THE SECOND CRADLE - BOOK TWO OF THE IRON CRADLE SAGA Chapter 6: CHAPTER SIX - Uninvited Guests

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CHAPTER SIX ROSLYN RESEARCH FACILITY: Uninvited Guests ARi helped me step down out of the tunnel. I found the chair next to one of the consoles and dropped into it. My reserves were low and I wasn't in any hurry to push them. The last thing I wanted was to pull into my stamina and become a liability. "We're making good progress." ARi glanced back at me but her attention was split between where she was standing and whatever was happening further in the tunnel. It had been that way for most of the day. "I think after the next one Roslyn and I should be able to reach the start of the residential level." "Are you guys ready for me again?" Kyle said as he walked by heading toward the tunnel. Yumi followed behind him. She had been staying close to him ever since the incident at the bottom of the elevator. "You better give Roslyn about ten more minutes." ARi said. Kyle dropped into one of the other chairs with a long exhale and stretched his arms over his head before letting them fall. Yumi sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, her back against the leg of his chair. He reached down without looking and rested his hand on her shoulder. At this point we'd all had to put on our rebreathers. But even through the device the constant phasing of material as we tunneled left a metallic taste in the air. The light in the observation room was dim. Mostly coming from the cradle chamber itself. Rosslyn had found a supply of chem lights though, and we spread them across the floor of the tunnel, and they lit the opening in an eerie green glow. Tanya had been sitting against the far wall for a while, watching Maddie and Erica. "Does the air bother you at all?" Maddie looked at her. But, didn't say anything. Tanya nodded slowly, Maddie and Erica had been quiet for a while now. "It didn't seem to bother you on Adaeya either." She said, adjusting her rebreather, still watching them. "I've been thinking about that. Kobold biology seems to be able to adapt to pretty harsh environments." "I was thinking about something else too." She continued. "I don't think I remember seeing any mammals there either. We saw plenty of reptiles, amphibians, dinosaurs, in a pretty significant variety. And it wasn't just the wildlife that caught my attention. It was the plants. The ferns, the grasses, the giant bamboo trees." She looked over at ARi. "It's very unlikely that these things would evolve the same on two completely different worlds." "The kobolds were on Earth before the dinosaurs," ARi said. "Right, but when a civilization colonizes a world, they don't arrive empty handed. They bring their crops, their animals." She looked at Maddie and Erica. "I don't think it's a coincidence that Earth hosted a kobold colony and ended up with all of the same fauna. I think the kobolds brought it here." "You think that a lot of the early life on Earth was brought here?" I asked. "Not all of it," Tanya said. "Earth had its own life before the kobolds arrived. And over millions of years the two things mixed. That's why Earth ended up with both mammals and reptiles. and Adaeya didn't." "Earth has had five major extinction level events," she said. "Some of them are easy to account for. Geological events, volcanic activity, asteroids. The one that killed the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago left a crater in the Yucatan and an iridium layer in the rock record." She paused. "But some of the largest extinction events in Earth's history are still more of a mystery." "Like the Devonian?" Tim asked from the doorway. Tanya looked up as Tim stepped into the room and leaned against the wall. "My dad was an archaeologist," he said. "I mean, it's not paleontology, but what can I say? History was kind of a thing growing up." "The Devonian is the one that's always bothered me," she said. "It happened three hundred and seventy-five million years ago. It was almost exclusively marine. The oceans essentially died, and most of the life on land was largely untouched." She let that sit for