“It’s a Stork,” Fallon sputtered, anger in his tone for the first time since the nightmare began. He swore, punching the dashboard. “Bastards. They hacked the Storks.”
The Storks, Carter recalled, were Fallon’s robot delivery drones, the source of the fortune that had made everything else possible.
Robots, self-driving cars, and now delivery drones, she thought. This is how the robot apocalypse begins.
The drone — a hybrid construct of airfoils and helicopter rotors about the size of a bicycle turned on its side — appeared in the mirror, falling further and further behind with each passing second. Advanced technology or not, the Storks didn’t have the power to keep up with the Aston Martin.
There was a flash of movement in front of them, and before Carter could react, another Stork slammed into the windshield. The steering wheel spun through her fingers — not a robot seizing control of the car, but simply momentum and acceleration. Then the world turned upside down.
CHARIOT
FIFTEEN
Three hours, Pierce thought. I’m gone for three hours, and the whole world goes to hell.
He was still trying to make sense of what Dourado had told him. She had been a little frantic, no doubt about that, but the things she was describing taxed his comprehension.
Global earthquakes? The sun stopped in its tracks? A 13,000 year old alien satellite? Robots? And worst of all, Felice Carter in the thick of it, all alone.
He glanced over at Lazarus, seated across the aisle of their chartered plane. The big man, now wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants purchased from a gift shop, had recovered from his wounds, but even though his face was stony and unreadable, Pierce knew he was seething inside. He was angry at a perceived failure to protect the woman he loved.
That was Lazarus’s curse. He believed it was his responsibility to save everyone.
Pierce understood. He felt just as helpless and angry.
The elation and relief they had experienced after escaping from the caves under Arkaim had started to evaporate during the mad dash across the border of Kazakhstan, when Dourado failed to pick up the phone. Pierce’s mood had diminished a little more with each successive attempt, but it had not occurred to him that something might be wrong in Rome, or that the source of the problem would turn out to be a threat of global proportions.
He was still having trouble wrapping his head around that.
Worse, Dourado had lost contact with Carter. At last report, Carter, along with tech billionaire Marcus Fallon and a physicist named Ishiro Tanaka, were being chased by an army of actual killer robots intent on preventing them from shutting down the errant Black Knight satellite. Pierce was less clear on the details, but that was some kind of massive electromagnetic mirror, diverting both the sun’s light and heat energy, and its gravitational influence. The threat was difficult to fathom, but the greater mystery — the identity of the enemy who seemed so intent on preventing Fallon from correcting his mistake — was an even more troubling mystery.
The earthquakes had played havoc with international air traffic control. The skies were being kept clear for relief flights, though Pierce had been assured the restrictions would soon be lifted. Every second they spent stuck on the ground just made him more helpless, but that was nothing compared to what Lazarus was feeling.
Pierce stared at his phone, wondering if he should call Dourado again, to check if there was any word from Carter. He knew it would be a futile gesture, though. Dourado would call the instant she knew something. Worrying wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
“I think this is all connected,” Fiona said, breaking the long silence.
Pierce looked over and saw the young woman staring at the metal orb they had recovered from beneath Arkaim. “It sounds like the Black Knight and this Roswell memory metal are made from the same stuff as that sphere. But what happened had nothing to do with you finding it.”
“I’m not so sure about that. But that’s not what I mean.”
Before Pierce could ask her to elaborate on the first statement, Gallo addressed the second. “Your vision. Raven stealing the light.”
Fiona nodded. “You were wondering why I dreamed that particular story. Maybe the sphere was communicating with the other pieces of memory metal. Maybe it knew what was happening. Or was warning me about what might happen.”
“Like a prophecy?” Pierce felt about prophecies much the same way he did about magic and miracles. Sure, they happened sometimes, but there was a rational explanation. There had to be.
“No,” Gallo said, with unexpected certainty. “It was an explanation. This has happened before.”
Fiona was as surprised as Pierce. “What do you mean?”
“According to Cintia, the Black Knight is at least 13,000 years old. Its arrival coincides with the dawn of civilization—”
“Well, that depends on your definition of civilization.”
She ignored him. “Nearly every civilization on Earth practiced some form of Sun worship. The Sun God was almost always the most important deity to the ancients. And there’s always a story like this. A god stealing the sun or losing control of it somehow. When Fiona told us about Raven, I thought of the Phaethon story.”
“Phaethon, the son of Apollo?” Fiona asked.
Gallo nodded. “Technically, it was Helios, not Apollo. Phaethon begged Helios for a chance to drive the sun chariot. That’s the part that reminded me of the Raven story.”
“But Phaethon lost control of the sun chariot and would have burned up the Earth if Zeus hadn’t killed him with a thunderbolt. That’s almost the opposite of what happened with Raven.”
“It is,” Gallo said. “But what if the stories are describing the same event? An actual solar crisis, but from different global perspectives?”
Pierce shook his head. “All these myths came out of stories intended to explain the changing of the seasons and cosmic events, like eclipses, to primitive people who didn’t understand how the universe worked.”
“That’s the accepted version, of course, but we both know better, George. Those ancient civilizations did understand. They weren’t primitives. They mapped the stars. Built observatories. They knew the Earth was round, no matter what they tell kids in school. They were too sophisticated to need reassurance about the cycle of the seasons or eclipses. Those stories are referencing a universal event. Just like the flood myths.”
Pierce let that dubious comparison slide. “Let’s say you’re right. Why does it matter?”
“Because if this has happened before, then it means there’s a way to shut it down.”
“Felice is already working on that.”
Gallo wagged her head sideways in a gesture of polite disagreement. “This Fallon fellow is a child playing with matches. We need a fire extinguisher.”
“Is that what this is?” Fiona held up the orb.
Gallo glanced at Pierce. “George, what do you think?”
Pierce rubbed his chin. “I think we can safely say that it might be part of the solution, but that sphere hasn’t seen the light of day — if you’ll pardon the pun — in at least five thousand years. Maybe a lot longer. Maybe not since the time of the Originators.”
“What happened to them?” Fiona asked. “Who were they? Aliens?”
“Gods,” Gallo murmured.
“Quite possibly the inspiration for them,” Pierce admitted.
“In Greek mythology,” Gallo continued, “the gods were not the embodiment of the forces they represented, but rather masters of those forces. Helios wasn’t the sun personified, but the master of the sun, which took the form of a chariot he drove across the sky. The sun chariot is ubiquitous in Indo-European mythology. The Norse. The Celts. It’s in the Rig Veda. There’s even mention of a divine chariot in the Bible.”