The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

  “Lived here ever since,” she said, glancing around at her apartment. Two levels below Travis’s, it was identical except for the touches her taste had brought to it.

  Her hands found their way into his. He held them, his thumbs tracing back and forth across her palms.

  She spoke softly. “Since prison, has there been anyone special?”

  “No one,” he said. A moment later he added, “No one special in prison, either.”

  Paige laughed, glancing up from their hands to meet his eyes.

  “After I got out,” he said, “part of me thought there was no point in trying. You can only get so far into a conversation before you run into the wall. ‘You’re from Minnesota? Oh, what did you do there?’ ”

  She laughed again, quietly. “What did the rest of you think?”

  He was silent a moment. “That this was my real punishment. The one I’d never get free of. And that I deserved it.”

  “For what happened to—” She paused, and Travis could see her parsing her memory of the police report she’d read. At last she said, “Emily. Emily Price.”

  Travis nodded. “She saved me from what I was. Saved my life, figuratively, even literally, I’m sure. And they killed her because of it. I should’ve known. I should’ve seen it coming, and I didn’t.”

  “It’s easy to underestimate the bad in people,” Paige said. “I don’t think it should carry a life sentence.”

  He managed something close to a smile, and held her hands a little tighter.

  In the darkness their clothes evaporated, and there was only her skin against his, so much warmer than he’d imagined, and her hair falling around him, scented sweet like apple trees in October. He tasted on her tongue the white wine they’d had with dinner. Tasted the soft skin below her jawline. Tasted everything.

  Later, holding her close, Travis felt the silence filling up with all the questions he knew they were both dwelling on. All the things that didn’t add up, no matter which way they were arranged.

  “Everything the Whisper’s ever done,” he said, “since the day it came out of the Breach in 1989, has been part of the act. Hasn’t it?”

  She nodded against his chest. “I think so.”

  “The notion that it’s compelled to help you at first, and then it tries to take over your will after that, it’s all bullshit. It can do anything it wants to do, anytime. Nothing compels it. Nothing limits it. All that stuff was just a smokescreen so it could control the way people handled it. Up in Alaska, when it used me to try setting off a nuclear war, it seemed to fail because Pilgrim’s people in the helicopter showed up too soon. Are you buying that for a second? The thing can predict a mega lotto outcome years in advance, but not the arrival of a helicopter a few minutes out? Something a radar tech with a stopwatch could probably figure out in his head?”

  “Strikes me as a little inconsistent,” Paige whispered.

  “It was keeping up appearances,” he said. “Playing the role a little longer. Every move it’s made, from the moment it arrived in this world, has been to steer things to exactly where they are right now. Do you see the problem with that?”

  “That twenty years is a long damn time for something that powerful to spend reaching its goal?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “If all it wants is control of Border Town and the Breach, it could’ve gotten it almost on day one. It could’ve just played nice, right from the beginning, won everybody over, and then as soon as the right person was holding it, someone with access to any of the really destructive shit locked away in this building, it could’ve used that person as a puppet to kill everyone here. Just like that. So what the hell is it really after? What’s far enough out of its reach, that it’s taken all these years, and all this elaborate planning?”

  For a moment she didn’t reply. Then her forehead furrowed against his skin.

  “What if it’s after something that wasn’t available until now?” she said.

  Travis thought about that. It sounded right. A hell of a lot better than what he had, which was nothing.

  “Like a new entity?” he said. “Something that would’ve just arrived?”

  “I don’t know. None of the recent unique arrivals has been especially powerful or dangerous, as far as we know.”

  They fell silent again. Travis heard the building’s air exchange system kick on with a sigh. His face was resting against the top of Paige’s head. Every breath was rich with the scent of her hair.

  After a moment he said, “There’s something that bothers me more than all of this.” He considered how to begin. “We agree that Pilgrim isn’t really the enemy here, right? That’s not to say he’s blameless. The Whisper probably chose him because it knew the kind of things he was capable of. But whatever Pilgrim believes, the Whisper is the one calling the shots. So far, so good, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But the Whisper is still a machine. It’s a tool, and a tool doesn’t choose its own purpose. Someone else would have done that.”

  Paige was silent a long while before speaking. “You mean someone on the other side of the Breach,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  With his arm, he felt a shiver climb the muscles of her back.

  “If that’s the case,” she said, “then we never had a prayer.”

  He tried to think of some reassuring reply to that, but came up empty. All he could do was pull her closer against himself. She responded, settling into him. He lay there listening to her breathing, feeling her limbs relax. Turning the questions over and over, and wondering who—or what—they were really up against, he faded out.

  Sometime later, he woke with the strangest feeling. Like he’d figured something out. Dreamed it, maybe. He tried to remember what it was, but could only push it away, like a child trying to palm a basketball. He relaxed and let it come back. For a moment, it seemed that it might. An impression of it swam into view: the video footage of the high-powered pump station at Cook’s house on Grand Cayman. It had something to do with that. Something about Cook’s need for it, in the first place. But that was all he could get. A moment later it was gone.

