The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

by Patrick Lee

  “What location on Earth right now would have a climate like fall in the northern United States?” Travis said.

  Bethany thought about it. She shrugged. “Maybe western Canada, a few hundred miles up the coast from Seattle. I really don’t know. It would still be dark there, for what it’s worth.”

  Travis took another breath of the chilly wind.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Even if it really is an opening to someplace thousands of miles away—as impressive as that is—what could Paige and the others have learned from this thing? What could anyone learn from it that they couldn’t learn by just flying to wherever it leads?”

  “There must be more to it than we’re thinking,” Bethany said.

  Travis nodded. There had to be. And they weren’t going to find out what it was by just standing here.

  Travis turned and looked around. There was a leather-bound room service menu on the nearest end table. He crossed to it, picked it up and came back to where he’d been standing beside the opening.

  He held the menu by one end. He put the other end into the projected cone of light. It blocked a big chunk of the beam, maybe a third or more. That portion of the light no longer reached the black opening.

  But the opening was unaffected.

  In a way it was the most surreal thing Travis had seen yet. It was like sticking your hand into the beam of a movie projector, seeing the shapes of your fingers cast down the length of the light—but seeing no shadow on the screen.

  “It makes sense,” Bethany said. “They’d have to build it so that the hole stayed open, even if part of the beam were blocked. Otherwise, think about it: you’d block the beam with your body before you could climb through the opening.”

  Travis wondered how much of the beam could be cut off before the opening failed. Keeping the menu in the light cone, he moved it slowly toward the couch. Toward the cylinder’s lens, and the narrow part of the beam.

  He watched the opening as he did it. Watched the rectangle of blocked-out light grow until it was well over half of the beam. Then three fourths. The opening showed no effect at all. It didn’t so much as flicker.

  It stayed that way until only a sliver of blue light reached the hole. Maybe five percent of the total. When Travis blocked it further, the opening vanished. At the same time the projected light on the leather menu began to flash symbols in the same text that was engraved on the cylinder. Maybe it said obstruction error. Maybe it said stop blocking the light, asshole. Travis pulled the menu out of the way and the opening immediately reappeared.

  He pressed his other hand to the menu. It felt as cool to the touch as when he’d picked it up. He held it close to his eyes and tilted it so that the gleam of sunlight showed him the surface in detail. It didn’t appear damaged.

  He went back to the opening. He still held the menu. He shared a look with Bethany: Here goes.

  He put the menu fully into the cone of light, and then he put half of it through the hole in the air.

  It met no resistance. The leading half of the menu simply went through, as if the opening were no more than a hole in a wall, with a darkened room on the far side. They could still see the entire menu. It was right there with them—even if part of it was also far, far away from them, in the night air of some rural place halfway around the world.

  Travis drew it back into the room and tossed it onto an armchair a few feet away.

  He turned back to Bethany. “Unless you know a place in D.C. to get lab mice, I’m out of things to try.”

  “I think we’re the lab mice at this point.”

  Chapter Nine

  They closed all the drapes in the suite’s living room and shut the doors to the adjoining areas. The resulting near darkness allowed their eyes to adjust a little, but it made no difference as far as the opening was concerned. The place on the other side still looked pitch-black.

  Travis stepped into the projected beam of light and faced the hole directly. If the blue light had any effect where it shone on his back, he couldn’t feel it. Even the exposed skin on his neck and arms felt normal.

  Travis stood there a moment and let the wind rush over him. He closed his eyes. He listened. Behind him he could hear the ambience of D.C., even through the closed windows of the suite. The rumble of traffic. The beeping of some kind of construction vehicle on a build site. The drone of a propeller aircraft.

  But there were sounds coming from in front of him too, through the opening. Night sounds of insects and maybe frogs. They were very faint. He hadn’t noticed them earlier. He tried to isolate them now. The sounds seemed to come from only a few point sources, far away in the darkness. Which made sense. If it’d been a summer night on the other side, the chorus of insect song would’ve been overwhelming. Literally billions of tiny noisemakers within the nearest mile, any one of them loud enough to be heard at a distance. But the location on the other side of the opening—Canada or wherever it might be—was long past its local summer. The night air called to mind the trailing edge of the living season, when most things had already gone to ground or simply died off. Travis had the sense that he was listening to the region’s last few holdouts. A few nights from now, even those would probably be silenced, and there would be nothing but the dead quiet of the oncoming winter.

  Travis put his hand through the opening.

  In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany flinch a little, even though she’d expected the move.

  His hand felt fine.

  He lowered it to the bottom edge of the hole, but stopped just shy of touching it. He wondered what the margin was like. Was it a kind of blade-edge between the space on this side and the space on the other? If he ran his hand into it, would it pass right through, cutting his fingers off and dropping them away into the darkness over there? It seemed like Paige would’ve warned them about something like that, but she hadn’t had a lot of time to go into details.

  Travis was tempted to grab the bound menu again and test the edge of the hole with it. Instead he lowered his hand another inch, slowly, ready to retract it.

