Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

“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.