Deadly Memory

DEADLY MEMORY LIVING MEMORY SERIES BOOK 2 DAVID WALTON CONTENTS 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 Chapter 28 Epilogue Other Books By David Walton Acknowledgments About the Author for Silas fellow fantastical story creator CHAPTER ONE San Julian Basin, off the coast of Argentina Dr. Elena Benitez was obsessed with extinction. Her obsession had brought her here, to the deck of the Storm Petrel drilling rig in the South Atlantic, a hundred kilometers from the nearest coastline. She could see nothing but endless blue water in every direction. A gust of wind ruffled her hair and brought the smell of salt and seaweed. Despite the biting cold, she smiled. She had chased this dream for her whole life, it seemed, and now, finally, she was almost there. Her preoccupation with extinction had begun as a young graduate student, when the last few Titicaca water frogs in the world had died under her care. The perpetrator of this amphibian genocide had been a fungus that grew on the skins of the unfortunate frogs and toads who caught it. Starting in Asia over a century earlier, it had spread around the world through the live animal trade and killed off eighty-five percent of the world’s amphibian species. It was the worst infectious disease in recorded history, and most people had never even heard of it. Extinction, it turned out, was nearly as common as life. Everyone knew about the famous asteroid strike that had killed the dinosaurs, but there had been other great extinctions, too, some of them even more destructive. Elena’s professional curiosity had gradually focused on the end-Permian extinction, which had occurred before the dinosaurs, clearing out the previous large land animals to make room for the dinos to grow and thrive. The Permian extinction was known as The Great Dying, and it had been the greatest of all extinction events, killing ninety percent of the species on the planet. It had come perilously close to eradicating life entirely. The most intriguing part for her as a scientist was this: no one knew why. You could walk along an exposed shelf of Permian rock and see fossil remains of all kinds of animals: lizards with sails on their backs, reptiles with huge tusks, spiny fish, and the ubiquitous trilobites, twenty thousand species strong. Cross the line of the extinction event, and they all disappeared. An empty zone at the beginning of the Triassic, with almost no fossils at all. What had happened? Like an Agatha Christie murder mystery, there were many suspects but no clear perpetrator. Had it been another asteroid? Massive volcanic eruptions? Acid rain? Microbes that converted oxygen into methane? Theories abounded, but there was no smoking gun. Like Walter Alvarez, who discovered the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs, Elena wanted to be the detective who finally solved the Permian extinction mystery for certain. That obsession was what had sent her, finally, out to sea on this aging drillship to a place where surveys showed a thick layer of Permian rock under the seabed. The metal platform belched and clanked under her as drill engineers worked to replace a used drill bit. They had been drilling into the ocean floor for days now. The goal was to retrieve core samples—long cylinders of rock cut deep into the Earth’s crust—which could then be analyzed back in the lab, layer by layer. Core samples of this sort had been taken many times before around the globe, but the survey data for this location had shown several unique characteristics that Elena was looking for. She ducked out of the wind and descended to the moon pool, a sheltered area beneath the derrick that allowed direct access to the water. The engineers were lowering the pipe with another fresh drill bit into the water. Each time a drill bit wore out, they had to pull up the entire pipe, change the bit, and then thread the pipe back down into the hole at the bottom of the ocean, a difficult and sophisticated procedure involving sonar scanning and precision instrumentation. Once the pipe was in place, Elena and her team watched indoors on a screen that showed the drill’s depth overlaid with survey data. As it churned its way through Triassic limestone and into the sedimentary rock of the Permian era, they cheered. They still had days of drilling to go to reach the bottom of the layer, but it was an occasion worth celebrating. A burst of chimes from Elena’s phone announced incoming text messages. Even with their signal boosters, cell coverage was rare out here, but every once in a while, the stars aligned, and she would get a brief connection, enough to deliver her missed messages. The texts were from her daughter, Gabriela, who was currently on a dig in Thailand with Samira Shannon. Elena was glad Gabby had found a good team and was establishing her career. Apparently, they’d uncovered a new theropod species. They’re kicking us out of the country, her text said. Elena frowned. Thailand had always been open to foreign scientists. Shouts of alarm from outside interrupted her. Elena dropped the phone on the table, leaving the rest of the message unread, and clanged up the metal stairs to the platform. Black mud geysered from the open pipe, spattering the drill derrick and the deck. Engineers ran for cover. The water in the moon pool bubbled and spat. “Capture it!” Elena shouted. “We need uncontaminated samples!” She snatched a plastic bin used to store lengths of core and held it next to the pipe, capturing mud as it frothed over the edge. Her hands were quickly covered in muck, and black spatter decorated her shirt, face, and hair.