Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Read online

  “Why?” He struggled to his feet, and then jolted forward, throwing open a panel on the large metal cube that dominated the room. He stuck his head in for a moment then just as quickly emerged and slammed the panel shut.

  “It’s gone.”

  “Proof of concept,” Carter muttered. “This whole thing was a setup so Tanaka could steal the Roswell fragment. All he needs to do now is find another transmitter.”

  Fallon still looked confused and helpless. “But…why?”

  “Why else? He wants to destroy the world.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Mount Sinai, Egypt

  Pierce looked away from the fissure, the light burning inside too bright. Green globs floated across his vision, but through them, he could see the mountain slope rising before him, lit up bright as day. It was not from any source of heavenly or artificial illumination, but from below, from the light radiating out from fissures all across the slope.

  The rocky ground nearby erupted in a puff of dust, and a fraction of a second later, the report of a rifle reached Pierce’s ears. He ducked, but he knew that staying put was no longer an option. The gunmen—at least ten of them, maybe more—were ascending the mountain, rushing toward them.

  “Run!” he shouted.

  The unexpected light rising up from the maze of fissures had taken away the cover of darkness, but it also illuminated a path to the top. More shots were fired, the bullets striking all around, some uncomfortably close. But after just a moment or two, the light began to dim, the darkness returning with a vengeance.

  “What now?” Gallo whispered.

  A few more shots echoed across the slope, then those stopped as well. Flashlight beams lanced through the night, playing up the mountainside, searching for them. The gunmen had spread out and were ascending in a picket line, at least to the extent the broken terrain would allow.

  “Back to crawling, I guess.” Pierce wished he had a better suggestion, but until inspiration dawned, keep moving was the best he had.

  “No,” Fiona whispered. “Don’t move.”

  Pierce stopped. “What did you see?”

  “Those things…”

  “What things?” Gallo asked.

  “Didn’t you see them?”

  “I saw,” Pierce whispered back. “I think. I don’t know what I saw… It looked like… I don’t know… Like it was made of pure light.”

  “They’re here. All around us. Do not touch them.”

  Pierce recognized the certainty in her tone. He had heard it before, earlier that day in the passages beneath Arkaim.

  “What are they, Fiona?” Gallo pressed.

  “The sacred cattle of Helios.” Her voice sounded detached. “Not actual cows, but some kind of creatures made of pure energy. I think the Originators made them to store the power they harvested from the sun. Sort of like Energizer golems. Living energy inside a shell made of melted rock. Remember that story Father Justin told us about how the golden calf came out of the fire? I think this is the same thing. They’ve been here this whole time. Sleeping.”

  “What woke them up? The earthquake?”

  “The earthquake or the Black Knight. Maybe I did it, by bringing the sphere here. Or all those things together. We need to stay away from them. They’re dangerous.”

  Pierce recalled the jolt he had felt when Fiona touched the small tree inside the monastery—the actual Burning Bush of biblical fame, if the monk was to be believed. Had Fiona’s touch restored a spark of supernatural life to it, as well?

  He glanced back down the hill and saw that the picket line was less than fifty yards away. “Like we needed one more thing to worry about,” he muttered.

  “If they’re similar to golems,” Gallo said, “Maybe you can control them?”

  There was a brief pause, and when Fiona spoke again, her tone of flat certainty was gone. “I didn’t make them, but…I can try.”

  She lapsed into silence, and Pierce knew better than to disrupt her focus. The line of flashlights continued moving toward them, slowed somewhat by the terrain, but still advancing.

  A shout went up, and then one of the men opened fire.

  Pierce ducked his head, covering it with one arm in a futile attempt to protect himself, but the shooter wasn’t aiming at him.

  Suddenly, the world was filled with light.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It was like staring into the face of the sun. Light filled every pore of Abdul-Ahad’s body. Heat like a cleansing fire, burned through him. The holy mountain had opened up, and an army of strange creatures had come forth, summoned by the evildoers after their escape from the monastery.

  In that instant, he understood why Israfil had sent them here.

  “They are jinn,” he shouted, letting the others know. If they were still alive. He could not see any of them. He could not see anything at all.

  “Jinn?” The shout had come from somewhere off to his left, closer to the source of the brilliant eruption. “How do you know?”

  God is merciful, he thought to himself. I am not alone.

  “Can you see?” he shouted.

  “Not well,” came the reply. “But yes. I was looking away from the flash.”

  “The creatures? Can you see them?”

  “I can see shapes moving on the mountain,” the other man said. “Are you certain that they are jinn?

  Although he did not possess even a fraction of Israfil’s wisdom, Abdul-Ahad had spent many years immersing himself in the writings of the Prophet—peace be upon him—and the greater abundance of unwritten traditions. He knew the creatures had to be jinn, beings of smokeless fire, rather than malak—angels, beings of pure light—because malak, unlike both humans and jinn, did not have free will. Jinn could choose between good or evil. They could also be enslaved, bound in earthen vessels, just as Solomon had once done, binding the creatures in oil lamps, compelling them to guard his Temple. That was what the three enemies were attempting to do—binding the jinn in earthly shells, to send them forth to destroy the faithful.

