The solution, literally within her grasp, was about to be stolen away again, this time forever.
No. I won’t let that happen.
She opened her eyes. The air still felt thick, but she could see the computer screen, and that was all she needed. Putting her face close so she could see the keyboard, she began inputting the solution.
She had worked it all out during the days that she and Parker had been on the run. The Voynich manuscript had provided her with all the information she needed about the musical notes that had the greatest effect on the Prime, so it had been a simple thing to isolate the relevant frequencies.
“Sasha!”
Parker’s voice reached out through the gloom, but she ignored it. She didn’t need his help anymore, and she certainly didn’t need an unpredictable variable showing up now, not when she was so close to the solution.
“Sasha, are you there? Can you hear me?”
Go away.
She didn’t say it aloud at first, but when his inquiries became more urgent, she realized that her refusal to acknowledge him was making him more persistent, and might embolden him to interfere with what she was trying to do. “I’m fine, Danny.”
“Thank God.” The walls groaned again, releasing another small shower of dust. “Where are you? Keep talking so I can find you.”
“No. Don’t come any closer.”
“Why not? What’s wrong?”
“I found the Prime. I can fix everything, but you need to just leave me alone for a little while, okay?”
There was a long pause, and Sasha was just starting to believe that maybe he had complied with her request when he spoke again. “Sasha, what are you talking about?”
She sighed. His questions were making it hard for her to concentrate, hampering her efforts to enter the new frequencies. Why couldn’t he just go away?
“Sasha, what is it you are trying to fix?”
Exasperated, she smacked her palms against her thighs. “Everything! I’m trying to fix everything, okay? Does that answer your question?”
“And how are you going to do that?” He was speaking softly, but at the same time his voice was getting louder as he moved closer, trying to pinpoint her location in the near-total darkness. Maybe he couldn’t see the glow of the computer screen in all the dust. She decided not to answer any more of his questions.
“How is the Prime going to help you do that?” he continued. “Are you trying to come up with your own Elixir of Life? Something to heal everyone?”
“Ha!” It was out of her mouth before she could think to suppress it. She clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle any further outbursts, then she went back to typing. Almost done…
Parker must have heard her. “Something else then? Not a cure for disease, but maybe a new disease? A new Black Death? Is that what you want Sasha? You can tell me. I can understand why you might feel like you need to do that.”
His declaration surprised her. “Really?”
“Sure. I get it. Life sucks sometimes.”
“It’s the chaos I can’t stand. It was all just a big mistake.”
“What do you mean by ‘a mistake?’”
She realized that he was toying with her, trying to keep her talking so he could find her. She shook her head, trying to shut him out. She went back to work.
“Sasha, tell me more about the chaos? I need to know more if I’m going to help you fix it.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, speaking slowly so as not to enter the wrong data.
“I might. You like things orderly, right? Precise? That’s why you’re a mathematician. You like solving equations. You like things that make sense.”
Maybe he does understand.
“And people… Well, people are unpredictable. And with everything you’ve been through, I think it’s perfectly understandable that you want to…you know, bring some order to the world. Let me help.”
“I don’t need your help,” she declared. She could hear his footsteps crunching through the grit on the floor.
“Of course you don’t. But I want to help. I want to be a part of it.” Sasha felt his presence beside her. He knelt next to her and peered at the screen. “What are you working on there? Are you going to use the Prime to create a new plague? Is that how you’re going to fix things?”
She looked over at him. His face was a mess of dust and blood, and he looked positively ghoulish in the diffuse glow of the computer screen, but there wasn’t even a hint of accusation or condemnation in his eyes.
“No,” she said finally. “The plague isn’t a solution. It’s just another variable; unpredictable like all living systems.”
“Go on.”
“Life was an accident, Danny. It was a mistake. A statistical impossibility that somehow happened anyway.”
“Some people would call that a miracle.”
She shook her head. “Not a miracle. Just something that happened; a random spark that caught fire and is destined to burn itself out.”
“I know it might seem bad sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She felt no emotion now. No fear at what would happen, and strangely, no satisfaction. “Three and a half billion years, that’s how long the fire has been burning. We think we’re so important—the center of the universe, but the universe doesn’t even know we exist. Life is a plague, an infection that threatens the perfection of the universe. And it all started right here, with the Prime. But I know how to solve the equation.”
“How?”
She looked into his eyes. “Simple math. You subtract known values from the equation until nothing is left.”
His mouth formed the word: subtract.
“The Prime isn’t just this place, Danny. It’s the constant that makes all the variables possible. It’s fixed in all dimensions, time and space.”
“Then how are you going to…to solve it?”
“The Prime is only one factor. There is another; the frequency that made life possible. We’ll never know what caused it…the wind maybe? Cosmic rays? Who knows, but it was the catalyst. The frequency and the Prime combined to equal life. I can’t subtract the Prime from the equation, but I can nullify the frequency, and that will change one factor to zero.”
