“Shit!”
Knight’s rare expletive brought Bishop back to the moment. He wheeled around and saw the reason for his teammate’s oath. Two figures—Queen and Rook—had broken from the cover of the pines and were bolting across the clearing toward them.
His concern deepened. It wasn’t like those two to run from anything.
A frankenstein appeared behind them.
Why hadn’t Rook dropped it with a couple of shots from his hand cannons?
Two more of the monstrosities emerged on the heels of the first, and the situation became clearer to Bishop.
There were two more behind those, and then more. Suddenly, the clearing was filled with the lumbering once-human things, moving so fast that Bishop couldn’t accurately count them—at least ten, maybe a dozen, maybe more than that.
Knight’s Barrett boomed, the muzzle brake throwing up a huge cloud of dirt as it vented the hot sulfurous gases that propelled a .50 BMG round with lethal accuracy into one of the monsters.
The sniper rifle thundered again, but without the same effect; the frankensteins were moving too fast for him to sight them in.
Queen and Rook were only a few seconds from reaching them, and their pursuers were just a few more.
“Knight! Let’s go!” Bishop shouted.
“Where?” Knight must have intended it to be a rhetorical question, because he didn’t look up from his grim but futile task.
A good question. King had gone into the rock, but they couldn’t follow…
There was another way. He remembered the door they had passed when moving up on Rainer and his men; a door that led straight into the cliff, and to some old cave beyond. If they could get inside, that door would become a kill zone where they could repel almost any attack, even from the prodigiously strong frankensteins.
There was no time to explain all of this to Knight, so he simply reached down and plucked the smaller man up and threw him over one shoulder. The abrupt action startled Knight, but instead of struggling, he clutched at the rifle.
“This way!” Bishop shouted as he started running along the base of the cliff. He didn’t look back to see if Queen and Rook were following.
The door seemed further away than he remembered—probably a trick of his battle-heightened perceptions.
Knight had stopped struggling against him almost immediately, but he didn’t speak until Bishop reached his goal. “Put me down,” he said calmly. “I’ll hold them off while you get the door open.”
Bishop complied without comment, letting his teammate slip to the ground. Queen and Rook reached them at almost the same moment. Four of the frankensteins were about a hundred feet behind them.
“Keep moving!” Queen was breathing so hard, she could barely get the words out.
Bishop shook his head. “We can make our stand here…inside.”
“You got the key big guy?” panted Rook.
Bishop raised one foot and slammed it against the door, just below the U-shaped handle. The door buckled, practically folding in half around his boot, as it swung inward, revealing the darkness beyond.
“I guess you could knock,” Rook said.
A piercing shriek filled the air as the cave’s intruder alarm activated.
“Or ring the bell.”
Bishop swept them all through the opening with one mighty arm; with his other hand, he fired his carbine into the approaching enemy. He didn’t wait to see if his shots had any effect. He whirled and plunged headlong into the cave behind his teammates.
A narrow passage lay just beyond the door, and Bishop was forced to squirm through the tight throat of stone. Then, without warning, he was birthed into a great black void.
The oppressive darkness lasted only a few seconds. One by one, the tactical flashlights mounted to their carbines flared to life. Rays of tightly focused brilliance stabbed through the still air without really illuminating anything, but Bishop got the sense of being in an enormous enclosure, as big as an aircraft hanger. The floor alternated between loose chips of rock and a smooth surface that looked almost polished, but riding above both was a narrow bridge of steel plate—part of the conservation effort designed to minimize impact on the cave. The sweep of the lights revealed other discrete details: pillars of limestone and other minerals that stretched from floor to ceiling; stalagmites that seemed to be erupting from the floor like milky white mushroom clouds. One of the lights revealed something else, something that at first glance appeared to be moving, but was in reality an image painted on one wall—a buffalo or bison that appeared almost to be running. The illusion was gone even before Bishop could register it; the lights were sweeping back the way they’d come, shining on the narrow slit leading to the doorway.
Something was moving there.
Rook fired his pistol. The entire cavern rang with the noise of the discharge, and the acrid smell of burnt gunpowder obliterated the earthy odor of ancient stone. The shape in the entry twitched grotesquely with the impact, but then the figure began moving forward once more.
Rook fired again, and this time the damage was unmistakable; the bullet cratered the frankenstein’s forehead.
Impossibly, it kept advancing.
Rook fired out the last of his magazine, but the monstrosity just seemed to absorb each hit as if it was impervious.
There was an ear-splitting report as Knight fired the Barrett straight into the thing’s chest, nearly tearing it in half. This time it went down permanently, as did the frankenstein right behind it. But even before the bodies hit the steel decking, a third creature rushed forward and lifted the fallen body, holding it between itself and the Chess Team like a shield.
Bishop realized now why the first frankenstein had seemed invincible; it had been dead all along, and its body had sheltered the advance of its brothers through the chokepoint of the cave entrance.
Rook and Knight hastened to reload, while Bishop and Queen kept up a withering barrage of fire from their carbines, but the invading force just shrugged off the damage as they poured unhindered through the gap.
