Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Read online

  All the dots on the map were red.

  “That’s not…” She glanced at Dourado. “Is that right? All those quakes happened at the same time?”

  The other woman didn’t reply, but continued to stare at the map, eyes wide in horrified disbelief.

  Carter gave the map a second look. There were several red dots, many of them overlapping, up and down the Italian peninsula. They ranged from small to moderate in size, which Carter supposed was a good thing. There were a few very large red dots scattered around the globe, mostly along the Pacific Rim, but by far the largest concentration of quakes was in an area comprising Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and all of Europe, as far east as the Urals.

  Carter let out a gasp as the significance of that hit her. Now she understood Dourado’s concern. A medium-sized red dot covered the border region of Russia and Kazakhstan—the area where the Cerberus team was operating.

  Underground.

  “I’m sure they’re alright.” The platitude sounded hollow in her own ears. She swallowed, feeling helpless, and turned back to the map. “Did all these earthquakes really happen at the same time?”

  Dourado tapped a few keys, opening a sidebar next to the map. There was a list of quakes, with detailed information about the location, depth, magnitude, and time of occurrence, and while the screen only showed the first ten or so quakes, one commonality was apparent.

  Every single quake had occurred at almost the same time: 1000 hours UTC.

  As if reading Carter’s mind, Dourado brought up several different news feeds from all over the world on different screens. The BBC newsroom was in chaotic disarray, the anchors apologizing for the lack of information and admitting that they were unsure if their broadcast was even hitting the airwaves. The American 24-hour news networks seemed to have a better handle on the situation, with bold graphics and screen crawls repeating what little they knew. Reports were still coming in. Most of the quakes, including the one that had rocked Rome, were minor—5.1 magnitude or less. Enough to break a few windows and crack the sidewalks, but not enough to cause major structural damage. Less developed areas in North Africa and the Middle East, where building codes were lax if they existed at all, had not fared as well. Some places had suffered extensive damage. The number of casualties was unknown, but estimates ran to seven figures. The one clear message they were sending out confirmed what Carter had surmised from the USGS map. The quakes, hundreds of them, had occurred simultaneously, and that was indeed remarkable.

  A bleach-blonde anchor on CNN asked her guest, a seismologist, about it.

  “It is unusual, Ashley,” the man replied. “Large earthquakes can be felt around the world. The magnitude nine Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004 caused the whole planet to vibrate.”

  “But that was just one quake,” Blonde Ashley said.

  “Right. We’re breaking new ground with this one…if you’ll pardon the pun. This wasn’t a domino effect, with one quake triggering others. These were simultaneous earthquakes, and that’s something we can’t explain.”

  Carter had heard enough. She turned to Dourado and made a cutting gesture, a signal to mute the audio. “We need to look into this.”

  The other woman returned a blank look. “Our people might be in trouble. That’s the only thing that matters right now.”

  “And what are we supposed to do to help them?” Carter shot back.

  “What are we supposed to do about that?” Dourado asked, pointing at the screens. “It’s terrible, but natural disasters aren’t our job.” She winced, as if regretting the comment. “I suppose we could coordinate with the Red Cross, but—”

  “Is it?” Carter asked. “A natural disaster, I mean?”

  Dourado’s expression changed to reflect confusion. “What else could it be? You don’t think…” She trailed off as if unable to even speculate about Carter’s thought process.

  “You heard what he said. Simultaneous earthquakes don’t happen. Not naturally. This is something else.”

  “What?”

  “A new weapon. Some kind of earthquake machine. Runaway fracking. I don’t know. But we need to find out.”

  Dourado gasped and whispered something to herself. She swung her attention back to the screens and began entering information. After a few seconds, a list of search results for ‘earthquake machine’ appeared on one of the screens. One particular term stood out to Carter. “HAARP?”

  “It stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It’s a U.S. military research facility in Alaska, supposedly built to study the ionosphere for the purpose of improving radio communications.”

  “Supposedly,” Carter echoed. “What was the real purpose?”

  “Well, if you believe the conspiracy theorists, they were trying to build a weapon that could create extreme weather, control people’s minds, set the atmosphere on fire, or…” She allowed a dramatic pause. “Cause earthquakes.”

  Carter chose her next question carefully. “Is that what you think it is?”

  “I believe that powerful people would like to be able to do those things, and that the U.S. government could probably do some of it if they wanted to.”

  Carter couldn’t disagree with the latter sentiment, but that didn’t mean she was ready to get fitted for a tin-foil top hat. “I’ll take a look at it. Can you send these to my tablet?”

  Her tablet was back in her lab, which was still trashed. She wondered again at the overall wisdom of staying underground, but then decided that Dourado was right. Cerberus HQ was the place they needed to be.

  “On second thought, I’ll just work on it here, if that’s okay with you.”

  The other woman appeared somewhat discomfited at the prospect of sharing a workspace, so Carter added, “If there are any aftershocks, we may need to evacuate. Probably best that we stay together. And I want to be here if…when…you make contact with the team.”

  Dourado gave an unenthusiastic shrug. “I guess you’re right.” Her gaze flickered to a news broadcast and then her eyes went wide. Carter turned and saw a message displayed in bold graphics: ‘Sun Stands Still?’

