Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Page 13

  “Fly up? In an ancient alien spacecraft?” Pierce sighed. It was outlandish, but outlandish was par for the Herculean Society’s course. “Assuming it’s possible, in the story, Phaethon lost control of the chariot and nearly destroyed the Earth.” He looked at Fiona. “Raven was scorched by the sun. That’s why his feathers are black. Approaching it could make things worse.”

  Gallo pointed to the orb. “It’s alien technology. Has to be. And it responds to Fiona. To the Mother Tongue. There aren’t a lot of other options.”

  George gave a nod. She was right about that. “But we’ll have to find the chariot first.”

  “And Felice.” Lazarus spoke quietly but his tone was as hard as a diamond.

  Pierce nodded. “We know Fallon’s experiments caused this. That’s where we have to focus our efforts. But Erik, you go after Felice.”

  “You’re sure?” Lazarus looked surprised. He’d overcome the PTSD caused by drowning hundreds of times in a row while clawing his way out of a lake. He was back to full fighting strength now, physically and mentally, and for him, the mission always came first. But even a seasoned fighter like Lazarus could be undone by worry for a loved one. For him to bring his full force to bear, he first had to find Felice, whose presence and expertise would also be beneficial.

  “I’m sure,” Pierce said. “Go find her, and when you’re done you can both help us save the world.”

  SIXTEEN

  Gallo felt a flush of guilt. “I didn’t mean…”

  Pierce waved her off. “Don’t worry about it. We’d just be in his way.” He took out his phone and tapped the screen twice, once to place the call, and once more to put the phone on speaker.

  Dourado picked up on the first ring. “Still no word,” she said.

  “About our flight, or from Felice?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Change of plans. Erik is going to Geneva to help Felice. If he asks, and he probably won’t, give him whatever help he needs with travel arrangements.”

  “Just Erik? What about the rest of you?”

  Pierce looked over at Gallo. “Gus, where do we start?”

  Gallo was at a loss, feeling put on the spot, but Fiona jumped in. “Cintia, we need to find the chariot of Helios, the Sun god.”

  “Oh. Let me Google it.”

  Gallo wasn’t sure if Dourado was joking or not, but the brief exchange helped her organize her thoughts. “What we’re looking for is a real world connection to Helios. Temples. Specific locations mentioned in the myth that correspond to real locations. I’d look it up myself…”

  “I understand.” There was a slight pause. “Okay, the most significant ancient site associated with the worship of Helios is the island of Rhodes, just south of Turkey.”

  “Of course,” Gallo murmured. “The Colossus.”

  “The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was dedicated to Helios. There’s a whole file on it in the Herculean archives.”

  “We can save that for another day,” Pierce said.

  “The Dorians brought Helios worship to Rhodes, probably from Corinth on the Greek mainland. There was a small temple to Helios there, but he was never very important to the Greeks. The only other place associated with Helios is Thrinakia.”

  Gallo nodded. “From the Odyssey. After escaping Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus landed on the island of Thrinakia, where Helios’s daughter Lampetia tended his sacred cattle and sheep. Odysseus was warned to avoid the island, and especially the herds, but his men were hungry and killed some of the cattle. Helios demanded retribution. He threatened to stop the sun from shining on the Earth if the mortals weren’t punished, so Zeus sent a thunderbolt to destroy them. Odysseus survived but was exiled to Ogygia, the island of Calypso, for seven more years.”

  “Stop the sun from shining,” Pierce mused. “Sounds like he was threatening to cause a solar event.”

  “Why does a Sun God need sacred cows?” Fiona asked, shaking her head. “And people think Native American stories are weird.”

  Gallo gave her a thoughtful look. “That’s an excellent question.”

  “It is?”

  “If experience has taught us anything, it’s that, while there is more than a little truth in the old myths, we have to be careful about taking everything at face value.”

  “Right. Chariot equals spaceship.” Fiona shrugged. “And sacred cows equal what?”

