Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Read online

  When she was still a good fifty feet away, she steered to the side, angling for the wide open gap between the machines and the trees. The robot responded, but its slow, jerky turn gave Carter all the time she needed to zip past.

  She then angled the car back toward the pavement. Behind them, the machines were reversing course, but couldn’t keep up with the sleek sports car once she got the tires back on the asphalt.

  As they shot down the road, heading back toward the complex of buildings and away from both the array and the wayward construction robots, Carter kept accelerating, winding out each of the gears in the five-speed transmission. As she shifted into fourth, the speedometer was already tipping sixty—miles per hour, not kilometers. Evidently, this ride predated Europe’s embrace of the metric system.

  “You know how to drive a stick,” Fallon said. “That’s rare nowadays.”

  She shot him an annoyed look. “Are you hitting on me?”

  She almost added, My boyfriend won’t like that, but just thinking it reminded her that Erik and the others were all still missing.

  “Of course not,” Fallon replied, though the mischievous gleam in his eyes suggested otherwise. “Just noticing.”

  Her ability to drive a manual transmission had more to do with necessity than any particular love of driving. She had spent a good part of the last few years in remote parts of Africa, where older vehicles were more common and more reliable—or at least easier to maintain—than the newer, more technologically advanced models. Driving wasn’t a luxury activity for her, it was a necessary thing, and often a matter of survival. Sometimes her own, or sometimes survival for a village full of people a hundred miles out in the bush, desperate for a cure to some tropical disease. That had meant being able to drive whatever was available in any conditions.

  Still, Fallon’s car was a pretty sweet ride. She felt kind of bad about what she was going to have to do next.

  The turn-off to the garage flashed by. Ahead in the distance, she could just make out the entrance to the compound. “I don’t suppose there’s any way the gate is going to open for us.”

  “Probably not,” Fallon admitted.

  “Good thing these old cars don’t have airbags.”

  Fallon nodded but then realized what she was saying. “Oh, you’re not going to…” Leaving the sentence unfinished, he reached down to the upholstered arm rest on the center console, and flipped it up to reveal several small switches.

  “Bumper extensions,” he said as he flipped a couple of them, then straightened in his seat, gripping the dashboard with both hands in anticipation of the impending crash.

  Carter didn’t know what he was talking about, and she was too focused on the approaching gate to care. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed movement. A driverless electric cart, possibly the same one that had delivered her to Fallon’s building, was rolling down a side-road on an intercept course.

  She pushed the car harder, winding out fourth gear, and shot past the intersection before the cart could cut her off. There was a slight jolt as the robotic vehicle grazed the sports car’s rear end, but they were going too fast for it to make any difference.

  Carter kept watch for more kamikaze carts as the gate drew closer, but the hacker was out of tricks. She gripped the wheel and kept the pedal to the floor, closing the remaining distance so quickly that it came as a surprise when the front bumper slammed into the metal gate.

  The barrier flipped up and spun around in mid-air, registering a glancing blow on the car’s roof. Carter felt the impact shudder through the vehicle’s frame and heard the engine whine in protest for a moment, but that was it. She downshifted as they reached the main highway. Traffic was light, and she barely touched the brakes as they skidded through the turn, crossing to the far lane that would take them back to Geneva. Then she accelerated again.

  Beside her, Fallon let out his breath in a long relieved sigh. “Not bad. I’m glad we’re on the same side. Though you are kind of hard on my toys.”

  “Your toys tried to kill us.” She glanced over at him, wondering if they really were on the same side. “We need to get somewhere safe and figure out our next move.”

  “Our next move is taking back Tomorrowland. That hacker may have caught me with my pants down, but he’s played his hand. It’s my turn now, and payback’s a bitch.”

  Despite the bravado, Carter knew he was right about their priorities. Removing the memory metal from the transmitter had not shut the Black Knight satellite down, so regaining control of the array was imperative. “I have a friend who might be able to help with that.”

