by Patrick Lee
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.
Then 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 outs
ide 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.”
He was quiet for twenty seconds, lining it all up.
“You’ve been acting on limited information,” he said. “You knew that. You had no choice but to try connecting the dots anyway—the ones you had. Peter Campbell did the same thing, early in the Scalar investigation, and came to the same misunderstanding as you: that Ruben Ward did something bad.”
Paige looked at Travis and Bethany, then Dyer.
“He did do something bad,” she said. “My father was terrified about it.”
“In the beginning.”
Paige shook her head. “In the end, too, and long after. He was still scared of it five years ago.”
“He was scared five years ago, but not for any of the reasons you think.”
Paige started to reply, then just stopped and waited for him to go on.
Dyer shut his eyes for a few seconds. A last consideration of how to say it.
“The message Ward received had distinct halves. The first was a description of the place on the other side of the Breach, along with an explanation of why the message had been sent. None of which Garner shared with me. Those are the deepest parts of the secret. What he told me about was the second half: the instructions. They included a list of nine names, nine people who were alive in 1978, and directions for finding them.”
Travis looked at Paige and knew what she was thinking. Loraine Cotton.
“Ward’s task was straightforward,” Dyer said. “Take the message to each of these people and convince them it was for real. There were verifiers built into it, to help him do that. Specific predictions of things like aurora activity that summer, down to the minute. Things you couldn’t just guess about—things a human couldn’t just guess about anyway.”
“What were these people supposed to do with the message once they had it?” Travis said.
“Follow the instructions that were included for them. Which were more complicated than Ward’s. His part was done by early August.”
“Why did he kill himself?” Bethany said.
“For the reason everyone assumed, the day they heard about it. The Breach had fried him. Whatever gave him the means to translate the message—and dumped him into a near-coma for all those weeks—screwed him up in lots of other ways. Serious mood problems. Imbalances. It’s a wonder he lasted those three months. Did you know the message included an apology for that effect? Whoever sent it knew it would do that to a human brain. It couldn’t be avoided.”
The drilling atop the shaft suddenly changed tone. Became deeper, more guttural. The first bit had been swapped out for something bigger. Everyone listened for a moment and then tried to ignore it.
“So by August of 1978,” Dyer said, “the nine recipients had their orders in hand. These were nine pretty average people, but that was about to change. The instructions included ways for them to dramatically increase their financial and social status over the following years. The wording was pretty careful—the message’s senders may have anticipated that other people might see it along the way. It didn’t necessarily say ‘Invest in Apple on this exact date, or apply for this particular job,’ but it was in the ballpark. It read like a childishly simple riddle, if you knew to look past the surface, and for these nine people it was the recipe for becoming extremely rich, and politically connected, in just a matter of years.”
Travis thought of the three names Bethany’s data-mining had turned up. Three of the people Peter Campbell had met with here in Rum Lake, in December 1987. All three had been worth tens of millions by then, with ties to Washington.
And all three had begun amassing that wealth and power in the late seventies or very early eighties.
Suddenly Travis understood what the ping had been about, a while earlier when they’d learned about Loraine Cotton: they’d recognized that her steep financial climb started just after Ruben Ward met with her, and as a direct result of his doing so. But Travis hadn’t noticed the similarity with the other three. Hadn’t tied in the fact that their climbs had begun around the same time as hers. He’d overlooked it because those people were supposed to be Peter’s allies, whom he’d chosen in 1987. It hadn’t seemed to matter when and how they’d become powerful.
“Whoever’s on the other side seems to have at least some rudimentary knowledge of our future,” Dyer said. “They had it as of 1978, in any case. Some understanding of which technologies, even which companies, were about to break in a big way.”
“There are entities that can access the future,” Paige said. “With certain restrictions.”
“However it worked,” Dyer said, “the information was dead-on. These people were all major players by the mid eighties, which allowed them to begin following the next instruction: get close to the people who control the Breach. Stay informed on all that surrounds it, and gain as much influence over it as possible. That last part they were free to take their time with. They wouldn’t have to use the influence until quite a ways down the road.”
“How far down the road?” Travis said.
“Seven minutes past three P.M. mountain time, June 5, 2016.”
The three of them stared. None spoke.
Travis’s mind automatically sought a meaning for the date, but came up with nothing. It was a few months shy of four years from now. Beyond that, nothing about it stuck.
“What happens at that time?” Paige said.
“The Breach inside Border Town opens,” Dyer said. “Really opens, I mean. Becomes a two-way channel that a person can pass through from this end. But only one specific person, whom the instructions also name and describe. They made it very clear that no one else was to come through. Putting that person in front of the Breach at the right time falls to the other nine. That’s their entire purpose. It’s what all the power and influence are for.”
The notion of someone actually stepping into the Breach affected Travis to an extent that surprised him. Through the fabric of his shirt he could suddenly feel the stone wall at his back, radiating its chill.
“Who goes in?” he said.
Dyer looked at him. “You do, Mr. Chase.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The tunnel seemed almost to move beneath him. To rock gently left and then right, like a boat in a passing wake.
“The message that came through the Breach was about you,” Dyer said. “It named you. It specified your time and place of birth.”
A memory came to Travis. An image of the dark alley nea
r Johns Hopkins, between the town houses. Ruben Ward staggering somewhere ahead of him, aware that he was being followed.
The man had called out: Who the hell are you?
And he’d answered: Travis Chase. Let me help.
There’d been an audible response on Ward’s part. Some expulsion of breath Travis had pegged for confusion, and then dismissed.
You’re only a kid, Ward had said. And a moment later: The instructions didn’t say anything about this.
Travis looked around at the others—Dyer just watching him, reading his response, Paige and Bethany staring with blank faces, still processing the information.
Then Paige’s expression changed. She looked at Travis and mouthed a single word: it.
Travis acknowledged her with a nod neither Bethany nor Dyer saw.
It.
Jesus.
No doubting the connection now.
Was that what the filter was about, then? Was it some consequence of entering the Breach from this end? An unavoidable result, like the brain damage Ruben Ward had suffered when the thing opened?
Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.
Travis looked at Dyer. “Did Garner ever say anything about a filter? Did that word ever come up, regarding the message?”
Dyer thought about it, but seemed to draw a blank. He shook his head.
Travis considered the notion for another second and then let it fall away—for the moment. The present conversation drew his full attention again.
“I was a child when that message arrived,” Travis said. “How the hell could it be about me?”
“I’d tell you if I knew,” Dyer said.
“Does Garner know? Does he know what happens when I go through?”
“He knows something—whatever the first half of the message says.”
“We saw part of it,” Paige said. “I won’t go into the how, but we saw two separate lines from the notebook. One was about finding Loraine Cotton here in Rum Lake. The other was from earlier in the text. It said, ‘Some of us are already among you.’ ”