“Nullify?” He nodded slowly. “You’re going to create a phased wave to dampen the original one. And if, as you say, we are all linked through time and space to the Prime, eliminating one factor will pull the plug for us all. For all life on Earth.”
She gazed up at him, impressed by how quickly he had figured it out. “You’re very intelligent. I wish I’d met you sooner.”
He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “I want to hear all about this, but first we need to get out of here, okay?”
“No need,” she said. She could feel it now, a tingling in her skin…an itch like pins and needles. “It’s already started.”
Parker jerked back as if he’d been stung. “Sasha, you’ve got to stop it. Turn it off now.”
She gazed back at him. “Turn it off? Why would I—”
Her voice caught in her throat as the itching sensation blossomed into a spike of pain—a baptism in liquid fire.
The agony was transcendent, but it lasted for only an instant. Then the calculation was complete, and Sasha Therion was no more.
FIFTY-FIVE
Bishop had called out, warning them of what he was about to do. It was madness to fire a grenade inside the cavern, even as vast as it was, but what choice was there? The frankensteins had taken the entrance and were massing for an assault that Chess Team would never be able to repel. No one answered, and evidently taking the silence as assent, he had leveled the launcher and fired.
Queen heard the hollow pop as the spherical package of high explosive shot down the tube. She curled into a defensive ball in anticipation of the chaos that would follow.
The grenade exploded right in front of one of the monstrosities. There was a dull thump and a cloud o
f acrid smoke, and then the shockwave hit.
Queen was well outside the grenade’s kill zone, but the energy of the blast slapped her to the ground and reverberated in her gut. She thought that was the worst of it, but then the ground beneath her fell.
She scrambled away from the crumbling floor, flinging her arms out in a desperate attempt to find a handhold, but everything she touched was moving, falling into the abyss that had opened beneath her.
Yet she was not falling.
She felt a strain in her right arm, the burden of her body weight suspended by that single appendage, and she realized that she must have snared something solid…but no, her fingers were curled into a fist around empty air.
“I’ve got you, babe!”
She couldn’t see the face of her savior, but there was no mistaking the voice. Rook had somehow managed to snare her wrist, and now he held her, dangling over the brink of the newly formed fissure.
With a mighty heave, he pulled her up. She felt the rough stone edge of the abyss scraping against her body, and then she was on solid ground again, collapsing on top of her rescuer.
She pushed him away. “If you ever call me ‘babe’ again,” she rasped. “I’ll cut your balls off.”
“Hey, slow down chica,” he replied smoothly. “We should get to know each other better before you try getting in my pants.”
With a growl, she snared his goatee in the darkness. She pulled him close, stopping just an inch from his face, causing him to suck in and hold a quick breath. If he puckered, their lips would touch.
“Keep dreaming, big guy.”
She let go of his beard, and he smiled broadly. “If I dream about you, I’m going to have more nocturnal—”
The rest of his quip was lost as a peal of thunder boomed through the cave, and both of them scrambled back from the edge of the fissure. Then the noise sounded again, and Queen realized that it was the report of Knight’s Barrett.
Squinting through the dust and smoke, she could make out pinpricks of light, marking the locations of Bishop and Knight respectively. Both men were firing across the cavern, over the yawning void of the fissure where at least five of the frankensteins were shaking off the effects of the grenade and preparing to move.
Queen breathed a curse, and raised her carbine. Bishop’s grenade had improved the odds a little, but it hadn’t been the equalizer they needed.
She played her light toward the fissure that had nearly claimed her. It was a good fifteen feet across, a ragged split in the limestone, sloping down almost vertically, with few handholds. An ordinary man would not have dared attempt to leap across the gap. Even an Olympic long jumper would have been daunted, but the frankensteins, fueled by steroids, and fearless, would be able to skip across it like girls playing hopscotch on a playground.
The expected charge however, did not come. Instead, the creatures moved out along the perimeter of the cavern, keeping to the shadows and staying low behind stalagmites for cover, heading for the narrow end of the crevasse.
“They’re trying to flank us,” she shouted, and the implications of that realization hit her like a slap. When the frankensteins crossed to their side of the cavern, the team would be trapped.
“They’re smart,” Rook remarked in a low voice. “Too smart. Like they’ve got some kind of hive mind.”
She had been thinking the same thing.
“Well, your highness, any bright ideas?”
“All for one,” she said, nodding toward Knight and Bishop. “We fall back as far as we can and form a defensive line. If they want us, they’re going to have to get through a wall of lead.”
FIFTY-SIX
A wail of disbelief escaped Parker’s lips as Sasha collapsed in front of the stone circle. He didn’t need to touch her or check for a pulse to know that her life force had been completely extinguished.
He wanted to reach out to her, to hug her empty shell to his chest and demand that the heavens give her back, but he knew that to do so would be to join her.