  She meant it as a joke, but as she said it, her eyes got a faraway look. “A chariot is pulled by horses…a power source. There’s a logic to the symbolism.

  “Helios had cattle and sheep, right? Cattle for meat, sheep for wool. If we accept that Helios was an alien…an Originator…maybe he was the guy in charge of solar power. What would he need that would correspond to meat and…” She looked down at the orb again, squeezing the springy metal. “Wool?”

  “I’ll be damned,” Pierce muttered. “I think you’re onto something. I’ll bet if we take that thing to Thrinakia, you’ll be able to use it like a compass to find the chariot.”

  “Unfortunately,” Gallo said, “like so many other locations from the Odyssey and the Heraklion, we don’t know where it was, or even if it was. Ancient geographers thought it might have been Sicily, or Malta. But they were just guessing, and obviously they had no idea that there was a world beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

  Pierce nodded. “Cintia…”

  “Let me guess,” Dourado said. “You need me to cross reference all locations in the Odyssey with actual known locations and create a computer simulation of the actual route Odysseus traveled. Already on it.”

  “Actually I… You know what, never mind. I like your idea better.”

  “According to Homer, Odysseus and his crew arrived at Thrinakia after passing Scylla, a six-headed sea monster, and Charybdis, a giant whirlpool that’s often associated with the Strait of Messina, between Italy and Sicily. That’s the main reason why Sicily is often identified as Thrinakia. Before that, they were on the island of Circe, the sorceress—also a daughter of Helios. Circe told Odysseus that there were two routes back to his home, the Kingdom of Ithaca. The route he chose took him to Thrinakia, but the other route would have taken him through the Wandering Rocks, the same rocks that almost destroyed the Argo. Traditionally, the Wandering Rocks are associated with the Bosporus Strait, the passage between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. So if Odysseus had to pass through the Wandering Rocks to get back home, that would put Circe’s island in the Black Sea. Nowhere near Sicily.”

  “Not to mention the fact that the Bosporus is the only water route out of the Black Sea,” Pierce put in. “There isn’t another, so Circe couldn’t have offered Odysseus a choice.”

  Gallo shook her head. “There’s no way to make the geography described in the Odyssey fit the map unless we reject all our preconceptions about where Odysseus, or the person who inspired him, actually traveled.”

  “Too bad Alexander’s not around anymore,” Pierce muttered. “He’d probably know exactly where it is.”

  Alexander Diotrephes, was one of many names used by the immortal explorer who had inspired the legend of the demigod Herakles, or as the Romans called him, Hercules. Alexander—Hercules—had not actually been the son of the god Zeus, but in a way, he had descended from the heavens, or more precisely, from an alternate dimension. After an extended stay on Earth—several thousand years of walking among humans—he had recently returned home. He had formed the Herculean Society to preserve his legendary legacy and to protect humankind from dangerous truths about the universe. Before leaving he had entrusted its care to Fiona’s father, Jack Sigler. He had, in turn, appointed his good friend George Pierce to oversee day-to-day operations under the auspices of the Cerberus Group.

  While many of the stories about Hercules were exaggerations, the product of multiple retellings over the course of the centuries, there was more than a grain of truth in all of them, a fact they had discovered a few months ea
rlier when retracing the legendary Labors of Hercules. Gallo had been astonished by the revelation that Hercules’s travels had taken him well beyond the limits of the then-known world.

  Inspiration hit like a lightning bolt. “He did know!” She sat up a little straighter. “It’s in the Heracleia. Look in the Cerberus archives, Cintia. You should find scans of it.”

  The Heracleia was an epic poem about Hercules, believed to have been written by Homer—the very same poet to whom the Odyssey was attributed. There was only one physical copy of the poem, written on leaves of papyrus, and locked away in a hermetically sealed vault at Cerberus headquarters in Rome, but there was also a virtual version Gallo had studied.

  “Okay, I’ve got the scans,” Dourado said. “But it’s all in Greek.”

  Gallo had done a full translation of the poem and knew that her notes were somewhere at Cerberus HQ, but there was no time to send Dourado on a scavenger hunt. “Send me the files. I know what to look for.”

