by Patrick Lee
And catching up to the present.
From within a Tap memory.
He thought about that. He stared into space and tried to put it together.
The Tap memory had ended in the conference room aboard this plane.
Where had it begun?
When had it begun?
He couldn’t recall any starting point.
Worse yet, the Tap had burned all his real memories of the time span in question. It always did that. He had no way to remember what had really happened during the period he’d just relived.
“Coming around?” Garner said.
Travis nodded.
“They used a drug on you,” Garner said.
Travis nodded again. “Phenyline dicyclomide.”
Garner looked surprised.
“Dyer told me about it,” Travis said.
“Do you understand what they did to you just now?”
“Not really. Parts of it, maybe.”
“The drug has two stages,” Garner said. “Mild amnesia for a couple minutes, then four or five minutes of total short-term memory fracturing.”
“Dyer said they can give you commands during Stage Two,” Travis said, “and sometimes they feed you information in Stage One that they want you to use—”
He cut himself off.
He thought he suddenly understood part of it.
Garner nodded, seeing his expression.
“You never made it inside the mine, in real life,” Garner said. “You and Paige and Bethany got as far as the blast door, and you were trapped there. You didn’t have the combo. They used gas grenades and captured you all.”
Travis had been looking at the floor. Now he looked up sharply at Garner. “Paige and Bethany are alive?”
Garner nodded. “Tied up just like us, in the closet of the bedroom suite. They’re fine.”
All the emotions that’d torn into Travis earlier like serrated blades now reversed themselves. They withdrew in a searing instant of release that seemed to hit him as hard as the missile’s shockwave had. His breathing spasmed and his eyes flooded. He couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t care to, either. The most he could do, after a moment, was quiet the shuddering breaths. He lowered his head and let the tears stream and made hardly any sound.
Garner stayed quiet a moment longer, then continued.
“Until they chased you three to the blast door, Holt’s people hadn’t even known the mine existed. Neither had Holt. Once they found it, they figured it mattered, and they located the other access and blew them both in. Inside they encountered Dyer, by himself. They traded gunfire with him—and killed him. When they realized who he was, and that he must’ve been working with me, they figured he’d probably had all the information they were after. Including the one thing they couldn’t get from me.”
“My name,” Travis said, his voice still cracking.
Garner nodded. “They were sure Dyer knew it, and they considered using the Tap on themselves to go back and interrogate him. They even got the door combo out of me so they could enter the mine quietly. That information was far less important to me than your identity—I’m sure I didn’t give them much of a fight.”
Travis looked up and blinked hard at the tears. Garner’s image swam and then resolved.
“Holt was afraid of the Tap,” Travis said. “He was hesitant to even let his subordinates use it.”
“That’s exactly right,” Garner said. He stared for a moment, visibly confused as to how Travis could know that detail. Then he set it aside and continued. “They realized they could use you instead, to spare themselves the risk. They gave you the drug, and in Stage One they fed you the door combo, and in Stage Two they put the Tap in your head and commanded you to relive the day. If it worked like they hoped it would, the memory fracturing would keep you from knowing you were in a Tap memory at all. You wouldn’t remember using the Tap—or living through the day the first time around. You’d drop into some point in time this morning and think it was this morning. You’d think it was real.”
The plane. En route to Rum Lake. Waking up aboard it—that was when the Tap memory had begun. The whole day after that had been fake.
“Later on you’d reach the blast door,” Garner said, “and this time you’d know the combo. You’d never know how you knew it—you’d remember Stage One like it was some strange vision you’d had—but under the circumstances you’d certainly try punching those numbers in.”
“And end up meeting Dyer,” Travis said.
Garner nodded. “In all likelihood learning what he knew, given that you served the same interests. And when you came back out of the Tap memory, they could interrogate you for that knowledge. You’d be less conditioned to protect it than I am. Far less, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus, did I give it up? Did I tell them I’m the one who goes through the Breach?”
“You did, but they thought it was sarcasm.” Garner frowned. “An hour from now they’ll figure out that it wasn’t. I’m sorry, but there’s almost no chance of your protecting that secret against someone as skilled as Porter.”
Garner sounded defeated. It was impossible to blame him. For a long moment Travis felt the same.
Then he thought of something he’d seen earlier, while wandering the plane in the transparency suit.
A second later he thought of something else he’d seen, and managed a smile.
Holt and his people couldn’t possibly know he’d gotten such a detailed look at the aircraft. They wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that, in the Tap memory they dumped him into, he would end up boarding the plane and scoping it out nose to tail. That lack of imagination on their part had been a mistake. A big one, potentially.
He flexed his wrists against the zip tie that bound them behind him, and put his knuckles to the plasterboard an inch away.
Then he shoved. Hard. Once, twice, three times. He heard the board flex and protest, and on the fourth push its gypsum core cracked softly in a fist-sized hole, the paper surface tearing with it.
“What are you doing?” Garner said.
“You’ll see.”