  His fingers settled onto a smooth, rounded edge. Like the tubing of a hula hoop. It was cool and rigid as steel. Travis applied a few pounds of force to it. It didn’t budge. Strange—the cylinder’s movement on the couch a few minutes earlier had made the opening bob up and down easily, but the opening itself couldn’t be moved by direct force against it. It was as fixed as a hole cut into an iron wall.

  Travis ducked and leaned his upper body through the hole, into the night on the other side.

  At once he saw what’d been impossible to see from inside the suite: a sky shot full of stars, sharp and clear in the unhindered darkness. The hazy band of the Milky Way defined a long arc from one horizon to the other. A crescent moon hung like a blade, an hour from setting or having risen—Travis wasn’t sure which. But it was definitely the same moon he’d grown up under. He was staring at a nightscape somewhere on Earth, at least.

  His eyes were already adjusting to the dark, much deeper on this side of the opening than in the suite, even with the drapes closed.

  As the seconds drew out he began to discern details in the night around him, both near and distant. He saw the canopy of a forest, the treetops maybe twenty feet below his viewpoint. Spires of pine trees and the rough curves of hardwoods, all of them pale in the faint light of the moon.

  There were other shapes, but he couldn’t make sense of them. Strange geometric forms, like huge scaffolding assemblies or bamboo towers, jutted up from the forest here and there. The light was too poor to offer any detail about them. Even their distances were hard to gauge. Travis looked down and saw the footings of one of the structures right below. Its complex form rose into the darkness just behind his position.

  The only other shape he could resolve was something very tall and narrow, and solid in appearance, standing on the horizon at least a mile away. Its height was imposing even at that distance: it towered above the trees, easily five times their height
. He focused on it but could perceive no detail beyond its bulk and rough size. He thought of an enormous smokestack rising from a factory complex. The problem was that there was no smoke, and no factory, either, unless all its lights were shut off.

  He saw movement in his peripheral vision and then Bethany was there, leaning into the darkness beside him. He edged over a few inches to give her room.

  For a moment they just stood there in silence, side by side. They listened to the night. Travis looked at the moon again and judged that it was higher than when he’d first seen it. The crescent was very narrow, which meant the sun couldn’t be far below the horizon. Dawn was no more than an hour away, though there was no hint of it yet.

  “I’ve never seen any place this dark,” Bethany said. “There’s not the least bit of light pollution on the horizon. We’d have to be over a hundred miles from even a mid-sized town for it to look like this. But at the same time it’s a place where people have built large structures, whatever these are. And whatever that is.” She waved a hand to indicate the towering form in the distance. “It has to be forty stories tall. Maybe taller.” She was quiet for a moment and then she turned to him. “Where the hell are we?”

  Travis had no answer. He had a vague notion that it could be a military installation, built in remote wilderness out of concern for public safety or—more likely—secrecy. But why would an alien-made device just happen to show them a place like that? Why would it show them any place in particular, as opposed to some random location? Even if the place on the other side were some fixed distance and direction from here, it should still be someplace purely random. Simple probability said they should be looking out at the ocean right now, or a wide-open prairie, or an arctic tundra, or a city street with a McDonalds and a Starbucks and half a dozen stoplights.

  “I don’t know,” Travis said.

  Bethany started to speak, but before she could, a high-pitched cry rose from the trees right below them. Bethany flinched hard and grabbed onto his arm. Travis was glad for that: it masked the fact that his own muscles had tensed pretty damn hard.

  He grew calm at once, recognizing the sound: a wolf’s howl. As it died away Travis cocked his head and listened. He heard the clatter of running footsteps as the pack went by right beneath their position. Their claws scrabbled on ground that sounded unusually hard. Stone, he’d have guessed—if a forest could grow from stone.

  A hundred yards off, the wolves stopped and howled again, first one and then another. Seconds passed, and then a series of answering cries resonated from the trees half a mile away. The nearer set of wolves had just begun to respond when a new sound erupted somewhere between the packs, silencing both of them. Bethany didn’t exactly flinch, but Travis felt her body shudder. He felt his own blood go cold, and wasn’t surprised that it did. He was biologically wired to fear this sound, courtesy of a long chain of ancestors who’d survived to pass on their genes. It was the guttural bass wave of a lion’s roar.

  A lion. Among wolves. In a temperate forest far enough north that it felt like late fall during the month of August.

  “Okay: Where the hell are we? is the wrong question,” Bethany said. “Where the fuck are we?”

  Ten minutes later the first glow of dawn came to the horizon. Five minutes after that there was enough light to show them everything. They saw what the scaffoldlike things around them really were. And they recognized the towering shape on the horizon. They’d seen it in movies and on television all their lives.

  They knew exactly where they were.

  And they knew that where really was the wrong question to ask.

  Chapter Ten

  Travis paced at the windows on the west side of the room. The drapes were open again. There was no reason to keep them closed now—the place on the other side of the opening had its own daylight, though it was dulled by cloud cover that’d come in with the dawn.

