Authors: Patrick Lee
It looked like they were listening.
He kept pounding the panel. Another second. Two.
On three the first of the insects lifted off. It was one Travis hadn’t even seen—it came up out of the deep red, somewhere to the left. By the time Travis had swung his gaze toward it, there were others in the air. Lots of others. Dozens and then well over a hundred. Where they rose directly past the Breach, its glare shone right through their bodies, as if they were hollow shells made of thin paper. Light enough to fly—even on Earth.
They converged toward the booth before they’d ascended even a few feet, the whole mass of them moving as if guided by a single mind. Travis finally stopped pounding and stepped back, and an instant later the first of them hit the windows. They flew more like moths than hornets. They made great swooping circles and scraped the plastic in glancing blows. Within moments there were enough of them swarming the panels that it was hard to see out.
“Was there a
reason
you did that?” Bethany whispered.
“Yes,” Travis said, without looking back.
He dropped the magazine out of his MP5, drew it close to his eyes and studied the metal edges at the top where it socketed into the weapon. He found one that suited his purpose.
Then he stepped into the booth again, fit the chosen edge to the nearest of the screws holding a panel in place, and began to loosen it.
I
t wasn’t likely to work. He knew that. It was just all they had. If it failed they’d die—but if they did nothing they’d die anyway. Not much of a dilemma.
The idea was simple enough: prep the window to be removed with a good shove, wait for the contractors to enter the mine and reach the bottom of the stairs just outside this tunnel—and shove. The bugs would spill in. They would attack everyone. The four of them would expect it. The contractors wouldn’t. As a group, the contractors would present a much larger and louder target—as well as a fleeing one. It was hard to imagine the men wouldn’t reverse course in the mother of all hurries, all the way back to whichever access they’d come in through. With a decent amount of luck, the bulk of the swarm would go with them, and briefly scatter whoever was waiting outside the mine. Whatever portion of the bugs stayed down here in the tunnel might be manageable; Travis pictured their translucent, fragile bodies meeting violently swung MP5s. Maybe it would work. Maybe they’d get a few minutes’ opportunity to follow the contractors up into the woods and run for visual cover.
Maybe.
Travis didn’t pretend to be optimistic, either for the others’ benefit or his own.
H
e and Paige removed all but four screws, one at each corner, and loosened those as much as they dared. They left them holding on by no more than a few turns each. The panel, a little larger than a beach towel, rattled and swayed in place at the lightest touch.
On the other side, the hornets continued to loop and dive and scrape.
T
he four of them sat in the tunnel just shy of where it opened to the plastic enclosure. Bethany pressed her hands tightly between her knees and tried to keep them from shaking. She said little.
High above, the drilling continued. During pauses they could hear the same progress going on at the more distant access.
“All right,” Dyer said. “Here’s what I know.”
H
e was quiet for twenty seconds, lining it all up.
“You’ve been acting on limited information,” he said. “You knew that. You had no choice but to try connecting the dots anyway—the ones you had. Peter Campbell did the same thing, early in the Scalar investigation, and came to the same misunderstanding as you: that Ruben Ward did something bad.”
Paige looked at Travis and Bethany, then Dyer.
“He
did
do something bad,” she said. “My father was terrified about it.”
“In the beginning.”
Paige shook her head. “In the end, too, and long after. He was still scared of it five years ago.”
“He was scared five years ago, but not for any of the reasons you think.”
Paige started to reply, then just stopped and waited for him to go on.
Dyer shut his eyes for a few seconds. A last consideration of how to say it.
“The message Ward received had distinct halves. The first was a description of the place on the other side of the Breach, along with an explanation of why the message had been sent. None of which Garner shared with me. Those are the deepest parts of the secret. What he told me about was the second half: the instructions. They included a list of nine names, nine people who were alive in 1978, and directions for finding them.”
Travis looked at Paige and knew what she was thinking.
Loraine Cotton
.
“Ward’s task was straightforward,” Dyer said. “Take the message to each of these people and convince them it was for real. There were verifiers built into it, to help him do that. Specific predictions of things like aurora activity that summer, down to the minute. Things you couldn’t just guess about—things a
human
couldn’t just guess about anyway.”
“What were these people supposed to do with the message once they had it?” Travis said.
“Follow the instructions that were included for
them
. Which were more complicated than Ward’s. His part was done by early August.”
“Why did he kill himself?” Bethany said.
“For the reason everyone assumed, the day they heard about it. The Breach had fried him. Whatever gave him the means to translate the message—and dumped him into a near-coma for all those weeks—screwed him up in lots of other ways. Serious mood problems. Imbalances. It’s a wonder he lasted those three months. Did you know the message included an apology for that effect? Whoever sent it knew it would do that to a human brain. It couldn’t be avoided.”
The drilling atop the shaft suddenly changed tone. Became deeper, more guttural. The first bit had been swapped out for something bigger. Everyone listened for a moment and then tried to ignore it.
