by Patrick Lee
Travis thought of the men with the tape measure and the hammer, getting a sense of the steel’s bulk.
“They’re trying to blow the door,” he said.
“Who are they?” Dyer said. “Private sector guys?”
Travis nodded. It occurred to him that, until now, Dyer had been entirely unaware of any hostile presence outside the mine. Having come in the back entrance, he’d encountered none of them.
Now as Dyer took the information into account, his gaze seemed to dart back and forth over nothingness in front of him. The look of someone considering a large number of variables and making a fast decision. He jerked his head to indicate the tunnel leading away off the drop shaft, back in the direction he’d come from.
“This way,” he said. “Right now.”
The tunnel wasn’t as dark as it’d seemed at first glance, against the brighter mercury lamps in the vertical run. There were dim orange lights here, widely spaced, and after a few seconds Travis found his eyes adjusting. In the same short time, Dyer picked up the pace to just under a sprint, cursing softly under his breath.
“This was supposed to be the one place they wouldn’t know about,” he said. “That’s why it was the rendezvous point.”
“They knew about it hours ago,” Travis said. “They even had the door combo.”
He described the dream, leaving nothing out. He included their own speculation that Garner was still alive, and that the dream had been real—seen through the eyes of someone held captive with him, and sent to Travis by way of an unknown entity.
If any of it threw Dyer, he didn’t show it. He seemed about to reply when another thudding blast made them all flinch and stutter-step.
It hadn’t come from the upright shaft behind them.
It’d come from the darkness far ahead.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They came to a stop just inside one of the orange pools of light. Travis studied Dyer’s face and was surprised by the stress it showed, even taking the circumstances into account. Dyer didn’t strike him as a man prone to fearing for his own safety, yet at the moment he looked deeply afraid.
It crossed Travis’s mind that he himself had given no thought to escaping this place, until they’d set off a minute ago. All his focus, at first, had been on getting inside, and then it’d shifted to reaching the bottom of the mine and figuring out what to do there. He supposed that on some level he hadn’t really expected to make it back out.
But Dyer wanted out. That much was obvious. And it really didn’t look as though he was afraid for himself. There was more to it. A lot more, Travis thought. A missile commander in some bunker under South Dakota, with a launch order in hand, might look as tense as Dyer did right now.
The man turned back and forth, staring in both of the tunnel’s directions, as if willing either unseen exit to become viable again.
“Christ,” he whispered.
“They’re not inside yet,” Travis said. “The explosives they’ve used so far are nowhere near big enough to get through those doors.”
He imagined the men outside were using whatever small-scale stuff they’d already had with them, stored in one of the vehicles like the gas masks had been.
“They’ve got Holt on speed dial,” Dyer said. “They can chopper in whatever they need, from wherever’s closest. They’ll have the doors down in half an hour.”
His eyes tracked over their three MP5s but dismissed them in about a second. He paced to the wall and leaned his forehead into it, thinking hard but getting nowhere.
“I was told there’s a residence at the top of the shaft,” he said.
“There is,” Travis said.
“Anything in there we can use to set a trap? Gas lines to the stove or dryer?”
“Both electric.”
Dyer went back to thinking.
“What’s in the Breach’s chamber?” Travis said. “Other than the Breach. Is there any equipment? Anything big? Anything useful as a weapon?”
“Wouldn’t think so,” Dyer said, “given what Garner told me.”
“Let’s see for ourselves,” Travis said.
They were three flights from the bottom when Travis saw that he’d been wrong about something: the shaft wasn’t exactly open to the broad chamber below it. Just beneath the lowest step, and the catwalk that extended from it, a heavy barrier of glass or clear plastic had been bolted in place like a floor, separating the vertical stretch from the space that yawned underneath. All around its edges, the barrier had been sealed to the stone walls with some heavy duty compound that looked like tar.
Travis could see now where the catwalk led—what it disappeared into, anyway: a channel about the height and width of a standard doorway, bored through the shaft wall a foot above the bottom, and six inches above the clear barricade. By the time they were descending the last steps before the walk, Travis could see deep into the narrow tunnel. It extended some fifteen feet through darkness, then opened up broadly on its right side. Through the opening streamed the same intense red-and-pink light that shone over everything beneath the stair shaft.
