Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Page 8

  At least he didn’t act like he expected a tip.

  The gate was unmanned—what a surprise—so she put herself in full view of the security camera and waited to see what would happen. She expected to hear another disembodied voice from an intercom, but instead the gate rolled back. As she stepped through, an electric golf cart rolled up and stopped beside her. Unlike the taxi, this vehicle did not have even a token human operator.

  “Welcome to Tomorrowland, Dr. Carter.”

  The male voice—smoother than the automated system in the taxi, but no less artificial—did not surprise her. The fact that she had been recognized did. “I…ah…thought this place was called ‘Space Tomorrow,’” she said, trying to hide her dismay.

  “Space Tomorrow is the name of Mr. Fallon’s company. Tomorrowland is our unofficial nickname for this facility.”

  Our? Maybe the voice did belong to a real person.

  “Please, get in. I’ll take you to Mr. Fallon.”

  “Actually, I’m here to see…” She stopped herself. “Were you expecting me?”

  “Not exactly, but I will let Mr. Fallon explain.”

  She hesitated a moment, looking around at the manicured green lawn and sculpted topiary. In the distance, she could see buildings, but there was not a living soul anywhere to be seen. She settled onto the cart’s cushioned bench seat. “I guess I’ll talk to Mr. Fallon, then.”

  The electric vehicle executed a smooth, precise turn and headed down the paved drive, while behind her, the gate rolled back into place, sealing her in.

  Over the low hum of the electric motor, she heard the noise of activity. The high-pitched whine of saws tearing through wood, the grinding of concrete mixers, the rapid-fire report of nail guns… She hoped they were just nail guns. Tomorrowland had not come through the earthquakes unscathed, but the repair crews were already busy fixing the damage. But as the first of the buildings came into view, she realized that one of her conclusions was mistaken. There were no repair crews, at least not human ones. The work was being done by robots.

  They were utilitarian, more upsized WALL-E than C-3P0, though even that was an imperfect comparison. Their bulldozer-sized tracked bodies sprouted numerous appendages, articulated with hoses and telescoping chrome hydraulic actuators, some tipped with pincer-like clamps, and others with the power tools she had heard from afar. The robots moved with abrupt efficiency, performing a complex but beautiful synchronized ballet. Damaged sections of wall were cut down and removed, and just as quickly replaced with studs and sheets of plywood, cut to size and fastened in place in a seamless and unending progression. There were no mistakes, no ‘measure twice, cut once’ redundancies of effort, and no rest breaks. Carter recalled that Dourado had described Tomorrowland as a facility for testing robotic systems for space stations, but the reality was far more impressive than her wildest sci-fi fueled expectations.

  The cart pulled up to one of the buildings and stopped. Carter noted a conspicuous lack of signage to differentiate the buildings, which seemed odd. The disembodied voice spoke again. “Mr. Fallon is in the Operations Center. A guide will show you the way.”

  “Thank you,” she said, feeling the same strangeness about the interaction as she had earlier. It occurred to her that she had not experienced a meaningful interaction with an actual human being since leaving the airport.

  Her guide turned out to be another robot, albeit much simpler in design than the builder-bots. As she stepped through the door, something that resembled a scaled-down Segway scooter with a round yellow disk where the handlebars should have been, rolled toward her. “Hello, Dr. Carter,” The voice was female and pleasant, and Carter detected a faint accent. Some kind of personality subroutine, no doubt. “Please, follow me.”

  The guide-bot spun around, facing down the carpeted hallway, but did not move until Carter started walking. Once she did, it managed to stay just a couple of steps ahead of her. As they went along, Carter noted the plain décor. Evidently, there was no room in the budget for interior design or creature comforts. Stranger still, none of the doors had doorknobs. This mystery was explained when the guide turned toward one of the doors and it swung out into the hallway without any direct contact.

  Automatic, Carter mused. Naturally.