“So by August of 1978,” Dyer said, “the nine recipients had their orders in hand. These were nine pretty average people, but that was about to change. The instructions included ways for them to dramatically increase their financial and social status over the following years. The wording was pretty careful—the message’s senders may have anticipated that other people might see it along the way. It didn’t necessarily say ‘Invest in Apple on this exact date, or apply for this particular job,’ but it was in the ballpark. It read like a childishly simple riddle, if you knew to look past the surface, and for these nine people it was the recipe for becoming extremely rich, and politically connected, in just a matter of years.”
Travis thought of the three names Bethany’s data-mining had turned up. Three of the people Peter Campbell had met with here in Rum Lake, in December 1987. All three had been worth tens of millions by then, with ties to Washington.
And all three had begun amassing that wealth and power in the late seventies or very early eighties.
Suddenly Travis understood what the
ping
had been about, a while earlier when they’d learned about Loraine Cotton: they’d recognized that her steep financial climb started just after Ruben Ward met with her, and as a direct result of his doing so. But Travis hadn’t noticed the similarity with the other three. Hadn’t tied in the fact that their climbs had begun around the same time as hers. He’d overlooked it because those people were supposed to be
Peter’s
allies, whom he’d chosen in 1987. It hadn’t seemed to matter when and how they’d become powerful.
“Whoever’s on the other side seems to have at least some rudimentary knowledge of our future,” Dyer said. “They had it as of 1978, in any case. Some understanding of which technologies, even which companies, were about to break in a big way.”
“There are entities that can access the future,” Paige said. “With certain restrictions.”
“However it worked,” Dyer said, “the information was dead-on. These people were all major players by the mid eighties, which allowed them to begin following the next instruction: get close to the people who control the Breach. Stay informed on all that surrounds it, and gain as much influence over it as possible. That last part they were free to take their time with. They wouldn’t have to
use
the influence until quite a ways down the road.”
“How far down the road?” Travis said.
“Seven minutes past three
P.M.
mountain time, June 5, 2016.”
The three of them stared. None spoke.
Travis’s mind automatically sought a meaning for the date, but came up with nothing. It was a few months shy of four years from now. Beyond that, nothing about it stuck.
“What happens at that time?” Paige said.
“The Breach inside Border Town opens,” Dyer said. “Really opens, I mean. Becomes a two-way channel that a person can pass through from this end. But only one specific person, whom the instructions also name and describe. They made it very clear that no one else was to come through. Putting that person in front of the Breach at the right time falls to the other nine. That’s their entire purpose. It’s what all the power and influence are for.”
The notion of someone actually stepping into the Breach affected Travis to an extent that surprised him. Through the fabric of his shirt he could suddenly feel the stone wall at his back, radiating its chill.
“Who goes in?” he said.
Dyer looked at him. “You do, Mr. Chase.”
T
he tunnel seemed almost to move beneath him. To rock gently left and then right, like a boat in a passing wake.
“The message that came through the Breach was about you,” Dyer said. “It named you. It specified your time and place of birth.”
A memory came to Travis. An image of the dark alley near Johns Hopkins, between the town houses. Ruben Ward staggering somewhere ahead of him, aware that he was being followed.
The man had called out:
Who the hell are you?
And he’d answered:
Travis Chase. Let me help.
There’d been an audible response on Ward’s part. Some expulsion of breath Travis had pegged for confusion, and then dismissed.
You’re only a kid
, Ward had said. And a moment later:
The instructions didn’t say anything about this
.
Travis looked around at the others—Dyer just watching him, reading his response, Paige and Bethany staring with blank faces, still processing the information.
Then Paige’s expression changed. She looked at Travis and mouthed a single word:
it
.
Travis acknowledged her with a nod neither Bethany nor Dyer saw.
It.
Jesus.
No doubting the connection now.
Was that what the filter was about, then? Was it some consequence of entering the Breach from this end? An unavoidable result, like the brain damage Ruben Ward had suffered when the thing opened?
Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.
Travis looked at Dyer. “Did Garner ever say anything about a filter? Did that word ever come up, regarding the message?”
Dyer thought about it, but seemed to draw a blank. He shook his head.
Travis considered the notion for another second and then let it fall away—for the moment. The present conversation drew his full attention again.
“I was a child when that message arrived,” Travis said. “How the hell could it be about me?”
“I’d tell you if I knew,” Dyer said.
“Does Garner know? Does he know what happens when I go through?”
“He knows something—whatever the first half of the message says.”
