“Three days of darkness. A solar event?”
“I think so. If our assumptions about the Black Knight are correct, he must have used it to redirect sunlight away from that part of the Earth.”
“Wouldn’t that have caused earthquakes like it did today?” Fiona asked.
“It very well may have. Or worse. Some scholars have theorized that the true cause of the Plagues was a coincidental eruption of the Thera volcano, but what if it’s the other way around? What if that solar event triggered the volcano?”
“Which in turn caused the parting of the Red Sea.”
Pierce spread his hands. “It all fits. After the Exodus, Moses came back here where he had the Ark made, a golden chest topped with cherubs—”
“We’ve all seen the movie with you, George,” Gallo said with a wry smile. “Many times.”
Pierce grinned. After seeing that movie the first time, he had become obsessed with Ark lore, researching all the stories of what it was and what became of it, searching for it, if only in his daydreams. “Well you know the power that was released at the end of the movie to melt Nazi faces? That was a real thing, and they called it shekinah. The Ark was so dangerous that it had to be kept in a special tent, the Tabernacle of Meeting. It was made of heavy fabric woven with gold fibers. The lid with the angels was called the Mercy Seat, and when it was in the Tabernacle, it radiated light—shekinah. No one but the high priest was allowed to see the Ark, and even then, only once a year. They had to tie a rope to his foot so that if he died, they could drag his body out. When moving the Ark, they kept it covered at all times, with a blanket made out of the same fabric. No one was ever permitted to touch it. Several centuries later, during the reign of King David, the Ark was being moved by wagon. One of David’s men inadvertently touched it and died. Some fringe archaeologists have speculated that it might have been a sort of primitive battery, but I think it was a lot more than that.”
Fiona’s eyes widened in understanding. “Moses put one of the cows in it.”
“No…I mean, yes, he did that, but there’s more to it. I think he put the Originator artifact in it. He created the Ark to be the master control device for the entire Originator power system.”
Gallo raised an eyebrow. “How did you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Forty years after the Exodus, when Moses’s successor Yeshua ben Nun—Joshua—led the Israelite army into Palestine, the priests carried the Ark ahead of the army. When they walked into the Jordan River, the waters parted, just like at the Red Sea—and maybe just like Fi did at Arkaim—so that the army could ford the river. In the first battle, the power in the Ark leveled the city walls of Jericho. Later, during the battle of Gideon, the Bible says that God hurled stones from heaven to slay the enemy—some kind of gravitational anomaly maybe—and when the enemy forces tried to escape, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still in the sky, which it did for a full twenty-four hours.”
“So Joshua did the same thing Fallon did. Another solar event.”
“Possibly the same one that inspired the Phaethon legend and Fiona’s story of Raven stealing the sun. There’s one more solar event mentioned in the Bible. A minor one. During the reign of King Hezekiah, the prophet Isaiah caused the shadow on a sundial to turn backward ten degrees.”
Gallo folded her arms across her chest. “So the Ark and the Plagues and everything else… All miracles of the Bible… The foundation of the religious beliefs of half the world’s population… It’s all hogwash? An alien artifact pretending to be God?”
“Well…” Pierce shrugged.
“Bullshit,” Gallo said. “You’re a smart guy, but your narrow worldview tends to skew your perspective. You look for explanations without considering that the supernatural might be real. You’re willing to believe in the most outlandish theories I’ve ever heard, unless believing means changing the way you live your life. Everything that you’ve said fits, but there’s no evidence to suggest that the ‘Originators’ were from another planet, dimension, or time.”
“You think the Originators were supernatural?” Fiona asked. “Like angels?”
“Or demons,” Gallo said. “We know the Originators were viewed as giants. We know they played with genetics. We know they crossbred with humanity. All of these elements fit with the Biblical story of—”
“The Nephilim,” George said.
“The Nephi-what now?” Fiona asked.
“Nephilim,” George repeated. “The product of demons mating with human women. They’re recorded in the Bible, and other texts around the world, as ‘men of renown.’ Giants. Like demi-gods, far more advanced than mankind at the time.”
“Many scholars who believe the Nephilim story,” Gallo started, “also believe the inhabitants of Jericho were Nephilim. Joshua’s scouts reported that they were as grasshoppers in the sight of the people who lived there. So if the technology used to destroy the city was the same as Moses used to part the sea and rain down plagues on Egypt, perhaps its origin is more supernatural than alien. The fight between science and religion, and the hostility some people have toward religion—” She cleared her throat while looking at George. “—has never made sense to me. How could a God who created the universe and the scientific laws that allow it to function, not use science to carry out his plans?”
George was quiet for a moment, in part because he was surprised by Gallo’s strident point of view, but also because it made sense. While he didn’t consider himself hostile to religion, he did tend to categorize it as fiction. But he had seen things that could only be described as miraculous, and Fiona was learning to speak the language of God. At first, he thought the language discounted the stories of Moses and Jesus. They were just guys who spoke the language. But how could a shepherd and a carpenter learn the language of God? And why wouldn’t they have used it to improve their lives? Moses wandered the desert for forty years and never set foot in his Promised Land. Jesus was crucified. If they’d had access to the Mother Tongue, or the Ark’s power source, why didn’t they use those things to change the world?
