An Armageddon Duology (45 page)

S
avas gritted
his teeth as he trudged through the new-fallen snow. No longer snow, but a black slush from fires and exhaust that tainted the purity. Flames continued to lick at the metallic skeletons of blasted vehicles, chemical fumes from rubber and burnt machinery choking him.

His shoulders burned from carrying the stretcher. The medic at the other end of it walked with his head bowed in silence. Savas had lost track of the number of bodies he’d carried like this.
Less than one hundred?
It felt like more, but he knew he couldn’t have managed so many. Perhaps much less. All clarity had disappeared and his mind reeled.

Savas had killed men. Had watched them die in numerous ways. He’d seen small skirmishes with terrorist groups, suffered wounds on several occasions. Had watched the towers fall in New York, mosques obliterated around the world, and witnessed a nuclear detonation over the Gulf of Mexico.

But nothing had prepared him for true war.

Bodies still littered the roadway and sides of the road. To his right he caught a glimpse of the burning hulk of a fighter jet, the shape only barely discernible from the mangled wreckage. Far in the distance, he could make out the skyline of Columbus, a small handful of skyscrapers like desolate redwoods in a devastated forest veiled in smoke.

Columbus burned.

They reached a medical tent. He knew they were close before they entered from the smell and the screaming. Hundreds of wounded soldiers produced an environmental-level impact. The snow around them was crimson as well as black.

They placed the stretcher outside the tent alongside rows of corpses. The woman they carried had died along the way. Savas had seen her injuries and known that nothing in modern medicine could have changed the outcome.

“I’m going to take a minute,” he told the medic, who just nodded and went about his duties.

Savas sat down on a set of wooden boxes outside the tent. For the first time in many years, he felt an old craving, a desperate thirst for a drink that would burn and numb. It frightened and fascinated him to watch this old specter rise so many years after exorcism.
I’m more shaken than I realize.

He turned his mind to the ear-splitting and grating sounds of metal scraping on rock, watching the engineering corps clearing the road of debris and smashed vehicles. He hadn’t counted on the obstacles war would put in their way. They needed to deal with the human toll of battle, but the logistical nightmare—opening the path for what remained of the convoy—demanded attention.

He scanned the road behind them. He could not comprehend the carnage. It distorted his reasoning. He would have sworn truthfully that the overnight battle had obliterated the president’s force. But as he took appraisal of what remained in the morning light, he saw it was much the reverse. The bulk of the convoy remained intact. Perhaps one in ten vehicles had been successfully targeted by weapons fire. Craning his neck, he could see that the human toll, especially on the part of Hastings’s men who had recklessly assaulted their position, increased as one approached Columbus. Bodies carpeted the stretch toward the damaged city. A nightmare might surround him, but the lower levels of the hellscape awaited them ahead.

In the initial hours of the assault, he had absorbed some of the military strategy unfolding. Not a ground commander, Hastings had led his soldiers into a slaughter. Yet that assault had taken the lives of many in the presidential convoy. The air and artillery attacks had been devastating, as missiles and explosives strafed them along the highway. But the air advantage proved too weak to turn the tide on the ground. York’s advisors claimed their superior numbers and far superior battlefield strategy had won the day decisively.

Abstractions
. On the ground around him, a decisive victory looked more like a meat-grinder. The cries and weeping of the wounded had become a haunted chant from the plains of Gehenna in his mind, tearing at his awareness even when he was alone. Images of bodies broken, shredded, inverted in manners hard to imagine, trespassed before his open eyes. Young faces turned to cold cadavers. Voices silenced.
And voices crying out.

As the sun crept over the fog of smoke clinging to the ground, he saw a silhouetted form ambling slowly toward him. The rhythm, the stride, the body motions—
Rebecca.
The vapors slowly revealed her sooty face as she came to take a seat on the boxes beside him. She leaned back against a tent support and closed her eyes.

“The president?” Savas managed to ask after a few minutes.

“Safe. On overdrive. She can’t be human. We’re going to move soon, John. I came to tell you.”

“We aren’t done.”

“Doesn’t matter. We can’t wait to take care of everything.”

