A number of various petri dishes and sample holders sat on the workbench. Emily had been cataloguing all the seeds and frozen plant life they’d pulled out of the glacier.
“These are some of the samples we collected on our first day here.” She pointed at the end of the workbench. “Some I completely thawed and had stored for Dr. Taylor to start analyzing.”
Amara lifted her dark eyes to Rowan. The botanist was a little older than Rowan, with dark-brown skin, and long, dark hair swept up in a bun. “These plants are five thousand years old.”
Rowan frowned and leaned forward. Then she gasped. “Oh my God.”
The plants were sprouting new, green shoots.
“They’ve come back to life.” Emily’s voice was breathless.
The clink of silverware and excited conversations filled the rec dome. Rowan stabbed at a clump of meat in her stew, eyeing it with a grimace. She loved food, but hated the stuff that accompanied them on expeditions. She grabbed her mug—sweet, rich hot chocolate. She’d made it from her stash with the perfect amount of cocoa. The best hot chocolate needed no less than sixty percent cocoa but no more than eighty.
Across from her, Lars and Isabel weren’t even looking at their food or drink.
“Five thousand years old!” Isabel shook her head, her dark hair falling past her shoulders. “Those plants are millennia old, and they’ve come back to life.”
“Amazing,” Lars said. “A few years back, a team working south of here on the Teardrop Glacier at Sverdrup Pass brought moss back to life…but it was only four hundred years old.”
Isabel and Lars high-fived each other.
Rowan ate some more of her stew. “Russian scientists regenerated seeds found in a squirrel burrow in the Siberian permafrost.”
“Pfft,” Lars said. “Ours is still cooler.”
“They got the plant to flower and it was fertile,” Rowan continued, mildly. “The seeds were thirty-two thousand years old.”
Isabel pulled a face and Lars looked disappointed.
“And I think they are working on reviving forty-thousand-year-old nematode worms now.”
Her team members both pouted.
Rowan smiled and shook her head. “But five-thousand-year-old plant life is nothing to sneeze at, and the Russian flowers required a lot of human intervention to coax them back to life.”
Lars perked up. “All we did was thaw and water ours.”
Rowan kept eating, listening to the flow of conversation. The others were wondering what other ancient plant life they might find in the glacial ice.
“What if we find a frozen mammoth?” Lars suggested.
“No, a frozen glacier man,” Isabel said.
“Like the Ötzi man,” Rowan said. “He was over five thousand years old, and found in the Alps. On the border between Italy and Austria.”
Amara arrived, setting her tray down. “Glaciers are retreating all over the planet. I had a colleague who uncovered several Roman artifacts from a glacier in the Swiss Alps.”
Isabel sat back in her chair. “Maybe we’ll find the fountain of youth? Maybe something in these plants we’re uncovering could defy aging, or cure cancer.”
Rowan raised an eyebrow and smothered a smile. She was as excited as the others about the regeneration of the plants. But her mind turned to the now-forgotten mystery object they’d plucked from the ice. She’d taken some photos of it and its markings. She was itching to take a look at them again.
“I’m going to take another look at the metal object we found,” Lars said, stuffing some stew in his mouth.
“Going to check for any messages from aliens?” Isabel teased.
Lars screwed up his nose, then he glanced at Rowan. “Want to join me?”
She was so tempted, but she had a bunch of work piled on her desk. Most important being the supply lists for their next supply drop. She’d send her photos off to an archeologist friend at Harvard, and then spend the rest of her evening banging through her To-Do list.
“I can’t tonight. Duty calls.” She pushed her chair back and lifted her tray. “I’m going to eat dessert in my office and do some work.”
“You mean eat that delicious chocolate of yours that you guard like a hawk,” Isabel said.
Rowan smiled. “I promise to make something yummy tomorrow.”
“Your brownies,” Lars said.
“Chocolate-covered pralines,” Isabel said, almost on top of Lars.
Rowan shook her head. Her chocolate creations were gaining a reputation. “I’ll surprise you. If anyone needs me, you know where to find me.”
“Bye, Rowan.”
“Catch you later.”
She set the tray on the side table and scraped off her plates. They had a roster for cooking and cleaning duty, and thankfully it wasn’t her night. She ignored the dried-out looking chocolate chip cookies, anticipating the block of milk chocolate in her desk drawer. Yep, she had a weakness for chocolate in any form. Chocolate was the most important food group.
As she headed through the tunnels to the smaller dome that housed her office, she listened to the wind howling outside. It sounded like the storm had arrived. She sent up a silent thanks that her entire team was safe and sound in the camp. Since she was the expedition leader, she got her own office, rather than having to share space with the other scientists in the labs.
In her cramped office, she flicked on her lamp and sat down behind her desk. She opened the drawer, pulled out her chocolate, smelled it, and snapped off a piece. She put it in her mouth and savored the flavor.
The best chocolate was a sensory experience. From how it looked—no cloudy old chocolate, please—to how it smelled and tasted. Right now, she enjoyed the intense flavors on her tongue and the smooth, velvety feel. Her mother had never let her have chocolate or other “unhealthy” foods growing up. Rowan had been forced to sneak her chocolate. She remembered her childhood friend, the intense boy from next door who’d always snuck her candy bars when she’d been outside hiding from her parents.
Shaking her head, Rowan reached over and plugged in her portable speaker. Soon she had some blood-pumping rock music filling her space. She smiled, nodding her head to the beat. Her love of rock-and-roll was another thing she’d kept well-hidden from her parents as a teenager. Her mother loved Bach, and her father preferred silence. Rowan had hidden all her albums growing up, and snuck out to concerts while pretending to be on study dates.
Opening her laptop, she scanned her email. Her stomach clenched. Nothing from her parents. She shook her head. Her mother had emailed once…to ask again when Rowan would be finished with her ill-advised jaunt to the Arctic. Her father hadn’t even bothered to check she’d arrived safely.
Old news, Rowan. Shaking off old heartache, she uploaded the photos she’d taken to her computer. She took a second to study the photos of her mystery object again.
“What are you?” she murmured.
The carvings on the object could be natural scratches. She zoomed in. It really looked like some sort of writing to her, but if the object was over five thousand years old, then it wasn’t likely. She knew the Pre-Dorset and Dorset peoples had been known to carve soapstone and driftwood, but this artifact would have been at the early point of Pre-Dorset history. Hell, it predated cuneiform—the earliest form of writing—which was barely getting going in Sumer when this thing had ended up in the ice.