Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2)

by Jeremy Robinson

  The robots did not pursue him, but instead took up defensive positions at each corner of the relic, their quadruple-arms raised and ready to fend off any attack, defending it just as Fallon had ordered. Pierce however, had no intention of getting closer. For the first time since laying eyes on the still mostly hidden object, he knew with absolute certainty that he was in the presence of the true Ark of the Covenant.

  The change was barely perceptible, but it was there. A faint hum, almost too low to be heard. A tingling against his skin like static electricity, growing more intense with each passing second. Pierce had a pretty good idea of what would happen next. He flung the tattered papyrus fragments aside and scrambled after Gallo, who was trying to shepherd the others toward the relative safety of the Tabernacle and shouting for them to look away from the Ark. Fiona and the two priests were on the move, but Carter hesitated, concerned about Lazarus.

  “Felice!” Pierce shouted. “Cover your eyes.”

  Just as he reached her, almost tackling her to the ground, there was a bright flash behind them and a loud, harsh pop. The air filled with the crisp tang of ozone and a fouler, fishy smell of burnt insulation. The tingling sensation had abated with the lightning-like discharge, so despite his own warning to Carter, Pierce risked a backward glance.

  The four robots surrounding the Ark lay face down, unmoving under a haze of blue smoke.

  For a few seconds though, that appeared to be the limit of the effect. Lazarus was still caught in the grip of the remaining automatons. Fallon and his mercenaries were blinking and rubbing their eyes like they had just looked into a camera flash, but they were not out of the fight.

  Then things got really interesting.

  Without waiting to explain, Pierce dragged Carter along with him, fast-walking to catch up with the others as the entire cavern began to fill with light. In the time it took them to reach the shelter of the far side of the Tabernacle, the reflection off the limestone walls was so bright that the shadow cast by the great tent was indistinguishable.

  Then, just as quickly, the brilliance faded.

  Carter tried to pull away, but Pierce held her back. “You don’t want to go out there.”

  “But Erik—”

  “He’ll be okay. We won’t.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “It is the Glory of God,” Mateos said in a grave voice.

  Pierce had figured that out already. “Shekinah.”

  “You should not have uncovered it.”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Pierce muttered.

  The older monk said something in his native tongue, and the bishop nodded to him. “Abba Tesfa says that the shekinah will create for itself a body from the very dust.”

  “Just like the holy cows on Mount Sinai,” Fiona put in.

  “It is very dangerous to approach the shekinah,” Mateos continued. “Abba Tesfa can command it to return to the Ark, but to do so, he must be wearing the priestly garments. And the Ark must be covered, or more will be created.”

  Gallo called out. “It’s happening again!”

  In the space of just a few seconds, the light level in the cavern increased again, building to a climax and then diminishing, as if a switch had been thrown.

  The old monk began speaking again, his tone on the verge of panic.

  “It should not be happening so quickly,” Mateos translated. “Something is not right.”

  “It’s the Black Knight,” Fiona said. “Now that Tanaka turned it on, it’s drawing more power.”

  Pierce heard the certainty in her voice, the same assuredness that had guided them out of Arkaim.

  The light cycled again, the whole process taking less than thirty seconds.

  “Stay here,” he said, as the peak brightness signaled the end, or rather the beginning of the next cycle. He ignored the questions of the others and darted out into the open.

  The first thing he saw was Fallon huddled with his men against the wall, shielding their eyes. Then he saw the four robots holding a still unmoving Lazarus. They had gone statue still, as if awaiting new orders.

  Then he saw the shekinah creatures.

  There were three of them, horse-sized constructs that looked like living boulders with legs and horns. They were similar in some respects to Fiona’s golems, but as they moved, meandering in circles around the partially concealed Ark, brilliance shone through miniscule cracks in their solid shells, revealing the living light within.

  Fiona’s words from Mount Sinai came back to him. The Originators made them to store the energy they harvested from the sun… Living energy inside a shell made of melted rock.

  Now he understood. The Ark had been built to contain the Originator power collection machine, to which the Black Knight and the pieces of memory metal were all connected. When the Black Knight was dormant, the energy trickled into the Ark, but now the process had been kicked into high gear.

  Pierce did a quick calculation. Three cycles so far, each creating a new shekinah creature, all in less than two minutes. In ten minutes, the cavern would be full of the creatures, each one a walking bomb.

  The light from the Ark was getting brighter again.

  “Fallon!” Pierce shouted. The other man’s head came up and turned in his direction. “Get over here. And stay away from those things.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Fallon rallied his men and began moving along the wall toward Pierce, even as the brilliance spiked toward maximum intensity. Pierce looked away to avoid being blinded. In the instant that he did, he saw tiny charcoal gray particles, like fibers of ash, blowing across the cavern floor. They bonded together in fibrous chains, like dust motes transforming into cobwebs, as they were drawn closer to the Ark.

  This was how the shekinahs formed their bodies. Pierce recalled reading about a recently discovered phenomenon known as teslaphoresis, in which a strong electrical field caused carbon nanotubes to assemble into wires and even more complicated structures, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together on command. The Originators had evidently taken the process a step further, drawing carbon from dust particles on the cavern floor, maybe even pulling them out of the air, atom by atom, to form the shells that contained the living energy of the shekinah.

