Deep Sky (4 page)

She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.

It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was
burned
after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.

Another step.

If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.

But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.

Another step. And another.

The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.

Another step.

She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that was somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.

She squinted.

Ouray
.

Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.

Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.

A big part of her
did
want to. The same part that hated the second move.

Which was simply to talk to her father.

It wasn’t that she didn’t
want
to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.

But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.

It still did.

She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.

Time to do this.

She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.

And cleared her throat loudly.

She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.

She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this.
Especially
a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million
more
of.

She swallowed the tightness and stepped into the room. “I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

No reason to drag things out: “What was Scalar?”

He didn’t quite flinch. It was more subtle than that—all in the eyes. A flicker of fear and then perfect calm. He tilted his chair back and appeared to search his thoughts.

“Rings a bell,” he said. “Where’d you come across it?”

“In the archives. There’s an index page for it, but all the entries are crossed out.”

“Oh—I remember. Let me guess, the entries went from the early to late eighties.”

Paige nodded.

“It was a clerical thing,” her father said. “Had to do with videotape formats, way back. We used to shoot everything on standard VHS, and then we switched over to VHS-C—digital was still a ways off. Anyway, when we made the switch we decided to transfer all the old stuff too, for shelf-life. Huge pain in the ass. Couple thousand hours of stock. Probably took us six years or more, on and off.”

He shrugged, waiting for her to let it go.

She returned his gaze and wondered if he’d ever lied to her before this. Sure, he’d kept his work with Tangent secret from her, all through her childhood, but what choice had he had? This was different. And harder to stomach than she’d have guessed.

“That all you wanted to know?” he said.

Only a memory. She held onto that idea like it was a handrail at the edge of a cliff. If she called him on his lie, she wouldn’t actually be hurting him. He wasn’t real.

“Honey?” he said. “Everything okay?”

“I’ve already asked some of the others about Scalar,” she said. “No one wants to say much, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about transferring videotapes.”

His expression went cold.

“There was government involvement,” she said. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I want to know what it was.”

He stared. He seemed to be coming to some careful decision. When he finally spoke, it was in a calming tone, but one full of fear—
for her
. As if she were standing there with a gun to her head.

“Paige, you don’t want to get into this.”

“I have a right to know. And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“You’re right—I lied about the VHS stuff. But you lied too. No one here in Border Town told you a thing about Scalar. There are maybe half a dozen who know the parts you just described, and none of them would’ve said anything without coming to me first. Which means you talked to someone on the outside. And that scares the hell out of me.”

She couldn’t think of what to say to that. Almost every word had caught her off guard.

Her father stood from his desk and crossed to her. He stared at her with that strange, minefield caution still in his eyes.

“Who have you spoken to?” he said.

“First tell me what Scalar is.”

“Paige, this is more serious than you can know. If you’ve talked to the wrong people, you may have already triggered things we can’t stop.”

“Then tell me. Everything.”

He shook his head. “Knowing about Scalar puts a person at risk. I wouldn’t tell you a word of it to save my life. Now I need to know exactly who you spoke to. I’m not kidding.”

“If others here know about this, then I should know too—”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him—she had to step fast to stay balanced—and shouted into her face. “
Who did you talk to?
”

She pulled her arm away, turned and ran. Through the doorway, along the corridor, the lights sliding by and her father’s footsteps coming fast behind her. She shut her eyes as she ran. Pictured the deserted B42, where she and Travis were sitting. It was hard to focus on it now.

“Paige!”

Running. Eyes shut tight. Only a memory.

T
ravis held on to Paige and waited. Three minutes, sixteen seconds. It always took that long, no matter how much time someone spent inside a memory. During his own use of the Tap, Travis had revisited a random night of his stretch in Atlanta. He’d dropped into the middle of a long shift at the warehouse, then just walked out of the place and got in his Explorer. He drove west all that night and all the next day, stopping only for gas, food, and a couple naps, and reached the Pacific in about thirty-six hours.

Had he wanted to, he could’ve stayed in the memory for months—probably even years. Techs had remained under for as long as six weeks without encountering trouble. They’d even tried staying under while catching up to the present time and surpassing it; had it worked they would’ve found themselves
remembering
their own futures, a trick with all kinds of fun potential. But all attempts to do that had failed—even the Tap had its boundaries. Subjects hit the present and saw their vision start flashing green and blue like some system-crash warning, and then they involuntarily emerged from the memory—three minutes and sixteen seconds after going under, as always.