“We saw part of it,” Paige said. “I won’t go into the
how
, but we saw two separate lines from the notebook. One was about finding Loraine Cotton here in Rum Lake. The other was from earlier in the text. It said, ‘Some of us are already among you.’ ”
Dyer’s eyes tightened involuntarily. He’d clearly never heard that before.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Like I told you, Garner kept all that to himself. All he said about it was that it mattered. Like the biggest things in history matter. Things we can’t afford to get wrong.” He paused. “They
wouldn’t
have gotten it wrong. Everything was on the right track, at the beginning. The nine knew all they were supposed to, and were gaining power. No one else knew a thing. By the end, right before 2016, they’d have been well positioned to get you into Tangent, Mr. Chase, under whatever necessary pretense. To give you an idea of
how
well positioned, consider that Garner himself was one of the nine. In 1978 he was a retired Navy SEAL thinking about putting his law degree to use. The instructions rerouted him into politics. Everything was rolling smoothly. And then it wasn’t.”
“Scalar,” Paige said. There was a note of pain in her voice.
Dyer nodded. “Your father’s learning about the notebook, from Ward’s wife, threw everything off. He launched the investigation, came up empty, and got started on the project to create this second Breach the following year. Before it was long under way, a few of the nine had already gotten wind of it. They knew why Peter was doing it, and couldn’t blame him. Of course he’d want to find out what the message had said. Given the secrecy, how could it sound anything but ominous to him? Garner and the others debated meeting with him and telling him everything, but held back. What if he didn’t agree with their goal? Their advantage would be lost, just like that. So they waited instead, and watched over this project as closely as they could. They weren’t sure what would result from it, but they were confident it wouldn’t generate another Ward.” He shrugged. “In the end they actually exerted some influence on the construction. Peter had a team building the new ion collider in a secure location a few hundred miles from here—it could be taken apart and moved once he found a place to set it up for good. Secrecy around the search for a final site was incredibly strict. No one in Washington was privy to the memos. The nine were worried they’d end up never knowing how all this turned out, so they used indirect methods to suggest this mine shaft, by way of one of the engineering firms involved. Loraine Cotton knew the mine from her time as a biologist here.”
Dyer nodded at the red light streaming in nearby. “They installed the collider in about three months in 1987, and switched it on. You know how that went. Garner and the others figured that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. Even while he was containing the mess here, Peter began preliminary steps toward trying again somewhere else. And again and again, if need be. He was that rattled by not knowing what Ward had done. He couldn’t justify ever giving up. So Garner and the rest finally rolled the dice. A few of them met with Peter and told him the whole story.”
“How did he take it?” Paige said.
Dyer rubbed his eyes and leaned his head back against the stone. “Like he’d accidentally released plague rats from a lab.” He exhaled slowly. “Peter agreed entirely with their aim, and that all of his work on Scalar had to stop. But by then it wasn’t as simple as that. Things were worse than Garner and the others realized. They’d been watching Tangent’s dealings for a few years by then, especially as Scalar began to ramp up. They never thought Peter knew about them—but he did. And he’d countered their moves with his own. He’d been watching
them
. Remember, he had Breach technology at his disposal. Serious advantages no one outside Border Town knew about. He’d also involved contacts he had within the FBI, for things like background checks and financial record searches.”
“Oh shit,” Travis said. He could see the rough shape of the problem.
Dyer nodded. “Peter did that stuff long before Garner and the others came to see him. Before he knew any better. By the time they
did
meet with him, there were a handful of people in the United States government who knew all nine of their names, and knew they’d taken an unusual interest in Scalar—which a select few also knew about. You see the danger, right? And you see how even stopping the investigation in its tracks, ceasing work on new Breaches, wouldn’t make that danger go away. There would always be those few people out there, along with whoever they’d talked to, who might put the pieces together. Rumors of an alien message, its instructions carried out on Earth in 1978. Nine powerful people deeply involved with it somehow, all of whom had radically improved their standing right after the message arrived. There would always be the risk of someone connecting the dots and reacting out of fear. Of huge-scale action being taken against Garner and the others, and maybe against Tangent itself. All of that could happen years before 2016. Years before the culmination of their work.”
Dyer waved a hand to indicate the unseen chamber six hundred feet above. “So they all met to talk about it. Peter and the other Scalar investigators, and Garner and the rest of those who’d received the message. They came here in mid-December 1987 to figure it all out. The location worked because it was still secret to anyone in D.C. Only the engineers knew where this place was, and they’d all signed nondisclosure forms that threatened capital punishment. Between that and how damned scared of the place they were, by that point, they weren’t likely to ever talk. So, good place for the meeting. Peter and the others brought a report with them. A plan for how to proceed.”
“The cheat sheet,” Paige said.
Dyer looked puzzled.
“That’s what others in Tangent called it,” she said.
“A one-page plan,” Travis said. “Jesus, now I know why. It could’ve probably been a one-
line
plan:
Stop everything and cross our fingers
.”
“More or less,” Dyer said. “In the end it was all they could do. Like submarine combat. Rig for quiet and go dead in the water. Hope like hell they just lose you after a while.”
He went silent, and for a moment the four of them listened to the drilling up top. Droning, patient, relentless.
“I guess they didn’t,” Travis said.
A second later the drilling stopped.