Deep Sky

by Patrick Lee

  On that point Travis couldn’t even reach. She was exactly right: Holt should know. It made no sense at all for him and his associates to be out of the loop.

  “So why didn’t they use the combo?” Paige said. “They had it, and it definitely works—we just proved that. Why not send these contractors in here hours ago to take a look around? They were two hundred yards away at the house. Or if Holt didn’t trust them enough, he could’ve come here himself. None of it adds up.”

  Travis nodded slowly. More gaps in the puzzle. The whole middle of the image was nothing but a void.

  Every instinct told him that was about to change.

  He wasn’t half as sure they’d like what it changed to.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  They found a long switchplate on the wall, just visible in the gloom three feet from the door. Five switches, all down. Travis flipped them up one by one, and the chamber lit up in discrete zones until the whole thing was blazing.

  It was bigger than he’d expected—a nearly perfect cube of space, forty feet in each dimension—but its size lost hold of his attention almost at once.

  What grabbed it was the layout.

  The place looked like a loft apartment cut out of solid stone. There was a kitchen area in the far right corner, complete with cabinets, a range, a deep sink, and a huge refrigerator. A few recent issues of Newsweek lay on the counter. Ten feet away was a couch facing a flat-panel television on the wall, and beyond that, filling the nearer corner, was a bedroom suite. It included a bathroom of sorts—not really a separate room but just a vanity butted up against a glass-block shower enclosure, and a walled-off area containing a toilet. A stacked washer and dryer stood nearby. The wiring for all of it—switches and outlets and overhead lights hanging out of the dimness high above—ran in black conduits fixed to the stone walls. The conduits converged on a breaker box near the kitchen, from which a much thicker conduit plunged through the chamber’s floor.

  That was the right side of the room. The left side had a computer desk at the far end, its data cable climbing the wall and disappearing through the ceiling. Travis hardly noticed it. His eyes had been drawn to the rest of that wall—and the array of additional flat-panel monitors that covered it, three screens high and ten wide. They were each the same size as the television in the living room, but while that one remained dormant, all thirty of these had come on when Travis flipped the light switches.

  They carried video feeds from the forested slope surrounding the mine access, a strange equivalent to Defense Control in Border Town, with its dozens of angles on the empty desert. In some of these shots of the redwoods, the access itself was visible, with contractors milling around looking pissed. On closer inspection Travis saw that the rough opening appeared vacant in some of the images. After a second he realized what he was really seeing: the other access Jeannie had told them about, across the ridge and lower down.

  Travis looked at the screens a few seconds longer, then turned his focus to the room’s most commanding feature.

  The pit.

  It was exactly centered, measuring maybe fifteen by fifteen feet—a square donut hole, in proportion to the chamber’s floorspace. A steel-tube handrail boxed in its entire perimeter except for a three-foot gap where a flight of stairs descended. The same kind of stairs they’d come down a few minutes before. From where he stood, Travis could see only a few feet of the hole’s depth, but he knew it went a long way down. This was the actual mine shaft. The concrete floor around it bore the scars of its long-abandoned function: corrosion-stained outlines, dotted with masonry bolt holes, where the footings of heavy equipment had rested. Twin grooves worn faintly into the surface, three feet apart and parallel to each other, extended from the pit back to the green door and right under it. There’d been a rail track here at one time, for heavy-duty carts and maybe a gantry crane.

  The last thing Travis took in was a red metal locker fixed to the wall at the near end of the bank of monitors. It was shaped more or less like the one he’d had in high school, but was half the height and positioned at chest level. It had a standard drop-latch with a hole for a padlock, but no lock had been put into it. On impulse Travis went to it, lifted the latch and opened the door. Nothing inside. He closed it and turned back to Paige and Bethany.

  “He lived here,” Paige said. “Allen Raines. He had the house down at the edge of the woods, but this was his home.”

  Travis nodded. The illusion would’ve been perfect. From town, people would’ve only seen Raines park his vehicle at the house and walk in the front door. They wouldn’t have seen him continue right through the place, out the back and up into the trees; from a flat viewing angle the undergrowth and low boughs would’ve hidden him completely.

  “It must’ve mattered,” Bethany said. “Being right inside here almost all the time, instead of down at the house. It must’ve made a difference, in terms of his handling of the Stargazer.”

  On the last word her eyes went unconsciously to the pit.

  Travis nodded again, and started toward the railing.

  He was halfway there when the snapping buzz started back up, the same as it’d been in the alley. The field-of-grasshoppers sound, deep inside his head. The only difference was that it was stronger now—a lot stronger—this close to its source. It brought Travis to a halt, and after a few seconds he found his balance deserting him. He saw Paige and Bethany swaying on their feet too. He put his hands forward and let himself lean in the same direction, ready to control the fall if it came. As before, the sound—the thought—intensified until it felt almost physical. Like there were things moving inside his head. Skittering little legs and wings and mandibles, descending the brainstem now, boring toward his throat. Bethany shut her eyes and gritted her teeth and sucked in a deep breath, and Travis was sure she was about to scream at the top of her lungs—

  And then it was gone again. A perfect cutoff, like before. Paige put a hand to her stomach, eyes widening for a second. Bethany released the pent-up breath. She looked rattled all to hell. Looked like she might scream anyway, but didn’t.

