Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

King knew how to break free of such a hold, and Parker knew how to prevent him from doing so. For several seconds, they struggled without appearing to move more than a few inches at a time. They had fought each other often in training, and sometimes just for the hell of it; they knew each other’s best moves and Achilles’ Heels. Neither man could hold an advantage against the other long enough to achieve a decisive victory. Experience told King that exhaustion would be the decider, and that was something he couldn’t wait for.

He slammed his head back, driving the back of his skull into Parker’s face. There was a white flash of pain, accompanied by a ringing in his ears, but he also heard the crunch of bones smacking together.

Parker let go and scrambled back. “Shit, Jack.”

In the diffuse glow from King’s light, he saw Parker holding a hand to his mouth, and bright drops of blood seeping through his fingers. “Shit,” he repeated, the words distorted by the injury.

“You just can’t let go, can you?” Parker continued, the accusation pouring out in an accompanying fountain of blood. “No wonder you didn’t want me on your team.”

King shook his head, and winced as another wave of pain spiked through his head. “Danno, we can talk about this later, but right now, you need to get her back. The Prime is dangerous. Don’t let her mess around with it.”

“Damn it, Jack. Would you just fucking back off for once? You don’t have to be in control every God damned minute. It’s not like the world is going to end.”

A deep rumble shuddered through the cavern, throwing both men to the hard floor, and showering them with dust. The tremor lasted a few seconds, and when it stopped, King could hear the sound of the cavern walls groaning with the strain of holding up the earth.

The air was thick with falling dust, giving the beam of King’s light the illusion of solidity but reducing its effectiveness. He could just make out Parker, struggling to rise a few yards away.

Between them, stretching from one wall of the passage to the other, was a shadowy line that swallowed the light whole, and as he peered into it, King saw that it was getting wider. The tremor had opened a fissure in the cavern.

The earth rumbled again, and King’s side of the passage dropped six inches, with an accompanying shower of dust. Over the crushing of rock, other noises were audible, muffled but no less distinctive—the sound of gunfire.

“You were saying, Danno?”





FIFTY-FOUR


Twenty-five meters further down the tunnel, Sasha Therion had reached her destination. While King and Parker fought, she had pressed forward, using the laptop screen to light her way. She arrived at a small, unremarkable looking cavern.

She saw a few stalagmites, looking like deformed white mushrooms growing out of the floor, but the feature that immediately drew her attention was man-made. In the center of the chamber, someone had laid down a circle of stones, each about the size a man’s head. It looked like it might have served as a campfire ring, but instead of charcoal remnants, the entire circle—about six feet in diameter—was filled with soil, and poking up from the crumbly surface were the desiccated fibrous stalks of plants that had once grown here, in defiance of all the laws of nature.

This, she knew intuitively, was where Bacon and al-Tusi had conducted their experiments. This was the Prime—the place where life had begun—or as near to it as any human had ever come.

Not in this cave of course. When the spark of life had first caught, some three and a half billion years ago, the surface of the Earth had been a very different place. The land mass that would eventually become the continent of Europe would not be thrust up from the Earth’s mantle until hundreds of millions of years later. The calcium carbonate that comprised the limestone walls of the cave network itself was an accretion of organic material—the skeletons of aquatic life forms settling to the ocean floor and compressing into sedimentary rock—and so the cave itself could not have existed prior to the genesis of life on Earth. Life had not begun in this cave, nor had it necessarily begun in the physical space the cave now occupied, but there was nevertheless something important about this place, something that was not bound to the fickle whims of geology.

There were many places like it, places long known and revered by humans even before the rise of civilization—power spots, rivers of invisible Earth energy, ley lines, vortices. They were places where the laws of nature could sometimes be bent, if not broken altogether. On a day lost to time, so long ago that the span of years was incomprehensible to the human brain, those laws had been distorted in a very special way, at this particular place, and the tinder of life had become a wildfire.

Sasha stood above the ring of stones, one hand extended as if she might be able to feel the unique energy of the Prime.

Oddly enough, she could feel something…a tingling in her skin, like the vibration of a tuning fork. She closed her eyes and savored the moment.