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 of 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.”