Only one person had ever come back sooner. Gina Murphy. Her eyes had popped open at around two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she’d screamed and held her head as if it were being pried apart. The screaming had lasted for over a minute, while Travis and others carried her to the medical quarters. Along the way Gina managed to evict the Tap from her head—another intuitive control, you got it out by simply
wanting
it out—but that didn’t end the pain. Her death ended it, around the time they set her on a bed in medical. By then she was bleeding from every opening in her face, including her eyes. An Army medical examiner, off-site, did the autopsy the following day. The results, understandably, were unprecedented in medical literature. Gina had died from laceration and hemorrhaging of the brain, confined to a narrow pathway atop the neocortex. In the doctor’s words, it looked like someone had taken a radial saw to the contents of her head, but had managed to do it without cutting the skull.

More disturbing than those answers were the questions that didn’t have any. Above all, what had gone wrong? Had something about Gina’s biochemistry triggered the problem? Had she used the Tap in some incorrect way? What would that even mean? She’d gone under to relive a memory, like everyone else had done—some sibling’s birthday party she’d missed years ago. The fact was that the questions weren’t just unanswered. They were unanswerable. As with all entities, Tangent was simply out of its depth. There was a way to get yourself killed using the Tap, and no victim would ever live to say what it was.

Travis watched the time on his phone.

Two minutes and thirty-five came and went.

He relaxed only by a degree.

Three minutes.

Three minutes and ten.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

Paige jerked against him and took a hard breath.

“
Fuck
,” she whispered.

She raised her head from his shoulder.

“One for two,” she said. She rubbed her forehead, looking badly rattled by something. “I’ll explain while we wait for the plane.”

Chapter Six

B
efore they’d even returned to their residence, Paige called Bethany Stewart—one of the youngest people in Tangent, at twenty-five, and very likely the smartest. Bethany answered on the second ring with no edge of sleep in her voice, despite it being four in the morning.

“I need DMV files, with photos, for everyone in Ouray, Colorado,” Paige said. She spelled out the town’s name. “Narrow the results to females in their sixties, and send them to my computer.”

“Take five minutes,” Bethany said.

It took three—and less than another two for Travis and Paige to spot Carrie Holden among the candidates. She’d dyed her hair dark brown, but nothing else had changed except her age. Her name in Ouray was Rebecca Hunter.

T
hey were in the air by 4:20. Though Tangent kept no aircraft on-site at Border Town, it had a small fleet stationed at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper, ten minutes’ flight time away.

The jet, a Gulfstream V with seating for eighteen, felt enormous with only the two of them in the cabin. The pilots’ voices up front were lost under the drone of the engines. Travis looked out as the aircraft climbed, but there was only unbroken darkness below. The nearest towns were faint pinpricks of light, far out on the plain beyond the limits of the Border Town Exclusion Zone.

For a few minutes neither spoke. The jet’s turbofans throttled back an octave as the aircraft reached altitude and leveled off.

“You’re thinking about it,” Paige said.

She didn’t have to frame it as a question any more than she had to specify what
it
was.

It
was almost all Travis thought about these days.

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

Fourteen months ago Travis had rejoined Tangent after two years of self-imposed exile. He’d spent the fourteen months doing the same kind of work as everyone else in Border Town—helping to study Breach entities, both new and old—while also cramming for hours a day to give himself the underpinning of scientific literacy that every other Tangent recruit had come prepackaged with. He’d taken to it surprisingly well. At ten months he’d passed the equivalent of MIT’s Calculus 4 exam, and had at least a solid undergrad-level hold on physics, chemistry, and biology. The joke was that none of it really mattered where entities were concerned: the smartest people in the world were probably about as qualified as sparrows to study the objects that emerged from the Breach. Still it was nice to speak the same technical language as everyone else, and Travis had found his awe of the Breach only deepening as his intellect grew. Like staring at the night sky through increasingly sharp eyes.

More to the point, his recent training meant he could do real scientific work at Border Town. He felt like he belonged there now—as a contributor, not just an outsider taking up space.

