Previous: Chapter Twenty-Five: Le Garage
The galley curtains were drawn aboard the Marcel Loubens. Terry extracted the memory chip from the surviving drone and downloaded the video. The process took a few seconds. At the end Terry gave a grunt of satisfaction. “I don’t know what we owe WKU, but their backup strategy worked. We have the feed from both drones.
The crew watched as the video played, hundreds of meters of water filled cave passage.
“Well, they never swam through that.” Jo’s comment silenced the explorers gathered around the video feed.
“What?”, said Merl.
“This is an amazing acheivement. Tech and all… but we’ve mapped, what? Four kilometers of cave passage, which has been underwater for – how long?”
“At least since the last ice age, and higher every year since the Industrial Revolution,” said Petra. “Way outside our Soviet era window.”
The wallabologist nodded. “No wallaby holds its breath, any longer than a white tailed deer does. So raft migration only gets us so far. Did they walk inland from the coast to the cenote? The walls are sheer. Did they just hop to the edge and jump?”
Merl was the only one still looking at the monitor. “CAP!” Merl never shouted.
The image was gone by the time they looked. Merl grabbed the remote and hit the rewind button. The view froze, then jumped backward in time by a few seconds.
Merl paused the view, and said, “Look.” By then, they could all see.
The skeleton was human, sitting casually cross legged on a ledge in the underwater cave.
“It’s a PERSON!” said Jo.
“From Soviet Cuba, I’ll bet,” said Frances.
Merl whispered, “It’s whole… it’s intact.”
Terry had an answer. “Carbonate limestone aquifer. There must’ve been enough calcium in solution to cement it in place… look.” The cave diver indicated the surface of the ledge, where a layer of calcite covered the base of the skeleton.
Petra frowned. “No. That couldn’t have happened underwater. It’s dripstone. The cave was dry when they died. The sea rose later.”
“What do we have around there, video wise?” asked MaryLiz. “Did the other drone get anything from the area?”
Merl was already on it. “Buddy system to the rescue. Other drone was a meter away.”
Drone B’s camera field was partially obscured by the body of Drone A. The skeletal remains were visible in the background, cemented by calcite to the cave’s wall. Around it, the ranchers could see small, dark rectangular shapes, arrayed around the bones in an almost symmetrical, purposeful manner.
“Tributes,” whispered Petra. “Funeral offerings.”
“Made by WALLABIES?!” said Merl.
MaryLiz turned to Petra.
“Can we get one of those?”
Petra was looking at Terry.
“Maybe,” said Terry.