The Six Sacred Stones jw-2

by Matthew Reilly

  “It’s not a symbol. It’s a diagram.”

  “Of what?”

  Alby had looked up at West seriously. “It’s a diagram of the layout of Stonehenge.”

  STONEHENGE

  THE HONDA crested a rise, and without warning the cluster of great stones came into view.

  Zoe inhaled sharply.

  Of course she had been here before, several times. Everyone in the UK had. But the scale of the site, the sheerbravura of it, always took her by surprise.

  Stonehenge.

  Quite simply, Stonehenge was stunning.

  A source of fascination to her for a long time, Zoe knew all the myths: that this ring of towering stones was an ancient calendar; or an ancient observatory; that the bluestones—the smaller six-foot-high dolerite stones that formed a horseshoe-shaped arc within the far more famous trilithons—had been brought to the Salisbury Plain around the year 2700B.C. by some unknown tribe from the Preseli Hillsover 150 miles away in distant Wales. To this day, many believe that the bluestones, even on bitterly cold winter days, remain warm to the touch.

  It would be another 150 years, around 2,570B.C., before the spectacular trilithons were raised around this minihenge of bluestones. But the date is important: in 2,570B.C. the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu was completing his famous work on the Giza plateau in Egypt, the Great Pyramid.

  Over the years, Zoe knew, cosmologists and astrologers had tried to link Stonehenge with the Great Pyramid, but without success. The only confirmed link was the closely matching dates of their construction.

  Other peculiarities of Stonehenge intrigued her.

  Like the rare green cyanobacterium that grew on the great trilithons themselves. A variety of lichen, it was a true oddity, an uncommon hybrid of algae and fungus that grew only on exposed coastlines—yet Stonehenge was fifty miles from the nearest sea, the Bristol Channel. The mosslike substance gave the stones a mottled, uneven aspect.

  And then, of course, there were the unexplained theories about the site’s location: the unique way the Sun and Moon rise over the fifty-first parallel; and the unusually high number of neolithic sites running the length of the British Isles on the same degree of longitude as Stonehenge.

  In the final analysis, only one thing about Stonehenge could be said with any degree of certainty: for over 4,500 years it had withstood the ravages of wind, rain, and time itself, offering a multitude of questions and very few answers.

  “OK,” Zoe said as she drove. “How are we going to tackle this? Thoughts anyone?”

  “Thoughts?” Lachlan said. “How about this: that there’s no precedent for what we’re about to do. Over the years, scholars and wackos have linked Stonehenge with the Sun and the Moon, with virgins and druids, with solstices and eclipses, but never with Jupiter. If Wizard’s hypothesis is correct and this Firestone is the real deal, then we’re going to see something that hasn’t been seen for over 4,500 years.”

  Julius said, “Can I add that the good folk at English Heritage don’t look kindly on people who step over the rope at Stonehenge and walk among the stones, let alone lunatics like us wanting to perform ancient occult rituals. There’ll be security guards.”

  “Leave the guards to me,” Zoe said. “You just handle the occult ritual.”

  The twins pulled out Wizard’s notes again, gazed at the diagram of Stonehenge:

  “In his notes, Wizard says that the Ramesean Stone at Stonehenge is the Altar Stone,” Julius said. “But what about the Grand Trilithon? It’s the signature element of Stonehenge.”

  “No, I’d go with the Altar Stone, too,” Lachlan said. “It’s the focal point of the structure. It’s also made of bluestone, laid at the same time as the original ring of bluestones, so it’s older than the trilithons. And fortunately for us, it’s still there.”

  Over four-and-a-half millennia, Stonehenge had been pilfered by locals searching for stones to use as walls or as millstones. Nearly all the bluestones of the henge were gone. The bigger trilithons had survived—at over eighteen feet tall (twenty-one in the case of the Grand Trilithon) they had just been too big for the local peasants to move.

  Lachlan turned to Alby: “What do you reckon, kid?”

  Alby looked up, surprised to be asked his opinion. He had thought that, as kids, he and Lily were just being brought along for the ride, assigned to Zoe to be kept safe.

  “Well?” Lachlan said expectantly. “Jack West thinks you’re a clever one and Jack’s a notoriously hard judge. And Zoe here doesn’t hang out with losers—I mean, hey, look at us.”

  Lily raised an eyebrow at that.

  Julius added, “And weren’t you the one who figured out the connection between the Titanic Rising and Stonehenge?”

  Alby swallowed. Lily smiled at him reassuringly. She had long ago become used to this kind of adult treatment.

  “I, well,” Alby stammered. “The stone we’re after has to fit some way with the Firestone. I can’t see the Firestone fitting onto the Grand Trilithon in any practical way. But the Altar Stone, if reerected, would be at the very heart of the structure. The other thing to remember is the rising of Titan to the northeast—”

  “Ah, yes, yes. Good point,” Julius said.

  They had gone through this earlier.

