Deep Sky

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.

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