Travis, leading the way, came to a stop at the foot of the stairs. He looked straight down through the transparent floor just under his feet. Even from here he couldn’t see the sides of the chasm below it. Its bottom was maybe thirty feet down, and covered with a dark gray layer of something granular and crumbled. Like ground-up asphalt, but not quite.
Travis refocused on the barrier. He could see its thickness under the sealant along the walls. Three inches at least. A person could walk on it without risk. It looked like someone had: the whole surface was scratched and scuffed—it must be dura-plastic instead of glass. Had the installers made those marks? Travis took a step sideways while keeping his eyes on the damage, and by the movement of vague reflections on the surface he realized he had it wrong again: the scratches were on the underside of the barrier.
He stared at them a moment longer and then continued into the tunnel. His footsteps and the others’ echoed everywhere in the pressing space.
They came abreast of the opening at the end.
They stopped.
They said nothing.
Hanging off the side of the corridor, into emptiness, was an elevator-sized enclosure made of the same plastic as the barrier in the shaft. Rectangular panels of it were bolted into a steel framework. Even the floor was clear.
The structure offered a perfect view of what lay beyond: a vast biscuit of space blasted and carved out of the mountain’s core. Thirty feet from top to bottom, at least a hundred feet in diameter. The viewing booth looked out over it from up near the plane of the ceiling.
This had been the original ore deposit, Travis was sure. Miners had cleared this cavity with dynamite and pickaxes in the early twentieth century. The notion registered and faded in the same instant. Two other things filled all his awareness.
One was the second Breach. Its familiarity and exoticness overlapped, each inescapable. Positioned straight out ahead of the viewing structure, near the furthest point of the cavern’s arc, the thing had the same size and shape and texture as its counterpart in Wyoming. A ragged oval torn open across thin air, ten feet wide and three high, forming the flared mouth of a tunnel that plunged away to a vanishing point beyond. The tunnel itself was perfectly round, its height matching the opening’s three feet but drawn far inward from its sides. Mouth and tunnel alike were made of something like plasma—like flame rippling and playing along the underside of a board.
Only its colors set this Breach apart, but they were enough to make the difference jarring. Travis stared and didn’t blink. The tunnel was a deep bloody red, with strands of ethereal pink twisting and writhing along its length every few seconds. Those colors spread out across the flared mouth, flowing against its edge: a five-inch border that shone brilliantly white.
All of it combined to illuminate the second thing that had Travis’s attention.
The cavern’s floor.
Which was carpe
ted with dead insects the size of human hands.
He’d seen them from the lowest flight of stairs, but hadn’t realized it. The details were only obvious where the light was brightest—in the thirty or forty feet around the Breach. Fractured carapaces and cracked wings and segmented, chitinous bodies—the chamber could be waist deep in them for all Travis knew.
He noticed something else: the plastic shielding here was scratched like the panel below the stairs—and again only on the opposite side.
He became aware of Bethany’s breathing, off to his left. Intensifying and speeding up. Travis recalled her telling him once that she hated bugs. Deeply, irrationally hated them—a serious phobia she had no intention of coming to grips with. Now she stepped into his peripheral vision and pointed to a spot halfway between their position and the Breach. He followed. And saw.
One of the bugs was alive. It lay atop the detritus, fanning its wings in slow, delicate beats. It was visually similar to a hornet. Needle-thin waist, compound wing-structures, bristled thorax with some kind of stinger at the tip. Head to tail it was maybe six inches long.
Travis saw another just like it ten yards to the left—also alive. He picked out three more in the next few seconds.
Bethany steadied her breathing and spoke. “I thought they couldn’t come through.”
“They can’t, exactly,” Dyer said. “How they get here is tricky. That’s where the parasite signals come in. Bugs just like these ones transmit them from the other end of the tunnel. The way Garner described it, the signals can seek out conscious targets on this end. Living brains—the bigger the better. They get in your head and use it as a kind of relay, probably amplifying the signals, which are … kinetic. Telekinetic. They can trigger complex reactions in certain materials. Can rearrange them, at least on a tiny scale. Down at the level of molecules.”