  The door led into a large open room—it reminded her of a budget hotel conference room—and she was relieved to see two actual living people seated in folding plastic chairs around a folding plastic table, which was lined with laptop computers and other electronic devices. On the back wall of the room hung three large plasma screens, each one depicting rows of mathematical formulae. The men at the table turned to look at her, and one of them—he had pale, freckled skin and wiry red hair, and he looked far too young to have any sort of authority—began walking toward her, a tablet computer still gripped in one hand.

  Carter tried for a winning smile. “Mr. Fallon, I presume?”

  “Who are you?” he said, with more than a trace of suspicion.

  She wondered at his ignorance. Hadn’t her identity already been well-established? She decided to roll with it. “I’m Dr. Felice Carter.”

  The guide-bot spoke up. “You selected Dr. Carter for Proteus Team, Mr. Fallon.”

  This explanation surprised Carter, but seemed to resolve the confusion for Fallon. “Ah, I see. My apologies, Dr. Carter. You’ve come at a rather bad time for me.”

  “I…ah, actually, I didn’t…” She stopped and forced a smile. “I’m sorry, but what is Proteus Team? And how do you even know who I am?”

  Fallon glanced back at the table for a moment as if trying to decide whether she was worth his time. “From time to time, I need to bring in freelancers to consult on some of my projects, so to save time, I pre-screen potential candidates and assign them to project teams. If you were selected for Proteus Team, then your field must be biology, correct?” He looked down at his tablet. “Display Carter.”

  “Micro and genetics,” she replied. “So you just drafted me onto this Proteus Team?” Just like the Herculean Society and their recruitment codes.

  Fallon continued looking at the tablet as he spoke. “As I said, it’s a prescreening measure to save time. There are twenty-three teams, each with at least a hundred candidates. Rather than issuing ident cards and credentials on a case-by-case basis, we streamlined the process by entering the likenesses into the facial recognition database. In the event that your expertise was called for, a proper invitation would have been made, along with suitable compensation for your time.”

  He looked up and met her eyes again. “I’m afraid the protocols I put in place to welcome you didn’t anticipate the possibility that you might drop in of your own volition. I’m sorry I can’t give you a proper welcome. Proteus is part of our terraforming initiative, and we’re still in the conceptual phase with that. I would love to talk to you about the possibility of introducing genetically modified extremophiles into the Venutian environment, but as I said, this is kind of a bad time. Again, I apologize for wasting your time. I’ll have some information sent to you, and maybe we can see about reimbursing you for your time and expenses.”

  “Actually, Mr. Fallon, I’m here on an unrelated matter. I’m looking for Dr. Ishiro Tanaka.”

  Fallon was nonplussed, but Carter saw the other man react. She recognized the Japanese man from the photograph that accompanied his CV. He was clean-shaven with a modest business-like haircut, but ten years older than Fallon. Without waiting for Fallon’s reply, she started toward the table. “Dr. Tanaka, I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  Fallon hastened to intercept her. “Dr. Carter, you can’t just barge in here and start interrogating people.”

  She ignored him and continued to focus on Tanaka. “I understand that you’re an expert on microwave heating of plasma in the ionosphere. I was hoping to get your professional opinion on whether these earthquakes could be manmade, specifically the result of something like the HAARP array.”

  She expected him to scof
f, dismissing the very notion as baseless conspiracy theory, not worth the trouble of a detailed debunking.

  But Tanaka did not scoff. Instead, he swallowed nervously.

  He wasn’t the only one.

  Fallon stepped in front of her. “Dr. Carter, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “You know something,” she persisted. “Dr. Tanaka, were the earthquakes man-made? Did someone use HAARP or something like it to trigger the earthquakes?”

  Fallon’s forehead creased in thought. He looked at Tanaka for a moment, then back at Carter. “Perhaps you can be of some help to us.”

