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

The discovery of the ice mummy had changed everything.

Callum pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took the bone object and placed it on one of the work surfaces. The more he’d looked at it that day, the more confident he’d felt in his original assessment. It was the end of a highly ornate, ancient bone ski and it was the most probable cause of the mummy’s stomach wound.

He reached up, grasped the head of an anglepoise and brought it into position above the artefact. After a great deal of trial and error earlier that day, he’d managed to affix the digital camera to a robotic arm extending from a unit above the workstation. He now returned to the computer, where the shutter image was relaying in real time. Grinning like a child with a new toy, he remotely manoeuvred the arm until the camera was in the perfect position. He then took a number of shots at different resolutions and from different angles; the photographs were automatically uploaded and saved to the computer’s hard drive ready to be emailed back to the department.

He’d attempted to contact both Clive and Jonas as soon as he and Lungkaju had returned to the Albanov. But Volkov hadn’t been kidding about the predicted solar flare activity. It had been playing havoc with the ship’s transmitter and all external communications were down. This was disappointing, but no great disaster. Lungkaju had agreed not to mention the find to anyone until official arrangements could be put in place to deal with the logistical, financial and publicity fall-out, and Callum had no problem taking him at his word. In truth he was more concerned about missing his video call with Jamie; the intermittent and minimal disruption Volkov had talked about had actually been regular and prolonged, at least over the last couple of days.

As he went to rearrange the ski-tip, there was a sudden crashing noise and the sound of raised voices from Ava Lee’s laboratory next door. Callum rushed out into the corridor and knocked on the door. “Ava? Are you okay in there?”

There was no response, so he tried the handle. The door was unlocked, and he went ahead and cracked it open.

Ava was on her knees collecting up a scatter of beige-coloured stones from the floor. A tray teetered back against the side of a storage unit and Dan Peterson was bent over a stool, his face contorted, clutching at his lower back.

Ava looked up suddenly. She blushed. “Doctor Ross.”

“I heard shouting,” Callum said. “There was no answer when I knocked…”

“Oh, it’s all been a bit Chaplin meets the Marx Brothers,” she said, fishing the last of the stones out from underneath a cabinet. “I was showing these to Dan when I went and dropped the tray. When I tried to pick them up I knocked into him and he hit his back against the desk there.” She attempted a laugh.

“Are you okay, Dan?” Callum asked.

“I’m just fine, thank you,” Peterson replied, unable to conceal a wince. “It’s like Ava says. It’s my own damn fault for being such a doofus.”

“You should go to the infirmary and get it checked.”

“Oh, hell no, it’s just a little knock to the pelvis, that’s all. I’m gonna go lie down a while and it’ll be fine.” Still clutching at his spine he stood up, wished them both a good evening and made his way out.

Callum walked over to Ava and took the tray. “Here, let me help you.” He went to place it back down on the nearest counter-top only to find that it was already strewn with books and stacks of papers. He scanned around. The whole place was in a state, clutter spread across every surface.

He placed the tray down on top of an open textbook. “Busy evening?”

“Oh, this is nothing,” she replied, the redness retreating from her cheeks. “You should see my office back home. I put half a bacon sub down in there once and it was a full week before I found it again.”

Callum studied the beige stones scattered across the surface of the tray. They were shark fin-shaped with serrated edges.

“They’re teeth,” Ava said.

“Dino teeth?”

“You betcha.” She moved over to stand beside him and gently lifted one of the larger specimens. “They’re from a troodontid, a late cretaceous bipedal species we find quite commonly at high latitudes. It’s possible they’re all from the same individual.”

Carefully, Callum accepted the tooth into his palm. It was about six centimetres long and a plaque of surrounding rock still clung to its surface.

“No, they haven’t been properly processed yet,” she said, reading his thoughts. “At the moment I’m just collecting a sample of the material I’ve located eroding from the cliffs at Nansen Rocks. They can be cleaned up after the field season, but for now I just need to be able to prove the scale of the palaeontological resource here.”

“Looks like you’ve hit pay dirt.”

“Put it this way. I located all twenty-four of these in a single day, along with a sizeable number of other much larger bones. That’s more than some palaeontologists recover in an entire season.”

Callum ran a finger along the serrations. “I’m guessing Mr troodontid was a carnivore.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she replied. “He’s a therapod for sure, a predator, and the name Troodon is even taken from the Greek for wounding tooth.” She pointed a nail at one of the denticles. “But these prominent serrations are apically oriented, which is unusual in other therapods. They’re actually much more similar to those of herbivorous species.”

“So he was just a plant-eater with bad teeth?”

“More likely he was an omnivore, ate whatever he could sink those bad teeth into.”

“Presumably that’s why they survived well here, because they could eat whatever?”

“It’s one of the reasons, sure. But not the only one. They were also fast, agile and hugely intelligent. People have themselves convinced that the velociraptor was the most intelligent dinosaur, and they