"Leng. Go ahead!" Sherman ordered.
Kevin Leng nodded and went ahead to scout.
The group was about to enter in the third and final area of the necropolis, where the remains of the clergy and the nobility laid.
It consisted of a network of tombs, each containing one or several sarcophaguses closed by a stone lid.
According to Cortès' assumptions, each of the tombs belonged to a specific family and one could have an idea of the social rank it occupied by looking at the number, quality and rarity of the objects and the furniture in the tomb, which were either put right next to the sarcophagi or in niches carved in the walls. They saw jewellery and artefacts adorned with jade stones and other green gems, ceremonial millstones, stone sceptres and ceramics objects rich in details. The people that had built the necropolis seemed to have in particular a long tradition of jade work since many objects found in the tombs were adorned with it. It seemed to have developed itself mostly without any outside influence, even though some items showed influences from Olmec and Mayan arts and crafts. Many of the motifs featured on the objects seemed to have a religious significance.
But the fights of which they had seen traces earlier had been particularly violent in this area, judging by the number of skeletons and weapons that littered the floor, and traces of desecration, mostly human in origin, were numerous: many of the sarcophagi had been opened and the mummies inside extirpated before being smashed with clubs, and pottery had been shattered.
As he explored one of the tombs on their way, Leng passed the beam of his lamp in a nearby one out of precaution but in doing so, he saw something that caught his eye and troubled, he approached it carefully.
"Mr. Grady! Mr. Sembène!" He called a few moments later. "Could you come over here please?"
The two keepers came and when they reached the tomb, they saw his back as he was squatting in front of something on the floor near the sarcophagus in the centre of the room.
They also noticed that one of the tomb's walls had collapsed a long time ago and that the created breach opened on a high and wide lava tube.
"Tell me, dinosaurs lay eggs, right?" He asked.
"Yes," Sembène replied.
"So explain me this shit!"
Leng got up and moved aside, letting the keepers saw what he had found.
The rest of the group arrived and was also surprised by Leng's find.
Grady and Sembène studied the morphology of the found animal, a small white dinosaur whose body was still coated with a transparent and viscous liquid that had almost completely dried.
Of the size of a panther, it was slender in constitution and had very long front limbs even though it was creature mainly biped at adulthood. Its skin was lined with osteoderms, its snout elongated a moderately narrow, and its lower jaw had the peculiarity of being slightly curved upward while the end of the upper jaw formed a hook that hid the front teeth when the mouth was closed. Despite the absence of crests and horns on the head, there was no doubt concerning the nature of the creature: It was a baby Indominus, stillborn.
"Viviparous or ovoviviparous reproduction," Grady mumbled as he ran his fingers on the amniotic fluid while he and Sembène were kneeling by the body.
"English please," Leng requested.
"In the first case, the mother gives birth to live young, like mammals do, and in the second, the eggs incubate and hatch in the mother's womb," Grady explained.
Getting up, the two keepers saw that the Slayers were receiving this explanation with scepticism.
"Many more reptiles than you imagine follow this mode of reproduction," Sembène added. "Chameleons, rattlesnakes, some vipers, boas… Newborns of those species are also autonomous a few hours after birth."
"A chance for us that she had a miscarriage. I wouldn't have liked to meet that little bastard in these tombs or in the tunnels," Decker declared.
"She has Boa constrictor DNA," Grady remembered. "She must have inherited, I don't know how, of its ovoviviparous mode of reproduction. On the list that Wu gave us, it's the only species with one of the two modes I mentioned."
"And how was it conceived? With the help of the Holy Spirit?" Leng questioned them with sarcasm.
"No. Through parthenogenesis," Sembène answered, "a mode of reproduction where an embryo grows even if the egg hadn't been fertilized. Boas sometimes breed that way. A former colleague of mine from the zoo in France where I worked before coming here learned it at his expense."
"I won't make the same mistakes again," Wu said when media asked about the consequences of including West African frog DNA in the dinosaurs' genome," Grady remembered. "No, he made new ones…"
As the two keepers moved away from the body and headed to the breach, they heard gas burning in their backs gas and there was suddenly a stifling heat.
They quickly turned around and then saw a jet of flames lapping the baby Indominus.
"What are you doing?!" Grady exclaimed, stunned.