  She was about to dig out her phone to call Dourado, but a flash of color in the rear view mirror stopped her. A familiar-looking blue car had just turned onto the highway behind them. “Is that your Tesla?”

  Fallon craned his head around. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ That must be our hacker.”

  Fallon shook his head miserably. “No. It’s autonomous.”

  Two more cars, one a cream-colored sedan, the other a sleek black coupe emerged from the Tomorrowland gate to join the pursuit. She couldn’t discern the make or model, but there was little question that they were also from Fallon’s stable. “You turned your cars into robots?”

  “No, they come that way. Self-driving cars are inevitable, so a lot of car makers are getting a jump on it by pre-installing the hardware in newer models. Actually, the design uses some of my patents, so I guess you could say it was me.”

  The significance of that was not lost on Carter. Their unknown foe could turn any autonomous car on the road against them.

  The blue car was closing the distance. In terms of speed, the Tesla was more than a match for the older, classic sports car, but its real advantage was the computer brain controlling it, informed by an array of cameras, radar, and laser sensors, with reaction time measured in picoseconds and no fear whatsoever. The black car swung out from behind the Tesla and pulled up alongside it, matching its speed. Both vehicles were so close that Carter could see their distinctive hood ornaments—the stylized T with wings of Tesla motors on the blue car, and the blue and white checkered circle that identified the coupe as a Beemer.

  Fallon saw them, too, and to Carter’s astonishment he gave a little laugh. “Ha. Watch this.”

  He reached for the armrest again, and this time Carter could not help but glance down as he threw one of the switches.

  A cloud of black smoke billowed out behind the car, blocking her view of the two pursuit vehicles. “A smoke screen?” she asked, incredulous. “Seriously?”

  “Whoops,” Fallon said. “Wrong one.” He flipped a different switch.

  Although the two vehicles were still partially hidden by the dense cloud, Carter could tell that something was happening. The blue car swerved into the coupe, and then both cars were spinning as if they had hit a patch of ice…

  Or an oil slick.

  The BMW went sideways and then flipped and started tumbling down the highway before disappearing once more in the smoke. The Tesla veered off the road and crashed into a fence.

  “You made a spy car,” Carter said, with more than a little disgust. “Or are you going to tell me those are standard features, too?”

  “They are for this car,” Fallon said with a grin. “This is the actual Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger. All the gadgets from the movie were actually built into the car. I got it at auction a few years ago.”

  The smoke screen petered out, but there was no sign of pursuit behind them. Or any other traffic for that matter. The opposite lane was turning into a parking lot.

  “Someone sold you a car with actual working spy weapons? Oil slicks and machine guns? Missiles?”

  “There aren’t any missiles,” Fallon replied, sounding just a little rueful. “And the machine guns were just props. I had to switch those out, but believe me, I wouldn’t have paid what I did for this car unless the gadgets were functional. Never would ha
ve dreamed I’d actually get to use them.”

  “You just dumped oil all over a Swiss highway, and all you can think is ‘dreams come true?’” Even as she said it, she remembered that she was up to her neck in this mess because of Fallon’s reckless—almost sociopathic—disregard for consequences.

  “You said it yourself. My toys are trying to kill us. Well, I just used one of my toys to save us. And I am letting you drive.”

  Carter had no argument for either point. “Just don’t use the oil slick again if you can help it.”

  “Couldn’t even if I wanted to. It’s a one-shot deal. Smoke screen and oil slick are gone, but we still have road spikes, tire-shredder hubcaps, and of course the machine guns. Oh, and don’t worry about the ejection seat. That was never functional.”

  “Pity,” she muttered, entertaining a fantasy of pushing a button and shooting Fallon through the roof. She shook her head to clear the image. “If we can’t get back into Tomorrowland, we may need to come up with some alternatives. What would it take to build a new transmitter?”

