Origin Read online

  ORIGIN

  J.T. Brannan

  Copyright © 2012 Damian Howden

  The right of Damian Howden to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 0 7553 9685 6

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  About the Author

  J.T. Brannan trained as a British Army officer at Sandhurst, before deciding to pursue a writing career. A former national Karate champion, he now teaches Karate, MMA, and his own system of reality-based self-defence. He lives near Harrogate with his wife and two young children. ORIGIN is his first novel.

  For more information about the author, visit his website at www.jtbrannan.com

  For Jakub and Mia

  Acknowledgements

  I WOULD LIKE to thank the following people for their help on the road to publication: my parents, for their long-standing belief in me; my fantastic agent Luigi Bonomi, as well as Thomas Stofer and the rest of the team at LBA; my superb editor Alexander Hope and everyone at Headline Publishing; Dr Jeffrey D. Means at the University of Wyoming; Matthew B. Barr and the staff at the Institute for American Indian Studies; my friend Tom Chantler for his valuable assistance and scientific advice; and my wife Justyna, without whose constant support, drive and creative input this book would never have been written.

  ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’

  Benjamin Franklin

  Poor Richard’s Almanack

  PART ONE

  1

  LYNN EDWARDS OPENED the base-camp door and stepped straight into a frozen hell.

  ‘Where did you last see him?’ she shrieked over the howling wind, panic in the eyes of the man before her.

  ‘The ridge!’ Stephen Laverty screamed back, pointing into the vast, ice-covered wilderness behind him.

  Lynn looked over Laverty’s shoulder. The ridge was over four hundred metres away – not far in the real world, but out here on the Antarctic Pine Island Glacier, it might as well have been four thousand. What had he been doing there?

  As if reading her mind, Laverty shouted to her, ‘He just went out to find a better site for his readings. But the ridge slipped, and he went down.’

  It wasn’t time for recriminations, but the missing man should have known better. Lynn was the lead investigator for the NASA team that was investigating the rapidly melting glacier, and Tommy Devane was responsible for the hot water drilling that was a major part of that mission. The sites had already been painstakingly selected, but Devane had obviously wanted to explore further. In the Antarctic, Lynn knew such foolhardiness could prove fatal.

  She sensed movement behind her, and turned to see four other members of her team join them. She nodded, and gestured at the ferocious landscape beyond Laverty. ‘Over there,’ she told them. ‘Past the ridge.’

  ‘What the hell was he doing over there?’ Sally Johnson wanted to know, to murmurs of general agreement.

  ‘We can argue about that later,’ Lynn yelled. ‘Right now, we’ve got to get him back.’ She turned to face the brutal Antarctic wind. ‘Now let’s go!’

  Pine Island Glacier, otherwise known as the PIG, is one of the two largest glaciers that drain the West Antarctic ice sheet into the Amundsen Sea, a large ice stream that flows down the side of the Hudson mountains into Pine Island Bay. Satellite imagery has shown that it has undergone a noticeable acceleration in recent years, making it disperse more ice into the sea than any other drainage basin on the planet.

  The team led by Lynn Edwards was tasked with gaining an understanding of the interaction of the ocean and the ice by taking complex sets of measurements and then modelling the results to give an overall ‘virtual’ image of the action of the entire glacier.

  The PIG itself was in one of the most remote areas of the vast ice-bound continent, eight hundred miles from the nearest permanently manned research station. Lynn and her team had arrived just a week ago from the large US research base known as McMurdo Station, some thousand miles south. They had flown in a small Twin Otter aircraft and landed at the old Matrix base camp, which they had reopened.

  The week had gone well, and Lynn had established the base camp quickly and efficiently with the help of her team of eight hand-picked scientists.

  They had discovered the ridge on the second day. Just four hundred metres from base camp, the ridge rose over one hundred metres from the surface of the glacier in a long, pristine line across the frozen horizon. The drop-off at the other side – which Devane had apparently fallen down – was nearly three times that distance, a slightly angled cliff left by the action of the ice calving away.

  The basic sameness of the bleak white scenery made navigation and assessment of distance an almost impossible task, and Lynn could only pray that Step
hen Laverty would be able to lead them back to the place where he last saw Devane.

  If he couldn’t, Tommy would be dead within the hour.

  Tommy Devane adjusted his body, testing each limb in turn, then his neck. Nothing broken.