He smiled at himself.
They had changed the world. But not like a human being would have. “I concede the point. The Originators could be supernatural. Angels, demons, Nephilim. I can’t discount anything, and I don’t have all the answers. But for the sake of making sense of all this, I’m going to work through it in a way that’s easier for me to grasp.”
Gallo smiled and turned to Fiona. “This is why men need women willing to challenge their point of view. Makes them more well-rounded.”
“Anyway…” George said, trying to suppress his smile. Gallo held the keys to his heart and his mind, and she knew it. “…what I’m getting at is that Moses and the Israelites left with the Ark, but the shekinahs—”
“That’s a dumb name,” Fiona said.
Pierce smiled. “The important thing is that Joshua triggered the solar event, and he didn’t have a transmitter array or any special knowledge—”
“That we know of,” Gallo put in.
“That tells me that the Ark is some kind of user-friendly control interface. Maybe Moses taught Joshua a few words in the Mother Tongue, or maybe it responds to psychic intentions. Either way, we can use it the same way. Turn off the Black Knight. Maybe even make it self-destruct, so this can never happen again.”
“You really think you can find the Ark?”
“I think we have to. It’s the only way to guarantee that Fallon or someone like him doesn’t trigger another solar event. Fi, do you think you could make a golem to keep the cows away from us?”
Fiona considered the question for a moment. “Maybe. It doesn’t take much to set them off, but I’ve got an idea. Do you think it’s a good idea to leave them here?”
Pierce nodded. “Once we leave, put some distance between them and that sphere, they’ll melt back into the ground, just like they did when Moses left three thousand years ago.”
“What about the guys with guns?” Gallo asked.
“I think I can deal with them, too,” Fiona promised.
“They’re probably already gone.” Pierce nodded to Fiona. “Do it.”
The young woman moved to the mouth of the cave and shone her headlamp down at the piled rocks at the base of the cliff. She murmured the emet command, and then, with a loud rumble like another small tremor, the rocks began to move. Thousands of small pieces and a flurry of sand came together like iron filings around a magnet, forming a towering colossal figure that reached as high as the cave opening. Unlike the other golems Pierce had seen her create, this one was not humanoid. Despite its rough composition, he had no trouble distinguishing the shape of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Gallo grinned and laid on the sarcasm. “Definitely nothing supernatural about that.”
Fiona allowed herself a slight smile, but the crease of her forehead showed her intense concentration. The golem began moving away, shaking the ground with each ponderous step. Fiona followed it with the beam of her headlamp, but after just a few steps, she turned around. “You guys should probably look away.”
There was a faint flash of light, nowhere near as brilliant as what they had earlier experienced. Then he heard Fiona cry out.
“Fi?” Pierce whirled around and found her picking herself up off the cavern floor, trembling.
“That doesn’t usually happen,” she said.
“What? What happened?”
“Feedback. Felt like an electric shock, but I’ll be okay.” She stood up, shook herself, and managed a wan smile. “Rexie went all to pieces, though. One golem per cow, I guess.”
“You’re not doing that again,” Pierce declared. “We’ll just have to make a run for it.”
The fact that she didn’t protest told him that she was trying to downplay the severity of the jolt.
Pierce peered down at the base of the cliff, and was dismayed to see two of the shekinah creatures milling about nearby. They weren’t circling like predators. In fact, they were barely moving at all.
He took a deep breath, and then began the descent, facing the wall as he made his way down the irregular steps the way he might climb down a ladder. Every few steps, he glanced down, making sure that the beasts were keeping their distance. As soon as he was back on the grade, he waved for the others to follow, then returned his attention to the shekinah creatures. There was no indication that they were even aware of his presence. They ignored Gallo’s arrival as well, but when Fiona emerged from the cave, the reaction was unmistakable. In unison, the creatures began shuffling toward them. Pierce felt the first tickle of static electricity on his face.
He shone his light away from the creatures and started forward as fast as the loose terrain would allow. A shekinah appeared ahead, trundling toward them on a slow but obvious intercept course. Pierce shifted away from it, but he was stopped after just a few steps by a gaping fissure. The shekinah now blocked their retreat, forcing them to continue along the edge of the fissure, but then another creature came into view in that direction.
Pierce skidded to a stop and searched for another route. The fissure was too wide to leap across, which left only climbing back up the slope, a move that would leave them pinned against the cliff face.
He heard Fiona speak, but it took him a second to realize what she was saying. “Versatu elid vas re’eish clom, emet.”
“Fi, no!”
Even as he said it, he felt the ground tremble as a newly formed golem began moving toward the strange creatures. Pierce saw it in the light of his headlamp, a giant T. Rex composed of sand and loose rock, closing on the creature pursuing them. Its massive jaws opened and then came down over the misshapen shekinah.
“Don’t look!” Fiona shouted.
Pierce was already turning away, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw the golem envelop the smaller creature. There was a harsh tearing noise, and Pierce could feel electricity cracking all over his body, but the golem’s body shielded them all from the worst effects. Some light rays seeped through the cracks between the loosely joined rocks comprising the earthen creation, leaving a few streaks across Pierce’s vision. But it wasn’t even as bright as a camera flash. As the golem crumbled, Fiona collapsed like an unstrung puppet.
