The 6th Extinction (Sigma Force 10)

With the anchor freed, the ship slowly turned with a great cracking of ice from the rigging and a shiver of frost from the sails. FitzRoy had already gone off to see to the ship’s battery of guns. The HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class sloop of the Royal Navy, outfitted originally with ten guns. And though the warship had been converted into an exploration vessel, it still carried six cannons.

Another scream drew Charles’s attention back to the deck, to the crewman writhing amid a nest of sailcloth.

“Hold him down!” the ship’s surgeon shouted.

Charles went to the doctor’s aid, joining the others to grasp a shoulder and help pin Rensfry in place. He made the mistake of catching the boatswain’s eyes. He read the pain and pleading there.

Lips moved as a moan pushed out words. “. . . get it out . . .”

The surgeon had finished freeing Rensfry’s heavy coat and split the man’s shirt with a blade, exposing a belly full of blood and a fist-sized wound. As Charles stared, a thick ripple passed through the abdomen, like a snake under sand.

Rensfry bucked under all their weights, his back arching in agony. A screech burst from his clenched throat, repeating his demand.

“Get it out!”

Bynoe did not hesitate. He shoved his hand into the wound, into the steaming depths of the man’s belly. He pushed deeper yet again, past his wrist and forearm. Despite the frigid cold, beads of sweat rolled down the doctor’s face. Elbow-deep now, he sought his prey.

A loud boom shook through the ship, shaking more frost atop them.

Then another and another.

Distantly, echoing from shore, came a much louder retort.

To either side, massive crags of ice broke from the cove’s coastline and crashed into the sea. Still, more of the ship’s guns boomed out their destruction of fiery grapeshot and heated cannonballs.

Captain FitzRoy was taking no chances.

“Too late,” Bynoe finally said, withdrawing his arm from the wound. “We’re too late.”

Only now did Charles note the boatswain’s body lay limp under his grasp. Dead eyes stared toward the blue skies.

Sitting back, he remembered Jemmy’s earlier words about this accursed continent: Demons also haunted its dark depths, ready to eat the hearts of the living . . .

“What about the body?” one of the crewmen asked.

Bynoe looked to the rail, toward the roiling ice-choked sea. “Make his grave here, along with whatever lies inside him.”

Charles had seen enough. As the sea rocked and guns exploded, he retreated while the others lifted Rensfry’s body. He slunk cowardly back to his cabin without bearing witness to the boatswain’s watery burial.

Once below, he found the small fire in the oven was almost out, but after the cold, the room’s heat stifled his breaths. He crossed to his journal, ripped out the pages he had been working on, and fed them to those meager flames. He watched the pages curl, blacken, and turn to ash.

Only then did he return to the chart desk, to the maps still there—including the ancient Fuegian map. He picked it up and stared again at the cursed grove of trees marking this cove. His gaze shifted to the freshly fed flames.

He took a step toward the hearth, then stopped.

With cold fingers, he rolled the map and clenched it hard in both fists.

I’m still a scientist.

With a heavy heart, he turned from the fire and hid the map among his personal belongings—but not before one last unscientific thought.

God help me . . .

FIRST

DARK GENESIS

Σ

1

April 27, 6:55 P.M. PDT

Mono Lake, California

“Looks like the surface of Mars.”

Jenna Beck smiled to herself at hearing this most common description of Mono Lake from yet another tourist. As the day’s last group of visitors took their final snapshots, she waited beside her white Ford F-150 pickup, the truck’s front doors emblazoned with the star of the California State Park Rangers.

Tugging the stiff brim of her hat lower, she stared toward the sun. Though nightfall was an hour away, the slanting light had transformed the lake into a pearlescent mirror of blues and greens. Towering stalagmites of craggy limestone, called tufa, spread outward like a petrified forest along this southern edge of the lake and out into the waters.

It certainly appeared to be an otherworldly landscape—but definitely not Mars. She slapped at her arm, squashing a mosquito, proving life still thrived despite the barren beauty of the basin.

At the noise, the group’s tour guide—an older woman named Hattie—glanced in her direction and offered a sympathetic smile, but she also clearly took this as a signal to wind up her talk. Hattie was native Kutzadika’a, of the northern Paiute people. In her mid-seventies, she knew more about the lake and its history than anyone in the basin.

“The lake,” Hattie continued, “is said to be 760,000 years old, but some scientists believe it might be as old as three million, making it one of the oldest lakes in the United States. And while the lake is seventy square miles in area, at its deepest it is barely over a hundred feet deep. It’s fed by a handful of bubbling springs and creeks, but it has no outflow, relying only on evaporation during the hot summer days. That’s why the lake is three times as salty as the ocean and has a pH of 10, almost as alkaline as household lye.”

A Spanish tourist grimaced and asked in halting English. “Does anything live in this lago . . . in this lake?”

“No fish, if that’s what you were thinking, but there is life.” Hattie motioned to Jenna, knowing such knowledge was her specialty.

Jenna cleared her throat and crossed through the cluster of a dozen tourists: half Americans, the others a mix of Europeans. Situated between Yosemite National Park and the neighboring ghost towns of Bodie State Historic Park, the lake drew a surprising number of foreign visitors.

“Life always finds a way to fill any environmental niche,” Jenna began. “And Mono Lake is no exception. Despite its inhospitable chemistry of chlorides, sulfates, and arsenic, it has a very rich and complex ecosystem, one that we are trying to preserve through our conservation efforts here.”

Jenna knelt at the shoreline. “Life at the lake starts with the winter bloom of a unique brine-tolerant algae. In fact, if you’d come here in March, you’d have found the lake as green as pea soup.”

“Why isn’t it green now?” a young father asked, resting a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

“That’s because of the tiny brine shrimp that live here. They’re barely bigger than a grain of rice and consume all that algae. Then the shrimps serve to feed the lake’s most ubiquitous hunter.”