  As Alby had explained briefly at the meeting in Dubai, the Titanic Rising and Sinking occurred only when the Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn were in alignment, something that occurred approximately once every 400 years, and which—clearly by no coincidence—was happening right now.

  The “rising” of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, actually preceded the passage of Saturn itself, rising from behind the great hulking mass of Jupiter. Soon after this rising, Saturn would sink again behind Jupiter. Due to each planet’s angled orbit around the Sun—its ecliptic—this upward-downward motion occurred eight times in the month that the planets remained aligned.

  Seen from Stonehenge, first Jupiter would appear on the northeastern horizon, then Titan, then Saturn.

  “So why is this Titanic Rising so important?” Zoe asked. “What does Titan or Jupiter or Saturn have to do with the Sa-Benben and the Dark Star?”

  “The connection with the Sa-Benben is straightforward,” Julius said. “It’s the connection between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid that people have been searching for for centuries. Our theory is simple: the Pyramid is a temple to our Sun. Stonehenge is a temple to the Dark Sun.”

  “And the two are most certainly linked geographically,” Lachlan added. “You know how the bluestones were brought to the Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in Wales?”

  “Yes, Lachlan,” Zoe said patiently. “I do have two degrees in archaeology. I just didn’t do the subjects on Crazy British Neolithic Cosmology that you obviously majored in.”

  “Then you know about the rectangle formed by the four original Station Stones that once surrounded Stonehenge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t,” Lily said.

  To illustrate, Lachlan opened a book, showing Lily a picture of Stonehenge’s layout. Arrayed around the circular henge in a perfect rectangle were four stones known as the “Station Stones.” They formed a 5:12 rectangle.

  Lachlan said, “Now, if you draw a diagonal across that rectangle, simple Pythagorean math tells us that the resulting right-angle triangle is a 5:12:13 triangle.”

  He drew a triangle on the picture with a pencil.

  “Following me?” he said.

  “So far,” Lily said.

  “Nice triangle, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  Lachlan then pulled out a map of the United Kingdom. He indicated Stonehenge at the bottom of the map, and then drew the same 5:12:13 triangle on the map using Stonehenge as the tip of the triangle and keeping the triangle’s baseline parallel to the equator.

  “The 5:12:13 triangle reveals the original location of the bluestones in Wales: The Preseli Hills,” Lachlan said. “This is pretty exceptional geography for a primitive tribe. It’s so ex
ceptional that some believe the ancients had outside help.”

  “I thought you were going to prove a link between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid,” Zoe said.

  Lachlan smiled. He winked to Lily. “Remember how I said it was a nice triangle?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Well, if you extend the hypotenuse of this wonderful triangle like this…”

  “…see what it runs through.”

  Lachlan turned to a map of the world and did precisely that.

  “No way…” Lily said, when she saw the finished product.

  The arrow passed directly through Egypt, right at the Nile Delta…at Giza.

  “Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid at Giza,” Lachlan said proudly. “United at last.”

  “Which brings us to the second connection,” Julius said. “The connection between all this and Titan, Saturn, and Jupiter. You see, it’s not Titan or Saturn or Jupiter that matters. It’s what lies hidden behind them that matters.”

  “Behind them?” Lily asked.

  Lachlan grinned. “Yes. We checked the data you sent us from Dubai, the data from Wizard’s notes about this Dark Star and its rate of approach. Seems it’s coming at us from behind Jupiter. Thus the importance of this celestial event, the rising of Saturn behind Jupiter. It is, to put it simply, beyond value, because it will allow us, for the very first time, to see this fearsome Dark Star.”

  “How?” Zoe asked, turning in the driver’s seat. “I thought we couldn’t see it in our light spectrum.”

  “Well, we won’t see it , we’ll see the dark space that it occupies,” Julius said. “Now, are you familiar with the concept of space-time?”

  “Or more specifically the curvature of space-time,” Lachlan added.

  “Yes, good clarification, brother,” Julius said.

  “Thank you.”

  “More or less,” Zoe said. “The gravitational pull of a planet bends the space around it. I once heard it compared to a stretched-out rubber sheet with marbles placed on it…”

  “That’s right,” Lachlan said, “and each marble makes a slight depression in the rubber sheet, indicating the curvature of space-time. So if you were in a spaceship traveling past these planets, your trajectory would actually bend as you pass each planet, unless of course you applied more power.”

  “Yes…”

  Julius said, “Well, it’s the same with light. Light bends, too, as it passes through the gravitational fields of planets and stars.”

  Lachlan: “And big planets like Jupiter bend it more than small planets like Mercury.”

  “Correct,” Julius said. “So tonight, as we look out at Jupiter from Stonehenge, and see Saturn rise behind it, we will, if only for a moment, thanks to the peculiar bending of light around those two planets, get a glimpse of the section of space hiddenbehind Jupiter.”

  Zoe frowned. “And if the Sa-Benben is set in place at that time—positioned atop the Ramesean stone of Stonehenge—what happens then?”