  Dourado restored the audio.

  “…unconfirmed reports from observers that the sunrise on the East Coast was late.” The anchor drew out the last word for emphasis. “By at least a full minute. John, is that even possible?”

  The guest commentator shook his head. “Ashley, sunrise and sunset times vary from place to place because of the Earth’s curvature, so it’s not unusual for there to be disagreement between the time when the Internet says the sun should rise in a given place, and when you actually see it happen.”

  “But John, these reports are coming from observatories up and down the East Coast. They’re saying that the sunrise was late. Now, we all know that it’s the Earth that moves, not the sun—”

  “Most of us,” the seismologist said with a nervous laugh. “There are still a few Flat-Earthers out there.”

  Ashley pressed on undaunted. “People are asking, is there some connection to these earthquakes? Did the Earth stop moving?”

  John shook his head. “No, Ashley. That’s just not possible. Look, people are freaked out right now. I get it. This is nothing more than a misinterpretation of the data. I promise you, there’s a rational, perfectly boring explanation for this.”

  Carter wasn’t so sure. She turned back to Dourado. “Something’s going on. Something big, and we need to figure out what it is before it happens again.”

  FOUR

  Arkaim, Russia

  Lazarus hunched his shoulders forward, sheltering Fiona from the debris raining down, and hurried down the passage, trying to outrun the collapse. Fist-sized chunks pelted him with increasing frequency. Each impact felt like a sledgehammer pounding his body. He took no comfort in the fact of his own invincibility. If a larger chunk came down on them, putting himself between it and Fiona would make little difference to her.

  “Look out!”

  Lazarus glanced back in resp
onse to Fiona’s shout. Through the haze of headlamp-lit swirling dust, he could see the ceiling coming down like a gigantic flyswatter.

  He turned his eyes forward again and realized that the collapsing section stretched out ahead of them, well past Pierce and Gallo, who were a few steps ahead of them.

  He ground his teeth together and braced himself.

  Maybe it wasn’t as heavy as it looked.

  Maybe he could buy Fiona the fraction of a second needed to get out in front of the cave in.

  Probably not.

  More chunks of stone rumbled to the ground all around them, bouncing like rubber balls…

  No, not bouncing. Rising.

  It was as if the world had turned upside down. The cascade of debris reversed direction, falling up instead of down, coming together, coalescing into…

  He looked down at the girl in his arms. Fiona’s lips were moving, speaking ancient and powerful words.

  A tall figure, like an enormous statue, materialized from the gloom, hands raised to catch the falling slab. Lazarus ran past without slowing, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw the golem compressed like a gigantic spring under the weight of the collapsing ceiling.

  A loud grinding noise chased after them, then the boom of an explosion. Another blast of wind buffeted him, pelting him with stones and filling the passage with choking dust, but the thing he dreaded most did not occur.

  Fiona’s golem had saved them.

  Blinded by the debris cloud, Lazarus skidded to a complete stop. The ground was no longer shaking underfoot, and the cave-in appeared to have stopped, leaving the passage quiet.

  “I think it’s over,” Fiona whispered.

  Lazarus nodded. “Good job back there.”

  She started to say something then broke into a coughing fit.

  “Cover your mouth,” he advised. “Don’t breathe this shit in.” He peered into the haze and saw a faint glow ahead. “Pierce! Sound off!”

  Pierce’s voice, faint and broken by spasms of coughing, reached out to him. “We’re okay.”

  Lazarus set Fiona on her feet and then guided her forward through the settling dust until they reached Pierce and Gallo.

  “It wasn’t me,” Fiona croaked. “I didn’t cause this.”

  “I know, Fi.” Pierce gave her shoulder a pat, but Lazarus detected a note of uncertainty in his tone. Something had caused the cave-in, and the timing of it was an uncomfortable coincidence. “All the same,” he added, “Let’s…ah, watch what we say down here.”

  Fiona frowned but nodded her assent.

  “How far down do you think we are?” Gallo asked.

  “I’d say we only moved about fifty yards…” Pierce glanced at Lazarus for confirmation.

  “Fifty max,” Lazarus said. “Maybe less.”

  “Given the slope of the passage, I’d say we’re thirty feet down.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad when you say it like that,” Gallo remarked. “I suppose we’re going to have to burrow our way out like gophers.”

  “If we have to,” Pierce said. He surveyed the area. The dust was settling, revealing a rubble-strewn passage that continued deeper into the earth. “Since we’re here, we might as well take a look around. Maybe there’s a back door.”

  Gallo raised a dubious eyebrow. “You ever heard the saying: ‘If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging’?”

  “Will Rogers.” Pierce managed a grin. “But I’m an archaeologist, Gus. ‘Dig deeper’ is always the right answer.”

  Gallo rolled her eyes, then turned to Fiona. “Fi, honey, you said this passage spoke to you. What did you mean?”

  “It was like a…gut feeling. I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “How about now?”

  “It’s still down there.”

  “Dig deeper,” Pierce said. “This is what we came for.”

