Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Read online

  The creature continued moving, dragging the hapless man along. Undeterred, he got his feet under him and tried to pull himself up onto the animal’s back, with the intent of mounting it like a horse. But as soon as he touched it, there was a loud crack, like the sound of a ship’s mast snapping in half during a gale. The man was flung away, crashing to the ground in a smoking heap just a few steps away from where the king stood, a distance of fifty paces. For a moment, the air was filled with a sharp smell—the smell of lightning—but it was just as quickly replaced by the odor of burning flesh.

  It is death to approach them, the old man had said. Now the king understood what he had meant by that.

  The other men stared in disbelief at their fallen comrade. Then, almost in unison, they raised their weapons and charged the creature.

  “No!”

  The king’s warning fell on deaf ears. The men closed to within a few paces of the creature and attacked. As the first blow was struck, the world vanished in a flash of light, and he saw no more.

  ONE

  Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia—Present Day

  “This is not what I expected.”

  George Pierce glanced over his shoulder at the young woman seated in the rear of the rented SUV. Fiona Sigler stared out the window at the landscape passing them by, a featureless grassy steppe stretching out to the horizon. “What were you expecting?”

  Fiona turned to meet his gaze and shrugged. “Well, you know… Russia. I thought it would be more…” Another shrug. “Russian.”

  “You do realize,” Pierce said, “that Russia is the largest country on Earth, geographically speaking, with many diverse ecoregions? It’s not all Doctor Zhivago and frozen tundra. I hope they taught you that at that expensive private academy your father sent you to.”

  “Yes, Uncle George,” Fiona said, with more than a little exasperation. “I just didn’t expect it to look so much like Kansas.”

  Pierce smiled. Fiona was not wrong. He knew on an intellectual level that Russia—all six-and-a-half-million square miles of it, fully one-eighth of the Earth’s habitable land—was comprised of a variety of climates and topographical zones. But the world outside the windows of their rented SUV bore little resemblance to his preconceived notion of what they would encounter during their excursion to Chelyabinsk Oblast. In truth, he had not known what to expect, but not anything so dull.

  “Too many hills,” Erik Lazarus murmured from behind the steering wheel. “Kansas is a lot flatter than this.”

  Fiona’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Is that even possible?”

  “Aside from the fact that the road signs are all in Cyrillic,” Lazarus said, “it looks a lot like where I grew up.”

  Pierce hid a smile. He sometimes forgot that the brooding Lazarus, a physically imposing man of few words, had grown up in the US Midwest. Iranian by birth, Lazarus had been adopted as an infant by an American couple—Derek and Ruth Somers—and spent his early years in rural Illinois, though it was his subsequent life experience as a Special Forces operator that seemed to define him.

  Lazarus was right about the terrain, though calling the gentle undulations ‘hills’ was a bit of a stretch. Still, as a trained archaeologist, Pierce knew that even minor variations in the landscape could hide discoveries of monumental importance—especially here.

  The archaeological significance of this particular parcel of Russian real estate had only been recently established. In 1987, Soviet surveyors preparing to flood the area to create a reservoir, to support the local iron mining industry, had discovered ruins thought to be associated with the Sintashta culture. The Bronze Age proto-Indian people had occupied the steppe to the east of the Ural Mountains, possibly as early as 2000 BCE. The site, named Arkaim—the word translated imprecisely to ‘arch’—had been called Russia’s Stonehenge, owing to its circular layout and possible significance as an ancient astronomical observatory. Like Stonehenge, Arkaim had become both a tourist destination, albeit a regional one, and a Mecca for believers in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

  As an archaeologist specializing in the Classical Era, Pierce had only a passing familiarity with the Sintashta culture. In his new role as the Director of the Cerberus Group—the public face of the very secret Herculean Society, an ancient organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the legacy of the man whose life had inspired the legend of immortal Hercules—Pierce had been compelled to take a closer look at Arkaim.

  During the course of a highly classified mission just a few months earlier, an American military special operations unit had discovered the remains of a megalithic city—predating even four thousand-year-old Arkaim—in the Ural Mountains, just a few hundred miles to the north. Contained within that nearly pristine site, was evidence of a prehistoric race of giants known as ‘the Originators.’ Their advanced—and possibly alien—technology had influenced the rise of human civilization, and in the wrong hands, it could just as easily end it.

  The architectural similarity and close proximity of Arkaim suggested that it might also hide Originator artifacts, and that possibility obligated Pierce to take pre-emptive action. If there were Originator artifacts at Arkaim, or even clues hinting at the existence of that ancient and possibly otherworldly race, it was imperative that they not fall into the wrong hands. When technology with the potential to enslave or exterminate the human race was concerned, pretty much any hands were the wrong hands. It was the mission of the Cerberus Group to keep those things secret.

  In his youth, Pierce had dreamed of being Indiana Jones, a dream that had directly fueled his interest in archaeology. But in his role as Director of the Cerberus Group, he was more like the workman from the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, hiding the prize away in a secret warehouse at Area 51, never to be seen again. He hated it, but he also knew that there was a very good reason for it. The upside was that sometimes, like today, he got to be Indiana Jones before he turned into Area 51 guy.

