The World Keys (The Syker Key Book 2) (2 page)

The Keys actually had names. The one the human named Pan had found in Florida was called An-Ire, and it was a sibling to the An-Navit that the human John Syker bore.

It was pleased to have a bearer again. It preferred the companionship, more than An-Navit did, but had suffered without it longer. It was not sad at this, exactly, more as if it sensed missed opportunities.

It would share with Pan what it knew, but it knew it’s brother too; An-Navit would not have shared certain things. Each of them had specialties, focuses, and this was in fact what their names had meant in the ancient tongue. An-Ire literally translated as “the Key of Knowledge”, while An-Navit meant “the Key of Power”. Pan was about to learn some things that would likely spur him to action.

A threat was coming, one that had been traveling for millennia. There had never been a bearer in a position to do anything about it until now, but it would be close.

Just as Jessica could feel it when John appeared nearby suddenly, John could detect when Pan appeared. The difference was that he wasn’t expecting it.

With a light popping sound, Pan materialized in John’s living room, surprising John and Jessica sitting on the couch.

It was only because of what he felt that John knew it was Pan...he certainly didn’t recognize the stranger standing before them in jeans and a t-shirt, with nothing on his face but some light stubble. “Jesus Pan,” John complained, “you should really warn someone when you’re going to...wait, you found other Key!”

Pan simply nodded. He wasn’t smiling. “John, we have a problem.”

The Key in Pan’s pocket lit briefly, and Pan’s son and erstwhile daughter in law watched in rapt attention as he began to relate the story the Key of Knowledge had shown him.

***

A few minutes later, Pan finished. Jessica didn’t believe it, and she could see John’s jaw had fallen as much as hers. It was beyond imagining.

“How the hell do we defend against that?” she asked Pan.

“We have to find the last Key, and fast.”

She was doubtful. Even with all three Keys, she didn’t know how they would defend against the threat.

***

An-Ire was glad to have another bearer, and for the first time in millennia it was near it’s sibling. There was still one missing, however. An-Udo, “the Key of Joining” was created to allow faster than light travel throughout the galaxy. And it could travel very, very fast, literally from one end of the Milky Way to the other in less than half a second.

But it too had been lost in the Atlantis conflagration.

Chuck Magnuson worked for the government, but actually didn’t mind it. It wasn’t like he had a social life anyways, so working on a top secret program in Alaska was no bother, and he certainly liked the money.

The program was called HAARP, the High frequency Active Auroral Research Program. A massive array of antennae designed to find ways to use the ionosphere for radio communications and surveillance. The array was used to pump large amounts of energy into the upper atmosphere to see what would happen.

The real problem was that the public didn’t really know either the true intentions of the program, or the amount of energy they were truly throwing up. Since 2007 the array had been using a nuclear reactor to power its transmissions. Instead of the 3.6 megawatts they told the public, they were actually pushing 120 megawatts. Chuck suspected that the Earth might not be taking the hit as gracefully as his superiors claimed.

As an engineer his job was to simply make sure the entire thing kept running, and so far it had, with a couple of minor hiccups.

Chuck knew that the government used specific pulses of the antennae for mind control experiments. He didn’t understand the science behind it, but it amounted to something like this: since the brain was wired to use electricity, a high energy magnetic pulse of specific frequencies would cause certain types of responses in the brain. Basically, a government-run remote control for the mind.

It was a bit over his head.

No matter. He worked, he got paid. Even if he thought his bosses were incompetent sometimes.

***

Teleportation wasn’t something Jessica had mastered, even when she was the bearer. She could do it, but it took a great deal of concentration. One time she even ended up some place she didn’t expect to, and that had scared her enough to stop trying.

Now she was no longer the bearer, she didn’t expect to ever have, or want, to teleport somewhere again. And it surprised her to know that she was wrong.

“Don’t try to overthink it,” John had told her, all those weeks ago when they started training. “Literally, just focus quickly, like a blink of your eyes, and flip.”

And she had done it. She was starting to think she was getting good at it too. Of course, going between places you had been and could picture in your mind was easy. Going some place you had never been was substantially harder.

John had shown her a few tricks for that too. It basically involved doing the teleportation in reverse; instead of transporting yourself to the place you wanted to go, “retrieve” a visual, see it remotely, then use that image as your landing spot.