With his fingers he felt the edges of the hole, and snapped away piece after piece until he’d exposed several inches of the vertical aluminum support behind him. The one his own dolly must be secured to.
Then he contorted his wrists until he had the encircling zip tie stretched between them, and pressed it against one edge of the aluminum strut.
One crisp, machined edge.
It was as sharp as a blade.
He began sliding the zip tie up and down against it.
Garner finally understood, but still didn’t look hopeful.
“That won’t free your shoulders or your ankles,” he said.
“No,” Travis said. Then he nodded to the nearby desk. The one so close beside him he hadn’t noticed it in his first glimpse of this room. “But I’ll be able to reach the top right drawer there, and get ahold of the nail clippers inside.”
Garner’s eyes registered deepest confusion for three seconds. Then he smiled too.
“You found what Allen Raines had in his red locker,” he said.
“Found it and used it,” Travis said. “Tell me about the weapons cache in the hall. Will your palm print work on the scanners?”
“It will. But an alarm goes off as soon as you open a case. They’ll be on us before we can get anything loaded.”
Travis laughed softly. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Holt was in the conference room, reading the interrogation notes again, when he felt the heat on the side of his face. For three or four seconds he ignored it, assuming the plane’s climate control system had begun venting warm air from the ceiling ducts.
Then it felt more than warm.
He turned in the direction it was coming from—the back wall—and his legs involuntarily kicked and shoved him away from the table.
Above the counter where the Breach entities were line
d up, the plastic facing of the wall had begun to warp and melt in one area—a big half-circle blooming from the counter’s back edge.
Centered right beneath the melting place were three entities, all the same type. Holt had read the paper slip that detailed their function, but couldn’t remember it now. The objects were roughly cigar sized and made of something that looked like polished blue stone.
They’d been blue earlier, anyway.
Right now they were closer to pure white, incandescing like lightbulb filaments.
At that moment a line of flame erupted where the melting plastic had begun to pool atop the counter, the material breaking down into constituent oils. A tenth of a second later the entire melt zone was engulfed and sending noxious black smoke toward the ceiling.
Holt shoved himself up from the chair, turned, and began screaming at the others in the seating area ahead. He’d just gotten out the word fire when an alarm began shrieking, seeming to come from everywhere. He reached the doorway and saw the others already moving, running for the fire extinguishers positioned along the outer walls. The extinguishers’ mounts were strobing bright red—it was impossible to miss them.
Holt stepped aside as the first of the men sprinted past him into the room. One by one they went in, dodging around the chairs and one another, and blasting carbon dioxide at the flames. With their bodies in the way, Holt could no longer see the fire, but the men’s audible responses told him they were having trouble with it. They kept triggering the extinguishers, the sound not quite drowning out their curses and shouts.
Porter arrived at the rear of the pack, carrying two extinguishers. He shoved one into Holt’s hands and then ducked in past him. Holt followed. As he did, he heard another alarm begin blaring somewhere. Back toward the tail, maybe. God knew what it was; flames and smoke aboard an aircraft probably set off all kinds of emergency indicators.
He shouldered past the edge of the crowd and at last saw why the fire was proving difficult. The carbon dioxide was all but evaporating in the envelope of blazing air around the three entities. How hot were the damned things?
Even as he wondered, he saw one of them flicker. Then the other two. Within the following seconds all three began to dim visibly. The white-hot color was fading before his eyes.
Then the throat of the man next to him exploded out from under his head.
A gunshot.
From behind.
Holt spun—saw some of the others turning too, even as a storm of gunfire kicked up—and for maybe a quarter of a second he discerned the figures standing in the doorway. Garner. The other man. Both women. All leveling and firing Benellis from the aft arms locker.
Holt saw Garner’s weapon swing toward him. Saw its barrel aim straight into his viewpoint from ten feet away.
Holt shut his eyes.
It was over by the time Travis’s shotgun ran dry. He saw the last body drop, and as planned, the other three spun and trained their weapons on the seating area—reloading as they did—on the chance that some straggler might yet be coming in.
At the same time Travis lunged forward into the conference room. He dropped his own gun, grabbed one of the fallen extinguishers and began spraying down the remaining flames. The blue flares were already cool enough that they no longer got in the way.
Within a moment there was no fire at all. Just pooled bubbling plastic and a foot of gray vapor swirling under the ceiling. Travis gave the wall another long blast for good measure, then turned, ducked out of the room, and took his first breath since going in. As he emerged he heard a man shouting from somewhere forward of the bulk seating. Footsteps thudded on stairs, and then one of the flight crew came sprinting back.
“Where is it?” the man screamed. He started to repeat it, but the words caught in his throat. He’d seen the shotguns the other three were carrying, and for a second his expression flooded with fear.
Then it simply went blank.
He’d seen Garner.
After a long moment the man swallowed and said, “Sir.”
Garner accompanied the airman back upstairs to speak with the rest of the crew. Twenty seconds after they disappeared, all the alarms cut out.