  “The turn-off is coming up,” a disembodied female voice said. “Five hundred yards.”

  “I see it,” Lazarus said, easing off the gas pedal. “Thanks, Cintia.”

  Pierce glanced down at his satellite-enabled smartphone, which rested in a bracket mounted to the dashboard of the vehicle. The screen displayed a real-time GPS map, with their route and destination outlined in blue. But the voice that had issued from the speaker did not belong to an automated system, at least, not in the literal sense. Cintia Dourado was the Director of Technology for the Cerberus Group. She was probably more comfortable interacting with computer networks than she was with actual living humans. However, under her outlandish appearance of dyed hair, tattoos, and facial piercings, along with fashion choices that could only be described as eclectic, the Brazilian-born computer expert was still very human.

  Partly because her job required her to stay close to the computer, but also because she was moderately agoraphobic, Cintia preferred to work from Cerberus Headquarters, beneath Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. That was by no means a limitation, though. If the worldwide computer and satellite network was like an orchestra, then Cintia was the conductor, and together they made beautiful music.

  “No problem,” Cintia replied. “I’m going to get the babelfish online, but if you get lost, you know where to find me.”

  Lazarus turned the vehicle onto a rutted but serviceable dirt road and continued forward at a slower pace.

  “And this is where we leave Kansas behind and head over the rainbow to Oz,” remarked the woman sitting beside Fiona in the back seat. Augustina Gallo was not only a professor of Classical History at the University of Athens—on an indefinite sabbatical to work with the Cerberus Group—but she was also Pierce’s girlfriend. Despite her name and her obvious Mediterranean ethnic heritage, Gallo was as American as a Georgia peach.

  “Flying monkeys, I can deal with” Pierce said. “Russian bureaucrats, on the other hand, may prove a little more daunting.”

  “That’s easy,” Fiona chimed
in. “Just have Erik drop a house on them.”

  Pierce thought he saw a hint of a smile touch Lazarus’s lips.

  Although his acquaintance with Pierce went back more than half a decade, Lazarus, along with his girlfriend, geneticist Felice Carter, had only recently joined forces with Pierce to create the Cerberus Group. Lazarus’s official title was Director of Operations, but in practical terms, he was their protector. Pierce could not imagine anyone better suited to the job. In addition to more than a decade of military service, Lazarus was rhinoceros-strong, focused, and owing to an experimental serum that promoted rapid cellular regeneration, he was damn near indestructible.

  Carter had her own unique…attributes. Several years before, during a research trip to the Great Rift Valley, she had been exposed to a retrovirus containing genetic material from one of humanity’s oldest shared ancestors. Stranger still, through a process known as quantum entanglement, Carter had become a living evolutionary kill-switch. The science of it boggled his mind, but the short version was that her mind and body had become entangled with every other human being on the planet. A hive mother to the human race.

  When faced with an extreme threat, Carter could—without consciously intending to do so—psychically overpower anyone in the immediate area, transforming them into a sort of zombie protector driven to mindlessly defend her. Unfortunately, the effect was permanent. Fortunately, thus far the only people to suffer the effect were the aggressors who had intended her harm, but there was no guarantee that innocent bystanders or even her close friends would be spared if the circumstances were dire enough. And no one knew what would happen if Carter ever suffered a mortal injury. Because distance wasn’t a factor, the effect might be universal.

  It was a dangerous ability, but Carter had dedicated herself to mastering mental discipline techniques, and she was confident of her ability to keep it under control. Still, keeping her out of harm’s way seemed prudent. Since their current mission did not call for her particular skill set, Cerberus’s Chief Scientific Adviser had elected to stay behind so she could continue an ongoing research project of special interest to Pierce.

  The role of Fiona Sigler—she was not literally Pierce’s niece, but might as well have been—in the Cerberus Group was not as well defined as the others. She had an intuitive understanding of language mechanics and was well on her way to completing an undergraduate degree in linguistics with a second major in archaeology. That by itself made her a valuable addition to the team, but it was only the tip of the iceberg where Fiona was concerned. A Native American from a nearly extinct tribe in the Siletz Confederation of the Pacific Northwest, Fiona was the last surviving speaker of a language that was believed to be a direct offshoot of the ‘Mother Tongue,’ an ancient and mysterious form of expression that transcended mere communication.

  It was nothing less than the language of creation.

  In the Kabbalist tradition of Judaism, people like Fiona were called Baalei Shem—Masters of the Word—capable of using this secret, possibly divine language for miraculous purposes. If the stories from the Bible were true, it had been done many times throughout history. There were other possible explanations for the effect, ranging from metaphysics to quantum physics, but the bottom line was that a master of the Mother Tongue could literally change the world with a word.

  Five years earlier, Pierce would have scoffed at the idea, but he had seen far stranger things.