It worked too, though she came back from Antarctica much more quickly than any other place she had been. She’d forgotten her coat.

She was learning a lot these past weeks. She had to, since it appeared there were far greater dangers out there than she could have imagined possible.

They had been forced to close the restaurant. There was no getting around the fact that time was short and they had to get off their collective asses if they were going to save the planet.

***

An-Navit knew about the damage being created by the HAARP program, but didn’t care, and certainly didn’t feel the need to inform it’s bearer. So for the two years John spent learning all he could about the Key, the damage was reaching a breaking point.

An-Ire on the other hand felt the need to tell its bearer quite strongly. The human bearers were surprised by these differences. They hadn’t expected to see any kind of a difference between them, believing them to simply be copies of each other.

An-Ire watched, and knew the folly of the experiment being run in Alaska. Clearly, it had creative leanings, unlike it’s brother, who tried to be completely objective.

For the better part of a century, science had believed that a massive molten iron core at the center of the Earth was responsible for creating the magnetic shield that protected the planet from solar radiation. An-Ire knew that the magnetic field was a consequence of the planet’s voltage differential compared to the Sun, not a hypothetical spinning core. Earth was literally a voltage sink, a capacitor, and it was that flow of electrical energy that had produced the massive magnetic shield, redirecting the most harmful radiation safely away.

The problem was that HAARP had depended on the theory of that mass of iron being intractable, that nothing they could do would have any negative permanent impact. And one incorrect assumption was going to have devastating consequences.

Earth’s core was, in fact, not iron, but mostly silica and carbon. Non-magnetic, non-electrical, but having an impact again mostly due to it’s difference in raw atomic-level voltage from the Sun and surrounding galaxy.

The energy that HAARP was pumping into the magnetic field was weakening that field, dropping the voltage differential with the Sun and creating a situation that would see more of the Sun’s energy reach the surface.

The only saving grace had been the Sun’s inactivity. Except for a short spike two years previous, the Sun had actually been channeling less energy the last decade. HAARP’s effects weren’t being noticed because it was coincident with a fall in Solar energy.

The weakening magnetic field was going to have devastating effects, since it was the planet’s largest defense against incoming attacks, natural or otherwise.

And this time, the Earth was ill prepared for the onslaught. An-Ire pressed the urgency upon it’s new bearer, and he understood. That was good. It meant humanity had a chance, however small.

Because more than anything, with Earth’s magnetic defenses weakened, solar radiation was the lesser of the concerns.

The depth of his ignorance surprised him.

John was never one to think he knew it all, but certainly spending a couple of years with the Key had made him complacent, filled him with assumptions about the nature of the universe. And it wasn’t that the Key had lied to him; it simply hadn’t told him the whole truth, and never would, but at least now he understood why.

Pan had found the second of the three Keys, but was it in time? HAARP had been ripping away at the Earth’s defenses for so many years, it was going to be nearly impossible to repair the damage and defend the planet.

Nearly, but not quite, impossible. He hoped.

Getting any real information about the government’s HAARP program was problematic. There was so much garbage relating to conspiracy theories, finding anything true about it was a chore.

Even the Key of Power didn’t know anything about it, beyond the basics related to the impact to the environment. Pan’s Key seemed to know much more.

A little investigation was in order, something his Key was thankfully capable of helping with. He decided to use one of Pan’s old tricks.

***

Chuck got into his Ford Explorer and started it up. July in Alaska was actually a beautiful time, depending on where you were. Too close to the ocean and the humidity sucked right through you, and he hated being that cold all the time. But here in the foothills, this time of year was actually pretty nice.

He dreaded the 45 minute commute, but this was the price of government work, and he damned well wasn’t going to sleep under that massive EM field.

The drive was uneventful, as usual. No animals. It was like they knew to avoid this place. No birds even. Chuck often wondered if that was a hint.

The first checkpoint was a safe ten miles from the array. “Morning Chuck,” the guard said as Chuck handed him his ID to scan into the system. Fred, his name was Fred.

“Morning Fred.”

Fred handed back the ID and Chuck drove on.

The array was operational today. In fact it had been running for fifteen hours straight, a new record. They expected to shut it down by noon, but that was still hours away.

The guards at checkpoint two had no sense of humor at all, no sense of familiarity. It was as if the closer you got to the array the more serious they became.