Pierce scooped the fallen girl up in his arms, over her weak protest, and with Gallo beside him, he started back the way they had come. The rubble left from the golem’s disintegration made for a precarious crossing, but once past the worst of it, Pierce picked up the pace. His lungs burned from altitude and exertion, and his legs felt like molten lead, but the sight of more shekinahs closing in on them supplied a burst of adrenaline that left him both numb to the pain and energized.
“I can walk,’ Fiona mumbled. Pierce ignored her, but then she whispered one more word. “Emet.”
“Damn it, Fi!”
He felt a rumble rising up through his boot soles as the rubble pile behind them coalesced into another golem, and he had to slow almost to a stop as the construct lumbered past on an intercept course with the shekinahs. Pierce caught only a glimpse of the golem—not a dinosaur this time, but a crude humanoid form—before he heard Fiona’s voice again. “Met.”
The golem crumbled into a heap right in front of the shekinah creatures, blocking their approach, and buying the three of them a few extra seconds to maneuver.
All Pierce could think to say was: “Good thinking.”
“I can walk,” Fiona said again, and this time, Pierce took her word for it.
THIRTY
With Fiona using the golems to block the creatures instead of destroying them, they reached the monastery walls without triggering any further radiant bursts. The gunmen were also absent, but Pierce remained wary as they made their way around the monastery. The garden area on the opposite side of the complex had been transformed into a triage site, with emergency workers and monks ministering to the wounded.
“I hope Father Justin made it,” Fiona said.
Pierce nodded. “Right now, the best thing we can do for him and all the survivors is to get as far away from here as we can.”
“How far is that?” Gallo asked.
“We’ll just keep moving,” Pierce said.
They slipped past the casualty collection point and made their way down the road to the tourist village, also named for Saint Catherine. The hotels were full of visitors who, following both the earthquakes and the rumors of a terrorist attack at the nearby monastery, were waiting to be evacuated by bus to Sharm el-Sheikh. After a few inquiries, Pierce found a local taxi driver willing to make the road trip, for quadruple the normal fare—a very competitive rate given the circumstances, he was assured—and they were soon underway again.
As the hired car raced down the desert roads, Pierce called Dourado and learned of the debacle in Geneva, and the worldwide consequences.
There had indeed been another spate of earthquakes in the western hemisphere. In an ironic reversal, earthquake-prone California had experienced only mild shocks, nothing above magnitude 5.0. But further to the north, the pent-up energy of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, had been released in a massive six-minute-long quake measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale. The entire northwest coast of Oregon and Washington had gone silent. The predictions emerging from scientists and news agencies were ominous. Portland, Seattle, and everything west of Interstate 5 had been devastated by the temblor and the subsequent tsunami. Alaska had been hit with the most destructive temblor since the 1964 Good Friday earthquake that had leveled Anchorage. Hawaii and Japan were bracing for tsunamis that would, in all likelihood, dwarf the disastrous effects of the 2011 Fukushima quake.
That the seismic disturbances had been a long time coming—historically, a ‘Big One’ hit the region every 300-600 years, and the last one had occurred in 1700—didn’t make the news any easier to swallow. Carter was a Seattle native, and Fiona’s ancestral home was just a few miles inland on the Oregon Coast. It would be hours, possibly even days, before the true extent of the damage was known. But even the most
optimistic predictions were dire.
Yet as terrible as the news was, Pierce knew it was only a shadow of the danger that still loomed on the horizon.
Following the showdown with the renegade robots, the team had regrouped and set up an ad hoc command center at Tomorrowland. Despite his frustration, Pierce knew that the misguided attempt to ‘fix’ the Black Knight had been the right decision, given the circumstances. At least now they knew who was responsible for the global threat.
Ishiro Tanaka.
Pierce put the phone on speaker mode, as Dourado began relating what she had discovered about the Japanese physicist.
The grandson of a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Tanaka had, from an early age, shown a macabre fascination with the destructive forces at work in the universe. Later in life, as a university student, he had become an active and vocal proponent of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement—VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’. They were a group that espoused the belief that humans were a virulent disease and would destroy all life on Earth if they were not themselves made extinct. It was a goal they believed could be accomplished peacefully through anti-natalism—the end of human procreation.
“Vehement wasn’t radical enough for him,” Dourado explained, “But he became friends with an Indian student named Bandar Pradesh—”
“Bandar Pradesh?” Gallo broke in. “That’s not a real Indian name.”
“I know, right? Bandar literally means ‘port’ and Pradesh means ‘province.’ It’s probably an alias or some kind of inside joke. He preferred to go by his hacker name: Shiva. Pradesh or Shiva or whatever you want to call him, took the whole humans-are-a-disease thing one step further. He believed that all life—from microbes to redwood trees to blue whales—was a great big cosmic mistake.”
“Huh?”
Carter broke in. “It’s the philosophy of pessimism.”
“Like Rust, in True Detective,” Dourado supplied.
Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Page 19