  Paige murmured, rising halfway out of sleep beside him. He kissed her forehead and she rolled into him, softly kissing his neck before drifting away in his arms. Feeling her heartbeat against him, he closed his eyes and followed her down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A phone began to ring. Somewhere in the dark. Travis felt Paige stir. She rolled toward the nightstand—the clock read just past four in the morning—switched on the light, and pressed a button for the speakerphone. Even as she answered with her name, she slipped under the covers again and hugged her body to his.

  The voice that issued from the phone sounded scared. “Paige, it’s Crawford. I’m at Secure Storage on B31. The attendants on duty called me down. There’s something going on. Maybe you should come down here.”

  Her eyes locked on Travis’s.

  “Paige?” Crawford said.

  “I’m here.” She let go of Travis, sat up and swung her feet to the floor, hunting for her clothes. “Describe what’s happening.”

  “We’re not really sure. It has to do with the object you brought back from Zurich. The black cube.”

  “The amplifier,” Paige said. She looked at Travis again.

  In the background over the speakerphone, they could hear some kind of droning sound. Like someone humming, from deep in the diaphragm. It was the sound they’d heard on the ninth floor of 7 Theaterstrasse, just before everything went to hell.

  “It’s locked inside one of the vaults,” Crawford said. “Where we put it yesterday morning. But it’s making the sound you’re probably hearing behind me. We haven’t opened the vault yet. Not sure we should.”

  At that moment they heard a quick gap of silence over the phone, and Crawford said, “Paige, hold on, I’ve got a call from Defense Control. I’ll put it on conference so I don’t lose you.” He clicked out for a second, and then they heard him
say, “Defense go ahead.”

  A woman spoke. “Mr. Crawford, we have a situation up top. We’re not sure how this is happening, but there’s a radar contact directly above us, about forty thousand feet up, and falling. Computer says it’s human bodies.”

  “Divers?” Paige said.

  “We think so. They’re dropping at around two hundred miles per hour, consistent with terminal velocity for humans tucked into a bullet fall. Radar didn’t see a plane, so it was either an ultra-high-altitude bail-out from something like a U2, or a stealth, if that’s possible.”

  Travis saw Paige’s eyes narrow at that, but only slightly. Pilgrim had the Whisper; of course it was possible.

  “The diver formation went into a sparse pattern right after the first contact, and the radar lost them, but with the thermal cams on the chain guns, we should be able to track them manually when they get low enough. With your permission, sir, we’ll just kill everyone up there.”

  “Do it,” Crawford said. The bass-range hum continued on his end of the call.

  Sufficiently rattled by whatever the hell was going on down there, Paige stood, her clothes still balled up in her hand.

  “Did anything trigger the amplifier?” Paige said. “Any experiment going on nearby, anything like that?”

  “Nothing,” Crawford said. “It just came on. Like it was on a timer.”

  A thought hit Travis. Hit him hard enough to make him sit up and put his feet to the floor. Paige turned, seeing his expression.

  “Crawford, this is Travis Chase,” he said. “What entities are in the vaults closest to the amplifier?”

  There was a pause as Crawford processed the fact that Travis was speaking over Paige’s phone at four in the morning. Then he answered. “I don’t have that information in front of me. Hold on.” They heard him talking to one of the attendants in the background.

  But Travis already knew the answer. He stood from the bed and crossed to Paige’s desk, looking for a pencil and something to write on. Paige followed, dropping her clothes behind her.

  “What is it?” she said.

  Before he could answer, the woman at Defense Control spoke up again. “I see them on the thermals now. Barely. Initializing ground cannons for manual targeting.”

  “We need to write ourselves a message,” Travis said, “so we’ll know what happened.”

  He pulled open a drawer, found a dull pencil, and grabbed a printout of some kind, turning it over to write on the back.

  “What do you mean?” Paige said.

  Crawford spoke up over the phone. “Got the list. The vault nearest the amplifier contains Entity 0436, Jump Cut.”

  Just what Travis had expected. The thing Paige had told him about in Zurich. The thing that was exactly like the Ares, except for its effect. Which was that it killed the past three days’ memory, and left you feeling like you’d just blinked and missed that time.

  Paige’s mouth fell open slowly. Head shaking a little from side to side. Understanding. Unwanted understanding.

  “If the Whisper can predict the lotto,” Travis said, “it can predict which vault the amplifier would end up in.”

  “Oh my God,” Paige said.

  He returned his eyes to the paper, his mind laboring for what to write. Then Crawford screamed on the phone, and Travis knew it was too late. An instant later Paige’s bedroom flared with bright green light, like every room in Border Town, Travis was sure. On instinct he threw his arms around Paige, as if he could protect her from it. The light seemed to shine right through their bodies—

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Travis had been lying awake in his tent, listening to wolves howling somewhere along the ridge. He’d read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey—and other wolves—as to their distance. It worked on humans, too. These sounded at least as close as—

  Suddenly he found his eyes shut, and a wild flash of light, like lightning but with a green cast to it, shone bright enough to be visible through his eyelids. It vanished almost at once, though he hardly noticed, because by then he’d realized someone was with him, holding on to him but at the same time struggling—

  He opened his eyes to find himself standing in a room he’d never seen before. The struggling figure wrenched away from him.

