Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

Jenna searched her memory. The answer was still there, she could feel it. “It keeps increasing,” she said slowly, as if stalling for time. “But always at a constant rate.”


“A mathematical progression? Logarithmic? Prime numbers?” Soter’s tone was becoming strident. “Think girl. What’s the pattern?”

Something familiar. A face remembered, a name forgotten. “Spiral?”

“Like the Golden Ratio?”

Jenna’s recall of that subject was picture perfect. The Golden Ratio—approximately 1.618, also called phi—was one of those remarkable examples of mathematical perfection in nature. She had learned about it in both math and art classes. It described the perfect spiral in conch shells and pine cones, and had been employed in both art and architecture for thousands of years. It was also, Jenna recalled, the exact ratio found in the Fibonacci sequence where each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8 and so forth.

“That’s it! It uses the Fibonacci sequence. The first value is unchanged. The second and third increase by one, then two, and so on.”

Soter laid a hand on her shoulder. “May I?”

Jenna vacated the seat, and the older man took her place. He opened a new program and began typing, his fingers flying across the keys as if inspired. It took him just a few minutes to write a translation algorithm, after which he cut and pasted in the binary sequence.

Jenna held her breath as the start of a now all-too familiar phrase appeared.

This is th…

The rest was a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers, but Jenna knew that she had been right about the key to the cipher. “It resets to zero after ten characters.”

Soter nodded. “That makes sense. If the progression continued to follow the Fibonacci sequence, it would run to more than twelve places.” He made a quick adjustment, and then he ran the program again.

“‘This is the way the world ends,’” Noah read aloud. “‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ That’s from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Eliot.”

Jenna flashed him a smile. Noah, it seemed, could still surprise her.

Cort harrumphed. “I’m supposed to believe that these aliens of yours are English lit majors?”

Soter shrugged. “I didn’t just make this up. It’s been clear from the start that the intelligence behind this understood our capabilities. They would certainly be familiar with our works of art.”

“I think the poem is part of the trigger,” Jenna added. “Like a hypnotist might use.”

Cort rolled his eyes, but said nothing more.

The rest of the message was mostly numbers, but Jenna felt certain that Soter’s program had correctly unlocked it. “Those are coordinates.” She recalled the emergency letter Noah had left for her. “Somewhere in the Southwest. New Mexico or Arizona.”

Soter recognized the rest of it. “I think this sequence is a Julian date. And I’d recognize these numbers anywhere. That’s the location of the Chi Sagittarii stellar group, where the Wow! Signal originated and this—1420—is the original frequency, the hydrogen line.”

He turned his chair to face Cort. “The VLA radio telescope is in Socorro, New Mexico.”

As she read it, Jenna felt her memory of the message stirring, but the voice remained silent. “That’s where we have to go. Someone—one of the clones—is going to send a signal into space. To those coordinates.”

Cort nodded slowly. “You said there’s a date?”

“A date and time,” Soter replied. He seemed suddenly ill-at-ease.

“When?”

He swallowed. “Midnight tonight.”

“Well that’s freakin’ wonderful,” Cort grumbled.

Something in Soter’s manner set alarm bells ringing in Jenna’s head. “You already knew this was going to happen today.”

Soter refused to meet her gaze. “For years, there was talk among the children of something important related to this date.”

“You knew,” Jenna repeated. There was no accusation in her tone. “That’s the real reason you sent Cray to get me, isn’t it? The deadline had arrived and you still didn’t know what the message meant.”

His silence was answer enough.

“So,” Cort said after a pause. “At midnight, something is going to happen at this place in New Mexico. We’ll get somebody there and shut the place down.”

Soter shook his head. “Julian dates start at noon Greenwich Mean Time. The date/time indicated in the message is midnight GMT. Eight hours from now.”

“I need to be there,” Jenna said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Cort declared, making a cutting gesture with his hand. “The only way you’re leaving here is in my custody.”

“Like hell,” Noah growled, raising the pistol again. The other agents tensed but did not go for their grounded weapons.

Cort waved them off but kept his attention on Noah. “If you try to leave any other way, you will be hunted down. Even you aren’t that good.”

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we.” Noah turned to the others. “Jenna, Mercy, we’re going.”