“These are men and women here. We can wait.”

She sighed. “If we do, we’ll have more deaths on our hands. Every minute we delay keeps us from Mount Cheyenne. Every minute means Hastings has more time to plan another assault.”

“Another?” Savas couldn’t process it.

“I’ve been in the command module. I’ve seen the new recon. He fucked up here, but he’s already regrouping. York says he’s not stupid and he’ll learn. Next time will be worse, and there’s no telling how much more tech he’ll have online by then.”

“Where next? I mean, where are we headed? Where’s the next battle?”

“Kansas City for both, unless Hastings gets a lot more creative.” She placed her hand on the back of his head. “We’ve got to move.”

Savas nodded and stood up, Cohen behind him. He looked over the battlefield once more.

“Kansas City. Another battle.
Worse
.”

She stared out toward the smoldering skyline of Columbus.

“Looks to be. Yes.”

“My God, Rebecca. This is America. What are we doing?”

“
T
here’s a code here
,” came Lightfoote’s weary tones.

The three remained in the basement of a Princeton University dorm room. A wave of soldiers had come by the building, loudly thundering through several of the upper floors, but abandoned the search as they moved toward the smoldering remains of the Nash Museum. They’d ignored the lower floors.

Houston moaned and drank from a cup of cold water. Her eyes were closed. “God I need an aspirin. I’m breaking up with Jack for real this time.”

“There’s a primer,” continued Lightfoote. “I know it. I just can’t figure it out. There’s a measuring stick in this mess!”

Lopez sighed. “So you’ve been saying since dawn. But it’s a quarter to five and there hasn’t been anything more. Don’t you get hangovers?”

“Cyborg.”

“Right. I’d forgotten.”

They’d been staring at the reconstructed image for hours, assembled on the computer from several photos Houston had taken, completing the half obtained from Fawkes’s file.

“What do you make of it, Francisco?” Houston had asked after they stitched the images together.

“Nothing,” he’d sighed. “Just more crazy.”

But from early on Lightfoote had disagreed. As the night had limped by, she continued staring at the news clippings, scrap paper, words and diagrams, equations and images John Nash had taped and pinned together across the giant poster board.

“Look. This isn’t coincidence. Numbers!” she gestured to the image. “These number strings always appear over words or math symbols. It’s like they’re labeling them.”

“But what’s the significance? What does it mean?” asked Houston.

Lopez shook his head and yawned. “Modern art from a madman.”

“We don’t have time to sleep, priest!” Lightfoote stood up from the computer and came within inches of his face. “You’re a mathematician.”

“Math
teacher
. Remember?
High school.
”

“Do any of these equations mean anything?”

He rubbed his eyes and stared again at the image. “It’s a chaotic patchwork. These are mathematical symbols, no doubt. But no true equations. Pieces of them, computational instruments without substrates. Incomplete. Might as well be random.”

“They’re
not
random.”

Lopez shook his head again. “I can’t see the pattern.”

She turned back to the image on the computer, tapping with her index finger on the screen.

“This then. In the center. It looks like some weird symbolism. It’s huge, colored strangely.”

“Everything here is strange,” Lopez added.

Lightfoote ignored him. “We only had half the image from the file, split down the middle. But look, here we can see it’s a gold circle with a long black line underneath, and underneath that, a short gold line.
That
has to mean something!”

“Yeah, to aliens on Stargate.”

Her eyes flashed. “Try, dammit! There’s something here, I just can’t see the pattern. Find the primer to interpret it. This thing stands out the most. In the middle. Gold on black. It
means
something.”

Lopez sighed and squinted at the screen. “I’ve been staring at the image for hours, Angel. Yes, it stands out. A golden circle over a golden line. I don’t—”

His words stopped abruptly.

“You don’t what?” asked Houston, opening her eyes. They were bloodshot.

Lopez leaned in closely. “A golden circle over a golden line. A golden ratio.” He laughed. “Holy shit.”

“Well, coming from a priest,” said Lightfoote, “that sounds promising.”

“Former priest. But, yeah, maybe. Look, the gold line underneath is the perfect length to be the diameter of the circle above.”

