that such a prominent feature could go unnoticed until a person had all but jogged into it. But life on Harmsworth had been nothing if not a steep learning curve. Little was what it seemed in this guarded and demanding place. Like a large optical illusion, the land itself seemed to shift by the second. High became low. Low became high. Far was near, and near could take forever to reach.

At the base of the rockface was a narrow opening, partly obscured by a rock-fall, where the river had long since chiselled its way through. Straight away, Fenris leapt up and over the obstructing boulders and began sliding his way in.

“This is where he found the bone,” Lungkaju said. He beckoned the dog back with an ear-piercing whistle. “But I am not sure that it is safe.”

Until now, Callum had feared they were on a wild Malamute chase. But the fact that Fenris had led them here made a believer of him fast. There was no way that the object could have survived so well preserved if it had been rolling around in the open for centuries. Protected from the elements, within a tunnel, such preservation was much more likely.

Callum’s mind raced in tandem with his heart as they approached the opening. If he could find evidence of human occupation here, it would be one of the archaeological discoveries of the century. Jonas’s conviction that ancient people had lived at these latitudes would be vindicated. There was even a chance that he could justify himself to Jamie.

The entrance to the tunnel rose to just below waist height. Callum knelt down and peered inside. An icy draught yawned its way between the cheeks of ancient rock, causing him to shiver. “Well, I think we’ve safely disproved Doctor Semyonov’s hot springs,” he said, removing his rucksack. “This place feels more like a walk-in freezer.” On his hands and knees he started to creep forward. “Make that crawl-in.”

“Are you sure it is wise to enter this place, Doctor Ross?”

There was consternation in Lungkaju’s voice. The grin that Callum had grown accustomed to was nowhere to be seen. In fact, for the first time, Lungkaju looked his age. Fenris shuffled awkwardly from paw to paw beside him, a low, impatient whine escaping his jaws.

Callum himself would normally have been the first to preach caution over curiosity. If it had been one of his students creeping headfirst into an unknown tunnel in the middle of God knows where, he would have given them hell. But the possibility that there was something ground-breaking so close at hand was too much for him. It had that same gravitational effect that had brought him into archaeology in the first place. It was the scent of discovery, the opportunity to see what no other human being had seen for so many years.

“I’ll be careful,” he said at last, holding Lungkaju’s still-cynical gaze. Then he crawled on into the tunnel.

3

The smell was overpowering. It was the fug of wet stone, like a dank medieval cellar. Callum moved forward, his elbows scraping past the naked ribs of rock, the torch beam fluttering ahead like a pale moth.

In the closeness of the confines every sound was amplified, from the faint whistling of his breath to the scraping of his toes on juts of stone. When Lungkaju called to check on him, his words were accelerated by the tunnel’s natural rifling until they flew past, deafening and garbled.

Up ahead the torchlight met with something.

Callum stopped. He searched the obstruction out and homed in. Whatever it was, it was sizeable, propped against the right-hand side of the tunnel and spreading out into the centre. It might have been a rock. But something about the shape and the glimmers of colour feeding back to him along the faint beam made him think otherwise.

He edged forward until it was within reach.