The Nemesis Origin

XXXV

A brutal wind swept into Ethan’s face as he climbed the steeply inclined slope, the bitter cold biting into his skin as it swept up from the arid Atacama desert far below and was chilled by the high atmosphere.

He stopped for breath and gazed around at the spectacular scenery, wide mountain ranges against a hard blue sky that, literally, took his breath away, the air at this altitude immensely thin and barely breathable. The barren wastes of the Atacama Desert stretched away into the distance far below and vanished into an asthmatic haze, a wilderness that they had been traversing for two days now.

‘Does anybody else have a problem with us climbing an active volcano?’ Lopez rasped as she joined Ethan.

Surrounded by debris fields from previous eruptions that littered its slopes, Mount Llullaillaco was the second highest volcano in the world and the seventh highest in the Andes mountain range. Perpetually capped with snow patches, the ridge upon which they stood was thousands of metres above sea level.

‘The mountain’s name is from the Aymara dialect, and means treacherous water,’ Lucy informed them as she reached the ridge, ‘probably because of the snow run-off in spring that would have been laced with volcanic debris.’

‘Fascinating,’ Lopez murmured without interest. ‘Got any decent explanations for why we’re up here in the middle of nowhere?’

Behind them, a small baggage train of native huaqueros followed, one of them helping Jarvis and two of his men along the ascent. The climbing route selected needed no specialised techniques, but the sheer altitude was in itself a danger and oxygen was being carried as part of their equipment. Ethan and most of the team carried crampons and ice axes to cross major ice patches that they had encountered above the snow line. Nearby, Ethan could see warning signs erected to warn of land mines left since the conflict between Argentina and nearby Chile in the late 70s and early 80s.

‘There have been numerous archaeological expeditions to this mountain in the past,’ Lucy explained as they waited for Jarvis. ‘American archaeologist Dr. Johan Reinhard directed three surveys of archaeological sites on the summit, and in 1999 on Llullaillaco’s summit an Argentine-Peruvian expedition co-directed by Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti found the preserved bodies of three Inca children, sacrificed half a millennia earlier. It was the highest Inca burial so far discovered in Tawantinsuyu and is now the world’s highest archaeological site.’

‘Sacrificed?’ Lopez echoed. ‘Children?’

‘It was a common practice among the ancient Inca,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘They were conducted as part of the capacocha, a sacrificial rite that celebrated key events in the life of an Incan emperor. The best examples we have are of a six year-old girl nicknamed La nina del rayo, or Lightning Girl, due to her remains having been partially burned by a lightning strike, a young boy, and a teenage girl nicknamed La doncella, or The Maiden. Their remains were perfectly preserved due to the extreme aridity and cold temperatures of this area, perhaps why it was chosen by the Inca despite its extremely difficult location.’

‘Can’t we just go and look at the remains in a museum?’ Jarvis asked as he finally reached them, his features drained and his breath coming in short, fast gasps.

‘We’ll be looking at your remains in a museum if you go much higher,’ Lopez observed with what might have been a hint of anticipation in her tones. ‘You should wait here.’

Jarvis straightened his back and sucked in a lung full of the thin air, which took a lot longer than it should have. ‘I won’t be quitting any time soon.’

‘More’s the pity.’

Ethan turned and looked up at the volcano’s distant peak. ‘You think that there are more of these mummies up here, something that you can use to help Bethany?’

Lucy nodded as she reached into her pocket with her gloved hand and produced both a map and the quipu she had recovered from the remains at Huyuana Picchu.

‘I do,’ she said, ‘and this quipu is guiding us. The direction of the quipu’s longest pendent pointed us to this location, but it is the knots within it that are directing us to a particular spot on the mountain side. If we find that, we should find what we’re looking for.’

‘Which is?’ Lopez enquired demurely.

‘Fresh remains preserved from decay by the extreme cold and aridity of this region, and likely the most highly protected of all Inca burials,’ Lucy replied as she set off again. ‘That’s what we need here and if I’m right, the remains won’t be entirely human.’

Lucy marched off up the hillside, leaving Lopez, Ethan and Jarvis looking at each other. Lopez flashed a bright smile at Doug Jarvis.