  It was a very beautiful—and very naked—young woman.

  She was holding her right upper arm tightly, her face just now easing from what looked like a contortion of agony; Travis was sure he hadn’t grabbed that arm or even bumped it. He had only an instant to consider these things, and then she was screaming at him, her eyes as bewildered as his own must look.

  “What is this?” she shouted. “What the fuck is this? Where’s my father?”

  He reflexively stepped back from her, saying he didn’t know, then repeating it; it was the only answer he had for her questions—or his own.

  All at once she seemed to recognize the room, though that only confused her further, and then her eyes came to rest on a backpack and rifle leaning against the wall, and before Travis could register the danger, she’d lunged for the weapon, shouldered it and leveled it at his face.

  “What the fuck have you people done?”

  He had nothing he could say to her. He kept his eyes steady on hers, and shook his head, hands out from his sides to present no threat.

  She racked the rifle’s action and advanced a step, forcing him back against the wall. In the same moment her gaze dropped; Travis followed the look, and realized he was naked too. He met her eyes again, and saw them narrow as she looked around at the room once more, and then at herself—she noticed her own lack of clothing—as she struggled to piece the moment together. Her aggression faltered; the rifle didn’t.

  Somewhere nearby, agitated voices had been issuing from a speaker; now they stopped, and a single voice—an older man’s voice—said, “Did I hear Paige?”

  The woman—Paige, apparently—turned toward the sound, which Travis could now see came from a speakerphone. “Crawford?”

  “Paige, where are you?”

  She hesitated, as if too confused to say aloud what she knew. “I’m … in my room. Where are you?”

  The man’s answer was equally tentative. “I thought I was in the conference room, but … I’m down at Secure Storage now—”

  A new sound over the phone line interrupted him: a soft computer voice saying, “Inbound … Inbound …”

  For the first time, Paige lowered the rifle. That repeating word, coming from the speaker, had taken her full attention. She turned and moved toward the phone.

  “Who’s in Defense Control?” she said.

  A woman answered, sounding as stressed as everyone else. “This is Karen—Karen Lowe. I’m sure I’m not supposed to be up here right now, I was in my room—”

  “Forget about that,” Paige said. “What’s the inbound?”

  “Nothing. The radar’s blank, all fields. It looks like the gun cameras are up, but I don’t know why, there’s nothing on them—”

  Other voices spoke in the background, and then Karen said, “Okay, yeah. What are they?”

  Travis watched Paige lean in close to read the lighted display of an alarm clock. She reacted to it, and whispered, “Three days …”

  “I count at least ten of them up there,” Karen said, to someone on her end of the call.

  “Karen, tell me what you’re seeing,” Paige said.

  “We don’t know. They’re not aircraft. The thermals are reading them at body temperature; they could be divers, but … are they hostiles, or—”

  “Kill them,” Paige said. Travis could see in her eyes that she’d jettisoned the confusion for the moment. “Get everyone at the controls and start shooting, right now. And someone hit the dead switch for all the containment levels. Lock everything down and then smash the control boards.”

  If the people on the other end of the call were confused, her direct tone got them past it. Travis heard alarms begin blaring, and then
what sounded like someone following her orders about smashing things. He heard computer cases breaking open, fragile components inside being shattered by some blunt, heavy thing. A chair, maybe.

  “Are you shooting yet?” Paige said.

  “We’re targeting,” Karen said. “Ready in five, four, three—”

  Suddenly Travis felt a jolt pass through the floor, and then the building shook from the bass wave of an explosion, somewhere high above.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The speakerphone went to static. Paige stared at it for less than a second, and then grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and threw them at Travis. By the time he caught them, she was reaching for her own clothes.

  “You seem to know more than I do,” he said. “Mind sharing?”

  “I have a guess,” she said. “With gaps.”

  “More than I have.” He stepped into the jeans and pulled them up.

  Paige buttoned her own pair, then slipped her shirt over her head and grabbed the rifle again.

  “Do the words Tangent or Breach mean anything to you?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then I couldn’t explain it if we had an hour—” The hum of an automatic weapon sounded through the nearest air vent. “And we don’t have an hour.”

  She opened the cabinet front of her nightstand and took out a .45, along with two spare magazines.

  “Do you know how to shoot a gun?” she said.

  He nodded. She took a step toward him, then stopped, sizing him up one last time. More gunfire, and a small popping explosion, transmitted through the ductwork. She came forward and handed him the pistol and ammo. Already she was on her way out of the room, grabbing the backpack and shouldering it as she went.

  He followed, as his most obvious question finally surfaced. “How the hell did I get here?”

  Paige checked the hallway outside her bedroom, and looked satisfied that it was clear. “I’m pretty damn curious about that myself,” she said, and moved out of the room.