  Travis wondered how Paige and the others had first reacted to what the cylinders did. They were long familiar with Breach technology. They’d been dealing with it for years. Maybe it hadn’t been hard for them to get their minds around what was beyond the open circle.

  It was hard for Travis.

  It looked like it was hard for Bethany, too. She was sitting in the armchair Travis had tossed the menu onto earlier. She was staring at nothing in particular. Her eyes kept narrowing as she considered new angles of the situation.

  Travis went to the south end of the room and stared out the windows. Not quite a mile and a half in that direction stood the Washington Monument. For height it dwarfed everything else in the city. It was over five hundred fifty feet tall. Its white marble was nearly blinding in the summer sunlight.

  Travis turned and walked to the projected opening, which was aimed more or less to the south. He ducked and leaned through it and stared at the Washington Monument there, rising from the canopy of pines and brightly colored hardwoods, its marble dull and gray beneath the overcast autumn sky.

  Nearer by, the rusted girder skeletons of highrises reared from the trees in various states of decay. Strangler vines had enveloped all but the tallest of them. Travis looked down at what remained of the Ritz-Carlton beneath him. Much of the southwest corner had collapsed, but otherwise the framework still held. Here and there a few sections of concrete flooring remained in place, though mostly there were just stubs of rebar where the concrete had long ago cracked and fallen away.

  Through gaps in the trees Travis could see the ground ten stories below. He could see the remnant of Vermont Avenue, fractured by years of plant root invasion and ice expansion. He recalled the sound of the wolves clattering over it in the darkness.

  “There’s a city in Russia called Pripyat,” Bethany said. “It’s right next to the Chernobyl power station.”

  Travis drew back in from the opening and turned to her.

  “The city had a population of about fifty thousand,” she said. “It was evacuated within a couple days of the accident, and it’s been empty ever since. Biologists are fascinated with it. It’s kind of a thumbnail view of what the world would look like if we all just disappeared one day. In Pripyat there were saplings taking root in the middle of city streets within just a couple years. We can assume the same thing would happen here. Which means the age of the trees on the other side gives us an estimate of the time frame we’re dealing with. It gives us a minimum, anyway.”

  Travis nodded. “There’s a white pine out there that’s got sixty-seven rings of branches, and it’s about as tall as anything in sight. Branch rings equal years, more or less.”

  “So call it seventy years,” Bethany said. “On the other side of the opening, it’s seventy years after the end of the world. Whenever that is.”

  “The rest of it slots in easily enough,” Travis said.

  He was pacing at the windows again.

  Bethany was still sitting in the chair. Still looking numb.

  Travis continued. “Paige and the others turned on the cylinders inside Border Town. Who knows what they saw on the other side, down there. Maybe that far in the future, the place is just deserted. Whatever the case, they took the cylinders up into the desert the next morning, and spent a lot more time there. They took radio and satellite equipment through the projected opening, and set it all up in the future. They wanted to find out if there was anyone alive in that time. If there was anyone out there, on the air.”

  Bethany turned to him. Her eyes looked haunted.

  “I wonder if they heard anyone,” she said.

  Travis thought about it. “One way or another, they learned something. Something specific enough that they thought the president could help them understand it.”

  “The first piece of the puzzle,” Bethany said.

  Travis nodded. “It could have been anything. Some old military transmission broadcasting on a loop somewhere, even decades after everyone was gone. Or something else entirely. Who knows, right? But whatever it was, if they couldn’t make sense of it themselves, who bette
r to go to than the president? He could put them in touch with almost anyone who might have expertise.”

  Bethany considered it. Nodded slowly.

  Travis stopped pacing. He returned to the opening and leaned into it. He stared at the wreck of the city beyond.

  What the hell had happened? Not a nuclear war. D.C. would be an ash plain in that case. There might be trees there by now, grown up in the aftermath, but there sure as hell wouldn’t be girder frames left standing.

  “Paige’s goal was the most obvious thing in the world,” Travis said. “She and the others were going to take the cylinder to some number of sites, go through to the future, and dig through the ruins for evidence. Figure out exactly how the world ends. Figure out how to prevent it. No doubt they explained all that to the president.” He leaned back into the suite and turned to Bethany. “So think about this. Suppose right now, the president is involved in something nobody’s supposed to know about. Something that’s happening, or maybe is about to happen. Paige and the others uncovered some little scrap of it in the future. Not enough that they could recognize its full meaning, but enough that the president could. And when he saw it, he understood the threat they posed to him. Because his secret is well protected in our time, but it’s vulnerable as hell in the future. Someone sifting through the rubble could eventually learn all about it.”

  Travis went quiet. He stared at nothing. “What is he hiding?”

  “Could it just be his own complicity in whatever happens to the world?” Bethany said. “Say the thing he’s involved in right now is going bad. Really bad. Say it’s big enough that it’s over even his head, and when it goes off the rails it’s going to take the world with it. Maybe Paige and the others could have found information in the future to help us turn it all around—something to give us a chance, anyway—but in the process they’d have discovered President Currey’s role in it. Jesus, could it be that simple? Would he rather let the world end than have people find out it’s his fault?”