Ford, whose flamethrower consumed the stillborn creature, did not even deign to look at them when he replied coldly:
"Crispy bacon, doesn't look like it?"
Before the slayer took the decision of incinerating the body, the keepers would have liked to bring it back after the mission in order to study it, even though they knew that InGen would hardly let them do this.
"Orders from the board," Sherman told them. "If ever someone else learn that Indominus' genetic material is exposed here, agents of InGen's rivals will show up here and take some on this body. Once the mother will be killed, her body shall suffer the same fate. You didn't see anything, understood?"
Grady and Sembène looked blankly at the white skin of the animal being charred and then scanned the Slayers who had formed a semicircle around the central sarcophagus and at a respectable distance from the body while the flames cast their shadows against the tomb's walls.
Cortes and Pizarro however, had already crossed the breach. They were waiting for the rest of the group to come and keeping their rifles aimed at the oppressive darkness of the lava tube.
The two keepers preferred to join the Tun-Si but when they turned to walk upon the collapsed wall, they faced Olsen, who was standing on the rubble.
They tried to get around him but the giant stepped across their way and his tall size combined with the fact that he was standing higher on the rubble pile made him tower over them.
They heard for the first time the sound of his voice:
"Gregor asked you a question," he reminded them. "We would like to have your answer."
His voice was surprisingly calm and collected, contrasting with his massive, almost monstrous appearance, but one could feel the threat behind his question and he looked at them in the eyes, giving them a terrifying look, and the sight of his muffler from so close made them turn pale.
"Understood... We won't say anything," Grady said, although he didn't intend to keep his word and leak this discovery once they will be far away from these individuals.
The rumours about the Slayers seemed to be true actually and for the rest of the mission, he and Sembène felt more uneasy and became mistrustful toward their companions.
They would have preferred to stand near a Neoraptor nest in the middle of a stormy night on Isla Sorna than to spend more time with the Slayers in the dark corners of this mountain known only by them and where it might have been so easy to abandon them in some labyrinth of tombs or tunnels, throw them in a chasm, one could have pretended that an accident happened, or worse, entomb them alive in the sarcophagi.
They moved on, going up the lava tube eastward, passing by many skeletons on their way. At one point, as he passed his torch on the wall on their right, Grady lighted a mural.
He and Sembène came closer to look at it.
It depicted a scene that took place in a large room surrounded and overhung by galleries, probably the temple mentioned by Sherman.
Above a platform in the centre, there was a man, hanging in the air with arms outstretched, held only by tight ropes linked to two pillars, one on each side. Under him, a pyre had been set ablaze and its flames partly engulfed the man.
In the foreground, below the steps that led to the pyre, a tall character with androgynous features – a priest most likely – had his arms raised in the air.
On both sides of the priest, a large crowd had gathered and watched the immolation without any trace of remorse in their expression.
Overlooking the pyre's platform and the crowd, was the sculpture of a dreadful head, probably that of some evil god to whom the sacrifice was destined.
Grady and Sembène wondered if the cult depicted hadn't led Nublar's civilization to its downfall.
They turned away from the mural.
Suddenly Grady thought that he heard muffled footsteps in his back but when he passed the beam of his torch behind him, he saw nothing.
The feeling of being followed that he and the group had felt earlier at the exit of the warriors' necropolis struck him again and made him nervous.
They hadn't yet seen traces of the escaped neoraptors and proceratosaurs, and the last time that their implants had transmitted their location, many minutes before the ground entered in the mountain, the received coordinates had indicated that they were somewhere on its slopes.
What if they too had found a way to get into the mountain, preventing the reception of their implants' signal by the satellite? And if some of the predators, lurking in the darkness, were taking their time in tracking them, in order to only attack at the opportune moment?
A furlong further, the group reached the end of the tube, marked by a tall and wide arch, carved into the walls and even the rocky ceiling itself. Humanoid faces with an impassive and stern look adorned it.
"The Temple is just beyond that arch," Sherman said, "but if we pass through it, the Indominus will see us right away if she is there."
He then led the group to the entrance of a tunnel on their left and due to its narrowness, they entered into it one by one. They went into tortuous corridors and climbed one or two stairs before reaching the gallery from where they would overlook the Temple and, if the Indominus was there, plan their attack.