  The light peaked and then subsided, revealing a fourth creature standing before the ark.

  He ran out to intercept Fallon and the mercenaries. The latter, taking note of his approach, shifted their guns toward him, but he ignored them, focusing on the billionaire. “Tell your robots to stand down.”

  Fallon gaped at him for a moment, processing the request, then turned toward the four remaining automatons. He cupped a hand over his mouth and shouted: “Secure and remove!”

  In unison, the four robots let go of Lazarus, dropping him in a heap on the cavern floor, and then began moving toward the Ark.

  “No,” Pierce protested. “Get them away from—”

  A bright flash and the harsh pop of an electrical current ionizing the air around the humanoid machines drowned out his warning. Their circuits fried by the discharge, the four robots fell over like broken toy soldiers.

  Pierce shook his head in frustration then turned to Fallon again. “Stay the hell away from that thing! You’ll get us all killed.”

  Then, ignoring his own advice, he sprinted across the chamber, maneuvering around one of the slow-moving shekinah creatures, to reach the supine form of Lazarus. The big man’s face was twisted into a rictus of pain—not from his injuries but from the expedited healing process. Pierce knew all too well how vulnerable Lazarus was at this instant, not physically but psychologically. Lazarus’s mental discipline did not make him immune to the agony that accompanied rapid cellular regeneration. But it enabled him to keep the madness that accompanied it at bay. If that discipline slipped…

  A few steps away, the light around the Ark was reaching another peak.

  “Erik. We’ve got to get you out of here. Can you walk?”

  Lazarus’s eyes fle
w open and locked onto Pierce. For a fleeting instant, Pierce feared his friend had crossed the threshold. But instead of tearing Pierce’s head off, Lazarus sprang to his feet. There was a hint of wildness in his expression as he looked around, taking in his surroundings, catching up. Then he nodded.

  Pierce turned and led the way back to the Tabernacle at a run, reaching it just a few seconds after Fallon and his men. The mercenaries were holding their weapons up tentatively, as if uncertain whether they were supposed to be guarding the others. When Carter ran to Lazarus and threw her arms around him, the men bristled, as if she was about to attack them.

  “Put those things away,” Pierce snapped, directing most of his ire at Fallon. “Tell your goons to stay out of the way, and we just might all walk out of here.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he moved past to join the others and addressed Mateos. “Tell the Abba to get suited up. We need him to keep the shekinahs from killing us all, long enough to get the Ark into the Most Holy.”

  Mateos relayed this to Tesfa, who nodded and reached for the bundle containing the ancient priestly garments. Even with an efficiency borne of practice, it took a couple of minutes for Tesfa to get outfitted, during which time the shekinah glory cycled three more times. But despite the urgency of the situation, Pierce marveled as he beheld ancient holy artifacts that only a handful of living people had ever seen.

  After the tunic-like ephod and the gem-encrusted hoshen breast plate were donned, Mateos settled the turban onto the monk’s head. Pierce glimpsed the writing on the golden crown but didn’t recognize the script—it definitely was not Hebrew.

  Fiona recognized it though. “That’s the Mother Tongue,” she whispered. “I can’t tell what it says though.”

  Despite her unique abilities, Fiona was by no means literate in the forgotten language of God. She had memorized certain phrases, and had used her knowledge of the Siletz tribal language to estimate others, but the script was indecipherable. There were hardly any existing samples of it, which meant that even figuring out its alphabet was a virtual impossibility.

  “It’s the true name of God,” Pierce whispered back.

  With the addition of the headgear, Mateos was left holding only a small cloth bag, tied shut with a length of red string. Pierce guessed that it held the two most mysterious artifacts associated with the High Priest of ancient Israel.

  “Urim and Thummim,” he whispered, and he watched as Mateos opened the pouch and shook the contents into his palm, curious to see what they would really look like.

  The first item was a smooth sphere of polished transparent crystal, about two inches in diameter.

  Tesfa took it and slipped it behind the priestly breastplate.

  Was that the Urim or the Thummin? Pierce wondered. Revelation or Truth?

  Mateos gave the pouch a shake and something else rolled out, another sphere the same size as the first, but it was not a crystal or a stone. The object nestled in Mateos’s cupped palm was an orb of memory metal.

  Of course, Pierce thought, resisting the impulse to smack his forehead.

  Tesfa placed the second orb under the breastplate and signaled his readiness.

  Pierce turned to the others. “Gus, get Fi into the Tabernacle and wait for us. Erik, you and Felice go with her. Fallon…” He fixed his stare on the other man. “If you care about making this right, we could use a hand.”

  Fallon stared back in surprise, either at Pierce’s assertiveness or at the request itself. He narrowed his eyes. “We’ll help you get that thing in the tent, but we’re going to use it to control the Black Knight, not shut it down.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the mercenaries. “You heard him. Let’s go save the world.”

  The men looked at each other and then back at Fallon. Even Pierce could see their hesitancy.

  “This is why I prefer robots,” Fallon growled. “You do realize that if we don’t get out of here, you don’t get paid?”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Pierce said, and turned back to the Ethiopian clergymen. “We have to do this, now.”