  She picked up the phone and began scrolling through the images. It was like picking up a treasured book from childhood. The more she read, the more she remembered of her initial translation.

  “Here,” she announced after almost twenty minutes of reading. “In this passage, Herakles is talking about an encounter with a goddess ‘whom the Egyptians call Hecate.’ She tried to seduce him to steal the secret of his long life, and when that didn’t work, she tried to trick him into stealing one of the undying beasts who graze ‘upon the slopes of the mountain where no mortal dares to go, across the sea in the land of the sun’s rising.’”

  Pierce nodded. “Okay, that does sound familiar. Hecate is the goddess of sorcery and witchcraft. That could be another name for Circe. Undying beasts could be the cattle of Helios and ‘the land of the sun’s rising’ could be describing Thrinakia.”

  Gallo nodded. “Hecate is Greek, not Egyptian, but the Egyptians did worship a goddess named Heqet, a fertility goddess and a symbol of the Nile during flood season.”

  “Now you’re losing me.”

  “This makes sense, George. Cows were sacred animals in Egypt long before there was any kind of civilization in the Greek isles. In Egyptian mythology, the symbol of the goddess Hathor was the horns of a cow holding the sun. Hathor was either the daughter, wife, mother, or female personification of Ra, the sun god.

  “Homer was guilty of getting things mixed up, especially when it came to geography. He probably did it intentionally. But maybe he let something slip here when he mentioned the Egyptians. Maybe the land of Circe is actually somewhere along the Nile, in Egypt. Thrinakia, the land of the sun’s rising, where the sacred cattle are kept, lies across the sea, to the east.”

  “Which is it? From Egypt, you have to go north to get to the sea, not east.”

  “The Mediterranean is north,” Gallo said with a grin. “But the Red Sea is due east.”

  Pierce rubbed his chin. “The Red Sea, huh?”

  “It’s not as crazy as it sounds. The Egyptians dug canals connecting the Nile to the Red Sea going back as far as the nineteenth century BCE. Odysseus would have known about that route. According to the poem, after the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men raided a city called Ismaros, in the land of the Cicones. Now supposedly, that’s one of the fixed geographical points, but remember that the events described in these poems took place before the Greek Dark Ages. A lot of places all around the Mediterranean took their names from locations mentioned in the stories, rather than the other way around. So the people that Homer calls Cicones could be almost anyone.”

  “Sort of like the way Native Americans are called Indians,” Fiona said. “Because Columbus thought he had landed in India.”

  Gallo nodded. “Sort of like that. Some historians have speculated that the city Odysseus called Ismaros was actually Lothal, on the Indian peninsula. It was one of the richest port cities in the ancient world. Odysseus almost certainly would have known about it and he might have considered it a worthwhile prize, especially after the other kings divided up the wealth of Troy.

  “After the raid on Ismaros, the poem says he was blown off course and spent the next ten years trying to find his way back home, which when you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense, if he’s in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea.”

  “Okay,” Pierce said. “For argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. The land of Circe, a.k.a. Heqet, is Egypt. Where’s Thrinakia?”

  “It would also have to be a place with very little flora or fauna; otherwise, Odysseus’s men would not have had to kill Helios’s cattle. So a desert, and there’s a lot of desert on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. Thrinakia is also described as a triangular island. In fact, the word translates as ‘three corners.’ There are some small islands in the Red Sea, but nothing with a mountain. However, a primitive sailor might not be able to distinguish a small peninsula from a large island.”

  “Sounds as if you’ve already got a place in mind.”

  “I do. A triangle of land, mostly desert, with a mountain that’s considered sacred even today. Thrinakia is the Sinai Peninsula.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Geneva, Switzerland

  It took a few seconds for Carter to realize that the car had stopped rolling, and another few for her to recognize that she was upright.

  Unhurt? That was debatable.

  She looked over and saw Fallon, dazed but also uninjured.

