Deep Sky (26 page)

“What are you doing?” Garner said.

“You’ll see.”

With his fingers he felt the edges of the hole, and snapped away piece after piece until he’d exposed several inches of the vertical aluminum support behind him. The one his own dolly must be secured to.

Then he contorted his wrists until he had the encircling zip tie stretched between them, and pressed it against one edge of the aluminum strut.

One crisp, machined edge.

It was as sharp as a blade.

He began sliding the zip tie up and down against it.

Garner finally understood, but still didn’t look hopeful.

“That won’t free your shoulders or your ankles,” he said.

“No,” Travis said. Then he nodded to the nearby desk. The one so close beside him he hadn’t noticed it in his first glimpse of this room. “But I’ll be able to reach the top right drawer there, and get ahold of the nail clippers inside.”

Garner’s eyes registered deepest confusion for three seconds. Then he smiled too.

“You found what Allen Raines had in his red locker,” he said.

“Found it and used it,” Travis said. “Tell me about the weapons cache in the hall. Will your palm print work on the scanners?”

“It will. But an alarm goes off as soon as you open a case. They’ll be on us before we can get anything loaded.”

Travis laughed softly. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

Chapter Forty-Four

H
olt was in the conference room, reading the interrogation notes again, when he felt the heat on the side of his face. For three or four seconds he ignored it, assuming the plane’s climate control system had begun venting warm air from the ceiling ducts.

Then it felt more than warm.

He turned in the direction it was coming from—the back wall—and his legs involuntarily kicked and shoved him away from the table.

Above the counter where the Breach entities were lined up, the plastic facing of the wall had begun to warp and melt in one area—a big half-circle blooming from the counter’s back edge.

Centered right beneath the melting place were three entities, all the same type. Holt had read the paper slip that detailed their function, but couldn’t remember it now. The objects were roughly cigar sized and made of something that looked like polished blue stone.

They’d been blue earlier, anyway.

Right now they were closer to pure white, incandescing like lightbulb filaments.

At that moment a line of flame erupted where the melting plastic had begun to pool atop the counter, the material breaking down into constituent oils. A tenth of a second later the entire melt zone was engulfed and sending noxious black smoke toward the ceiling.

Holt shoved himself up from the chair, turned, and began screaming at the others in the seating area ahead. He’d just gotten out the word
fire
when an alarm began shrieking, seeming to come from everywhere. He reached the doorway and saw the others already moving, running for the fire extinguishers positioned along the outer walls. The extinguishers’ mounts were strobing bright red—it was impossible to miss them.

Holt stepped aside as the first of the men sprinted past him into the room. One by one they went in, dodging around the chairs and one another, and blasting carbon dioxide at the flames. With their bodies in the way, Holt could no longer see the fire, but the men’s audible responses told him they were having trouble with it. They kept triggering the extinguishers, the sound not quite drowning out their curses and shouts.

Porter arrived at the rear of the pack, carrying two extinguishers. He shoved one into Holt’s hands and then ducked in past him. Holt followed. As he did, he heard another alarm begin blaring somewhere. Back toward the tail, maybe. God knew what it was; flames and smoke aboard an aircraft probably set off all kinds of emergency indicators.

He shouldered past the edge of the crowd and at last saw why the fire was proving difficult. The carbon dioxide was all but evaporating in the envelope of blazing air around the three entities. How hot
were
the damned things?

Even as he wondered, he saw one of them flicker. Then the other two. Within the following seconds all three began to dim visibly. The white-hot color was fading before his eyes.

Then the throat of the man next to him exploded out from under his head.

A gunshot.

From behind.

Holt spun—saw some of the others turning too, even as a storm of gunfire kicked up—and for maybe a quarter of a second he discerned the figures standing in the doorway. Garner. The other man. Both women. All leveling and firing Benellis from the aft arms locker.

Holt saw Garner’s weapon swing toward him. Saw its barrel aim straight into his viewpoint from ten feet away.

Holt shut his eyes.

I
t was over by the time Travis’s shotgun ran dry. He saw the last body drop, and as planned, the other three spun and trained their weapons on the seating area—reloading as they did—on the chance that some straggler might yet be coming in.

At the same time Travis lunged forward into the conference room. He dropped his own gun, grabbed one of the fallen extinguishers and began spraying down the remaining flames. The blue flares were already cool enough that they no longer got in the way.

Within a moment there was no fire at all. Just pooled bubbling plastic and a foot of gray vapor swirling under the ceiling. Travis gave the wall another long blast for good measure, then turned, ducked out of the room, and took his first breath since going in. As he emerged he heard a man shouting from somewhere forward of the bulk seating. Footsteps thudded on stairs, and then one of the flight crew came sprinting back.