  He didn’t know how to explain all of this to his brothers, but he did know what had to be done. “Shoot the creatures,” he shouted. “Unleash the jinn. Let holy fire consume the enemies of God!”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Despite the fact that he was face down and covered up, Pierce was compelled to squeeze his eyes shut against the painful brilliance. The light was like a physical force, buffeting his entire body with incandescent radiant energy. It was, he imagined, like the flash of an atomic bomb. He could feel the exposed skin of his hands grow hot, and then cold. He heard Gallo cry out—in pain or alarm—but her wail was nothing compared to the screams from the gunmen.

  The screams faded after a moment, as did the light. Pierce raised his head, but all he could see was a green haze. The still-cool night air was crisp with the smell of ozone. “Gus? Fi?”

  “I’m okay,” Gallo said. “Can’t see a blessed thing, but I think it will pass.”

  “I’m all right,” Fiona said. She paused a beat, then added. “They shot one. That was a bad idea.”

  “I guess so,” Pierce said, blinking and willing his sight to return. There was no pain, and that seemed like a good thing. He had never experienced flash-blindness before, but he had heard stories of the intense, lingering pain of exposure to intense light. Even so, navigating the mountain at night without a flashlight had just gone from being difficult to impossible. It would be at least an hour or more before his eyes readjusted to the darkness. Still, if the light had been bright enough to do that to him, and he had been looking in the opposite direction, the gunmen were surely blinded.

  He flipped on his head lamp. The green fog was still there, slowly receding from the periphery of his vision, but through it he could make out Gallo and Fiona, lying flat, shading their eyes. Beyond them, the torn landscape, and at the edge of his headlamp’s light, he saw something else.

  “Holy shit,” he muttered.

  It looked nothing like a cow, or any
other kind of animal, and yet he could see how an ancient poet, grasping for the words to describe it, might have made such a comparison. A large, bulbous body, was perched atop what might have been legs, and spiraling protrusions that, without too much imagination, could be compared to the long horns of an ox or water buffalo. However, as Fiona had suggested, the creature looked more like a golem—a rough approximation of life—than like an actual living thing.

  He tore his eyes away from it and shone the light down the slope. The gunmen were still there, though there were fewer of them. All of them were clutching their eyes, and groping about in the unique pantomime of men recently struck blind. After a few seconds however, the man furthest out swung his rifle in Pierce’s general direction.

  “Time to go,” Pierce shouted.

  He grabbed Gallo with one hand, Fiona with the other, and was just starting to move when the shot was fired. The round sailed past them. The man had probably seen nothing more than a bright blur, but that was enough to give him an aim-point. Pierce didn’t dare turn his headlamp off. Darkness, and what they might blunder into, was now the greater danger.

  As they reached the nearest fissure, the fusillade began in earnest. Puffs of dust erupted all across the mountain. The surviving gunmen were firing blind, trusting in an overwhelming volume of lead to make up for their blindness. Eventually, they would hit someone.

  Or something, he thought, and then he made a mental note to come up with a better name for the light creatures. Anything but cows.

  As they skirted the edge of the fissure, Pierce spotted the creature again, meandering along the far side, eight-feet tall and half again as long. It resembled nothing less than a behemoth made of shifting sand. Pierce could feel its energy, like invisible feathers of static electricity brushing his face.

  Too close, he thought, adjusting course to give it a wide berth. But he knew that if a random bullet struck the creature, piercing its shell, they would probably all be vaporized.

  As if to underscore that threat, another flash lit up the mountain.

  The source of it was behind them, well out of their line of sight, but Pierce felt his entire body glow red for an instant. The light revealed a path through the maze, but as it faded, night blindness returned with a vengeance.

  “Can either of you see?”

  Fi replied first. “Not much.”

  Gallo’s admission was even more succinct. “Nope.”

  “Okay. Looks like it’s going to be the blind leading the blind.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember how the world had looked in that instant of brilliance. Fortunately, the flash had given them another reprieve from the shooting, but how long it would last was anyone’s guess. “Single file behind me. Gus, hang on to me. Fi, you hang on to her.”

  They started forward again, with Pierce counting the steps to the end of the fissure, and then taking a few more just in case, before starting upslope. If he remembered correctly, there was one more fissure ahead, thirty or forty yards—which is it, Pierce? It matters!—and then just a very steep climb to the top.

  Something brushed against his face, the touch softer than a breath, and he froze. The sensation lingered. His skin began to tingle, like tiny insects crawling across his face.

  Gallo felt it, too. “Stop. We’re too close to one of those things.”

  Pierce turned his head back and forth, trying to see around the haze. He knew the creature was somewhere close, no more than ten feet, but try as he might, he couldn’t pinpoint its location. “Back up. We’ll circle wide, give him lots of room.”

  “Wait,” Fiona said. “Let me try.”

  She began chanting, her voice so soft that it sounded more like faint musical notes than words. After a few seconds, the tingling stopped. After a few more, she stopped singing. “Okay. Follow me. But keep your eyes shut. I think it’s going to get pretty bright.”