  “Well, the Roswell Fragment is the critical component. Aside from that, any large radio telescope with a 10 gigahertz frequency transmitter should suffice.” Fallon looked back at Tanaka, as if for confirmation. “There’s at least a dozen of them in Europe. I think the closest one is in France.”

  “Finding the right antenna isn’t the problem,” Tanaka said. “It’s time. We’re—”

  “Look out!”

  Carter had been watching the road the whole time but saw nothing to warrant Fallon’s cry of alarm. Unsure of where to look for the threat, she chose the only route that she knew was clear—straight ahead—and floored the gas pedal again.

  The Aston Martin shot forward again. As they raced ahead, she spied movement in the mirrors—not a car, but something else. A flying something.

  “It’s a Stork,” Fallon sputtered, anger in his tone for the first time since the nightmare began. He swore, punching the dashboard. “Bastards. They hacked the Storks.”

  The Storks, Carter recalled, were Fallon’s robot delivery drones, the source of the fortune that had made everything else possible.

  Robots, self-driving cars, and now delivery drones, she thought. This is how the robot apocalypse begins.

  The drone—a hybrid construct of airfoils and helicopter rotors about the size of a bicycle turned on its side—appeared in the mirror, falling further and further behind with each passing second. Advanced technology or not, the Storks didn’t have the power to keep up with the Aston Martin.

  There was a flash of movement in front of them, and before Carter could react, another Stork slammed into the windshield. The steering wheel spun through her fingers—not a robot seizing control of the car, but simply momentum and acceleration. Then the world turned upside down.

  FIFTEEN

  Astana, Kazakhstan

  Three hours, Pierce thought. I’m gone for three hours, and the whole world goes to hell.

  He was still trying to make sense of what Dourado had told him. She had been a little frantic, no doubt about that, but the things she was describing taxed his comprehension.

  Global earthquakes? The sun stopped in its tracks? A 13,000 year old alien satellite? Robots? And worst of all, Felice Carter in the thick of it, all alone.

  He glanced over at Lazarus, seated across the aisle of their chartered plane. The big man, now wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants purchased from a gift shop, had recovered from his wounds, but even though his face was stony and unreadable, Pierce knew he was seething inside. He was angry at a perceived failure to protect the woman he loved.

  That was Lazarus’s curse. He believed it was his responsibility to save everyone.

  Pierce understood. He felt just as helpless and angry.

  The elation and relief they had experienced after escaping from the caves under Arkaim had started to evaporate during the mad dash across the border of Kazakhstan, when Dourado failed to pick up the phone. Pierce’s mood had diminished a little more with each successive attempt, but it had not occurred to him that something might be wrong in Rome, or that the source of the problem would turn out to be a threat of global proportions.

  He was still having trouble wrapping his head around that.

  Worse, Dourado had lost contact with Carter. At last report, Carter, along with tech billionaire Marcus Fallon and a physicist named Ishiro Tanaka, were being chased by an army of actual killer robots intent on preventing them from shutting down the errant Black Knight satellite. Pierce was less clear on the details, but that was some kind of massive electromagnetic mirror, diverting both the sun’s light and heat energy, and its gravitational influence. The threat was difficult to fathom, but the greater mystery—the identity of the enemy who seemed so intent on preventing Fallon from correcting his mistake—was an even more troubling mystery.

  The earthquakes had played havoc with international air traffic control. The skies were being kept clear for relief flights, though Pierce had been assured the restrictions would soon be lifted. Every second they spent stuck on the ground just made him more helpless, but that was nothing compared to what Lazarus was feeling.

  Pierce stared at his phone, wondering if he should call Dourado again, to check if there was any word from Carter. He knew it would be a futile gesture, though. Dourado would call the instant she knew something. Worrying wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

  “I think this is all connected,” Fiona said, breaking the long silence.

  Pierce looked over and saw the young woman staring at the metal orb they had recovered from beneath Arkaim. “It sounds like the Black Knight and this Roswell memory metal are made from the same stuff as that sphere. But what happened had nothing to do with you finding it.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. But that’s not what I mean.”