“
Where is it?
” the man screamed. He started to repeat it, but the words caught in his throat. He’d seen the shotguns the other three were carrying, and for a second his expression flooded with fear.

Then it simply went blank.

He’d seen Garner.

After a long moment the man swallowed and said, “Sir.”

G
arner accompanied the airman back upstairs to speak with the rest of the crew. Twenty seconds after they disappeared, all the alarms cut out.

Travis and Paige and Bethany sank into three of the row seats, side by side, and Travis leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

“Did they interrogate you?” Paige said.

He nodded.

“Are you okay?” she said.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. He took in every detail of her face: the strands of hair hanging past her forehead and in front of her ears, the subtle, rhythmic movements of her throat as she breathed.

“Yeah,” he said.

G
arner came back down five minutes later. By then the twilight outside had deepened nearly to black, and the landscape below had lit up in soft blues and oranges: bright street grids and dotted parking lots.

Garner sat down just across the aisle from the three of them. He exhaled deeply and for a moment said nothing. Travis couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a person look so weary. He turned to Travis and said, “Tell me everything Dyer told you, so I know where to start.” He indicated Paige and Bethany. “They need to catch up on it too.”

Paige looked from Garner to Travis, confused. “Who’s Dyer?” she said.

T
ravis spent twenty minutes explaining it. By the time he’d finished, Paige and Bethany looked rattled, but both clearly understood it all.

“Dyer told you everything,” Garner said. “Everything I told
him
, at least.”

“The second half of Ruben Ward’s message,” Travis said.

Garner nodded. “I never would’ve told you any of this—
either
half of the message—until as late in the game as possible. I would’ve waited until days before you’re supposed to enter the Breach, if I could have. There was just nothing to be gained by telling you sooner, and plenty to lose. It adds unpredictability to bring
anyone
new into the fold. Even you.” He paused. “But I guess that horse is already out and galloping.”

For a long time, fifteen seconds at least, Garner said no more. He rested his hands on his knees and looked down at them.

“I’m sure all three of you have at least a grasp of the physics implied by the Breach,” he said. “The rough theories—guesses, if you like—as to how wormholes function. Maybe you’ve read Stephen Hawking, and know that space and time aren’t really separate things. A wormhole can cross both of them.”

Travis nodded, as did Paige and Bethany.

Garner looked up and met their gazes.

“On the other side of the Breach is a starship,” he said. “It’s orbiting the binary star 61 Cygni, a little over twelve hundred years in our future. The ship was designed and subassembled by General Dynamics in Coffeyville, Kansas, in the first half of the 2250s, and built in low orbit over the next twenty years. It was christened July 17, 2276, the EAS
Deep Sky
. It has a crew of eight hundred thirty-nine people, including an executive officer named Richard Garner, and a commander named Travis Chase.”

Chapter Forty-Five

T
ravis waited. He understood that Garner was neither lying nor joking.

“Ballpark figure,” Garner said. “When do you think the last veteran of the American Civil War died? Don’t crunch the numbers. Just take a shot from the hip, any of you.”

“The 1930s,” Travis said.

Paige nodded. “My guess too.”

“Around there,” Bethany said.

“There are disputed claims,” Garner said, “but the most agreed upon candidate is a Union veteran named Albert Woolson. He died in August of 1956.”

Travis traded looks with the others.

“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” Garner said. “The mind tends to chop off the tails of the bell curve when it makes an estimate. But do the math. Three million people fought in the Civil War, most of them very young, many young enough that they had to lie about their ages to serve. You could safely estimate a few tens of thousands of them were fifteen or sixteen when the war ended in 1865. Which means they were born around 1850. Out of that number of people, a handful could be expected to live to a hundred. A much smaller handful would make it a bit further, or would’ve been a little younger than fifteen when they served. Either way, the mid 1950s would be your best guess, even if you could never know for sure.” He offered a smile. “It
is
right—it just doesn’t
seem
right. It’s strange to consider that Civil War vets and atomic bombs overlapped each another in history by more than a decade.”

He looked forward again. “It’s stranger still to learn that the first humans to become effectively immortal—ageless, anyway—were born just before the Great Depression. You’re familiar with the Methuselah Project? You must have seen the political attack ads during the midterms.”

Travis and Paige and Bethany all nodded.

“Turns out it works,” Garner said. “It comes in about fifteen years ahead of schedule, in fact, according to the message from the
Deep Sky
. The first real stabilization and reversal of age symptoms is achieved around 2035. Which means a tiny scattering of people born in the late 1920s will live long enough to benefit from it—will live to see their biological age rolled back until they look and feel about twenty-five, indefinitely. Many more from the 1930s, forties, and fifties will make the cut, and damn near everyone born after that will. Most of the
Deep Sky
’s crew don’t yet exist in our time, but some do, and some were already adults in the year 1978—including all nine of the people Ruben Ward was instructed to take the message to that summer.”

