Read Jaunt for Free Online Page A

walls. Waters, with a pair of pliers in her hands, reached over to the metal layers containing the organic object. De Lis held the metal while Waters extracted the object from its centuries-old entrapment.
    The object popped out sooner than Waters anticipated, dropping out of the pliers. Only good reflexes by her left hand kept the object from hitting, and most likely smashing, on the lab’s reinforced metal floor. Throwing the pliers down, she grasped the object in both hands, allowing all in the lab to glimpse the unusual artifact under the glare of real lighting. A shade of mottled brown stained the artifact, as if bruised.
    The five said together, in immediate synchronicity, “A skull.”
    Waters soon found a strange glint lodged inside a crack at the base. “Hold on....”
    “What is it?” de Lis asked.
    Waters picked up the pliers again, and working it into the crack, grasped an object in its teeth. Pulling gently but firmly, she plucked a glittering jewel from inside the wound, exposing it to the overhead light.
    “Well, how’s about that?” Mason said.
    “It’s not Homo sapiens ,” de Lis announced, clamping the skull in a spectrometer.
    Gilmour took a close look at the relic, noting the two large eye sockets, cheek bones and upper mandible. “Some sort of simian, a native species here?”
    “It doesn’t fit any profile of the hominids, past or present,” Waters explained. “I’d bet my money against the missing link, too.”
    De Lis closed the hood over the skull and tapped a button below the spectrometer’s scanning plate, activating the device’s spectrum sensor. A small monitor attached to the spectrometer read out the object’s atomic spectrum: a dozen peaks and valleys, rapidly drawn from a single red line.
    A spike near the middle of the spectrum caught de Lis’ attention. “Look at that!”
    Waters closed in. “That...that can’t be right.”
    De Lis typed in a series of buttons on the spectrometer. “Readings are good. Everything’s online.” He pointed a finger to an unassuming spike. “Hmm...interesting.”
    “What is it?” Gilmour asked.
    “The signature of yttrium. An isotope, actually...one I’ve only seen in laboratories.”
    Gilmour recalled the chemistry classes from his youth. “Isn’t that a rare element?
    How could it be in this skull?”
    “Yttrium itself isn’t that rare,” Waters explained. “In fact, it’s more common than silver. Its isotopes, particularly the Y-90 here, are different than the Y-89 found in Earth’s crust, and are found in asteroid and meteorite crater strata. As rare as those isotopes are compared to terrestrial Y-89, they’re only a fraction compared to the seven parts per million that are in this skull. The Y-90 here is a major constituent of the skull’s minerals, although I can’t see how a radioactive isotope with its short half-life got to Earth without decaying as soon as it made contact with our atmosphere.”
    “Well, if it’s not a hominid,” Gilmour said, “what is it?”
    De Lis looked at Waters. “Uh, we don’t know.”
    All five were drawn again to the thirteen-centimeter-long skull, resting anonymously on the spectrometer. It seemed so peaceful.
    “The only way to find out will be to catalogue its DNA,” Waters said after a moment's pause.
    “That can wait for now,” de Lis said. “I think, in light of our dwindling time, our next course of action should be to split our resources. Agent Gilmour, Javier, we’ve got to see if we can find any other pieces of that impactor out there. Stacia, start work on those jewels...I want to know what’s so special about them, why that abbot had them, and what one is doing inside that skull.”
    Waters nodded. “Good luck.”
    Pausing at the hatch’s threshold, de Lis continued, “If we don’t get anything else out of that crater, this will be all we have to show for ourselves.”
    Waters didn’t have to have de Lis spell it out for her; whatever they potentially left