FIFTY-THREE
The darkness surrounding King was becoming substantial. At first, he attributed this to some lingering vestige of claustrophobia, but as the air became viscous, like syrup clinging to his limbs, he realized that it was the literal truth. The strange effect that had opened this passageway into the Earth—science or magic, or maybe a little of both—was receding; the stone was returning to its solid state.
The realization triggered a surge of panic, and he started clawing his way forward, swimming as much as running. Abruptly, the resistance vanished. He stumbled forward, sprawling face down on hard stone.
What just happened?
He knew the answer. The rational part of his brain stodgily refused to embrace the reality of the experience, but what other explanation could there be?
Understanding the Voynich manuscript and securing the Prime had never been his highest priority, but he had been paying attention when Parker and Sasha had told their tale of medieval scientists discovering the secret source of life and using music to change the very nature of the physical world. If even a little bit of what they had told him was true…
I just walked through a solid rock wall!
There was a faint glow directly ahead, and King heard raised voices, conversing heatedly just a few yards in front of him.
“You have to let me do this,” Sasha urged.
“And you can,” Parker said. “Once Jack has secured the area.”
“And what if he can’t? What if Rainer kills him? Kills them all?”
Frowning, King got to his feet, and with his hands extended ahead, probing the darkness, he moved toward them. He could see their silhouettes now, lit by the glow of Sasha’s computer.
He brought his carbine around and switched on the attached light. The high-intensity LED bulb revealed a tunnel, cut and smoothed by the passage of some ancient subterranean river long since diverted, sloping gently downward, and standing partway do
wn the slope were two human shapes.
Parker threw up a hand to shade his eyes, but Sasha seized on the moment to break free of his restraining hand. She charged ahead, deeper into the passage.
“Stop her, Danno!”
Parker was already moving. He caught her by the shoulder and spun her around. King could see the desperation in her eyes. She struggled in his grasp, her efforts becoming more frantic as King drew near.
“It’s right there,” she pleaded. “The Prime. I can fix everything, if you just let me go.”
“Sasha…”
King reached them. “Miss Therion, I’m sorry, but you have to come back with us.”
Sasha looked at him for a second, and then turned the full force of her gaze on Parker. She pointed ahead into the darkness. “The Prime is right there. It’s why we came here.”
King sensed that his friend’s resolve was starting to slip.
“Danny, please let me. My whole life has been leading up to this. Don’t let him stop me.” She reached out and placed her hand over his heart. “You promised to help me.”
Parker’s restraining hand fell away. With a sigh of resignation, he nodded down the tunnel. “Go.”
“Damn it, Danno.” King reached out to restrain her, but Sasha was already forging ahead, deeper into the darkness. He started after her, but then felt a hand pull him back.
“Let her go, Jack.” Parker’s voice sounded weary, defeated. King tried to pull free, but what had at first been only Parker’s token effort to forestall him abruptly became something more resolute. As he tried to wrench himself free, Parker yanked him back hard enough to spin him into the wall.
The impact stunned him, but not as much as the evident betrayal. Parker, too, seemed surprised by what he’d done; he took a step back and raised his hands. He knew he had crossed a line, and now he had to decide whether to retreat and do some damage control, or commit with both feet.
“I don’t have time for this shit, Danno.”
King started forward, but Parker moved to block his way. “Jack, just let her do this. It’s important to her.”
“The last time someone screwed around with this stuff, it killed half the world’s population, remember? You told me that. The Black Death? The Prime is dangerous.”
The flame of Parker’s resolve flickered, but then he shook his head. “That was different. Sasha knows what she’s doing. I have to let her try.”
“Well I don’t.”
King advanced again.
Parker, with arms akimbo, tried to block the passage, but King stepped to one side and lowered his head like a charging linebacker. He plowed into Parker, staggering him back, but even as he fell, Parker closed his arms around King, taking him to the ground in a bear hug.
Parker grunted from the impact, but instead of letting go, he wrapped his legs around King’s, hobbling him, and then he started grappling for a better position. King quickly recognized what was happening, but before he could do anything about it, Parker had rolled him over and slipped an arm around his neck.
King knew how to break free of such a hold, and Parker knew how to prevent him from doing so. For several seconds, they struggled without appearing to move more than a few inches at a time. They had fought each other often in training, and sometimes just for the hell of it; they knew each other’s best moves and Achilles’ Heels. Neither man could hold an advantage against the other long enough to achieve a decisive victory. Experience told King that exhaustion would be the decider, and that was something he couldn’t wait for.
He slammed his head back, driving the back of his skull into Parker’s face. There was a white flash of pain, accompanied by a ringing in his ears, but he also heard the crunch of bones smacking together.
Parker let go and scrambled back. “Shit, Jack.”
In the diffuse glow from King’s light, he saw Parker holding a hand to his mouth, and bright drops of blood seeping through his fingers. “Shit,” he repeated, the words distorted by the injury.
