Gregg Hurwitz - Minutes to Burn

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.

"I need to get my hands on samples from those cores. We have reason to believe that the drilling unleashed a new virus from the oceanic crust. In fact, the virus might be present in the thermophilic microbes living in the archived cores. It's quite urgent; I've spent the better part of the past few hours figuring out how to get ahold of you."

"Then you've been wasting your morning," Buck said. "We skipped the goddamned Galapagos this time down. Too much shakin' and bakin'. Drilled Sangre last leg. The cores are archived up in your neck of the woods."

"Where?" Donald's voice conveyed his exasperation.

"Scripps Institute. Right in La Jolla, California." Buck pronounced the "J" hard in "La Jolla" and gave the end of "California" a western spin-Californ-i-ae.

"Excellent. Thanks very much."

"No shit off my back. Oh, and Doc?" Buck shot a puffy jet of cigar smoke across the radio. "It's Captain Tadman."

Tell Iggy that peanut butter will get it out, but he shouldn't go to bed "chewing it to begin with." Samantha shifted on the small bed, cradling the phone to her ear with a shoulder. "No, you can't go to the NVME concert, Kiera. Because you're…how old are you again? Well, there. See-that's much too young to be going to a concert."

She gazed at the ceiling, having memorized each line, crack, and bump over the past two and a half days. She should have made sketches of the ceiling the last time she was in the slammer; she could have wiled away her hours now analyzing the changes in the plaster.

Donald had called to let her know he was sending her thermopro-teaceae pulled from a deep sea core, of all things. Evidently, they'd sur-vived being archived and refrigerated at Scripps, which she supposed made sense-they could endure temperature extremes, sometimes thriving in environments of up to 113 degrees Celsius. Donald sus-pected that the thermoproteaceae were infected with the same virus as the dinos. Once the sample arrived, she'd hand it off to Tom so that he could get it under the lens for comparison.

She was wearing scrubs now, finally having changed out of her chil-dren's clothes.

"Are you remembering to take your meds?" she continued into the phone. "Uh-huh. And aren't you getting report cards or something soon? After the break?" Her face softened with empathy. "I know, I know, honey. English does suck."

Someone banged on the window. Samantha sat up, nervously straightening her hair once she realized it was Dr. Foster. It was a losing battle-her hair stood up in tangles where she'd been resting her head on the pillow. He made her simultaneously buoyant and insecure, a mix-ture of emotions to which she was unaccustomed. She was unsure if she needed buoyancy and insecurity in her life. She pulled on a surgical cap to hide her crazy hair and scurried to the window, speaking rapidly into the phone.

"There are plenty of fourteen-year-olds in day care. Oh. Well, just pretend you're the teacher's assistant or something. Maricarmen will get you over to the college to pick up your microbiology assignment. Good. If there are any problems, make sure she calls me. All right, sweetie. Tell your European brothers I love them." She snapped the phone shut and faced Dr. Foster with a smile.

"Kids?" he asked.

She nodded.

"I have two myself." Samantha nervously adjusted the surgical cap, and Dr. Foster looked at her with amusement. "Getting ready to scrub in?"

She worked her lower lip between her teeth for a minute, gathering her thoughts. "Look, Martin, I wanted to say…well, I don't really date. It's not that I don't want to. It's more that I don't know how. And, well, I could save you the time of finding out how badly I'm gonna botch-"

He held up his hand and she stopped, mouth open. "There's a space suit through the crash door," he said. "Suit up-I need to show you something."

She was into the space suit in ten minutes, and then she was free from the slammer, shuffling down the long, white hallway by Dr. Foster's side. She knocked over a tray of folders with a puffy hip, and Dr. Foster stopped to pick them up for her. For the rest of the way, he guided her, a hand resting softly on the small of her back.

She turned to him, awkward and mushy in the space suit. "Romantic, isn't this?" she said sarcastically.

"Yes," he replied. "It is."

They reached another slammer unit, and he pointed through the large plate glass barrier. A woman whom Samantha recognized as the flight attendant lay on a bed near the window, weak, pale, and dotted with fading bruises, but very much alive. Samantha could tell, even from her pres-ent state, that she was an attractive woman. Gorgeous blue eyes paired with flowing blond hair gave her a sexy, if somewhat unsophisticated, look.

The woman tried to pull herself up to a sitting position, but couldn't. She turned slightly, her swollen face looking through the glass at Saman-tha. She reached out a hand, touching the window, and Samantha raised a glove and rested it on the glass near hers, feeling her eyes tear up.

"She's not out of the woods yet, but I think she's going to pull through, she and the pilot," Dr. Foster said softly. "The titers have decreased substantially. She wanted to see you."

The insides of the flight attendant's lips were stained with dried blood.

"Tough little blond, huh?" Samantha murmured. She blinked back the growing moistness in her eyes, staring at the woman's thin arm extending to the glass. "Maybe I should've been a stewardess. More job security." She leaned forward until her mask bumped against the win-dow. "Are there any openings on your airline?" she asked.

The woman shook her head, confused. "What?" she mouthed.