‘Not entirely human. Seems likely won’t be on your own then, Doug.’

Lopez trudged off in pursuit of Lucy before Doug could reply. ‘Why are you still hanging out with her?’ he asked Ethan as they began climbing again.

‘I’m not,’ Ethan replied. ‘She showed up in Cambodia, had probably been following us for some time.’

‘How did she know what you were doing?’

‘Lucy came looking for me in Chicago, and when she couldn’t find me her first port of call afterward was Lopez.’

Jarvis peered up the hillside, squinting against the fine spray of ice crystals being whipped off the surface of the snow through which they crunched. ‘But she didn’t accompany Lucy.’

‘Lucy said that Lopez wasn’t interested in finding me, which I can imagine is probably true. I pretty much left her in the lurch when I quit Warner and Lopez Inc.’

Jarvis nodded absentmindedly. ‘Makes me wonder what happened to change her mind.’

‘I’m guessing that she had an attack of conscience,’ Ethan replied. ‘She knows what’s at stake here because Lucy told her.’

‘Why did you quit?’ Jarvis asked, changing the subject abruptly.

Ethan did not reply for a moment as he gathered his thoughts. ‘I needed a change from Chicago, from everything. After we did that final job for you in New York City, after Joanna showed up alive and well and went on her way it just seemed like the end of a chapter and I needed to get out. I stayed working with Lopez for over a year but my heart wasn’t in it.’

‘And so you went to live in a damp cottage in Scotland?’

Ethan looked sharply at Jarvis. ‘You’ve been watching me?’

Jarvis shook his head. ‘Not watching, but I made it my business to find out where you’d gone after you quit. I never know when I might need to call on somebody for difficult work.’

‘I don’t do that kind of work anymore.’

‘And yet here you are.’

‘This is different.’

‘This is exactly the same,’ Jarvis insisted. ‘You may be working for a different cause but you’re working nonetheless, looking for things that nobody else can find, travelling to the ends of the earth for somebody you’ve never even met.’

Ethan said nothing, shoving his hands in his pockets as they trudged ever upward. Jarvis sighed as he took another pull on his oxygen mask and gestured to the barren wilderness around them.

‘I’m retired too,’ he pointed out. ‘And yet here I am marching up a damned volcano because the powers that be in Washington DC suggested that it might be helpful to them. You and I are much the same, Ethan. We have an unquenchable thirst to discover, to solve problems, to find solutions to things that others would not have even started a quest to find yet alone achieved their goal. You’re here because you want to be here.’

‘I’m here because a three-year-old girl will die if we don’t find what Lucy is looking for,’ Ethan snapped back. ‘I consider that a good enough reason to take a trip halfway round the globe. If you’re trying to suggest that you can get me working for the DIA again because you think that I somehow need to, you’re pulling the wrong chain.’

‘Who said anything about working for the DIA?’

‘You’re a government man Doug, and you have been ever since you transferred from the Marine Corps. Even if I was working for you directly, I have absolutely no doubt that you would be on the pay check of one government agency one other.’

Jarvis shrugged and chuckled. ‘You’re probably right, but we all have to pay the bills Ethan. What would you rather be doing? Marching up a volcano in pursuit of alien remains while being chased by Russians, or shivering in a damp foxhole in the Scottish Highlands hoping you won’t be found by a bunch of British infantry recruits?’

Ethan did not reply. Instead he quickened his pace and left Jarvis floundering behind him as the old man struggled with the steep incline and the thin air. He caught up with Lucy and fell into step alongside her as they traversed a wide patch of snow that had been frozen solid, possibly for decades.

‘Why on earth would the Inca bring children out here so far from their empire just to sacrifice them, and to whom?’

‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Lucy replied. ‘Like so many ancient cultures The Inca worshipped the heavens above them, and so the sun was a major factor in their lives along with the seasons and such like. Poor harvests or perhaps conflict with other civilizations might have compelled them to sacrifice their young in order to gain support from their gods in return. Almost all ancient cultures have some evidence of blood sacrifice in their history, despite being separated by many thousands of miles.’