Travis felt as if two halves of a drawbridge had just dropped together and locked with a heavy thud. He looked at Paige and Bethany and knew what they were thinking, to the last word:

Some of us are already among you
.

“Who better to trust the message with,” Garner said, “than themselves?”

Paige started to respond, then stopped and frowned, as if something that’d been bothering her for the past couple minutes had finally surfaced. “It’s one thing to send us a message through the Breach, but why are they sending dangerous things like entities? If they created a wormhole to tell us something—”

“They didn’t,” Garner said. “They didn’t create the wormhole. Or the entities passing through it. That stuff is all archaic, even on the timescale of the universe. Whoever created it disappeared long ago. Probably a billion years back. These old transit tunnels full of relics are all that’s left of them. The
Deep Sky
’s original purpose was simply to study the tunnels—a whole network of them, discovered earlier by the first robotic probes that went out to neighboring stars. The
Deep Sky
was built from top to bottom as a dedicated research ship, with the means to investigate and even exert some control over wormholes. In the end, the crew used that capability to cause the Breach to open here on Earth, in our time. They rerouted a single tunnel to some degree—enough to make sure that the VLIC’s first shot in 1978 would connect with it, and not to a primordial one teeming with parasite signals. It took an ungodly amount of power to move the tunnel, and as soon as they’d done it, they had to begin generating and storing
more
power to move it again—this time so
they
could tap into it on
their
end. That process—repowering—would require a little over thirty-eight years, and be completed on June 5, 2016, by our calendar. During all the time in between, they had no way of stopping the flow of entities through the system. The most they could do was set up a kind of reverb effect in the tunnel, a very specific disturbance in which they could encode a message.”

“The Breach Voices,” Paige said.

Garner nodded. “Along with the initial impulse that would make a translator of whoever was standing closest when the Breach opened. That was some kind of neurotechnology that’s probably a few centuries ahead of ours—and obviously not perfected, given the damage it did to Ward.”

Travis let all the information settle in his mind, to the extent that it could.

“The tunnels are abandoned?” he said.

Garner nodded again. “Ancient ruins. Though many of the systems engineered into them are still running. Including defensive measures. Safeties.”

“Like what?” Paige said.

“The message covered it all pretty briefly. I got the sense that it would take a textbook to really explain it, but the basics were straightforward enough. One of the safeties is the resistance force inside the Breach, which doesn’t allow you to enter from our end. All the tunnels have that, to protect against the threat of outsiders—like us—tapping in at some random spot and immediately traveling throughout the network. Which makes sense, when you think about it. If you strung the universe with these tunnels, you’d never know when some hostile race might evolve somewhere, punch in and show up in your backyard.”

“So how do you go through it?” Bethany said.

“You need a
tumbler
,” Garner said.

Everyone waited for him to go on.

“That’s the best stab at translating the word from their language—whoever built the tunnels. Tumbler, as in the mechanism inside a lock. The way it works is, any two points connected by a tunnel need to be authorized before someone can travel between them. Think of it as
unlocking
them. And the only way to do that is for a single individual—a single conscious mind—to think the same complex thought outside
both
entry points first. You see how that works? It means at least one person has to make the trip the old-fashioned way—in a ship—before the tunnel lets anyone through. So you’d open one entrance, think a specific thought near it—an exchange from Twelfth Night, say—and then chug across space at ship speed to the
other
entrance, and think the exchange again. Same mind, same thought—that’s what the tunnel listens for. Until it hears that, it won’t open.”

Travis thought he understood the concept, and the reasoning behind it. “It means no new civilization can come out of the blue and expand their presence in space too quickly, right? They can’t push their boundaries any faster than ships can travel.”

Garner nodded. “And a person stuck with that job, unlocking a tunnel’s two ends, is the tumbler. In this case it’s you. I’m sure you can guess why.”

Travis considered it. He stared at the seatback in front of him, then turned to Garner. “Because I’ve already made the trip. There’s one of me on that end already, and one of me on this end.”

Another nod.

“Will that actually work?” Travis said.

“Same mind, same thought,” Garner said.

“So what
is
the thought? Did they put it in the message?”

Garner shook his head. “They’ll give it to you in person. After you go through to their end.”

He watched Travis for the confusion he obviously expected. Travis saw Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes narrow too.