  The Siletz tribal language was not the Mother Tongue, but it was similar enough to give Fiona a foundation upon which to begin reconstructing the lost language. Her grasp of the Mother Tongue and how to use it was improving, but as she was often quick to point out, there was more to it than saying ‘Abracadabra’ or whatever the Mother Tongue equivalent was. There was an intentional aspect to it as well, mind over matter. Thus far, her ‘fluency’ was limited to the creation of golems—crude automata made from earthen materials like loose rock or clay—and to a lesser degree, the ability to change the density of solid rock. She, and anyone in close proximity, could walk through walls. The latter would be a handy trick for investigating subterranean chambers, if she was ever able to perfect the skill.

  If Pierce’s suspicions about Arkaim were correct, she would soon have an opportunity to test herself. Although the site had not been fully explored, it was believed that an elaborate system of tunnels were hidden beneath the partly excavated ruins. Any Originator artifacts that might be on site would be found there.

  A short drive on the dirt road brought them to a grassy meadow with rows of parked vehicles. Just beyond the cars, vans, and minibuses, were a slew of colored tents. A couple dozen people, who looked like a motley representation of Russian society, moved between the parking area and the tent city. Some wore the casual attire of vacationing tourists, but others wore blousy red and saffron robes that made them look more like day-trippers from a Yogic ashram or a Buddhist monastery.

  “Is this an archaeological reserve or a Dead concert?” Gallo asked.

  “Arkaim has a certain counter-culture appeal,” Pierce said. “Think of it as Russia’s Sedona.”

  The comparison was apt. Like Sedona, Arizona, Arkaim was believed—at least by those inclined to believe—to be an anomaly zone, with frequent reports of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. People from all over the region visited the site in hopes of having just such an encounter.

  The odds favored a rational explanation—mass hysteria influenced by the power of suggestion—but there was a remote chance that something else was going on at Arkaim.

  “Best to avoid making eye-contact,” Lazarus said, as he shouldered an over-sized backpack containing their survey gear, along with a couple of items Pierce hoped they wouldn’t need.

  “Cintia, is the babelfish up and running?”

  “I hate that you call it that,” Fiona muttered. “I’m sure it’s like copyright infringement or something.”

  If she overheard the comment, Dourado gave no indication. “Just say the words.”

  The babelfish, named for a fictional creature from a science-fiction novel, was Dourado’s sophisticated instantaneous translation system, instantaneous of course being a relative term. Rather than relying on computer-generated translations, which were awkward and often unreliable, the babelfish employed real human translators, recruited from the vast new labor pool of the modern ‘gig economy’ and networked together by a computer-based voice communication platform.

  While it was not a revolutionary idea, what made the babelfish unique was its security. By employing multiple translators simultaneously and feeding most of them randomly generated alternative phrases, no one translator would ever hear an entire conversation. The person hearing the foreign language and supplying an English interpretation for the field user—Pierce in this case—would not be the same person to translate the reply. Such extreme measures were unnecessary for simple interactions, but intelligence services could extrapolate broad conclusions from irrelevant and fragmentary data supplied by informants and electronic eavesdropping programs. Given the secretive and sometimes dangerous nature of Cerberus Group operations, there was no such thing as too careful.

  Pierce fitted a custom-made Bluetooth device to his ear and recited a test phrase as he got out of the vehicle. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

  There was a momentary pause, and then an electronic approximation of his own voice repeating the phrase, but in Russian, issued from the speaker on his phone. Satisfied with the test, Pierce led the group across the field toward the Arkaim preserve’s entrance.

  The site was intended as an open air museum, where visitors could move about freely. There were a handful of modern structures—trailers and cottages for the archaeologists and other workers—and a small building that housed some of the artifacts discovered at the site that doubled as the administrative center. Pierce headed there first and approached one of the guides, a young man wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with Cyrillic characters.

  The
babelfish also had a visual component for translating text, and a quick glance at the phone’s display informed Pierce that the image on the shirt was the logo of ‘The Museum of Man and Nature.’

  Pierce introduced himself. “My associates and I are representatives of the World Heritage Committee. We’re here to begin the preliminary evaluation of the nomination.”

  It was a cover story, but only partially untrue. Pierce was still a credentialed agent for UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, the international body dedicated to preserving ancient cultures and combating the illegal trade of antiquities. Arkaim had not been nominated for World Heritage preservation status, but it was a plausible fiction, and more than enough to afford them unrestricted access to the site.

  The young man’s look of confusion only deepened when the babelfish device began uttering words in his own language, but as the awkwardness passed he began nodding.

  “Follow me,” Pierce heard, as the young man led them from the building.

  So far, so good.

  The young man led them out across the site, past groups of visitors and toward two structures that resembled Mongolian yurts made out of mud bricks. Although the buildings looked like dwellings preserved from antiquity, they were the most recent additions to the site—replicas of Sintashta houses—and the first step toward a proposed full-scale reproduction of ancient Arkaim. Nearby, a group of young men and women, a few wearing the same T-shirt as their guide, were removing dirt from a shallow trench with garden trowels. Pierce, recalling his own time as an undergrad digging in the dirt, felt a twinge of nostalgia, but his musings were interrupted when a middle-aged man climbed out of the excavation to meet them.

  Pierce repeated the introduction he had used with the young guide but before the translation could be supplied, the man spoke in halting English. “World Heritage Committee? United Nations? I did not know we had been nominated.”