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

Then he refocussed the torchlight. There, dimly illuminated, was another piece of bone. Only it was not carved or smoothed off on the surface. Instead it looked brittle, jagged where it had been roughly snapped off. The shaft disappeared into a brownish oval, overhung by shreds of fabric. To the right was another almost identical arrangement of bone, oval and shreds, though in this case the shaft was even more badly splintered.

It took a while for Callum to realise what he was looking at. He recoiled suddenly, knocking the back of his head against the roof of the tunnel. Behind him, Fenris barked and Lungkaju’s voice echoed past once more, prompting Callum to reply that he was okay.

The two yellowing lengths of bone were clearly the remains of human femurs, thighbones, a honeycomb of marrow at their centres. Their distal heads had been snapped off, neither fracture appearing fresh. The dark ovals into which they disappeared were stumps of thigh, discs of quadricep and hamstring muscle left in cross-section around the nubs of bone, where both legs had been roughly hewn above the knee.

Callum reached out and prodded at the flesh. It was frozen solid. He moved the torch along what was left of the thighs. The beige trousers were made of animal skin. The fur was on the inside for insulation and the outside had been sown with black thread and treated with oil of some description, presumably for waterproofing. Strands of the material hung over the ends of the severed thighs, frozen to the muscle.

The corpse lay on its front, arms outstretched. Around the torso was a fur parka, similar to Lungkaju’s. The hands were frozen into claws, and a large hood concealed the head.

Callum’s brain flooded with a thousand questions. Most pressing was the matter of when exactly the person had died. Some Samoyedic peoples had maintained a traditional lifestyle for so long that a person alive at the time of Christ might have appeared identical to one alive today. There was nothing Callum wanted more than to accept that this was one of Lungkaju’s earliest ancestors, perfectly preserved in time. But it was not that simple. When it came to human remains, getting the distinction right was crucial. It was the difference between an ancient burial and a modern murder victim, between archaeological excavation and the forensic examination of a crime scene.

He thought on it. The corpse was frozen solid, which might have suggested age. But then in these temperatures most things were frozen solid. The bone was an off-yellow colour, a sure sign of age under normal circumstances. But these were not normal circumstances, and whatever mechanism had removed the lower legs in the first place may have had a part to play in any colour change. Even the waterproofing agent from the clothing might have affected the bone composition. Then there was plain old scepticism. Just as he had argued with Jonas, the likelihood of anybody ever living at this latitude in the distant past was as remote as the place itself. But then was it any more likely that a modern Nganasan, Dolgan or Nenet had ended up lost out here, alone and unreported?

Strictly speaking, the process now would be to record the body as it lay, before disturbing it. But on both a professional and personal level, Callum needed to be sure. He moved his hands gently along the sides of the thighs to the base of the jacket. Around the top of the buttocks was strung a thick belt of hide. He followed it, patting his hands around the hips, feeling more like a police officer frisking a crook than a professor of archaeology.

The fingers of his left hand closed around an item dangling from the belt. He shifted his position and, as carefully as possible, peeled back the frozen flap of parka.

In his palm was a leather sheath, no more than ten or eleven centimetres long. Within it sat a knife with a beautifully crafted bone handle. The patterns adorning hilt and handle were similar to those on the ski-tip, though in this instance the paintwork was still pristine. Undoing the toggle clasp, he jiggled the blade upwards just far enough to reveal what it was made of.

He held his breath. If it said ‘Clydebridge Steel’ he would have his answer.

It was an unadorned, smoky-blue flint blade that met Callum’s gaze. It was as skilfully fashioned as any he had ever excavated before and still as sharp as the day it was knapped.

He let out a massive sigh of relief. In front of him was a genuine ice mummy, the archaeological equivalent of a lottery win. The freezing temperatures had prevented breakdown of the body’s soft tissues by fungi and bacteria. Hair, nails and skin survived, as did stomach and bowel contents, clothing and other organic personal effects. In front of him was a near-complete picture of a past life frozen up into a human time capsule.

Other famous examples flashed through his mind: the mummified Inca children discovered from time to time, high up in the Andes of Peru; Oetzi, the Bronze Age man discovered on the Italian/Austrian border in the European Alps; the two ancient Inuit women preserved at Barrow in Alaska; the family of eight discovered in a communal tomb at Qilakitsoq, north-west Greenland. The mummy in front of Callum now was easily as well preserved as any of these other cases that he had read about. Better even. The summer temperature on Harmsworth may have crept above freezing over the last few years, but the tunnel’s sheltered interior and the constant sub-zero through-breeze had effectively freeze-dried the body.

A short distance beyond where the mummy lay, something else caught his eye. He resecured the flint blade back within its sheath and then crawled over to inspect.

It appeared to be a fibre sack, open at one end, empty. In front of it were a bird skeleton and a scatter of yellow-white pot shards. He reached out and carefully lifted