  Julius looked at Lachlan.

  Lachlan looked at Julius.

  Then they both turned to face Zoe and shrugged together.

  “That,” Julius said, “is what we’re going to find out.”

  The car sped into the night.

  STONEHENGE

  DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:22A.M.

  THEY PARKED on the gravel shoulder a few hundred yards from the henge.

  The moon shone down on the wide plain like a great spotlight, illuminating the relentlessly flat landscape all the way to the horizon.

  Stonehenge stood at the junction of the A303 and a smaller side road.

  Two security guards stood near the great shadowy stones, silhouettes in the moonlight. They saw the Honda stop, but did not investigate: travelers from London often stopped to gaze at the stones while they stretched their legs.

  Zoe stepped closer, to within fifty yards of the two guards and then quickly raised a boxy gunlike object fitted with a handgrip and trigger, aimed it at the guards, and called,“Hey!”

  The guards looked over.

  Zoe pulled the trigger. There was an instantaneous flash from her device accompanied by a deep sonicwhump, and immediately the two guards dropped to the ground like marionettes whose strings had been cut, out cold.

  “Whatthe hell was that!” Julius asked, coming up alongside Zoe.

  “And where can we get one!” Lachlan added.

  “LaSon-V stun gun,” Zoe said. “It’s a nonlethal incapacitator. Laser flash accompanied by a sonic charge. Originally designed for use on planes by sky marshals to subdue hijackers without the risk of shooting out a window and disrupting cabin pressure. The sonic charge would usually be enough to knock out an aggressive attacker, but the laser flash blinds them too. No aftereffects except for a splitting headache. Some people think this is what was used to disorient Princess Diana’s driver just before her fatal car crash.”

  “OK…” Julius said. “On that cheery note, let’s get to work.”

  A gap was cut in the wire fence surrounding the henge and Zoe and the twins quickly rolled a handcart packed with equipment through it, followed by the kids.

  They came to the stones and paused for a moment, awed.

  The towering pillars of rock soared into the sky above them, looming large in the moonlight—powerful, ominous,ancient. The biggest of them, the lone pillar of the Grand Trilithon, rose to a massive twenty-six feet, a conical stone “tongue” at its peak indicative of the lintel that had once lain across its top.

  “What time is the Titanic Rising?” Zoe asked.

  “Jupiter should already be on the horizon,” Alby said, setting up a serious-looking telescope on the grass among the stones. “Titan will rise over it at 3:49A.M., Saturn two minutes later, then, as it rises, a gap will appear between Saturn and Jupiter.”

  “And that’s when we see our Dark Star.”

  “Correct.”

  Zoe checked her watch. It was 3:25. “Let’s move. We’ve got twenty-five minutes.”

  By the light of a penlight, Julius examined a more recent plan of Stonehenge, showing the layout of the stones that still stood:

  “Three of the five central trilithons are still intact,” he said. “One upright from the Grand Trilithon still stands, and one upright down here, at the bottom right. Might be an issue.”

  “What about the Altar Stone?” Lachlan said.

  “It’s fallen.”

  “Which one is it?” Zoe asked.

  “This one.” Lachlan hustled among the towering stones, came to a fallen one, a great horizontal slab, half-buried in the grass within the central ring of stones. It was about eight feet long, slim and lean. A small rectangular hole in the earth lay next to it.

  Lachlan examined one of its ends and called, “It’s got a depression in it! Square in shape. Maybe eight by eight inches.”

  “That would match the Sa-Benben,” Zoe said.

  She stared at the horizontal slab, amazed at what she was about to say: “OK, then. Let’s reerect it.”

  They moved quickly but gently, not wanting to damage the 4,500-year-old stones.

  Slings were wrapped around the Altar Stone and it was gently lifted by an A-frame pulley system fitted with a diesel-powered cable spooler.

  While this was going on, Lily cleared out the hole in the ground near the base of the Altar Stone. Alby was training his telescope on the northeast horizon.

  “I see Jupiter!” he called.

  Through his telescope, he saw a small orange dot hovering on the horizon, perfectly aligned with Stonehenge’s outer ring of lintels and its famous Heel Stone.

  “Hurry!” Zoe called to the twins.

  “I am not going to hurry with a national treasure,” Julius said indignantly.

  Slowly, very slowly, the spooler reeled the great stone slab upward, pulling it vertical until—whump—Julius jumped at the sound—it slid abruptly downward, slotting into the hole where over four thousand years ago it had originally stood.

  Zoe check
ed her watch.

  3:48A.M.

  One minute to go.

  It was then that she removed something from her backpack.

  The top piece of the Golden Capstone.

  the Sa-Benben.

  The Firestone.

  It was stunning to behold. It glimmered in the night, its golden sides shining, its crystalline peak sparkling.

  Zoe climbed a stepladder and stood at the top of the now-erect Altar Stone.