  “Hey!” she said. “Still with me?”

  He mumbled something incoherent.

  She tried the door, but it was jammed shut, so she wriggled through the hole where the side window had been. The Aston Martin had come to rest on a grassy patch alongside the road. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, but no one approached. Carter heard sirens in the distance, then a different noise, a high-pitched whine, growing louder.

  It was another Stork drone, flying over the road, heading right for them.

  She stuck her head inside the car. “Come on. We need to go.”

  “Go?” Tanaka asked, as he crawled from the back seat, still clutching his tablet computer. “Go where?”

  “Does it matter?” She pointed to the tablet. “Leave that.”

  He held it closer, as if fearful that she might try to take it away from him. “I need it to access the satellite.”

  “The hacker is using it to track us.” She glanced up at the incoming drone. It wasn’t moving very fast, but it would be on them in a few seconds. “That’s the only reason he didn’t shut you out completely. No electronics.” She tossed her phone aside. “Either leave it behind or stay here with it.”

  “She’s right, Ishiro.” Fallon had extricated himself on the opposite side and was circling around the wreck. “We’ll get a clean computer. Leave it.”

  Tanaka scowled, but threw the tablet through the open window, into the car, without further protest.

  Carter spun on her heel—a mistake, as the abrupt movement sent a throb of pain through her upper torso—and then she ran for the tree line. Fallon and Tanaka followed close behind. As expected, the drone appeared to be homing in on the car or something in it, and just before the three fleeing figures ducked into the woods, the flying robot slammed into the car behind them.

  The trees marked the boundary of an urban park, with paths and trails, allowing them to slow to a more discreet walking pace. Carter recognized the place as the Conservatory and Botanical Gardens of Geneva, a repository of rare plant species from all over the world. It was the sort of place in which she might have lost herself under better circumstances, both as a biologist and as a tourist. Unfortunately, there was no time to enjoy the beautiful surroundings. While there was no sign of further pursuit from rogue machines, Carter knew it was only a matter of time before the local authorities started looking for the trio who had fled the accident’s scene. No doubt at least a few of the witnesses had captured their likenesses on video.

  “We need to keep moving,” she said.

  “And go where?” Fallon shot back.<
br />
  “You mentioned a radio telescope in France. If we could get there, we could build a new transmitter and shut the Black Knight down, right?”

  Tanaka shook his head. “We may have only a few hours before another solar event begins. I don’t see how we could get there in time.”

  “It might as well be on the moon,” Fallon added. “Tomorrowland is still our best chance. We need to regain control of the network.”

  Carter sighed. “All right. I might be able to help with that.”

  She found a pay phone outside the small restaurant at the center of the park, and placed a collect call to Cerberus Group headquarters.

  A few seconds later, she heard Dourado’s overjoyed voice. “Thank God, you’re safe.”

  “I’m not sure ‘safe’ is the right word.”

  “Just hang on. Erik is on his way to meet you.”

  “Erik?” Carter’s heart skipped a beat. “You’ve heard from them?”

  As Dourado brought her up to date, Carter felt some of her anxiety about the situation slipping away. She wasn’t alone anymore. Her friends were safe, and Lazarus was on his way to help her, while the rest of the team was headed to the Sinai Peninsula.

  She wasn’t sure what to make of their working theory about the sun chariot of Helios. That it sounded crazy didn’t faze her. She had seen a lot of crazy things, particularly since coming to work for the Cerberus Group. As she saw it, the real problem was time. Finding the sun chariot, if it still existed at all, might take days. Weeks, even. If Tanaka was right, they might have only hours.

  “Erik just left Istanbul,” Dourado went on. “He should be there soon. I’ll arrange a safe house and hire a car to pick you up.”

  “Cintia, that’s great, but right now, there’s not a whole lot Erik can do to help.” She hated saying it, but it was true. There wasn’t anyone she’d rather have by her side against a human foe, or even a mutant hybrid monster, but his physical strength wouldn’t be much use against robots and hijacked computer networks.