“How will you go through the tunnel if you haven’t unlocked it yet?” Garner said. “That’s another safety—one for the tumbler’s own protection. The term for it translates to something like ‘scouting.’ You get to do it just once, back and forth—a single round-trip. The logic of it goes like this: a tumbler usually has to unlock a tunnel’s first end, then travel for a very long time across space to unlock the
second
end. But
before
he unlocks the second end, he can choose to enter the tunnel there, just once, and go through it to take a good look at the first end again. To scout it.”

Travis saw the point—was pretty certain he did, anyway. “After all that time had gone by, while you were crossing space in a ship, it’d be risky to reach the far end of the tunnel and just open it blindly. What if things back home had changed by then? What if there was something dangerous waiting to come through?”

Garner managed a smile. “Hell, you might open the tunnel and get a magma flow. Or seawater pressurized at a mile’s depth. A lot can change, given enough time, and it could take thousands of years for a ship to travel the distance required. It could take longer. The
Deep Sky
’s crew isn’t worried about that in this case, obviously. As far as I can tell, they just want to speak to you before you fully open the tunnel. About what, I have no idea.”

“So the other me,” Travis said, “the one aboard the
Deep Sky
, will unlock the far end of the tunnel first, and once that’s done, I can make a single trip to their side and back. A scouting trip.”

“That’s the plan, as I understand it.”

Travis stared at him, thinking it all through. Random questions remained. Trailing ends. One in particular.

“Tell us about the filter,” Travis said.

Garner looked surprised. “How can you know about that?”

“Beyond that word, we
don’t
know about it,” Travis said. “I’ll explain the
how
later.”

He held Garner’s gaze and waited for him to speak.

“I don’t know much more than you do, I’m afraid,” Garner said. “The filter was always the strangest part, to me. And the scariest, I suppose.”

“Why?” Paige said.

Travis noticed Bethany looking around at everyone like she’d missed something. Which she had; they’d never told her anything about this. Travis caught her glance and said, “I’ll tell you later.”

She nodded, but the confusion stayed in her expression.

“The filter was the one thing Ruben Ward chose to leave out of the written message,” Garner said. “He never dictated it to Nora during his stay at Johns Hopkins, and only spoke briefly of it to the nine of us, later that summer. He was afraid to share the details, he said. He worried that if we knew about that part, we’d back out. He said it was something absolutely necessary, but also terrible, and that it was best if no one but you, Travis, ever learned about it.”

“Do you think it’s something that happens to me when I go through the Breach?” Travis said. “Something that changes me? Am
I
what gets filtered?”

Again Garner looked surprised, but only mildly so this time. “That’s more or less what I’ve imagined all these years. But it’s no more than a guess—mine is as bad as yours.”

Travis nodded. As he had in the mine shaft, he let the subject slip from his thoughts. There were only so many ways he could hold it up to the light. He looked at Garner again.

“The nine of you were supposed to get me into Tangent,” Travis said. “Get me in and then, as you said, tell me everything at the last possible moment.”

Garner nodded.

“So what did you think,” Travis said, “when I ended up in Tangent
without
your help, in the summer of 2009?”

“That very strange things happen in connection with the Breach. And that it couldn’t be a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t. I’ll explain that later too.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Travis considered something else. “You were prepared to hit Border Town with a nuke, back then, when Aaron Pilgrim took control of the place.”

“The Breach would’ve survived. You can’t imagine the forces that stabilize it. All that stopped me was that you wouldn’t leave the place. I had no choice but to go along with the approach you suggested.”

For a while after that, nobody spoke. The heavy engines droned and the lit-up nightscape slid by, far below.

“Why are they doing this at all?” Paige said. “The crew of that ship. Does the message say why they’re opening the tunnel in the first place?”

Garner nodded slowly, looking down at his hands again. “That part it explains in simple terms.” He grew quiet for a few seconds, then continued. “There was a war. It happened on Earth around 3100, right around the time the
Deep Sky
arrived at what turned out to be its last destination—61 Cygni. That star is just over eleven light-years from here, which means the ship’s crew, once they were on-site, got all their updates from home with more than a decade’s delay. Correspondence from loved ones, news stories, everything. When the war started, they had to watch their world come apart on that same delay, knowing that whatever they were seeing was already eleven years gone. The crew considered returning, trying to intervene somehow, but gave up the idea without much debate: the
Deep Sky
doesn’t exactly have a hyperdrive button on its bridge. Its top speed is around twenty percent of the speed of light. It’d taken fifty-five years to get out to that star system, and it would take fifty-five to get back. In any case, it wasn’t long before they saw the final headlines, announcing the all-but-certain deployment of weapon systems more or less guaranteed to end the world. The message doesn’t clarify what exactly those weapons were—only that they worked. All transmissions from Earth ended right after that, and never started up again.”