  He sighed in relief, looking back up to the top of the ‘ridge’, which appeared to be more of a mountain when seen from this angle. He counted his blessings – his thermo-electric suit had cushioned the fall to a large extent – and then cursed himself aloud for being so stupid. He was a professional! What had he been doing?

  He cleared his mind. Feeling sorry for himself wouldn’t help in any way, he knew that for certain. He also knew that, even though base camp was a mere four hundred metres away, if he couldn’t get back over the ridge, he would soon be dead. He looked up at the towering mountain above him, its sheer sides mocking his hopes. Fat chance. He wasn’t getting back up there without a lot of help.

  He knew Laverty had gone to get help, but he also knew that there was always the haunting possibility that he would never be found.

  Unwilling to give in to panic, he pulled himself to his feet and started to examine the ridge. The slope was almost sheer, with nothing but ice to hold on to. Instinct told him to continue along the ridge, try and find some way of climbing it, but his head told him to stay where he was. If Laverty led the team back to the point where he had fallen and he was no longer there, he would be in a world of trouble.

  And so he would wait. He would wait, and—

  What on earth?

  Devane’s eyes went wide as he saw the ghostly image, just a little further along the base of the ridge.

  Could it be?

  He shook his head, his eyes transfixed. It was a body, seemingly buried in the ice.

  Wise move or not, he knew he would have to go and investigate.

  2

  LYNN AND HER team had finally arrived at the ridge. They skirted the edge, careful to avoid any calving ice, not wishing to go the same way as Devane.

  ‘Is this where you last saw him?’ Lynn asked Laverty, the lowered wind allowing them the luxury of communication without having to scream at one another.

  Laverty nodded his head. ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ He pointed to the readout on his weather-proofed GPS. ‘As sure as I can be, anyway.’

  Lynn nodded her head in return. ‘OK.’ She turned to the rest of the group. ‘Otis?’

  A small, wiry man came forward. Otis Burns was the principal oceanographer on the team, and also the most accomplished climber. At a trim one hundred and forty pounds, he knew he was the obvious choice to go over the edge. He grinned at Lynn. ‘Rope me up, baby,’ he said with a wink.

  ‘Steady!’ Lynn called to the three team members who were belaying the rope over the edge of the ridge. ‘Slowly does it!’ She peered over as far as she could. ‘You see anything yet?’ she called to Burns, who was now at least a hundred feet down over the other side.

  ‘Nothing!’ came the voice from the frozen depths beyond. ‘I can’t see anything down there!’

  ‘OK, we’ll keep going,’ Lynn replied. ‘Keep—’

  ‘Wait!’ The cry was heard by the whole team, the tone unmistakable. Burns had found something. ‘I think I see something over to the west! I . . . Yeah, someone moving, right down below at the bottom!’

  There was a pause, and the woman and two men holding the rope felt it move slightly, and knew Burns must be adjusting himself, swinging to face the person he had found. ‘Hey!’ they heard Burns shout. ‘Over here!’

  Lynn waited for news, anxious. The next words from Burns surprised her more than she expected. ‘It’s him! He’s all right!’ There was a pause. ‘But he wants us to come down there after him!’

  Lynn frowned. What the hell?

  Two hours later, half the team was down with Tommy Devane, who had been secured in a new thermal suit and been given emergency rations, although he had almost refused them in his excitement. And when Lynn saw what he had discovered at the bottom of the ridge, she was not surprised in the least.

  The body was only partly covered by ice, the glacial melt having exposed one half, perfectly mummified by the frozen conditions. It was the body of a man, modern in appearance. He was blond, short-haired and clean-shaven. He could almost have been one of them. Who was he? What had he been doing there? How had he died? How long ago? The questions tumbled through Lynn’s mind in quick succession.

  She knew the body could be very old indeed – in 1991, a frozen mummified man had been discovered in the Italian Alps, and carbon dating had shown him to be well over five thousand years old. But this body was different. For a start, it was clothed in a material of a sort she had never seen before.

  ‘What’s he wearing?’ she asked Devane, who had spent his time examining the body while waiting for the team to arrive.

  ‘I’m not sure. Some sort of armoured textile, but I’ve never seen anything like it. It seems incredibly complex.’

  ‘Some sort of military special ops?’ Lynn asked Jeff Horssen, a data analyst who used to work for the US National Security Agency, a hotbed for secret military technology that the average citizen never saw.