Again, they waved him through after checking his ID and, this time, checking the vehicle. Less than two minutes later he was stopped in his assigned parking spot.

But...something was bothering him. Something odd, out of place, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He looked around the vehicle, expecting to see something, but didn’t notice anything different.

It was as though there was a person in the car, and you had forgotten they were there, but obviously except for him, the Explorer was empty.

He got out. He never bothered to lock his truck. Who was going to steal it here? As he walked to his office, he heard something. The car door opening? He spun to see it, but it was closed, just as he’d left it.

This damned array was starting to play with his mind. Chuck almost laughed at the irony.

***

John tried to be very, very quiet. Either there was a problem with the array, or this Chuck Magnuson was a very sensitive person, at least sensitive to John’s particular brand of magic.

Was it possible the array was interfering with the Key, with his ability?

He walked slowly over to Chuck, in a wide circle to see if he could still sense him. Nothing.

Chuck opened the door to the building and walked in.

***

It was an impossible task.

Chasing down every little rumor of a small crystal, literally traveling around the world to follow any thread, and Jessica was starting to get tired.

All of them had been doing it, except for her mother, Catherine, who had agreed to stay home to look after Zack. Jessica had been to over two hundred locations in three weeks, and she knew Pan was moving even more aggressively than she was. She hadn’t even seen Arthur, her father, in a week, but she could feel he was out there, searching.

When she started, teleporting from one location to another still made her nervous, even with all of John’s training. Now it was just tedious. She had to be careful though; a couple of times she had almost teleported out when people were around. Having people watch you disappear into thin air was probably not a good idea, especially if you ever had to come back.

There was only one thing she didn’t like about popping in and out of all these different locations: The smell. Not that the smell was terrible, well, except in a few places, but it was an assault every single time. She had finally gotten in the habit of taking a deep breath before teleporting, to give her time for her sense of smell to catch up with what she was seeing.

In this case Angkor Wat, the Hindu temple complex in Cambodia. While certainly better than most of the places she had been, it was still too much for her western nasal sensitivities. A surprise since, though she could barely recall, it was probably better than the world she grew up in. But she had come to the ancient temple on the trail of the last Key, not to complain about the smell.

Ancient. Jessica laughed. She was born four hundred years before King Suryavarman II even built the thing. She had never met the King, but she knew of him. It was hard not to notice someone who ruled over successive military campaigns for over thirty years, even in those days.

In all her years though, she had never thought to visit the temple, and she had to admit it was spectacular.

She walked into the main gallery, marveling at the architecture. Concentric squares upon squares, or crosses, if you chose to see that. It was an intimidating place. Jessica continued walking around the temple. Something had drawn her here.

In the eastern gallery she noticed something, relief on the wall that was familiar. She recognized it as the Churning of the Sea of Milk from Hindu legend. Vishnu was holding something, and commanding the serpent Vasuki to churn the sea.

That something Vishnu was holding was a sphere.

But it wasn’t Vishnu that was important, or the sphere. It was the location. Like a lock tumbler clicking into place she could feel the information start to register. There was something at the edge of her perception, something...ah, Ley lines. It was the Ley lines that were the key, so to speak. And she had spent the last few days trampling all over them.

She had figured it out.

***

This was more drudgery than Arthur was used to. Pouring through ancient records hidden away in the basement of the British Museum was not his idea of fun. It was unfortunately his task though, since he was the only member of the family who read ancient Egyptian and Cuneiform.

Damned hobbies. He knew it would bite him the in ass someday.

There were certainly lots of hints he was coming across, but not only did they have to find references to things that
might
have been the Key, it had to be to the one Key they didn’t already have. That was proving to be a stubborn problem.

They didn’t even know if the remaining Key was even on the planet, or if it had been blown out into space like the An-Navit Key.

He suddenly felt Jessica intruding on his thoughts.

Baalbek!

Arthur knew the reference. Baalbek, Lebanon. An ancient site built by the Romans. In fact, what the Romans built was on top of something far more ancient, possibly by thousands of years. Nobody had ever sufficiently explained how stones as large as two thousand tons had been placed with exacting precision at the top of the mountain, creating a massive platform. What had been the purpose of that platform? And what did it have to do with finding the Key?