‘More evidence of you believing them to be linked,’ Ethan surmised. ‘Isn’t it possible that they simply developed the same habits as each other despite having no contact at all? I heard that the reason that pyramids that are so similar in cultures around the world is simply due to the fact that the pyramid is a stable structure and easy to build, so would be a natural choice for early civilizations.’

‘Entirely true,’ Lucy replied. ‘But then would they have the same legends, the same references to unusual events in the sky and visitations by unusual gods with bizarre properties that taught them how to live, how to manipulate the world around them in more complex ways? How on earth could it be that such widely separated cultures could all simultaneously develop the ability to smelt copper seven thousand years ago, or start erecting superstructures on differing continents in the same centuries?’

‘But blood sacrifice of children?’ Ethan persisted.

‘Children were considered pure,’ Lucy explained, ‘unstained by the foibles of adults. Most were prepared for sacrifice for years. Biological analysis of the mummies found on this mountain during Reinhard‘s surveys found significant lifestyle and dietary evidence, which included increased coca and alcohol consumption in the year prior to their sacrifice. We see these children as victims but they were feted by their people, worshipped in some ways like the gods themselves, perhaps as a direct link to the deities in whom these people placed so much faith. If those supposed deities had instead been a species not of this earth, then perhaps the sacrifices meant more to the Incas than just ceremonial or traditional events. Maybe they really believed that their powerful benefactors would return to save them, perhaps from disease or from the wars waged against them by the conquistadores.’

‘But why would an alien species start tinkering with our DNA anyway? What’s to gain?’

‘Survival,’ Lucy explained. ‘That’s all life really is, when you think about it. All species procreate in order to pass on their genes, their DNA, to keep their family line alive. A suitably advanced species may have found a way to keep their DNA alive by means other than procreation, perhaps using human beings as a living storage facility. Viruses inject their DNA into cells in order to hijack those cells and proliferate through a victim, so a viable process already exists in nature.’

‘You think that we being used as victims in some way, that this is some kind of infection?’

‘No,’ Lucy replied. ‘If an alien species had wanted to infect us with a disease they could have done so easily. It’s my hypothesis that they were in fact using cross-breeding in order to preserve elements of their DNA in our own bloodline for reasons that we don’t really know anything about. The unfortunate consequence of this is that those strands of DNA may be the cause of many of the more bizarre genetic illnesses that afflict a small number of our population. Put simply, there are people suffering from illnesses today that have no apparent explanation other than to be described as random genetic mutation. While random mutation is one of the means through which evolution operates, and can sometimes produce bizarre deformities that are quickly removed from the gene pool through the death of the carrier, some afflictions seem to continue on from generation to generation. The genes responsible often seem out of place, much in the same way as we find out of place artefacts in the archaeological record that suggest levels of intelligence far beyond the means of the civilizations who supposedly placed them there.’

Ethan peered ahead at the ridgeline of the volcano’s flank and saw a large flat area appearing, a plateau close to the mountain summit.

‘We’re almost at the peak,’ he observed.

In one gloved hand Lucy again produced the quipu that she had carried up the mountainside, and she nodded as she rubbed a gloved thumb over one of the knots in the quipu.

‘Remarkable, that even after all these hundreds of years such a simple device can prove so accurate. If I’m right, the plateau ahead is where the quipu says the remains should be buried.’

Ethan forged on at Lucy’s side across the treacherous ice, and together they worked their way to the summit and clambered onto the plateau to see a remarkable vista appear before them. The mountainside dropped away on the far side of the volcano to reveal rolling rocky valleys plunging to immense depths beneath a layer of broken cloud that tumbled and rolled in the sunlight like an ethereal veil. Before them on the plateau was nothing more than a few scattered rocks, dark material as black as coal that stood out against a layer of snow frosting the surface.

‘From the eruptions in the nineteenth century,’ Lucy observed as she knelt down to pick up one of the thick chunks of old magma.

‘I thought that there would be some kind of altar or place of worship during the sacrifices,’ Ethan said as he looked around the empty plateau.