  Before Pierce could ask her to elaborate on the first statement, Gallo addressed the second. “Your vision. Raven stealing the light.”

  Fiona nodded. “You were wondering why I dreamed that particular story. Maybe the sphere was communicating with the other pieces of memory metal. Maybe it knew what was happening. Or was warning me about what might happen.”

  “Like a prophecy?” Pierce felt about prophecies much the same way he did about magic and miracles. Sure, they happened sometimes, but there was a rational explanation. There had to be.

  “No,” Gallo said, with unexpected certainty. “It was an explanation. This has happened before.”

  Fiona was as surprised as Pierce. “What do you mean?”

  “According to Cintia, the Black Knight is at least 13,000 years old. Its arrival coincides with the dawn of civilization—”

  “Well, that depends on your definition of civilization.”

  She ignored him. “Nearly every civilization on Earth practiced some form of Sun worship. The Sun God was almost always the most important deity to the ancients. And there’s always a story like this. A god stealing the sun or losing control of it somehow. When Fiona told us about Raven, I thought of the Phaethon story.”

  “Phaethon, the son of Apollo?” Fiona asked.

  Gallo nodded. “Technically, it was Helios, not Apollo. Phaethon begged Helios for a chance to drive the sun chariot. That’s the part that reminded me of the Raven story.”

  “But Phaethon lost control of the sun chariot and would have burned up the Earth if Zeus hadn’t killed him with a thunderbolt. That’s almost the opposite of what happened with Raven.”

  “It is,” Gallo said. “But what if the stories are describing the same event? An actual solar crisis, but from different global perspectives?”

  Pierce shook his head. “All these myths came out of stories intended to explain the changing of the seasons and cosmic events, like eclipses, to primitive people who didn’t understand how the universe worked.”

  “That’s the accepted version, of course, but we both know better, George. Those ancient civilizations did understand. They weren’t primitives. T
hey mapped the stars. Built observatories. They knew the Earth was round, no matter what they tell kids in school. They were too sophisticated to need reassurance about the cycle of the seasons or eclipses. Those stories are referencing a universal event. Just like the flood myths.”

  Pierce let that dubious comparison slide. “Let’s say you’re right. Why does it matter?”

  “Because if this has happened before, then it means there’s a way to shut it down.”

  “Felice is already working on that.”

  Gallo wagged her head sideways in a gesture of polite disagreement. “This Fallon fellow is a child playing with matches. We need a fire extinguisher.”

  “Is that what this is?” Fiona held up the orb.

  Gallo glanced at Pierce. “George, what do you think?”

  Pierce rubbed his chin. “I think we can safely say that it might be part of the solution, but that sphere hasn’t seen the light of day—if you’ll pardon the pun—in at least five thousand years. Maybe a lot longer. Maybe not since the time of the Originators.”

  “What happened to them?” Fiona asked. “Who were they? Aliens?”

  “Gods,” Gallo murmured.

  “Quite possibly the inspiration for them,” Pierce admitted.

  “In Greek mythology,” Gallo continued, “the gods were not the embodiment of the forces they represented, but rather masters of those forces. Helios wasn’t the sun personified, but the master of the sun, which took the form of a chariot he drove across the sky. The sun chariot is ubiquitous in Indo-European mythology. The Norse. The Celts. It’s in the Rig Veda. There’s even mention of a divine chariot in the Bible.”

  “I’m familiar with the stories,” Pierce said. “UFO enthusiasts think those are all primitive descriptions of alien spaceships.”

  “What if they are? What if the sun chariot is an Originator spaceship? Maybe the Black Knight is what Fallon thinks it is, an alien device for harnessing and redirecting the sun’s energy. And the sun chariot is the vehicle used for going back and forth to turn it on. That’s what we need to do to fix this. Fly up to the Black Knight and shut it down.”