  Travis dropped his arms to his sides and steadied his breathing—he realized only now that it’d gone shallow.

  He went to the rail.

  Paige and Bethany stepped up to it beside him.

  They stared down and said nothing for probably half a minute.

  The pit had to be six hundred feet deep. Maybe deeper. Mercury lights every thirty feet or so lit up the descent. The stairs wound down in a squared spiral, following the shaft walls and leaving a wide-open drop in the middle. Seen from up here, that open space shrank to a tiny square by the time it reached the bottom. There was no way to discern the structure of what was down there—to know whether the shaft accessed a horizontal run, or did something else altogether.

  The only visible detail was a soft red glow that shone onto the lowest flights of stairs, its source apparently somewhere off to the side. Its brightness waxed and waned in random patterns, and even its color seemed to vary within a narrow range: deep red for the most part, but for fleeting instants it seemed closer to neon pink.

  Travis looked at the stair treads just beneath him. He followed them down and around through half a dozen flights. Each step had a layer of dust covering its ends, left and right, but was clear in the middle. They’d seen regular use.

  “These stairs weren’t part of the mine’s original architecture,” Travis said. “Workers weren’t lugging tons of ore up sixty flights back in the day. The stairs were built later on, for Raines’s use. Power consumption and maintenance probably ruled out a lift, but a person could go up and down these all the time, with the right pacing. Take it slow, don’t kill yourself.” He paused. “Whatever Raines was doing to keep the Stargazer in check, it required him to go down there and deal with it directly.”

  He didn’t need to finish the point aloud: the three of them would have to deal with it directly too.

  “When we see it,” Paige said, “do you
think it’ll be obvious what we’re supposed to do? Do you think we’ll just know?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Bethany said.

  But they didn’t go that minute. They did three things first, none of them difficult.

  They searched the chamber for any kind of paperwork that might help. Maybe, by a long shot, the cheat sheet would turn up.

  It didn’t. They checked the kitchen cabinets, the desk drawers, the space beneath the mattress, the vanity, even the couch cushions. Nothing.

  Next they switched on the computer and Bethany scoured Raines’s files. There were hundreds of songs and audiobooks and movies and television shows that’d been downloaded from iTunes. The web browser’s history showed lots of visits to mainstream news sites, YouTube, and a scattering of blogs. There were very few document files on the computer—just instructions for various programs that’d probably come with the system. There was nothing about Tangent or Scalar or the Stargazer. Nothing useful at all.

  The third thing they tried came to Travis as Bethany was reaching to shut off the computer.

  “Hold up,” he said.

  He followed the data cable with his eyes, up to where it punched through the ceiling.

  “How does the system get online?” he said. “Cell transceiver, right?”

  Bethany nodded. “It must be hidden up in the trees, like the surveillance cameras.”

  Travis took his phone from his pocket and switched it on. As expected, there was no signal at all.

  “Jeannie called me right before we came in off the slope,” he said. “She must’ve found out who lived downstairs in 1978.” He indicated the data line. “Is there any way to plug that into my phone? She might’ve left a voicemail.”

  Bethany thought about it. She slid the computer’s case out from under the desk, pulled two thumb tabs and removed its side panel. She leaned close and scrutinized a card attached to the motherboard.

  “No problem,” she said.

  While she rigged the connection, Travis gazed at the wall of monitors. The contractors were still gathered near the squared tunnel that led into the hillside. Still pissed. One of them was on a phone, yelling at someone.

  Travis noticed a few angles he’d overlooked before. They were interior shots of the tunnel right outside the green door, just resolvable through the gas cloud from the canisters. Other images showed an identical door that must be built into the second access—it was clear of gas, and no one stood outside it yet. Now as he watched, two men in ventilator masks made their way to the first door. Each had something in his hand, but through the haze the objects were impossible to identify at first. Then the men used them. The first held a tape measure. He pressed its tab into the gap on the hinged side, and walked the tape sideways until it stretched across the width of the door. The second man turned out to have a hammer, a standard-sized claw type. He rested an ear against the door and used the hammer to tap very lightly on the steel. Travis heard the tapping on this side, but only faintly. A few seconds later both men retreated back toward the stairs.

  “We’re in business,” Bethany said.

  She held his phone out to him, the computer’s cable attached to an exposed board within it.

  Jeannie had left a voice mail. In 1978 only one person had lived in either of the apartments beneath the Third Notch. A woman named Loraine Cotton. She’d moved in during the fall of the previous year and stayed through all of 1978.

  Bethany patched the data line into her tablet computer and quickly pulled up Loraine Cotton’s history. She seemed, by every measure, to be an actual person. She’d been born in 1955, which made her 23 when she lived beneath the restaurant. At that time she’d just gotten a biology degree from Oregon State, specializing in forest ecosystems, and had apparently come to Rum Lake on a grant to study the redwoods. Her choice of such a dismal apartment made more sense in that light; she’d probably only gone inside the place to sleep, if even then—maybe she’d tented in the woods part of the time.