Lightfoote shook her head. “Okay?”

“The length around a circle, the circumference, divided by the diameter! It’s the most famous number of all!”

“Pi,” Lightfoote said.

“Yes, Pi.”

Houston frowned. “Okay, so what? How does that help, even if that’s what it’s about? Who cares about Pi?”

Lopez continued to scan the image, tapping his fingers in several places. “Look,
here
—a large golden three over this word in a newspaper article:
External
. And, here, another golden number, 14, over this scribbled word, what is it—
Equilibration
.”

“And here,” said Lightfoote, “a golden 159 over the word
in
.”

“You two have lost me,” said Houston.

“Three point one-four-one-five-nine-two-six-five-three-five-eight...well, that’s all I have memorized,” said Lightfoote.

“Memorized?” Houston asked.

“Pi!” said Lopez. “The decimal expansion of the number Pi. My God, it’s so simple.”

Houston put her hand over the image. “Okay, geeks. Explain.”

Lightfoote moved her hand and grinned broadly. “The numbers. Over the words. It’s a code! The primer was the image of the circle and line. Telling us the code is centered on Pi. The decimal expansion of Pi is a series of numbers. Infinite. Doesn’t repeat. Nash put pieces of the numbers over words.”

“Not just single numbers,” added Lopez, “those will show up again, over and over in an infinite expansion. He’s used the
groupings
. The first few colored in gold to make it obvious. See, a golden three here over
External.
Three is the first digit of Pi, in the one’s place. Then the next two digits, 14, again gold, here over the word
Equilibration
. We get two more gold numbers: 26535 and 89793238.”

Lightfoote held up her smartphone, a list of digits running across a calculator app.

“The decimal expansion of Pi out to nineteen places. Divided into five groups of numbers. Colored gold.”

“What does it say?”

“If we’re right, the first four words of something: External Equilibration in Non-cooperative,” said Lopez.

“So, nonsense?” Houston asked.

“Maybe not,” said Lopez. “Sounds almost mathematical.”

Lightfoote spoke rapidly. “Nash specialized in an area called Non-cooperative Game Theory. It’s math meets economics. This sounds right!”

“So where is the rest of the code?”

Lightfoote frowned. “A few more golden numbers, then just...numbers. Lots of numbers. Different sized number strings.”

“How to we know which clusters of numbers are next?” asked Lopez.

“Pi, of course.”

He shook his head. “Yes, but which pieces of Pi. This could take forever. Unless...” He shook his head. “Golden ratio. I said it in the beginning but didn’t make the connection. Nash was brutally literal in his symbolism.”

“
The
Golden ratio?” asked Lightfoote. “Artistic ratio the Greeks loved?”

“Yes,” he said. “But not only. It shows up in many early cultures, in nature, in snail shells, flowers. Weird Catholic and Jewish numerology. And it shows up in a series called the Fibonacci numbers.”

Lightfoote nodded. “I remember. Take the last number and add it to the number before last to get the next number.”

“Exactly! One, two, three, five, eight...”

“Thirteen and twenty-one!” said Houston. “Look! Here and here. Two more golden numbers, thirteen and twenty-one digits long.”

“You’re catching on,” said Lopez. He turned to Lightfoote. “They match the next sequences in Pi?”

“Yes!” She showed them the numbers on the calculator.

“Then it all repeats, I would bet, starting the Fibonacci numbers from the beginning again. Seven golden numbers, the first seven Fibonacci numbers giving the length of the string of digits from Pi,” said Lopez. “The sequence lengths would get too big, otherwise, but this way we know quickly how to order the search and compare to Pi.”

“Good grief,” said Houston. “I thought you said this was simple!”

Lightfoote nodded. “It
is
simple for a code. A little messy for humans but not for any cryptographic analysis by computer. But we’re going to need a lot of digits from Pi.”

“But the first seven, all golden numbers. What does it say, Angel?” said Lopez.

She wrote down words and read aloud. “External Equilibration in Non-cooperative Games. John Nash.” She looked between her companions.

“Oh, my God. This is it.”