  “She’s a biologist,” Tanaka said. Despite his obvious ethnicity, there was no hint of an accent in his speech. “What would she know about this?”

  Fallon ignored the comment. “Dr. Carter, to answer your question, HAARP had nothing to do with what happened today, but you are correct about one thing. The earthquakes were man-made.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I thought that was obvious. I made them.”

  TEN

  Arkaim, Russia

  A silence hung over the group as they made their way out of the ice tunnel into a natural cavern system. Pierce couldn’t tell if his companions had been left speechless by the enormity of what Fiona had accomplished, or if, after everything else they had witnessed, they were taking this latest miracle in stride. He decided it was probably both, a not inappropriate oscillation between two opposing reactions that set up an interference pattern to cancel out everything else.

  Miracle.

  As a scientist, he was uncomfortable with the word. It felt like a cop-out. Every phenomenon had an explanation consistent with the Laws of Physics. Period. Admittedly, sometimes the explanation was beyond the comprehension of even the best theoretical minds, or as science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had asserted, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Falling back on words like ‘miracle’ or ‘magic’ was just plain lazy.

  Then again, he was an archaeologist, not a physicist or an engineer. He didn’t need to understand how Fiona had—using the Mother Tongue, or that weird ball of memory metal, or some combination of the two—turned the pool in the subterranean chamber into a skating-rink. At the same time, she had opened a tunnel through the ice that spiraled even deeper beneath the surface. It was enough for him to believe that an explanation did exist.

  The strangest part was that it wasn’t even that cold. The ice was freezing to the touch, but the surrounding air was tolerable. It was as if the heat energy had been stolen away from the liquid water through some kind of endothermic reaction, rather than a more conventional exchange of heat with the surrounding environment.

  Instant freezing by means unknown. Not a miracle, not magic, just a technology none of them could explain. Pierce might have said the same about his smartphone.

  Bottom line, they were moving again, hopefully in the right direction.

  The ice tunnel brought them to an outflow pipe—like a culvert deep beneath the surface of the pool—where the water drained out of the ancient city and joined an underground river. The passage rose, like the trap assembly in a flush toilet, then dropped in a frozen waterfall that splashed down the limestone wall. That was where the ice ended. Below them, the river was a glistening black void, a good twenty feet across, flowing through a deep canyon-like groove that cut through the uneven floor of the cavern.

  Fiona offered no explanation for it, but said, “We should go upriver.”

  “That will take us to the surface?” Pierce asked.

  Fiona nodded.

  “You saw that in your vision?” Gallo asked.

  “Sort of. I think the vision was just my brain’s way of making sense of it all.”

  “I’d still like to hear more about it,” Gallo said. “You mentioned the Raven?”

  Fiona shrugged. “Just Raven…no ‘the.’ He’s a trickster figure in the mythology of the Pacific Northwest tribes, but his tricks usually worked out for good in the end.”

  “And you saw Raven in your vision?”

  “Sort of. It’s like I was inside the story. How Raven stole the sun and moon. My grandmother taught it to me. Well, a version of it. Every tribe tells it a little differently.”

  “Not an uncommon thing in oral traditions,” Pierce observed.

  “Tell us,” Gallo pressed.

  “We should keep moving,” Lazarus said in a low, grave voice. Despite the fact that his clothes were now bloody tatters hanging from his large frame, he seemed to have made a full recovery from the wounds inflicted by the trilo-pede swarm, but Pierce knew how demanding, physically and mentally, the regeneration process was.

  As they made their way into the cavern, following the course of the underground river, Fiona related what she had seen in her dream of Raven.

  “And is that the way your grandmother taught it to you?” Gallo asked when she reached the end of the story.

  “There were a few differences. In the original version, Raven waits until Girl stops to take a drink of water from the river, and changes himself into a tiny little fish, which she swallows without realizing it. Later on, she gives birth to the baby boy—Raven in a new disguise. I guess the idea of swallowing a fish and getting pregnant always seemed kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s why the dream was different.”