Travis and Paige and Bethany sank into three of the row seats, side by side, and Travis leaned his head back and shut his eyes.
“Did they interrogate you?” Paige said.
He nodded.
“Are you okay?” she said.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. He took in every detail of her face: the strands of hair hanging past her forehead and in front of her ears, the subtle, rhythmic movements of her throat as she breathed.
“Yeah,” he said.
Garner came back down five minutes later. By then the twilight outside had deepened nearly to black, and the landscape below had lit up in soft blues and oranges: bright street grids and dotted parking lots.
Garner sat down just across the aisle from the three of them. He exhaled deeply and for a moment said nothing. Travis couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a person look so weary. He turned to Travis and said, “Tell me everything Dyer told you, so I know where to start.” He indicated Paige and Bethany. “They need to catch up on it too.”
Paige looked from Garner to Travis, confused. “Who’s Dyer?” she said.
Travis spent twenty minutes explaining it. By the time he’d finished, Paige and Bethany looked rattled, but both clearly understood it all.
“Dyer told you everything,” Garner said. “Everything I told him, at least.”
“The second half of Ruben Ward’s message,” Travis said.
Garner nodded. “I never would’ve told you any of this—either half of the message—until as late in the game as possible. I would’ve waited until days before you’re supposed to enter the Breach, if I could have. There was just nothing to be gained by telling you sooner, and plenty to lose. It adds unpredictability to bring anyone new into the fold. Even you.” He paused. “But I guess that horse is already out and galloping.”
For a long time, fifteen seconds at least, Garner said no more. He rested his hands on his knees and looked down at them.
“I’m sure all three of you have at least a grasp of the physics implied by the Breach,” he said. “The rough theories—guesses, if you like—as to how wormholes function. Maybe you’ve read Stephen Hawking, and know that space and time aren’t really separate things. A wormhole can cross both of them.”
Travis nodded, as did Paige and Bethany.
Garner looked up and met their gazes.
“On the other side of the Breach is a starship,” he said. “It’s orbiting the binary star 61 Cygni, a little over twelve hundred years in our future. The ship was designed and subassembled by General Dynamics in Coffeyville, Kansas, in the first half of the 2250s, and built in low orbit over the next twenty years. It was christened July 17, 2276, the EAS Deep Sky. It has a crew of eight hundred thirty-nine people, including an executive officer named Richard Garner, and a commander named Travis Chase.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Travis waited. He understood that Garner was neither lying nor joking.
“Ballpark figure,” Garner said. “When do you think the last veteran of the American Civil War died? Don’t crunch the numbers. Just take a shot from the hip, any of you.”
“The 1930s,” Travis said.
Paige nodded. “My guess too.”
“Around there,” Bethany said.
“There are disputed claims,” Garner said, “but the most agreed upon candidate is a Union veteran named Albert Woolson. He died in August of 1956.”
Travis traded looks with the others.
“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” Garner said. “The mind tends to chop off the tails of the bell curve when it makes an estimate. But do the math. Three million people fought in the Civil War, most of them very young, many young enough that they had to lie about their ages to serve. You could safely estimate a few tens of thousands of them were fifteen or sixteen when the
war ended in 1865. Which means they were born around 1850. Out of that number of people, a handful could be expected to live to a hundred. A much smaller handful would make it a bit further, or would’ve been a little younger than fifteen when they served. Either way, the mid 1950s would be your best guess, even if you could never know for sure.” He offered a smile. “It is right—it just doesn’t seem right. It’s strange to consider that Civil War vets and atomic bombs overlapped each another in history by more than a decade.”
He looked forward again. “It’s stranger still to learn that the first humans to become effectively immortal—ageless, anyway—were born just before the Great Depression. You’re familiar with the Methuselah Project? You must have seen the political attack ads during the midterms.”
Travis and Paige and Bethany all nodded.
“Turns out it works,” Garner said. “It comes in about fifteen years ahead of schedule, in fact, according to the message from the Deep Sky. The first real stabilization and reversal of age symptoms is achieved around 2035. Which means a tiny scattering of people born in the late 1920s will live long enough to benefit from it—will live to see their biological age rolled back until they look and feel about twenty-five, indefinitely. Many more from the 1930s, forties, and fifties will make the cut, and damn near everyone born after that will. Most of the Deep Sky’s crew don’t yet exist in our time, but some do, and some were already adults in the year 1978—including all nine of the people Ruben Ward was instructed to take the message to that summer.”
Travis felt as if two halves of a drawbridge had just dropped together and locked with a heavy thud. He looked at Paige and Bethany and knew what they were thinking, to the last word:
Some of us are already among you.
“Who better to trust the message with,” Garner said, “than themselves?”
Paige started to respond, then stopped and frowned, as if something that’d been bothering her for the past couple minutes had finally surfaced. “It’s one thing to send us a message through the Breach, but why are they sending dangerous things like entities? If they created a wormhole to tell us something—”