  Horssen examined the material, exceptionally well preserved by the ice. ‘Could be. They’re working on some really advanced cold-weather gear, I know that much. But this isn’t like anything I’ve seen.’

  Lynn looked back to Devane; his expression said that there was more to come. ‘So what else?’ she asked him.

  ‘I don’t know about advanced,’ he said with a curious mix of surprise and delight, ‘but how about ancient?’

  The bewildered looks on the faces of his teammates delighted him even more. As the hot driller, Devane was used to taking ice core samples – thirty-centimetre wide sections of ice drilled down and recovered from up to a kilometre deep, showing ageing layers like the rings of a tree. Air pockets, perfectly preserved in the ice, could give climate information on the region stretching back tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. An expert on the subject, he merely pointed at the steep iced walls of the ridge.

  Lynn followed his finger, and looked at the wall for several moments before realization dawned. ‘Oh my—’

  ‘Yes,’ Devane confirmed. The ice that had sloughed off from the main glacier body had left striations on the cliff face that were akin to an open ice core sample, the lines able to be read for miles across. ‘From my estimate of these readings, that man we’ve just found was buried here under the ice no later than forty thousand years ago.’

  3

  ‘WE’VE FOUND SOMETHING down here,’ Lynn announced over the UHF radio to the teammates back at the Matrix base.

  ‘What?’ came the static-laden reply.

  ‘It’s a frozen body. Mummified. Potentially very ancient. And with some anomalous artefacts.’

  ‘Huh?’ Lynn could hear the confusion. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Things better not to discuss on an open line,’ Lynn decided. ‘We’re coming back to base.’

  The UHF transmission was picked up by the National Security Agency’s Keyhole satellite, and transmitted directly to the supercomputers at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, fifteen miles south-west of Baltimore. Within fifteen minutes, it had passed through various levels of analysis; but on the orders of one man the message went no further, and was ‘lost’ for ever.

  Stephen Jacobs clenched his fists in anger. They were so near completion! So near! He couldn’t let anything stand in the way of the organization’s dream. A mummified body buried in the Antarctic ice with ‘anomalous artefacts’? It could, of course, be nothing. But Jacobs also knew what else it might be, and such a discovery would cause too many questions to be asked, at just the wrong time.

  He sighed. He would have to speak to his superiors. He could let nothing jeopardize the dream.

  ‘So just what the hell is it?’ asked Sam Maunders, a seismologist, when all team members were reunited back at the Matrix base – home, such as it was.

  ‘As
far as we can tell,’ Lynn began as Devane started distributing cans of beer from the fridge, ‘it’s the body of a man – apparently the same as a modern human – which seems to have been buried in the ice approximately forty thousand years ago.’ She looked up as Devane slid a beer across the dining table to her, smiled in thanks and popped the lid. What the hell, she thought as she took a long pull from the can. You don’t make a discovery like this every day.

  ‘We found the body with what appears to be modern clothing,’ Lynn continued.

  ‘Like what? What do you mean?’ Maunders asked, fascinated. This was much more exciting than shifts in the ice, that was for sure.

  ‘Advanced arctic clothing, some sort of light yet highly insulating material.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’ asked Joy Glass, the lead computer analyst.

  Lynn just shook her head. ‘At this stage, we don’t know.’

  There followed wild speculation over what they had found, and the atmosphere was jubilant, excited, and just plain crazy. Despite their mission, a forty thousand year old mummy was simply far more exciting than gathering seismic data and carrying out oceanic modelling. It was potentially earth-shattering in its significance.

  If it was true, Lynn reminded herself as a scientist. They would need a lot more examination time, and a lot more resources to get to the bottom of the matter. She was all too aware of the damage done to ‘Ötzi the Ice Man’, the mummy found in the Alps, when it had first been discovered. The authorities had assumed that the body, discovered by a couple hiking in the mountains, had died in a climbing accident. They therefore weren’t trying to preserve and protect the body, they were simply trying to free it from the ice. As a result, they shredded his clothing, used his bow as a tool to prise him out, and even jack-hammered a hole through his hip.

  Such mistakes were not going to be made with their own find; Lynn was determined to follow strict scientific procedure in the extraction and examination of the body. This attention to detail – even when the excitement of discovery threatened to overwhelm her – was what had put her at the top of her field.