She had found her answer, a solution to the incomprehensible equation of life with all its unpredictable chaos. Even if his rational mind balked at the idea, he could not argue with what he now beheld—Sasha, dead in an instant.
As if to affirm the testimony of his eyes, he felt a strange tingling in his skin.
He took a step back in alarm. The sensation faded but only a little and only for a moment. Whatever Sasha had done, it was still happening…and it was spreading.
He saw her computer, discarded and all but forgotten beside her body, but still functional. A thing of metal and silicon, it was immune to the anti-life power she had unleashed, and it would sit there casting its ambient glow until the battery died, a process that might take an hour or two…long after everything else on the planet had ceased to exist.
He had to get to the computer, turn off that sound and undo what Sasha had done.
But if he failed, if he died trying, there would be no second chances for humanity.
He spoke into the microphone taped to his shirt collar. “Jack, are you there?”
There was a momentary pause, and then King’s voice, breathless, sounded in his ear. “I’m here, Danno.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have trusted you.”
“Save it for later, buddy. I heard everything. You gave it your best try.”
“She did something to the Prime, Jack. Turned it against itself. I have to get to her computer to turn it off. You heard what she said. If I can’t stop this, everyone dies. Everywhere.”
“Then stop it. Do what needs to be done, Danno.”
“Listen to me, Jack. If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?”
King was silent for few seconds then simply said: “Roger.”
“I’ll keep talking so you know what to do.” Parker took a deep breath. The tingling sensation was getting stronger even though he had yet to take a step. “If I stop talking, you’ll know what it means.”
He lurched forward and instantly the itch became a fire burning on his skin, deepening into his muscles. One step forward, two… Despite his promise to keep communicating, the words were stolen away.
Another step…
He stood over Sasha’s corpse, reached past her… The pain was deep inside him now, but his extremities felt numb and cold. He stretched out his hand, closed his fingers over the hard plastic of the laptop. He couldn’t tell for sure if he was gripping it; his fingers had no sensation whatsoever, but through the haze, he could see the screen moving between his outstretched arms.
With what felt like the last of his strength, he staggered back down the passage, away from the Prime. Each step brought a measure of relief from the pain, but the coldness remained in his extremities.
“Jack, I have the computer.”
He thought he heard his friend say something, “Thank God,” perhaps, but he couldn’t be sure. Something was happening to his hearing, to all his senses.
He peered through the fog now clouding his vision and stared at the computer screen. A sound file was playing from the virtual urghan, playing a single note in an endless loop. Below the graphical representation of the wave, he saw numbers: 7.83.
That’s it, he realized. The frequency of life—7.83 Hz.
“It’s the Schumann Resonance!”
He couldn’t tell if King responded, so he kept talking.
“It’s a constant waveform produced by the friction of the Earth’s surface rotating beneath the ionosphere. You can’t hear it—it’s below the audible range for human hearing, but it’s everywhere, all the time, and has been for billions of years. Some scientists called it the ‘Earth’s heartbeat.’”
Like a beating heart, Sasha had stopped it with something akin to defibrillation. It was a simple matter of wave dynamics; when two oppositely phased waves of the same frequency met, they cancelled each other out completely. It was the same principle used in sound-dampening headphones
.
That was what Sasha had done; she had dampened the frequency of life, and plunged the Prime into deathly silence.
He tapped a few keys and shut down the waveform, trying to explain what he was doing to King, and wondering if it would make the difference.
The sudden flare of pain in his muscles told him it hadn’t.
“It’s not working,” he rasped, and then he realized why. Sasha had stopped the beating heart of the Earth. It wasn’t enough to stop the phased wave; he needed to start the heartbeat again.
His fingers fumbled uncertainly on the keyboard, making the adjustments that would play the Schumann Resonance again. A sine wave began oscillating across the screen, but that was the only change.
“It’s not working. I think it needs to be closer to the Prime.” He wasn’t sure if the words were even coming out or if he was just imagining them. “There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker. I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.
Gritting his teeth, he lurched forward, straight into the eye of the storm.
FIFTY-SEVEN
King heard every word.
When the fissure had first opened, separating him from Parker, he had lingered there, wondering if he should try jumping across. Before he could make the attempt, he heard Parker’s voice in his headset, and he knew that whatever else had happened between them, his friend was still trying to do the right thing.
Confident that Parker was doing everything possible to coax Sasha away from the brink of madness, King turned his attention to what seemed like a much more immediate concern. The report of gunfire drifting down into the crevasse painted an incomplete picture, but it was enough for him to realize that the effort to capture or kill Rainer had taken an unexpected, and evidently dire, turn. Somewhere up above him, his teammates were fighting for their lives.
He played his light on the walls of the crevasse. It was almost vertical, but the break was irregular, with nubs of stone sticking out everywhere. What he could not see was the top; there was no telling how high he would have to climb.
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