  Whatever the cause, the effects of the cave-in seemed less pronounced the deeper they went, but there were still sections of the passage so choked with rubble that they had to crawl on hands and knees, single file, to get through. At each obstacle, Pierce shot Fiona a questioning look, and the answer was always the same.

  Down.

  As the young woman’s certainty about what lay below them increased, so did Lazarus’s apprehension. The safety of the team was his responsibility, and the deeper underground they went, the harder it would be to do his job.

  The curvature of the passage was gradual but constant. They were in a descending spiral, orbiting the center of the old city above. The air was musty, the walls still damp from being submerged. Then some two hundred yards from the site of the cave-in, the passage turned inward and opened into another open chamber, more than a hundred feet in diameter.

  “If my mental GPS is still working,” Pierce said, shining his light up at the vaulted ceiling. Despite being riddled with cracks, it was mostly intact. “We’re right under the center of Arkaim.”

  Gallo was more interested in the walls, specifically, a uniform line ringing the chamber, about eight feet above the floor. Below that line, the walls were still wet. “Where did all the water go?”

  Lazarus looked around for the answer to that question. The room had been flooded with enough water to fill a short course swimming pool. For that much fluid to drain out so quickly would require a sizable opening, maybe another tunnel leading to a more extensive cave network, which in turn might mean a path back to the surface. But there did not appear to be any other exits from the chamber.

  Fiona said nothing, but walked out into the middle of the vast hall, as if drawn to an invisible beacon in the exact center of the room. “Here,” she called out, kneeling and gesturing with palms down. “It’s here. I’m going to try something.”

  “Fi, are you sure that’s wise?” Pierce said. “After what happened earlier—”

  “I told you. That wasn’t me.”

  “Let her try, George,” Gallo said. “It’s not like our situation can get much worse.”

  Pierce’s frown indicated that he disagreed, but he took a step back and nodded to Fiona.

  She turned slowly, as if trying to find a precise position, then her lips began moving. At first, Lazarus couldn’t hear what she was saying, but after a moment, he began to feel a deep hum, like the notes of a bass violin reverberating out from her chest cavity, building in intensity.

  Then the floor began to move.

  He shifted his stance, spreading his feet apart, as if he was standing on the deck of a storm tossed ship. Pierce and Gallo did the same, but after the initial lurch, the motion smoothed out.

  The stone floor began rotating and descending at the same time, like a bolt slowly screwing itself deeper into the Earth’s crust. After a full turn, the movement ceased. The passage through which they had entered was now about ten feet above the floor, but several more openings were revealed, spaced out evenly around the edge of the chamber.

  Fiona was grinning. “Told you.”

  “Well done.” Pierce stepped forward and gave her a nod. “Sorry I doubted you.” He turned, probing the enlarged chamber with his lamp. “I think we can safely say this architecture is not consistent with the Sintashta culture.”

  “Just as we suspected,” Gallo said. “Arkaim was built atop the ruins of a much older civilization.”

  “The Originators,” Pierce confirmed. “The Sintashta must have known about it. It would explain Arkaim’s circular design. But I doubt anyone has been here in thousands of years. That earthquake probably shook things up, activated this elevator mechanism and drained the passage.”

  Fiona shone her light down one of the passages. “That’s the one.”

  There was nothing different about the opening, but she had not led them astray yet. “We need to hurry, though. I think this place has an automatic reset.”

  As if on cue, the floor shuddered and started to move again, rising this time, as it rotated in a counter-clockwise direction.

  “Go!” Lazarus shouted. He scooped Fiona u
p in his arms and sprinted across the turning surface. Pierce and Gallo were right behind him, following his lead as he adjusted course every few steps to keep the correct passage in view, even as the rising floor began to eclipse the opening.

  He reached the entrance with plenty of time to spare, but in the brief moment it took him to set Fiona down, the opening moved sideways several feet and closed another six inches. Fiona dropped flat and scrambled forward, plunging head first into the passage.

  The floor kept moving beneath him and Lazarus had to keep walking forward just to stay in front of the opening, which appeared to be sinking as the ground rose beneath him. The top of the passage was like a slow motion guillotine, a rough stone blade that would slice through anything caught between it and the floor of the chamber.

  Gallo arrived next.

  “Dive for it,” he shouted, guiding her headfirst into the passage.

  The opening was just three feet high, the gap shrinking by inches with each passing second. He took another step forward, reached back for Pierce and propelled him through. The moving floor caught Pierce’s shirt in a scissor pinch, but Lazarus gave him a hard push that ripped him free of the trapped fabric, and Pierce vanished into the passage.

  Two feet now.

  Pierce’s face appeared in the shrinking gap, his headlamp shining into Lazarus’s face. “Hurry.”

  But Lazarus knew the chance to slip through had already passed. He shrugged off his backpack and shoved it into the opening. Twelve inches. Not enough.

  He dropped flat and kicked the pack. The contents shifted, and the heavy duty nylon scraped through. He snatched his foot back as six inches became five…four.

  “Erik!” Pierce cried out.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll find anoth—”

  His shout bounced off the blank stone wall as the gap vanished, leaving him alone and cut off.