there talking.
All three hugged Travis—Paige last, and longest. He held on to her and tried to think of nothing but what she felt like. He shut his eyes and let the moment last as long as he dared.
The elevator doors parted on the concrete hallway. The
He passed through the opening at the end. He stared at the dome’s colossal profile, barely a silhouette against the unlit ceiling and walls of the old VLIC shot chamber, which had been used for its intended purpose exactly once.
The dome’s small entry channel, like that of an igloo, lay to the right. Ten feet before it stood a table. Travis crossed to it, removed his phone from his pocket and set it there. He noted the time as he did.
3:06.
He went to the entrance and pushed in through the heavy glass door at its mouth, his eyes already losing everything but the Breach.
Those had been his first impressions of the thing, almost seven years ago, echoing the sentiments of one of the first people to see it—and to die because of it.
Travis let the door fall shut behind him and stood staring. The Breach hovered, patient as ever, in its soundproof glass enclosure at the center of the dome. The tunnel and its flared opening looked the same as they always had. Blue and purple. Rippling. Flamelike substance the color of a bruise. Travis went to the glass cage’s door and pulled it open.
The Breach Voices sang. They raked his eardrums, seemingly capable of piercing them. He ignored the pain and stepped across the threshold and stood there, three feet from the opening. There was nothing in the way now except the low-profile receiving platform, like a heavy-duty trampoline that rose eighteen inches from the concrete floor beneath the Breach.
Travis waited.
The Voices keened and sighed, multiple tones rising and falling in what sounded like random pitch fluctuations. They were ascending in a harmonic trill when they simply stopped.
The silence made Travis flinch, but almost before he could react to it, other things began happening. The air pressure in the room changed. He heard the door six inches behind him buffet outward and then immediately suck shut again. The glass walls around him seemed to flex and draw in, the Breach’s reflection warping in every surface.
Then the Breach itself changed. Rapidly. The distinct streams of blue and violet collapsed into each other. The rippling shallowed, the tunnel’s inner surface pressing itself smooth and uniform. The transformation happened in something like ten seconds, and when it was done Travis might have been staring down the interior of a polished steel tube. Even the flared mouth seemed to have solidified.
He waited.
Nothing else happened.
He stepped closer, resting one foot on the receiving platform. He stared straight down the tunnel and suddenly noticed what else was different about it.
He could see the far end.
It might have been a thousand feet away. Distance was hard to judge. It opened into someplace a little brighter than the tunnel itself.
He leaned closer, extended his hand and passed it through the plane of the Breach’s opening. For maybe a quarter of a second he thought he felt it resist him, and then his hand simply went through unhindered.
Another step—both feet on the trampoline now. He leaned all the way forward, his shoulders and head crossing the plane and his hands falling to the tunnel’s surface just beyond the mouth. He found it to be as solid as it looked—and then found it didn’t matter. He tipped the rest of his upper body into the channel and realized he weighed nothing once inside it. For a few seconds he stayed on the margin, his legs and feet pulled down by gravity on the platform, the rest of him floating suspended in the first three feet of the tunnel. Then he pressed his hands to the sidewalls and shoved himself forward, and a second later he was gliding along the channel’s length, as frictionless as a puck on an air hockey table.
He shoved again, and then again. Each time his speed stepped up and stayed up; only air drag slowed him —and maybe something else. Something he couldn’t quite get a fix on. It felt like the hint of resistance his hand had met briefly at the tunnel’s mouth. He sensed it only occasionally—sliding past one shoulder or the other, or compressing strangely around his feet. That made sense in light of what Garner had described: the idea of a one- time-only scouting trip. The tunnel’s resistance force was still as powerful as ever; it was simply letting him pass now in some active, selective way. A little bubble of nonresistance, following him as he glided along.
He waited to feel something, as the tunnel walls continued slipping by. Something like a barrier, or a threshold. Something—anything—that could be called a filter.
But there was nothing.
Just the smooth interior of the channel streaming past.
Much closer now. Maybe a hundred yards from the tunnel’s end. Then fifty. Then ten.
He could see details of the space beyond. A brightly lit room of some kind. Metal flooring. An opposite wall, easily a hundred feet beyond the opening. The chamber outside the tunnel must be huge.
He put his hands out again and caught the channel’s sides repeatedly, shedding the momentum he’d built up earlier. He came to a complete stop with his head right at the tunnel’s threshold. He hovered, staring at the room that lay beyond.
It was massive, and exotically shaped. The floor was a sweeping downward curve, like the inner surface of a barrel laid on its side. The walls to the left and right rose and angled inward, as if toward the barrel’s center somewhere high above the ceiling—though the ceiling itself had to be forty feet up. The floor just in front of the tunnel was metal, as Travis had seen earlier, but everywhere else it was glass or some equivalent—it was simply an enormous, curved window, and after the first passing glance at the room itself, Travis found his gaze drawn down and outward to the view.
A planet. Right there. Suspended in deep black space and filling two thirds of the window. It was an amber- and-white version of Jupiter. Distinct bands of color met along ragged, swirled boundaries, and bent around cyclonic formations that were probably bigger than the Earth. Only a crescent edge of the giant world was lit up, catching the glow of a red-orange star that hung beyond it and far to the side. The star was visually the size of a quarter held at arm’s length.
A second star, the same color, hovered much further away—it shone as no more than a superbright point in the darkness. Travis knew these were the two suns that formed 61 Cygni, seen as a single dim speck from the desert in eastern Wyoming.
He stared for probably twenty seconds, his thoughts nearly blank. He noticed that the entire view outside was sliding steadily in one direction, and knew what that meant. Then he bent his legs and drew them forward and got his feet ahead of him in a seated position, and slid out of the tunnel.
Gravity exerted itself at once. A good stand-in for gravity, anyway—the centrifugal force of the rotating ship. He put his feet down on the metal and felt his weight transfer onto them—exactly as it would have on Earth.
“Jesus, it worked,” a man said.
Travis turned to see a doorway that’d been out of view from inside the tunnel. Standing in it was Richard Garner, looking about as old as a college kid.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Travis stared at him, and then past him, suddenly wondering who else might step into the frame.