  The chain reversed, with Gallo now pulling Pierce along, as Fiona took the lead. Pierce squeezed his eyes closed, taking Fiona’s admonition seriously, but the warning also triggered a memory planted in his head since childhood.

  “Shekinah,” he whispered. “I know what they are.”

  “Trying to concentrate here, Uncle George.”

  Pierce held his tongue and followed along in silence. He climbed with careful, deliberate steps, turning when Gallo squeezed his hand, signaling a change of direction, but his mind was in another place, another time, pondering the nature of the strange light creatures.

  “We have to climb,” Fiona said. “But whatever you do, don’t look back.”

  Pierce opened his eyes and felt a measure of relief at his ability to see anything at all. There were still a few dark blobs, but he could make out a nearly vertical cliff face. The base of the cliff was strewn with boulders and debris, some pieces worn smooth by centuries of weather, others jagged and sharp, cleaved off from the wall during the recent earthquakes. The fractures formed a natural yet irregular staircase leading up the cliff. High above, a shadowy depression marked the location of a cleft in the rock, perhaps the entrance to the Cave of Moses.

  Fiona, still in the lead, scrambled up the staircase and plunged into the cleft. Pierce envied her youthful agility, but then Gallo, who was only a couple of years younger than he was, ascended almost as nimbly. Pierce gritted his teeth, reached down into his reserves, and started up the wall.

  Another wave of gunfire erupted in the distance, dashing Pierce’s hope that the gunmen were all dead or otherwise incapacitated. It seemed impossible that the three of them had been spotted, and the absence of any nearby impacts suggested the gunmen weren’t even trying to hit them.

  Then what are they shooting at?

  The answer, as unbelievable as it was obvious, gave him the impetus to reach the mouth of the cave an instant before one of the bullets found its mark, releasing a brilliant eruption of cleansing light.

  The angle of the cave opening protected the three huddled figures within from full exposure, but the flash revealed the interior of the small cleft, a space large enough to hold them all.

  What Pierce saw in that instant made him forget about the gunmen’s suicidal actions.

  He raised his head, shining his headlamp into the depths of the recess. The LED flashlight was a mere candle flame compared to the brilliance released with the light creatures’ destruction, but it was enough.

  The walls of the cave were covered in strange symbols.

  They weren’t Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the later hieratic alphabet, or any other form of writing Pierce recognized. He wasn’t even sure it was writing. The symbols might have been intended as decorations. Many of them were illegible, worn down by the passage of time, scrubbed away by the action of wind and sand swirling into the little recess. He doubted it would ever be possible to reconstruct the message. But the symbols were not what had caught his eye. A larger relief had been carved into the rock on the back wall.

  From a distance, it appeared to be a representation of the sun, a circle with lines radiating from its underside, but there was something inside the circle, a pair of humanoid figures that looked like kneeling angels, facing each other, heads bowed and wings extended toward one another.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered. “We got it all wrong. We don’t need to find the sun chariot.”

  He turned to the others, giddy with an excitement he had not felt since he was a child, leaving a movie theater, dreaming of the adventures he would have as an archaeologist.

  “We have to find the lost Ark.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Mount Sinai, Egypt

  They couldn’t stay. That much was obvious.

  Five minutes had passed since the last burst of light, and there had been no more shooting. Pierce was pretty sure the gunmen were either dead—flash-cooked—or blinded to the point of incapacitation. Either way, they were a secondary concern. Priority One was getting out of the cave and off the mountain, while attracting as little attention as possible.

  Fiona presented
an additional compelling reason for a hasty exit. “I think the cows—”

  “Shekinah,” Pierce said.

  “Whatevs. I think they’re attracted to the orb. I mean like a magnetic attraction. I tried to use it to shoo them away, but as long as we’re here, they’re going to stick around.”

  “And if we leave?” Gallo asked. “Will they follow us to the ends of the Earth, or just keep wandering around killing anyone who looks at them cross-eyed?”

  Fiona returned a helpless shrug.

  “If they are what I think they are,” Pierce said. “They’ll return to a dormant state as soon as we’re out of here.”

  “Shekinah,” Gallo murmured. “The glory of God. According to kabbalists, it’s the feminine expression of God’s divinity. And cows are female.”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not what I mean. Fiona is right. The creatures are some kind of mobile energy storage vessels for the Originators. When they left…or died out…the creatures went into sleep mode, until Moses showed up and found some kind of control device left behind by the Originators. Probably something made out of memory metal like the orb. Maybe it’s what inspired the legend of the sun chariot. While Moses held onto it, he could control the shekinahs. Use them to do stuff that must have seemed like the power of God.”

  “The Plagues,” Gallo supplied. “And parting the Red Sea. That’s more than a little blasphemous. And it doesn’t consider the possibility that maybe the Originators didn’t create any of this. Maybe they simply found it first.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “How’s the saying go? God works in mysterious ways.” She smiled, knowing the statement would irk him, and then added. “Is anything about all this likely?”

  Pierce conceded the point with a subtle nod. “But I’m going to run with my theory until proven wrong. Now, the ninth plague was three days—seventy-two straight hours—of total darkness, which the Egyptians would have seen as a direct attack against Ra, the sun god.”