  “Interesting variation on immaculate conception,” Gallo remarked. “Were there any other differences?”

  “In the story, Raven first meets the girl outside her father’s house. She isn’t lost like I was in the vision. She doesn’t have to follow the river, and she doesn’t have to thaw it out with her song. I figured that part was my subconscious telling me how to get out of here.”

  Pierce nodded. “You blacked out when you touched that thing.” He pointed at the orb Fiona still held in her hand. “Maybe it was telling you what to do, but your subconscious used the story to put it into a context you could understand.”

  “Why that particular story?” Gallo asked. “Have you been thinking about it recently?”

  Fiona shook her head.

  “Do you think it means something?” Pierce asked.

  Gallo shrugged. “Hard to say. I’m a historian, not a psychologist. But it’s an interesting story.”

  “Seems like your basic turning of the year myth,” George said. “The sun vanishes as the solstice approaches. A deity—in this case the raven, a winter bird—transforms into a human to bring it back.”

  “Well that’s one way to interpret it,” Gallo countered. “But if, as you suggest, that orb is trying to tell us something, maybe we need to open our minds to other possibilities.”

  Pierce gave a noncommittal grunt. “Are you getting anything from it now, Fi?”

  “I don’t think so. But it feels like we’re still going the right way.”

  Thousands of years of water flowing through the surrounding karst, eroding the limestone as it followed the path of least resistance, had created a cave system that was easy to navigate. Lazarus, however, seemed to grow anxious as he brought up the rear.

  Pierce dropped back. “Should we be worried?” he whispered.

  “Always.” Lazarus gave him a tight smile. “Those things back there—”

  “The trilo-pedes?” Fiona asked, looking back at them.

  “Private conversation,” Pierce said with a tight smile. He forgot how well-trained her ears were at detecting language, even when the words were whispered. And he had to admit, her name for the enormous arthropods was appropriate.

  “There were a lot of them in that pool,” Lazarus went on. “And it looked to me like they were drawn to us. Or to that thing Fiona is carrying.”

  “You think there might be more of them here, in the cave?” Pierce found himself wishing that Fiona had brought along one or two of her golems. Before venturing into the ice tunnel, Fiona had uttered a short command, ‘Tesioh fesh met,’ one of the very few phrases
in the Mother Tongue she had mastered, to disassemble the golems, just to avoid confusion if the buried city was ever discovered again. With the threat from the trilo-pedes neutralized by the ice, there was little reason to keep the golems, and besides, she could always make more if the need arose.

  “I think there are probably a lot more of them here,” Lazarus said. “This is their primary habitat, not that pool. They’ll have the advantage here, even over Fiona’s golems. I’ll feel a lot better when we’re back under the sun. Until then, all we can do is keep moving.”

  “George,” Gallo called out. “Look at this.”

  Pierce jogged forward to join her and found her examining a wall adorned with streaks and splotches of black and red. It didn’t take too much imagination to see animal shapes, and human figures.

  “Looks like we’re not the first people to discover this cave,” she said.

  “That’s a good sign, right?” Fiona said. “It means there’s a way out.”

  “No,” Pierce countered. “It just means there was a way out twenty thousand years ago. A lot could have changed since then.”

  Before Pierce could amend his pessimistic assessment, there was a splash behind them, followed by a scrabbling sound. Pierce turned his headlamp toward the sound, just as something emerged from the river channel, heading right for them.

  It was a trilo-pede, but bigger, with an armored thorax as broad as a queen-sized mattress, tapering into another six-feet of segmented tail.

  It also wasn’t alone.

  “Just once,” Pierce grumbled, “it would be nice to have a few minutes to look around.”

  ELEVEN

  Geneva, Switzerland

  I made them.

  Carter felt a mild surge of panic at Fallon’s revelation. He would not have made the admission if he had any intention of allowing her to walk out the front door.