“You just can’t let go, can you?” Parker continued, the accusation pouring out in an accompanying fountain of blood. “No wonder you didn’t want me on your team.”
King shook his head, and winced as another wave of pain spiked through his head. “Danno, we can talk about this later, but right now, you need to get her back. The Prime is dangerous. Don’t let her mess around with it.”
“Damn it, Jack. Would you just fucking back off for once? You don’t have to be in control every God damned minute. It’s not like the world is going to end.”
A deep rumble shuddered through the cavern, throwing both men to the hard floor, and showering them with dust. The tremor lasted a few seconds, and when it stopped, King could hear the sound of the cavern walls groaning with the strain of holding up the earth.
The air was thick with falling dust, giving the beam of King’s light the illusion of solidity but reducing its effectiveness. He could just make out Parker, struggling to rise a few yards away.
Between them, stretching from one wall of the passage to the other, was a shadowy line that swallowed the light whole, and as he peered into it, King saw that it was getting wider. The tremor had opened a fissure in the cavern.
The earth rumbled again, and King’s side of the passage dropped six inches, with an accompanying shower of dust. Over the crushing of rock, other noises were audible, muffled but no less distinctive—the sound of gunfire.
“You were saying, Danno?”
FIFTY-FOUR
Twenty-five meters further down the tunnel, Sasha Therion had reached her destination. While King and Parker fought, she had pressed forward, using the laptop screen to light her way. She arrived at a small, unremarkable looking cavern.
She saw a few stalagmites, looking like deformed white mushrooms growing out of the floor, but the feature that immediately drew her attention was man-made. In the center of the chamber, someone had laid down a circle of stones, each about the size a man’s head. It looked like it might have served as a campfire ring, but instead of charcoal remnants, the entire circle—about six feet in diameter—was filled with soil, and poking up from the crumbly surface were the desiccated fibrous stalks of plants that had once grown here, in defiance of all the laws of nature.
This, she knew intuitively, was where Bacon and al-Tusi had conducted their experiments. This was the Prime—the place where life had begun—or as near to it as any human had ever come.
Not in this cave of course. When the spark of life had first caught, some three and a half billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had been a very different place. The land mass that would eventually become the continent of Europe would not be thrust up from the Earth’s mantle until hundreds of millions of years later. The calcium carbonate that comprised the limestone walls of the cave network itself was an accretion of organic material—the skeletons of aquatic life forms settling to the ocean floor and compressing into sedimentary rock—and so the cave itself could not have existed prior to the genesis of life on Earth. Life had not begun in this cave, nor had it necessarily begun in the physical space the cave now occupied, but there was nevertheless something important about this place, something that was not bound to the fickle whims of geology.
There were many places like it, places long known and revered by humans even before the rise of civilization—power spots, rivers of invisible Earth energy, ley lines, vortices. They were places where the laws of nature could sometimes be bent, if not broken altogether. On a day lost to time, so long ago that the span of years was incomprehensible to the human brain, those laws had been distorted in a very special way, at this particular place, and the tinder of life had become a wildfire.
Sasha stood above the ring of stones, one hand extended as if she might be able to feel the unique energy of the Prime.
Oddly enough, she could feel something…a tingling in her skin, like the vibration of a tuning fork. She closed her eyes and savored the moment.
She had, at long last, arrive
d at a solution, discovered the common factor that would enable her to simplify the impossibly complex variables of the human equation. She had found the Prime.
She sat cross-legged in front of the stone circle and set her laptop in front of her. As she opened the hinged screen, she realized that the strange vibration wasn’t coming from the Prime, at least not directly. It was coming from her computer, which was still streaming out the tonal frequency that had—in conjunction with the proximity of the Prime—made it possible for her to pass through solid matter. Now, the ground upon which she sat was starting to resonate to the same frequency, growing warm as the molecular bonds holding the stone in a solid state began to loosen.
She quickly closed the sound file, but at that very moment, an explosion ripped through the softened rock.
Fifty meters away and about ten meters above the Prime location, the Chess Team had forced their way into Chauvet Cave and were now fighting for their lives. As the frankensteins poured through the entry, Bishop fired a 40-millimeter high explosive grenade from the XM320 launcher attached to his carbine. It had been an act of pure desperation; Bishop had known that the grenade might trigger a cave-in, collapsing the entrance and sealing them inside, but he had judged that a preferable fate to being overrun by the frankensteins.
What he could not have known was that the floor beneath him had been undergoing a subtle transformation; the stone was softening, and in some places, it had turned completely into a molecular slurry. When the small grenade detonated, its explosive energy ripped into the weakened stone and shattered it.
A section of the ceiling right above Sasha was pulverized, raining a fine powdery grit down onto her. Beyond that impenetrable dust cloud, long black fissures were appearing in the limestone as the cavern started tearing itself apart.
Sasha’s sense of triumph was also on the verge of self-destruction. She huddled over the computer, taking shallow breaths to avoid inhaling too much of the choking dust, and fought back the rising tide of panic.
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