by Patrick Lee
He stared a moment longer, the red glow almost hypnotizing at this range. It saturated the bottom walkway and the steps there, and every visible inch of whatever lay beneath it all.
Travis looked up and saw Dyer gazing down at it too. Then the man trailed his eyes upward until he was craning his neck to stare at the top two thirds of the shaft, rearing above them like a chimney seen from deep inside. Travis got the impression that Dyer was looking at it all for the first time.
“You came in through the other access,” Travis said.
Dyer nodded, at last leveling his gaze and turning to face the group. “I only got here half an hour ago. I was in Barbados with my wife and daughter when I got the news last night.”
“How did you know the door combination?” Paige said.
“Garner gave it to me, just after he took office again last year. He told me—” He cut himself off, looking puzzled about something. Travis realized the same puzzlement had been there, under the surface, from the moment Dyer had stepped out of the dark. The man looked from one of them to the other. At last he said, “Are you guys it? None of the others made it?”
“Others?” Travis said.
Dyer nodded. “This mine is the rally point. Everyone still alive is supposed to show up here.”
Travis thought of the people who’d been killed in unison with Garner, all over the country. The power players Peter had met with, all those years ago.
Still looking confused, Dyer said, “No offense, but I didn’t think you guys were part of the group. You’d be just about the last people I’d expect to meet in this place. How did you get the combination?”
Travis met Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes. Their bafflement matched his own. Clearly Dyer knew a lot more than the three of them did—he’d learned it directly from Garner.
Travis looked at Dyer again. The man stared and waited for the answer.
“We’re honestly not sure how we got the combo,” Travis said. “We think Breach technology was involved, but if so, it was a kind we’ve never heard of.” He shook his head. “Look, you seem to have the whole picture of this thing. We’ve been piecing it together slapshot since last night, and we’re missing big chunks of it. If you know it all, please tell us.”
Dyer frowned. He seemed to struggle with some deep indecision. “This is all happening wrong,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“Tell us what it is supposed to be like,” Paige said.
For a moment Dyer just stood there. He looked troubled by the idea he needed to express. Then he said, “The whole point is not to tell you. That’s what it’s supposed to be like. No current member of Tangent is supposed to know anything. Not for a few years yet.”
Travis found himself getting tired of the confusion. “You’re right,” he said. “It is all happening wrong—the people you expected aren’t here. But we are. I assume your purpose is the same as ours.” He nodded over the rail behind him. “To do whatever can be done about the Stargazer.”
Dyer looked more thrown by that than anything so far. “That must be an old nickname for it. Whatever you want to call it, I don’t think much can be done. Just management, like Allen Raines was doing.”
“You’re not here to stop it?” Paige said.
Dyer shook his head.
“What about the deadline?” Bethany said. “A little over six hours from now.”
“That’s the deadline,” Dyer said, “but it has nothing to do with what’s in this mine.”
Paige looked frustrated. “Just tell us everything. We already know the basics. We know Ruben Ward got instructions from the Breach in 1978. We know he spent that summer carrying them out. We know my father picked up on it later, and the Scalar investigation spent six years following Ward’s trail. Which led here, to whatever Ward created in this mine. So tell us the rest. Tell us what needs to be done, and we’ll help you do it.”
Dyer stared at her. His expression went almost blank, as if his thoughts had turned inward to process what he’d just heard.
“You’ve got the first few points right,” he said. “The rest is way off. Ward didn’t create anything in this place, and the Scalar investigation never picked up his trail. For all practical purposes, he didn’t leave one.”
Travis remembered their conversation on the Coast Highway. Their uncertainty as to how the investigation could’ve accomplished anything at all.
“But they spent hundreds of millions doing something,” Bethany said.
“Probably more like billions,” Dyer said. “Most of the cost was likely hidden one way or another.”
“The cost of what?” Bethany said. “What the hell did they do?”
Suddenly Travis knew. He realized he might’ve known hours ago, if he’d given it more thought. Might’ve guessed, anyway; he couldn’t have known for sure until they reached this place.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
Dyer nodded, seeing his understanding.
“They did the only thing they could do,” Dyer said. “They knew from the beginning that Ward’s trail was long gone, and so was the notebook with the instructions written in it. Trashed or burned before he killed himself. They were never going to see it again.”
“They needed a do-over,” Travis said.
Dyer nodded again. “They needed another Ruben Ward. And this is the place where they tried to get one. At the bottom of this mineshaft they created the second Breach.”
Part III
The Tumbler
Chapter Thirty-One
Paige started to speak, then stopped. Her mouth opened and closed a second and third time, but nothing came out. At last she just stepped to the rail beside Travis and stared down into the pit. Bethany did the same. They watched the light playing—slowly flaring and receding.
When Paige’s voice finally came, it was softened almost to a breath. “The colors are different.”
“Almost everything about it’s different,” Dyer said, “hard as they tried to duplicate the original.”
“Do entities emerge?” Travis said.
“No. But other things do.”
Every head turned to Dyer. Every eye widened a little.
“Understand,” Dyer said, “everything I know comes from Garner. I’ve obviously never been in Border Town. I’ve never seen the first Breach—or this one. Garner said the one you oversee is an opening to something like a wormhole, however loosely that term is defined.”
Paige nodded.
“He also said it’s a wormhole being used for a specific purpose,” Dyer said. “Someone out there, or something out there, either designed it or harnessed it for transporting the objects you call entities.”
“Something like that,” Travis said.
“Well the second Breach tapped into a very different kind of wormhole,” Dyer said. “Maybe a more common kind, according to some of the scientists who worked on it. The term they used for it was primordial. A natural wormhole that could’ve formed out of the energy of the big bang itself. They say the universe might be riddled with them. And this one, at least, has no physical objects moving through it.”
“So what comes out?” Bethany said.
“Transmissions,” Dyer said. “Garner called them parasite signals.”
Travis’s eyes snapped to Paige’s, then Bethany’s.
Dyer saw the looks. “You felt them too.”
All three nodded.
“No one knows exactly what they are,” Dyer said. “They figure the other end of this wormhole is bonded to someplace where there’s life. Some equivalent to bugs, maybe. The way I heard it, things like that would evolve to make use of the tunnel, if they could. Like things here evolved eyes to exploit sunlight, and ears to take advantage of soundwaves in the air. These things, even if they couldn’t physically pass through the channel, could transmit natural signals into it. There are any number of ways they’d benefit by doing that, and—”
He stopped. Frowned. “Look, this Breach is dangerous as hell, an
d it gets more dangerous if it’s not managed, but I can take care of that later. None of this is the reason Garner brought me into the loop. It’s not why I’m here. For now, it’s enough to know that this second one didn’t do what everybody hoped it would. There were no Breach Voices, and there was no effect up front like the one that hit Ruben Ward. That stuff just didn’t happen the second time around. Different tunnel. But in a way—I guess indirectly—opening this thing got them the answers they were looking for. They learned what was really going on.”
He went quiet again, shut his eyes hard and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to tell you everything I know. I don’t see any choice at this point. If I’d gotten here and found any of the others alive, they would’ve been in charge, and my orders would’ve been to help them. But Garner gave me different orders to follow if none of them made it. The only real priority now—”
A sound cut him off: a violent, concussive bass wave, like a shotgun blast amplified many times over. It came from the chamber four hundred feet above, and echoed down the shaft in strange harmonics that set the metal stairs vibrating. Everyone looked up. They listened as the reverberations faded.
Only silence followed.
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 carpeted 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.