‘Too far from their homeland, perhaps, or they just wanted to keep this location secret from grave robbers and the conquistadores,’ Lucy replied as she glanced back down to where Lopez, Jarvis and his men were following them up to the plateau. She looked back down at the snow. ‘This snowfall beneath our feet may be hundreds of years old. We need to clear it to see if there’s anything below — it could be what’s concealed these tombs for so long.’

Ethan shrugged off the rucksack he had carried up the mountain and pulled from within it a folding shovel, Lucy mirroring his actions as together they began breaking the frozen snow into chunks and shovelling it away from the plateau. Several inches thick, the work was hard in the thin air and Ethan found himself repeatedly going for more oxygen from his supply as he worked.

Jarvis and his men joined them on the plateau along with the huaqueros, and while Jarvis watched Lopez, the two escorts and the huaqueros all unpacked their shovels and began helping clear the snow and ice from the plateau. Lucy directed them as they dug down and the shovels hit the raw earth and rock of the mountainside, gradually exposing more of the surface of the plateau.

‘Hold there,’ Lucy said as she made her way to the centre of the dig.

Ethan stood upright and sucked in deep breaths of the meagre air as he let his shovel drop by his side, exhausted. He could see that Lopez, Jarvis’s agents and even the huaqueros were equally tired by the hard labour at such high altitude. Lucy moved to the centre of the plateau and knelt down as she examined the earth. Frosted with ice, Ethan realized that the surface was probably unchanged since the first snows had fallen on the burial site hundreds of years before, frozen solid for all eternity.

‘Here,’ Lucy pointed at what to Ethan looked like a perfectly normal piece of earth.

He moved alongside Lucy and knelt down to see that the rocks and soil were rutted and pitted unlike the smooth, free-flowing slopes of the volcano further down where countless eruptions had produced aged lava flows of basalt rock.

‘We must dig carefully,’ Lucy said. ‘If they’re in here, they won’t be far down. All the remains found previously were within a couple of yards of the surface.’

‘Just a couple of yards from the surface of permafrost entombed rock,’ Lopez uttered. ‘And there was I thinking this was going to be hard work.’

Getting onto their knees, Ethan and the remaining members of the team formed a circle around the spot Lucy had indicated and began digging down, using their shovels as trowels in order to scrape the unyielding soil away. The first few inches were unbearably hard, frozen solid, but then they began to reach slightly softer material beneath. They dug deeper and faster until Lucy’s voice rang out above the buffeting gale.

‘Hold there.’

Lucy pointed to a small piece of fabric fluttering in the wind that was poking out of the ancient soil. The group seemed to close in around her for a better look as Lucy used her trowel to pull away soil from around the fragment. Longer than it had at first seemed, Ethan watched in fascination as she worked carefully and began exposing a tightly wrapped bundle of fabric that seem to get larger before his eyes. Lucy finally threw her trowel aside and used her hands to scrape chunks of soil away from the remains.

Driven by her enthusiasm the rest of the team began likewise lifting chunks of soil out of the grave and tossing it across the pure white snow around them until Ethan could see the outline of a small body beneath the thick fabric. Despite the covering, he could see the shape of narrow legs pulled up under a chin and arms wrapped around them, the entire body concealed beneath swathes of patterned fabric and surrounded by a small ring of pottery, everything frozen absolutely solid as it had been for centuries.

‘Is this it?’ Lopez asked. ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

Lucy looked down at the remains, and in the bright sunlight that was beaming down into the ancient tomb Ethan spotted at the same time she did a quipu hanging around the neck of the ancient mummy along with a necklace of solid gold.

‘This is it,’ Lucy said without a shadow of doubt. ‘This is the one.’

It was a Russian voice that replied to her.

‘And we will take it from here.’

Ethan looked up in surprise to see a dozen armed men emerge from just below the plateau, there rifles trained on Ethan and the team as they advanced upon their position. At their head was a determined looking old man, his cold grey eyes blazing with hatred.

‘Yuri Polkov,’ Lucy snapped as she recognised him.

The old man’s features fractured like a glacier into a broad grin.

‘We meet at last,’ he uttered, his voice as brittle as thin ice. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this moment.’