Land of the Gods

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

When the dust settled, a world of unrivalled beauty dawned on Hawke and Lea. They had stepped into a vast chamber the size of the mightiest cathedral, with an intricate vaulted ceiling resembling the rib cage of some gigantic undiscovered beast.

The stone walls were perfectly smooth, hewn by masons over centuries, each giant block receding at the edges into a perfectly beveled camber and everything was bathed in a peaceful turquoise color by some kind of concealed lighting. In the center of it all was a large iron sphere set atop a golden pedestal.

Lea Donovan tried to gather an idea about its scale as she traced her eyes up one of the many supporting columns until eventually reaching the intricately ornate vaulted ceiling hundreds of metres above them. Gently running her hand over one of the honey-colored blocks as she took in the impressive sight, she whispered something only she could hear. “I wish you could have seen this, Dad.”

After a period of stunned silence, Hawke spoke. “Amazing.”

“Reminds me of the time my parents took me to visit the Basilica in Rome.”

“And yet it looks so modern,” he said.

With the Athanatoi still behind them, Lea reached out for Hawke’s hand. He took it in his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “This is making me nervous, Joe.”

“Tell me about it. We’ve seen a lot of tombs and temples but nothing like this.”

“They’re always dead places, dry and dusty. Brittle bones and chipped relics, but this… this is like something from another world.”

Her eyes danced over the gleaming golden surfaces of the temple’s interior, the impeccable and intricate ornaments, untouched by the passing of eons.

“It looks like something out of the movie Alien.”

She turned to see Ryan behind her. They were all in here now, including the Oracle and his Athanatoi. Also stunned by the awesome spectacle, they meandered around the structure with open jaws trying to take it all in.

“Weird,” Lexi said. “Alien was the first thing I thought of too.”

“But it’s not a ruin,” Hawke muttered.

Reaper turned to him. “Hein?”

“It’s not a ruin,” he repeated. “These ancient tombs, temples and chambers are always old ruins by the time we get to them. Hundreds or thousands of years old, they’re crumbling old wrecks today. This place looks like it was built this year.”

“It looks like it was built about a thousand years from now, more like,” Ryan said. “I’ve never seen materials like some of this stuff. Look at the walls! Looks at the way the ceiling arches are constructed. I don’t know how any of this is possible.”

“That’s because you don’t have the mind to know what you’re seeing.” The Oracle pushed past them and walked out into the center of the giant structure. He raised his hands in the air and when he spoke, he raised his voice to a shout and his words echoed eerily around the gigantic space. “This is the Citadel! The beings that built this place built it millions of years before humans even crawled out of the swamp! Their technology had reached levels we may not attain for thousands of years, if we get there at all without killing ourselves. Now I am here to claim it all!”

“We’re going into crackerjack territory again,” Lea said.

“Silence!”

“The last thing I want to do is upset you, Wolff,” Hawke said. “So before I do that I’m going to tell you what an arsehole you are.”

The Oracle ignored the insult. “Your time on this planet is short, Englishman.” He walked over to the towering iron sphere in the center of the building, carefully climbing the golden steps as if approaching a religious site. “I cannot believe I am finally in the Altar Room!”

“My destiny shall be fulfilled. Absalom! Start the search for the weapons.”

“Yes, Oracle.”

“Salazar, keep your gun aimed on the scum.”

“Yes, Oracle.”

The old man took the last few steps until he was parallel with the sphere. His eyes danced all over the dark iron ball in search of some unknown thing only he was aware of.

“What’s he doing?” Zeke asked.

“You can never tell with him,” mumbled Nikolai.

Laying his hands on the equator of the metal sphere, he began muttering some kind of prayer now, and the sphere began to glow blue at the poles.

Zeke took a step back. “This shit is way above my pay grade. This is voodoo.”

“It’s not magic,” Nikolai said grimly. “It’s technology.”

“Could have fooled me, but then I’m just a tank commander, so what do I know?”

“No, he’s right,” Ryan said. “It’s Clarke’s third law.”

“Clarke?”

“Arthur C. Clarke,” he said. “The famous science fiction author. His third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“To dumbbells like us you mean?” Lexi said.

Scarlet raised an eyebrow. “Speak for yourself, darling.”

The sphere was brighter now, a dull dark blue at the equator but a brighter neon color at the poles where it had first started glowing. When the Oracle screamed, his voice was a hoarse cry of insanity. “The world will be rent asunder by the powers this will give me!”

Reaper was in awe, moving closer to the sphere. “Mon Dieu! This color I have never seen before.”

“Get back!” Salazar barked, lifting his weapon. “Or I’ll shoot.”

The former French Legionnaire looked at him like he was scum and took a step back into the line beside Lea and Ryan.

As the Oracle continued to chant his mantra, Absalom returned and nervously approached his leader. “The place is empty, sir.”

The Oracle snapped, “Empty?”

“No weapons anywhere to be seen,” he said. “No technology of any kind.”

“Or knowledge. The libraries are empty.”

“What? Search again!”

Hawke turned to Lea and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’m looking for an egress point. Something tells me this is not going to end well, and when the shit starts flying, we’re going to need to get out of here in a hurry.”

“What about that over there?” Lea pointed to the west side of the sphere. “Looks like some sort of ledge with an archway in it.”

