“That’s easy,” Fiona chimed in. “Just have Erik drop a house on them.”
Pierce thought he saw a hint of a smile touch Lazarus’s lips.
Although his acquaintance with Pierce went back more than half a decade, Lazarus, along with his girlfriend, geneticist Felice Carter, had only recently joined forces with Pierce to create the Cerberus Group. Lazarus’s official title was Director of Operations, but in practical terms, he was their protector. Pierce could not imagine anyone better suited to the job. In addition to more than a decade of military service, Lazarus was rhinoceros-strong, focused, and owing to an experimental serum that promoted rapid cellular regeneration, he was damn near indestructible.
Carter had her own unique…attributes. Several years before, during a research trip to the Great Rift Valley, she had been exposed to a retrovirus containing genetic material from one of humanity’s oldest shared ancestors. Stranger still, through a process known as quantum entanglement, Carter had become a living evolutionary kill-switch. The science of it boggled his mind, but the short version was that her mind and body had become entangled with every other human being on the planet. A hive mother to the human race.
When faced with an extreme threat, Carter could — without consciously intending to do so — psychically overpower anyone in the immediate area, transforming them into a sort of zombie protector driven to mindlessly defend her. Unfortunately, the effect was permanent. Fortunately, thus far the only people to suffer the effect were the aggressors who had intended her harm, but there was no guarantee that innocent bystanders or even her close friends would be spared if the circumstances were dire enough. And no one knew what would happen if Carter ever suffered a mortal injury. Because distance wasn’t a factor, the effect might be universal.
It was a dangerous ability, but Carter had dedicated herself to mastering mental discipline techniques, and she was confident of her ability to keep it under control. Still, keeping her out of harm’s way seemed prudent. Since their current mission did not call for her particular skill set, Cerberus’s Chief Scientific Adviser had elected to stay behind so she could continue an ongoing research project of special interest to Pierce.
The role of Fiona Sigler — she was not literally Pierce’s niece, but might as well have been — in the Cerberus Group was not as well defined as the others. She had an intuitive understanding of language mechanics and was well on her way to completing an undergraduate degree in linguistics with a second major in archaeology. That by itself made her a valuable addition to the team, but it was only the tip of the iceberg where Fiona was concerned. A Native American from a nearly extinct tribe in the Siletz Confederation of the Pacific Northwest, Fiona was the last surviving speaker of a language that was believed to be a direct offshoot of the ‘Mother Tongue,’ an ancient and mysterious form of expression that transcended mere communication.
It was nothing less than the language of creation.
In the Kabbalist tradition of Judaism, people like Fiona were called Baalei Shem—Masters of the Word — capable of using this secret, possibly divine language for miraculous purposes. If the stories from the Bible were true, it had been done many times throughout history. There were other possible explanations for the effect, ranging from metaphysics to quantum physics, but the bottom line was that a master of the Mother Tongue could literally change the world with a word.
Five years earlier, Pierce would have scoffed at the idea, but he had seen far stranger things.
The Siletz tribal language was not the Mother Tongue, but it was similar enough to give Fiona a foundation upon which to begin reconstructing the lost language. Her grasp of the Mother Tongue and how to use it was improving, but as she was often quick to point out, there was more to it than saying ‘Abracadabra’ or whatever the Mother Tongue equivalent was. There was an intentional aspect to it as well, mind over matter. Thus far, her ‘fluency’ was limited to the creation of golems — crude automata made from earthen materials like loose rock or clay — and to a lesser degree, the ability to change the density of solid rock. She, and anyone in close proximity, could walk through walls. The latter would be a handy trick for investigating subterranean chambers, if she was ever able to perfect the skill.
If Pierce’s suspicions about Arkaim were correct, she would soon have an opportunity to test herself. Although the site had not been fully explored, it was believed that an elaborate system of tunnels were hidden beneath the partly excavated ruins. Any Originator artifacts that might be on site would be found there.
A short drive on the dirt road brought them to a grassy meadow with rows of parked vehicles. Just beyond the cars, vans, and minibuses, were a slew of colored tents. A couple dozen people, who looked like a motley representation of Russian society, moved between the parking area and the tent city. Some wore the casual attire of vacationing tourists, but others wore blousy red and saffron robes that made them look more like day-trippers from a Yogic ashram or a Buddhist monastery.
“Is this an archaeological reserve or a Dead concert?” Gallo asked.
“Arkaim has a certain counter-culture appeal,” Pierce said. “Think of it as Russia’s Sedona.”
The comparison was apt. Like Sedona, Arizona, Arkaim was believed — at least by those inclined to believe — to be an anomaly zone, with frequent reports of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. People from all over the region visited the site in hopes of having just such an encounter.
The odds favored a rational explanation — mass hysteria influenced by the power of suggestion — but there was a remote chance that something else was going on at Arkaim.
“Best to avoid making eye-contact,” Lazarus said, as he shouldered an over-sized backpack containing their survey gear, along with a couple of items Pierce hoped they wouldn’t need.
“Cintia, is the babelfish up and running?”
“I hate that you call it that,” Fiona muttered. “I’m sure it’s like copyright infringement or something.”
If she overheard the comment, Dourado gave no indication. “Just say the words.”
The babelfish, named for a fictional creature from a science-fiction novel, was Dourado’s sophisticated instantaneous translation system, instantaneous of course being a relative term. Rather than relying on computer-generated translations, which were awkward and often unreliable, the babelfish employed real human translators, recruited from the vast new labor pool of the modern ‘gig economy’ and networked together by a computer-based voice communication platform.
While it was not a revolutionary idea, what made the babelfish unique was its security. By employing multiple translators simultaneously and feeding most of them randomly generated alternative phrases, no one translator would ever hear an entire conversation. The person hearing the foreign language and supplying an English interpretation for the field user — Pierce in this case — would not be the same person to translate the reply. Such extreme measures were unnecessary for simple interactions, but intelligence services could extrapolate broad conclusions from irrelevant and fragmentary data supplied by informants and electronic eavesdropping programs. Given the secretive and sometimes dangerous nature of Cerberus Group operations, there was no such thing as too careful.
Pierce fitted a custom-made Bluetooth device to his ear and recited a test phrase as he got out of the vehicle. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
There was a momentary pause, and then an electronic approximation of his own voice repeating the phrase, but in Russian, issued from the speaker on his phone. Satisfied with the test, Pierce led the group across the field toward the Arkaim preserve’s entrance.