  Loraine’s career path had changed pretty dramatically in March of the following year, 1979. She’d moved up to Bellevue, Washington, and taken an entry-level job at a small company that’d just moved its operations there: Microsoft. By the turn of the millennium she’d been worth over half a billion dollars.

  “She’s on Twitter,” Bethany said. She pulled up the site and navigated to Loraine’s profile. “Doesn’t tweet much. Once every few days. Last one’s the day before yesterday: says she’s on vacation—Kings Canyon in the Australian Outback.”

  Travis paced, rubbing his forehead.

  “A passageway beneath the Third Notch,” he said. “Look for Loraine Cotton in apartment whichever. The message from the Breach sent Ruben Ward to meet her. It’s like she was intended to be another pawn. One that was going to last a lot longer than three months.”

  “And have massive financial resources at her disposal after a while,” Paige said. “If whoever’s on the other side of the Breach had a presence on our side by that time, maybe they recognized the potential of a company like Microsoft—even back then.”

  “Plenty of regular humans recognized it,” Travis said. “They all own islands now.”

  He stopped pacing. He stared at the floor for a second, thinking hard. Something in what they’d just learned about Loraine Cotton had set off a ping, but he couldn’t get his mind around it. He gave it another ten seconds’ thought but got nowhere. He let it fade. Maybe it would come to him on its own.

  He looked at a clock above Raines’s refrigerator. Twelve thirty. Six hours and fifteen minutes left before Peter Campbell’s estimated deadline. All at once it seemed like all the time in the world, but Travis took no relief from that fact. If things went well down in the shaft—if they saw what they had to do, and were able to do it—then he imagined it would all unfold pretty quickly. And if things didn’t go well—if they went bad in ways he couldn’t guess at the moment—then that would probably unfold pretty damn quickly, too.

  They went.

  The going was easy on the stairs. They were well constructed and solid and the mercury lamps put out plenty of light. Travis led the way. Every few flights he leaned over the handrail as he descended, and got a slightly closer look at the deep floor of the pit. Still no details. Just the slowly pulsing red-and-pink light.

  They were some two hundred feet down when Travis noticed a break in the pattern of stairs far below—maybe two hundred feet lower still. It was as if the squared spiral had been compressed by ten feet at a single point. Like an accordion held open vertically, with just one pleat of its bellows pinched shut in the middle. He stopped for a moment and stared at it, and realized what it was: a horizontal walkway where a flight of stairs would’ve otherwise been. A single stretch that went sideways instead of down. From this high angle he couldn’t see the shaft wall at that spot—the flights above it blocked it from view—but he knew what was there.

  The three of them stopped again when they were only fifty feet above the level walkway, facing it from the opposite wall. From this vantage they could easily see the opening there, where a side tunnel branched off the shaft into pitch darkness.

  They stared at it a few seconds and then continued downward, but Travis kept his eyes fixed on it as they made their way around. He couldn’t admit it out loud, but something about the opening unnerved him. Some ancient fear coded right into his DNA was setting off an internal klaxon, telling him it was a bad idea to walk past a dark cavity in a rock face. He had his MP5 slung on its shoulder strap, the same as Paige and Bethany, and was on the verge of taking hold of its grip as they came down the last flight before the tunnel. Only logic kept him from doing so. This was an abandoned mine in the present, not Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. Nothing with claws was going to erupt from the darkness and try to have them for lunch. That’s what he was thinking when he was two treads above the walkway, and then a man’s voice out of the blackness said, “Stop right there.”

  Chapter Thirty

 
There was no sound of a gun being cocked. Just a tone confident enough to imply one.

  Travis stopped.

  Paige and Bethany stopped behind him—he heard their breathing cut out at the same time.

  “Keep your hands away from the weapons,” the man said.

  “We’re not going to drop them,” Travis said. There was caution and then there was stupidity.

  “I’m not going to ask you to,” the man said.

  A moment later there came the soft crunch of a careful step, followed by another. Travis saw a hint of movement in the darkness, clothing catching the indirect spill of mercury light ten feet back in the tunnel.

  Then the man said, “You’re Travis Chase.”

  The unreal quality of the moment passed quickly. The analytical part of Travis’s mind kicked in, firing off questions. Who was still alive who could both recognize him and be inside this place? Had the voice sounded familiar? He had no immediate answer for either one.

  “Who are you?” Travis said.

  “I think you’ll remember me. I’m coming out now. My weapon’s holstered.”

  More footsteps. Then a shape materialized out of the gloom, and a second later the man was standing right at the tunnel’s opening, hands out at his sides in a nonthreatening stance. He glanced up the flight at each of them in turn, then looked at Travis and waited for him to speak.

  Travis knew him. He’d met him just over a year ago under very tense circumstances, and spent a few hours in his general vicinity. He couldn’t remember if they’d spoken directly—if so, it would’ve been just a few words. Paige and Bethany wouldn’t recognize him at all; they’d been in the same room with him for ten seconds back then, but their faces had been pressed to the floor, and there’d been a lot of shooting going on.