Minutes to Burn

Rex turned back to Szabla, looking somewhat ridiculous speaking into her shoulder. "The cores will be refrigerated and archived on one of the boats-get them thawed out, see if any thermophilic microbes have survived the refrigeration, and get them over to Dr. Everett to see if they're infected with the same thing. If they are, odds are they're what infected the dinoflagellates to begin with."

Donald agreed and clicked out.

The soldiers stared at Rex and Diego blankly. Szabla ran her fingers up along the front of her neck, testing the tender skin above her larynx. Derek averted his eyes from her, and she turned back to Rex.

"You want to tell us just what the fuck you're talking about?" she asked.

Captain Buck Tadman shifted his damp cigar to the left side of his mouth, leaning over the prow of the 143-meter advanced drilling ship and watching the waves crash against the hull. The cook stood next to him, wearing a stained white apron.

"You want my marital advice?" Buck said. He smacked the back of one hand into the other. "Buy a belt with a thicker buckle." The cook threw his cigarette into the foaming waters and headed back to the kitchen.

A thin man in spectacles walked past Buck and waved, and Buck sneered at him, spitting the plug of his cigar on the damp deck. The man scurried away toward the laboratory. Buck was tired of scientists. And his ship, the SEDCO/BP 469 was overrun with them-paleontologists, sedimentologists, petrologists, magnetics specialists, geophysicists, geo-chemists, geodipshitologists. All the degrees tacked on behind their names made the ship roster look like alphabet soup. He supposed it made sense-the boat was a floating research station, after all.

They'd left port in San Francisco over two months ago, setting out on Ocean Drilling Program Leg Seventeen, a six-month cruise that would take them down the west coast of South America, around the Cape, and back up to Florida. They'd stop at key sites along the way, pulling up plugs of earth from the ocean basins and seeing what information they encoded about the origin and evolution of oceanic crust, marine sedi-mentary sequences, and the tectonic evolution of continental margins.

Funded and managed by the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling and the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ocean Drilling Program ran four advanced drilling ships around the globe, each converted from a petroleum drilling rig and engineered to collect core samples of rock and sediment. Buck's boat, the SEDCO/BP 469, was the finest of these.

Buck gazed proudly up at the derrick rising over sixty meters above the waterline. Two men attached the four-coned tungsten-carbide roller bit to the drill pipe, along with its stabilizing weights. Once the bit got rolling, it would slice through the ocean floor like a razor coring an apple. The taller man signaled another member of the drill floor crew, and the assembly was lowered to the moon pool, a hole seven meters wide in the bottom of the ship. The assembly entered the water through a funneled guide horn.

The machinery wound up, a clicking and humming of mechanical and hydraulic devices that extended the drill string down to the ocean floor. The spot they hovered over was 5,500 meters deep; it would take the drill bit roughly twelve hours to hit bottom.

Once it did, they'd rotate the drill string, pump surface seawater and drillers' mud down the drill pipe to remove the cuttings and keep the bit cool. The plugs of earth, safely ensconced in an inner core barrel, would be pulled right up out of the ocean floor and through the drill string to the ship, where scientists would run it to the lab and pore over it for days. They'd check the six-inch-wide, ten-foot-long plugs for fossils, gas pock-ets, bubbles, patterns in the mafic and olivine minerals, and tiny, heat-resistant organisms called hyperthermophilic microbes. Sometimes, they'd even run a Gamma Ray Attenuation and Porosity Evaluator to measure density.

Buck barked out a few commands just to feel important, enjoying how the workers grew uneasy under his eyes. He chomped the end off another cigar and twirled it beneath his thick gray mustache before lighting it. A deck hand jogged up. "Someone from the New Center on the radio," he said. "A Dr. Donald Denton."

"And?" Buck asked.

"He wants to talk to you. Says it's urgent."

Buck walked in slowly to the radio in the control deck, enjoying his cigar. When he spoke into the receiver, his voice was gruff. "Yeah? Help ya?"

"Mr. Tadman, Donald Denton here, New Center of Ecotectonics in Sacramento. I understand you did some core drilling off the coast of Sangre de Dios?"

"Always good to be understood," Buck said.