Deep Sky

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 outside 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