  Tesfa was already moving, not waiting for a translation. Mateo followed him, and so did Pierce.

  Lazarus stepped forward as well. “You need me out there,” he said.

  Pierce nodded.

  They encountered a shekinah as soon as they rounded the corner of the Tabernacle. Pierce was about to shout a warning, but Tesfa spoke first, raising his hand and chanting in what Pierce assumed was his native tongue. The words, Pierce knew, probably didn’t matter. Only the intention of the speaker, in tandem with the Originator artifacts he carried in his priestly garments.

  The shambling thing stopped, turned and began moving away.

  Pierce breathed a small sigh of relief, but there were at least a half-dozen more of the creatures on the floor of the auditorium chamber, all gravitating toward the group. And judging by the light level, there was about to be one more.

  “Don’t look at it,” Pierce warned. “Keep your eyes shut!”

  He covered his face with his hands, but despite these precautions, he could still see a bright swell of illumination accompanying the creation of yet another shekinah. Tesfa’s chant however, was keeping the living-light beasts at bay, parting them like Moses parted the Red Sea, clearing a path to the Ark. He lowered his hand and saw that they were almost there.

  “When we get there,” he shouted, not looking back, “use the poles. Whatever you do, don’t touch the Ark itself.”

  “Pierce!” Lazarus’s shout broke through his tunnel-vision focus on the Ark. The big man was pointing to the mouth of the passage leading back to the surface. “Who the hell are those guys?”

  Pierce’s vision was so bleached by exposure to the intense light that he could barely make out the human shapes gathered there, but then a collective shout issued from the darkness. Pierce did not speak the language, but it was a phrase he recognized all too well. The battle cry of Islamic armies since the time of the Prophet Muhammed.

  “Allahu akbar!”

  Then, a swarm of dark shapes broke from the shadows and charged into the chamber.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Even before reaching the large hall deep within the cave, Abdul-Ahad knew that Pierce and the other agents of Masih ad-Dajjal were attempting to raise an army of jinn, just as they had done on the slopes of Jabal Musa in Egypt. The intense light radiating up from the depths, which triggered sympathetic pains in his still-burning eyes, was unmistakable.

  “The jinn will be bound in earthen vessels,” he told the others as they descended toward the source of that brilliance. “Destroy the vessels, and the jinn will be freed to consume the wicked for the glory of God.”

  “Will we die?” asked one of the young fighters.

  Abdul-Ahad was ready with an answer. “We will be taken into the bosom of the Prophet, peace be upon him.”

  When they reached the large chamber, crouching at the entrance to survey what would be their last battlefield, he saw the jinn, just as he knew he would, but he saw something else, too.

  “At-tabut,” he whispered. The Chest of Assurance, which God gave to the Prophet Musa, peace be upon him. It was written, in the Holy Quran: ‘The Chest will come to you in which is assurance from your Lord. Indeed in that is a sign for you, if you are believers.’

  Except the Chest was in the hands of the unbelievers.

  He raised his knife high, shouted the traditional war cry and charged.

  The men with Uzis reacted fastest. They raised their weapons and started shooting. The ululating of Abdul-Ahad’s fellow fighters was drowned out by the harsh report of automatic weapons fire and the screams of the injured, but even that was a glorious sound—more faithful martyrs on their way to Paradise.

  Some of the unbelievers scattered. Pierce and the big man covered the old priests with their bodies, hustling them away from the fight, as if they were the focus of the attack.

  Let them, Abdul-Ahad thought. The rocks will not hide them from
the glory of God. Taste the punishment of the Blazing—

  Something, like an invisible fist, slammed into his chest, spinning him off his feet. As he crashed onto the stone, he felt a tingling at the point of impact, then heat, then fire.

  I’ve been shot.

  The notion unexpectedly terrified him. This was not how it was supposed to be. Where was the ecstasy? The euphoria of martyrdom?

  Fool, he thought, gritting his teeth against the pain. There is no reward for failure.

  He struggled to roll over. Around him, the battle seemed to be growing more feverish, the air filled with shouts and screams. The harsh buzz-saw reports of the Uzis drowned out the screams, and the light, growing brighter and brighter again with the glory of God, filled the space.

  The shooting told him that at least some of his men were still alive, still in the fight, but for how much longer?

  He got to his hands and knees. His left arm collapsed, the pain bringing tears to his stinging eyes. He planted his right hand flat on the floor of the cave and pulled himself forward, toward the Chest.

  The brilliance swelled around him, enfolding him with but a taste of the glory that awaited him in Paradise. He squeezed his eyes shut, unable to endure it, raising his head again only when the vision faded.

  A jinn stood before the Chest, as if sent to block his way, but Abdul-Ahad knew it was something else. This was the sign, promised by God.

  He clawed the stone, pulling himself closer. The creature seemed impossibly far away, but after a moment, it began to move toward him.

  Even though the earthen vessel contained its glory, with each step closer, he could feel its power coursing through his body. Another step and it was within his reach, offering itself to him like a sacrifice.

  Yes, he thought, raising his blade. God be praised.