Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

“I need DMV files, with photos, for everyone in Ouray, Colorado,” Paige said. She spelled out the town’s name. “Narrow the results to females in their sixties, and send them to my computer.”

“Take five minutes,” Bethany said.

It took three—and less than another two for Travis and Paige to spot Carrie Holden among the candidates. She’d dyed her hair dark brown, but nothing else had changed except her age. Her name in Ouray was Rebecca Hunter.

They were in the air by 4:20. Though Tangent kept no aircraft on-site at Border Town, it had a small fleet stationed at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper, ten minutes’ flight time away.

The jet, a Gulfstream V with seating for eighteen, felt enormous with only the two of them in the cabin. The pilots’ voices up front were lost under the drone of the engines. Travis looked out as the aircraft climbed, but there was only unbroken darkness below. The nearest towns were faint pinpricks of light, far out on the plain beyond the limits of the Border Town Exclusion Zone.

For a few minutes neither spoke. The jet’s turbofans throttled back an octave as the aircraft reached altitude and leveled off.

“You’re thinking about it,” Paige said.

She didn’t have to frame it as a question any more than she had to specify what it was.

It was almost all Travis thought about these days.

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

Fourteen months ago Travis had rejoined Tangent after two years of self-imposed exile. He’d spent the fourteen months doing the same kind of work as everyone else in Border Town—helping to study Breach entities, both new and old—while also cramming for hours a day to give himself the underpinning of scientific literacy that every other Tangent recruit had come prepackaged with. He’d taken to it surprisingly well. At ten months he’d passed the equivalent of MIT’s Calculus 4 exam, and had at least a solid undergrad-level hold on physics, chemistry, and biology. The joke was that none of it really mattered where entities were concerned: the smartest people in the world were probably about as qualified as sparrows to study the objects that emerged from the Breach. Still it was nice to speak the same technical language as everyone else, and Travis had found his awe of the Breach only deepening as his intellect grew. Like staring at the night sky through increasingly sharp eyes.

More to the point, his recent training meant he could do real scientific work at Border Town. He felt like he belonged there now—as a contributor, not just an outsider taking up space.

But that wasn’t why he’d come back.

That wasn’t it .

“Are you wondering if there’s a connection?” Paige said. “Between whatever’s going on right now and . . . the thing about you?”

“I’m always wondering that,” Travis said. “Every time something new comes along, I ask myself if it’s all starting. Sooner or later, the answer will be yes.”

The issue was complex, but Travis thought of it in simple terms. Like delineated notes in some PowerPoint presentation. Or individual black flies circling his head.

The first piece of it was certain: somewhere down the road, Tangent would learn to use the Breach to send messages to the past—propelling them into the tunnel from this end, against the resistance force at its mouth, in such a way that they would re-emerge before they were sent in. The reason Travis was certain of this was that two messages had come back already. Some future Paige, and some future Travis, had given their lives to send them—the physical process of doing so was unavoidably fatal.

There were lots of details, but they all shook out to this: something bad was coming. Something that would end about 20 million lives. Something Travis himself would be responsible for, and might have no choice but to do, because to not do it would be worse.

Paige’s future self, perhaps acting on limited information, had opposed the action—whatever it was. Her message to the past had been a retroactive order—to herself—to kill Travis, in the hope of preventing this thing from happening at all.

Travis had countered her move by sending his own message—a messenger , really: a radically advanced, self-aware handheld computer called Blackbird , though almost everyone knew it as the Whisper . The Whisper had emerged even further in the past than Paige’s message to herself, and had set about manipulating people and rewriting history in order to put Travis in front of the Breach when Paige’s message came through.

In doing so, it’d allowed him to intercept it.

In the present, Travis and Paige had only limited clues as to what the hell it all meant. Their future selves had sent perfectly contradicting pleas, each important enough to merit dying in the bargain. All that differentiated the sacrifices was that Travis’s had been sent after Paige’s—it must’ve, since it’d been a response to hers. Had he known something she didn’t?

The details ended there. That far-off Travis had withheld them, no doubt fearing they would turn his present self away completely. All Travis could do was wait for it. Wait for any sign that it’d begun. The first link in the chain that would pull him down into the dark.

Down toward it .

“Let’s not dwell on it too much,” Paige said. “Save tomorrow for tomorrow, right? With any luck we won’t live to see it anyway.”

The man in the white parka had a name—Dominic—but his employers didn’t know it. Maybe they had a nickname for him, or more likely a number, but if so they never addressed him by it. They didn’t address him at all. They just called and gave him instructions. They were the only ones who knew the number for the blue cell phone.

That phone had rung last night while Dominic was painting the den in his condo in Santa Fe. A nice rich green that contrasted well with the white trim and the walnut desk. Dominic set the roller in the tray and answered before the ringtone reached the first drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Dominic listened as the caller spoke, committing everything to memory, then hung up and went to his closet and opened the cavity behind the back wall. He selected a white parka with battery-powered heating good for twelve hours of lying still in the cold, and a matte-white Remington 700 with a four-power scope. Two minutes later he was in his car en route to the private terminal at Santa Fe County Municipal.

Now he was lying prone in the snow five hundred feet above and half a mile east of Ouray, Colorado. He lay at the pinched, far end of a valley that rose from the town’s outskirts. The town looked like a snow globe village, its streetlights casting cones in the big papery flakes that were coming down. A halo of light-bleed surrounded Ouray itself—a barrier of visual warmth against the dark.

Dominic lay far outside that warmth, out in the deep, empty night.

So did the cabin he was watching.

He put his eye to the scope and panned across the windows. A pale glow rimmed the blinds at one of them—maybe a fluorescent light in a laundry room left on all night. Every other window was dark. There was a mercury lamp on a post in the front yard, though its glow served only to make the cabin appear lonelier. Only two other structures stood in the valley: a low-slung ranch and a mobile home, both tucked in close to town. The cabin was on its own.

Dominic raised his eye from the scope and looked at his watch. Not quite five in the morning. He’d taken position just after midnight. Nothing about the cabin had changed since then. Daylight was two hours away, but it would present no problem when it came. Dominic would remain invisible, and so would the five-man team he knew was lying much closer to the place—probably within forty yards of the front door.