But that wasn’t why he’d come back.

That wasn’t
it
.

“Are you wondering if there’s a connection?” Paige said. “Between whatever’s going on right now and . . . the thing about you?”

“I’m always wondering that,” Travis said. “Every time something new comes along, I ask myself if it’s all starting. Sooner or later, the answer will be yes.”

The issue was complex, but Travis thought of it in simple terms. Like delineated notes in some PowerPoint presentation. Or individual black flies circling his head.

The first piece of it was certain: somewhere down the road, Tangent would learn to use the Breach to send messages to the past—propelling them into the tunnel from this end, against the resistance force at its mouth, in such a way that they would re-emerge
before
they were sent in. The reason Travis was certain of this was that two messages had come back already. Some future Paige, and some future Travis, had given their lives to send them—the physical process of doing so was unavoidably fatal.

There were lots of details, but they all shook out to this: something bad was coming. Something that would end about 20 million lives. Something Travis himself would be responsible for, and might have no choice but to do, because to
not
do it would be worse.

Paige’s future self, perhaps acting on limited information, had opposed the action—whatever it was. Her message to the past had been a retroactive order—to herself—to kill Travis, in the hope of preventing this thing from happening at all.

Travis had countered her move by sending his own message—a
messenger
, really: a radically advanced, self-aware handheld computer called
Blackbird
, though almost everyone knew it as the
Whisper
. The Whisper had emerged even further in the past than Paige’s message to herself, and had set about manipulating people and rewriting history in order to put Travis in front of the Breach when Paige’s message came through.

In doing so, it’d allowed him to intercept it.

In the present, Travis and Paige had only limited clues as to what the hell it all meant. Their future selves had sent perfectly contradicting pleas, each important enough to merit dying in the bargain. All that differentiated the sacrifices was that Travis’s had been sent
after
Paige’s—it must’ve, since it’d been a response to hers. Had he known something she didn’t?

The details ended there. That far-off Travis had withheld them, no doubt fearing they would turn his present self away completely. All Travis could do was wait for it. Wait for any sign that it’d begun. The first link in the chain that would pull him down into the dark.

Down toward
it
.

“Let’s not dwell on it too much,” Paige said. “Save tomorrow for tomorrow, right? With any luck we won’t live to see it anyway.”

T
he man in the white parka had a name—Dominic—but his employers didn’t know it. Maybe they had a nickname for him, or more likely a number, but if so they never addressed him by it. They didn’t address him at all. They just called and gave him instructions. They were the only ones who knew the number for the blue cell phone.

That phone had rung last night while Dominic was painting the den in his condo in Santa Fe. A nice rich green that contrasted well with the white trim and the walnut desk. Dominic set the roller in the tray and answered before the ringtone reached the first drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Dominic listened as the caller spoke, committing everything to memory, then hung up and went to his closet and opened the cavity behind the back wall. He selected a white parka with battery-powered heating good for twelve hours of lying still in the cold, and a matte-white Remington 700 with a four-power scope. Two minutes later he was in his car en route to the private terminal at Santa Fe County Municipal.

Now he was lying prone in the snow five hundred feet above and half a mile east of Ouray, Colorado. He lay at the pinched, far end of a valley that rose from the town’s outskirts. The town looked like a snow globe village, its streetlights casting cones in the big papery flakes that were coming down. A halo of light-bleed surrounded Ouray itself—a barrier of visual warmth against the dark.

Dominic lay far outside that warmth, out in the deep, empty night.

So did the cabin he was watching.

He put his eye to the scope and panned across the windows. A pale glow rimmed the blinds at one of them—maybe a fluorescent light in a laundry room left on all night. Every other window was dark. There was a mercury lamp on a post in the front yard, though its glow served only to make the cabin appear lonelier. Only two other structures stood in the valley: a low-slung ranch and a mobile home, both tucked in close to town. The cabin was on its own.

Dominic raised his eye from the scope and looked at his watch. Not quite five in the morning. He’d taken position just after midnight. Nothing about the cabin had changed since then. Daylight was two hours away, but it would present no problem when it came. Dominic would remain invisible, and so would the five-man team he knew was lying much closer to the place—probably within forty yards of the front door.