“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.
He was just getting started on the ascent when he heard a crackle of squelch in his ear, followed by Parker’s voice.
“A new Black Death? Is that what you want Sasha? You can tell me. I can understand why you might feel that’s necessary.”
What the hell?
Parker had opened the channel intentionally so that King would know what was happening. King didn’t understand half of what was said, but he could quickly discern two things: Sasha Therion was bat-shit crazy, and Parker was doing his damnedest to rein her in.
King listened intently but kept his focus on the task at hand, moving slowly, methodically, patiently up the wall. The noise of fighting grew louder, and King realized that the crevasse did not lead outside, but rather connected with another cave where the battle was taking place. The good news was that the climb would be over soon.
The bad news was that he had no idea what he was about to step in.
When he reached the top, he kept his head down for a moment, wary of not getting caught in a crossfire. Off to his left, on the far side of the fissure, the team had just opened fire on a horde of the malformed creatures that were swarming toward them. Over the cacophony, King heard something else; a voice…a familiar voice…
Rainer’s voice.
“Hold your position. Stay behind cover. Let them burn through their ammo.”
Who’s he talking to?
At that moment, Parker’s voice sounded in his ear. “Jack, are you there?”
He didn’t respond right away. If he was close enough to hear Rainer speaking, then he was close enough to be overheard. He lowered himself down below the edge of the crevasse and whispered. “I’m here, Danno.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have trusted you.”
King’s mind sifted through what he had overheard. He recalled Sasha saying something about chaos and how life was a mistake, and the realization had chilled him. What had she done? “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.”
King heard Rainer’s voice again, almost simultaneous with Parker’s. “Now, advance. Stay in a single file line. Continue to use the dead for cover.”
Rainer was talking to the frankensteins through a radio headset just like the one Chess Team used. Not merely talking to them, but directing their movements, guiding them strategically, the way a chess player might maneuver pawns on the game board.
“You heard what she said,” Parker continued. “If I can’t stop this, everyone dies. Everywhere.”
King heard, and on some level he understood what his friend was telling him, but there was nothing he could do to help. “Then stop it,” he said. “Do what needs to be done, Danno.”