2
Michael Altman rubbed his eyes and looked away from his holoscreen. He was a tall man in his early forties, with dark hair going just a little gray at the temples and lively blue green eyes. Normally, he had a keenly intelligent gaze, but today his face was a little drawn, a little weary. He hadn’t slept well the night before. He’d had bad dreams, visceral stuff—all death, blood, and gore. Nothing he wanted to remember.
“That’s odd,” said James Field, the geophysicist whose lab he shared. Field ran stubby fingers through his thinning white hair and leaned back, his chair creaking beneath him, as he stared across the room at Altman. “Altman, did you get these same readings?”
“What readings?” Altman asked.
Field spun a copy of his holoscreen Altman’s way. It showed a Bouguer/Salvo gravity map of the 110-mile diameter of Chicxulub crater. The crater had been left when a ten-kilometer bolide had struck the earth 65 million years ago.
James Field, now in his late fifties, had spent most of his career micromapping the crater for the state-owned Central American Sector Resource Corporation (CASRC). He focused mainly inland along the perimeter of the trough, where small concentrations of key minerals might be found and quickly extracted. Since people had already been doing the same for hundreds of years, this mainly meant going back for quantities small enough that earlier teams, before the resource crisis, had deemed them unworthy of retrieval. It was slow, tedious work, as close to being an accountant as you could get and still be a geophysicist. That Field actually seemed to enjoy this job told Altman more than he wanted to know about him.
Altman, on the other hand, had been in Chicxulub only a year. His girlfriend, Ada Chavez, an anthropologist, had gotten funding to study the contemporary role of Yucatec Mayan folktales and myths. He’d managed to pull just enough strings and call in enough favors to get a small grant so he could follow her to Mexico. He was supposed to be profiling the underwater portion of the crater, providing a map of likely geological structures beneath the half mile or so of sea muck by gathering data from both satellite imaging and underwater probes. It was, in theory, a strictly scientific project, but he knew that whatever information he gathered the university would sell to an extraction company. He tried not to think about that. The work was slow and not very rewarding, but he tried to tell himself it wasn’t quite as pointless as what Field was doing.
He looked at Field’s holoscreen carefully. It looked normal to him, the gravity readings typical.
“What am I looking for?” asked Altman.
Field furrowed his brow. “I forget you’re new,” he said. “I’ll zoom in on the center.”
The center of the crater was in deep water, about a half dozen miles from their laboratory. Altman leaned toward the monitor, squinted. A darkness at the heart of the crater revealed a gravitational anomaly.
“Here’s what it looked like a month ago,” said Field. “See?”
He flashed up another profile. In this one, the darkness in the center wasn’t there, Altman saw. He checked the first profile. The readings everywhere but the center were the same.
“How’s that possible?” he asked.
“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” said Field. “It wouldn’t just change like that.”
“Probably just an equipment malfunction,” said Altman.
“I’ve been working here a long time,” said Field. “I know an equipment failure when I see one. This isn’t one. The anomaly appears both on the satellite images and the underwater scans, so it can’t be.”
“But how could it change?” asked Altman. “Maybe a volcanic eruption?”
Field shook his head. “That wouldn’t give this sort of anomaly. Plus, the other instruments would have sensed it. I can’t explain it. There’s something wrong,” he said, already reaching for his phone.