Hawke shook his head. “That’s no good. Look more closely and you can see it’s on the other side of a chasm, at least twenty feet wide. I can’t see the bottom but going by everything else I’ve seen around here I’m going to guess it’s a long way down.”

“No, further up there’s a rope bridge.”

He saw it now, barely visible in the darkness on the far side of the temple, toward the northern end of the vast space.

The sphere was humming now and glowing so brightly they had to look away. Somehow, the Oracle was able to stand right in front of it, his arms stretched out his sides as he repeated his mantra over and over again, the alien words tumbling out of his dry lips.

Then the sphere exploded in light, almost blinding them all. When the bright blue flash receded, they all saw the sphere was now a circular gateway filled with spinning, swirling gases and bolts of cyan electricity.

“Okay then,” Lea said. “It’s going to be one of those days.”

Hawke turned to a mesmerised Ryan. “What’s going on, mate?”

“Looks like some sort of plasma,” he said nervously. “To be honest, it’s beginning to frighten the shit out of me.”

“Moi aussi,” Reaper said.

“Over there!” Zeke yelled. “We got incoming!”

Hawke saw them next. At least a dozen men and women in white robes running through the arches at the rear of the temple.

The Oracle saw them too his face painted white with shock and terror.

“Who the hell are they?” Lexi said.

“I don’t know,” Hawke said, “but whoever they are it doesn’t look like Wolff knows either.”

“And what are those weapons?” Reaper said.

Lea took a step back. “They remind me of those weird crossbows Razak pulled out of the dirt back in the jungle.”

The white-robed figures streamed out of the archways and began firing on the Athanatoi with a vengeance.

The Oracle’s men took up positions of cover and returned fire, forcing the white robed guardians into positions of cover on a ledge running above the sphere.

“We’re out of here,” Hawke said. “Zeke, check if we can get out of here the way we came in. Take Kolya.”

“You got it, boss.”

The team watched the two new recruits as they jogged away into the gloom, not knowing if they would ever see them alive again or not.

A furious Lea turned to Hawke. “We can’t just go! We don’t know anything about this place! We have so much to discover!”

“You can’t discover anything in the grave, Lea.”

“What about my Dad?”

“We know where it is now,” Hawke said. “We can return with a bigger force.”

“But…”

“We know enough.” Ryan reached out to her. “We know there was a civilization on this world millions of years ago. We know they had different DNA and could live for thousands of years. We know this was their capital, and we know they seeded the world as we know it, using their idols to create new societies.”

In the center of the temple, the white-robed figures were gradually overcoming the Athanatoi. The fire fight intensified, but the Oracle refused to take cover. Standing tall before the sphere, he was soon strafed by bullets and bolts of blue neon from the white-robed guardians’ weapons, ripping into his upper legs and cutting him down where he stood.

His bloodcurdling screams made everyone turn and stare as he continued to crawl forward, blood pouring from the terrible wounds in his thigh. He stretched his arm desperately toward the glowing circle. “Please… show me the light!”

A thundercrack of electrical discharge and then he was wrapped in the blue plasma.

“Oh, Jesus!”

Hawke saw the Texan and Russian Athanatoi monk stagger back over from the main entrance and then a loud explosion behind them. “What is it, Zeke? Can we get out that way or not? Did I hear firearms down there?”

He stumbled over to them, a fresh bullet wound gouged into his shoulder. “We’re in deep shit, guys. That noise was the sound of around a hundred Special Ops making their way into the heart of this mountain right about now.”

Hawke darted his eyes over to the Texan. “Who?”

Zeke whipped off his battered and torn ten-gallon hat and wiped his brow. “Can’t be sure, but my best guess is US.”

“Which makes sense given Faulkner is now the President,” said Lea.

“A hundred?” Scarlet said.

Zeke nodded. He looked nervous for the first time since they’d seen him. “At least, and those boys sure are tooled up. They have enough weapons to take Moscow. M134 miniguns at fifty rounds per second, pintle-mounted machine guns, swing-arm GPMGs, you name it.”

“We can take them!” Ryan said.

“No,” Hawke said coolly. “We can’t. We’re good, but we’re not that good. We’ve been on the road for a long time. We’re exhausted and we’re injured and we’re out of ammo. There’s no way we’re beating over a hundred Special Ops guys freshly fed and looking for a fight, especially as we also have those white-robes guys to think about.”

With the Athanatoi guards heavily pinned down under incoming fire, Hawke led the ECHO team behind the support columns and around the outside of the temple to the rope bridge Lea had noticed moments earlier.

“It’s almost in sight!”

A white-robed man appeared on the other side of the chasm, a submachine gun in his hands. When he raised the weapon, Hawke screamed at the team to take cover, but before they had hit the dirt, the man in the robes was blasted off his feet by Athanatoi fire. With his white robes covered in deep red blood, he crashed down into the dirt on the far side of the chasm.

“Keep going!” Hawke yelled. “This is our only chance to escape this nightmare.”

Barely alive, the man in the white robes crawled through the dust and gravel and filth, pulling a grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin and threw it at the chasm where it detonated and blew the rope bridge into a thousand pieces before slumping down to the ground.

Lea turned to Hawke, bullets tracing over their heads. “What now?”

“Wait, I’ve got a great idea!”