“You mean the movement we felt inside our heads?” Paige said. She sounded more than a little rattled by the idea.
“No,” Dyer said. “Supposedly that feeling is just your nerves going crazy. The rearranging happens somewhere else—some random spot outside your body, but not far away.”
“What do you mean?” Travis said. “What do they rearrange?”
“Simple elements. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, a few others. They assemble them to form a cell—basically an embryo. Like one of ours, but even smaller, and much less complex. The signals build it in about ten seconds, and then they cut out and the embryo is on its own, and the rest is straightforward biology.” He waved a hand at the mass of hard-shelled bodies beyond the glass. “Only takes the embryo a few weeks to develop into the full-sized form—probably a perfect copy of the transmitting parasite at the other end of the wormhole.”
Travis let the concept settle over him. He was struck not by how strange it was, but by how it paralleled much of what he’d read of biology in the past year. Propagation was life’s first objective. To spread. To be. It evolved stunningly elaborate ways of doing that, from the helicopter seeds of maple trees to the complex, two-stage life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite that carried malaria between mosquitoes and vertebrates—Travis had struggled to accept parts of that process as possible, even though it was hard science that’d been nailed down decades ago.
“Most of these things don’t live very long after they form,” Dyer said, “and a lot of the ones that do can barely move. It’s pretty clear they’re not built for this world. Wherever they’re from, maybe the gravity’s weaker and the air’s thicker. Who knows? But the thing is, some of them can move. And fly. Garner said there were serious injuries to the workers here in 1987. They set up these barricades as soon as they got a sense of what was happening, and pretty much by accident they figured out how to rein it all in.”
“Someone has to be a lightning rod,” Travis said.
Dyer nodded. “That’s close to how Garner described it. For whatever reason, if someone comes down here even a few times a day and makes a nice, easy target of himself, the signals never hunt any further. If they do have to look further, they eventually look much further, even through hundreds of feet of rock, somehow. And in that case they don’t stop at one target—they don’t seem to stop at all. The signals get stronger. The intervals between them get shorter. Peter Campbell and the others who were here at the beginning used equipment to work out the signal strength, and even some of the timing. There was some kind of reliable curve you could draw on a graph, showing how bad it would get if you left it untended too long. It would get out past Rum Lake after a while. It could extend for hundreds of miles.”
Travis stared over the tumble of insect debris and imagined Allen Raines’s life for the last twenty-five years, centered entirely on this place. Bound to it as if tethered to a stake.
A sound intruded on the thought: a high metallic whine from far above in the stair shaft. It lasted a few seconds, then stopped, then proceeded in starts and fits.
“They’re drilling the hinges,” Dyer said. “Probably planning to stuff shaped charges into them.”
Travis turned and surveyed the cramped space around them. Observation booth on one side, rock-lined tunnel on the other. No tools or equipment of any kind lying around. Nothing that could help them lay a trap.
“I don’t know what to do,” Dyer said. “I just don’t.”
The bigger-than-himself fear was back in his eyes. Travis let it go for the moment. He turned again to the plastic-built compartment and, for the first time, stepped into it. He stood right on the see-through floor, a quick thrill of vertigo spinning up through his nerves. He looked down and across the cavern floor, studying the bugs. Many more of the hornetlike things were visible now, lazily beating the air with their wings, drawing forelimbs over heads full of terrible composite eyes. Was he imagining it, or were there a lot more of them moving now than at first? In a glance he could see dozens, and that was only where the light was strong. How many more were beginning to stir in the darker regions?
All that could explain this sudden activity was the fact that the four of them had just arrived. Their voices, transferring through the plastic, however faintly, had roused these things from some lethargic state.
Travis looked at the trace scratches crisscrossing the window in front of him, and then without warning he raised his fist and pounded it hard and fast against the panel.
He heard the others startle behind him.
“What are you doing?” Bethany said.
Out in the chamber, every hornet shape jerked at the sudden racket. They didn’t cock their heads—probably didn’t have their ears there—but splayed their bodies out instead, wings going flat and rigid, all movement ceasing in a matter of seconds. To Travis, the posture looked like the embodiment of tension and alertness.
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.
The
n 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.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It 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.
He 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.
The 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.”
