Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

The gas churned and curled toward them in delicate wisps.

We already know the combo .

Travis closed his eyes.

A second passed.

He opened them again and turned back to the keypad.

At the corners of his vision he saw Paige and Bethany watching him, confused.

He entered the numbers carefully but quickly: 4–8–8–5–4 .

The instant he punched the last one the keypad flared with green backlight. Something very heavy thudded inside the door, and with a hiss of air pressure the huge slab kicked open an inch.

Both Paige and Bethany flinched. They looked back and forth between Travis and the keypad. Then Paige stowed her bafflement and grabbed the door’s handhold again. Travis gripped it too, and they pulled it outward more easily than he’d imagined was possible. There had to be an unseen counterweight somewhere beyond the hinges, balancing the whole thing so that it pivoted smoothly.

In a few seconds they had it open a foot and a half. Travis saw darkness beyond, tempered by another mercury light somewhere above. He also saw the thickness of the door itself: at least five inches of steel. He stood aside and ushered Paige and Bethany through first, then glanced back along the short corridor behind them.

The ragged front of the gas cloud was three feet away.

Someone up in the higher chamber said, “Did you hear something?”

“I don’t know,” came the reply.

Travis followed the others through the opening, turned and took hold of an identical grip on the door’s far side.

“ How about this? ” he shouted, and leaned back and dragged the door shut with a booming clang .

Asecond later the heavy mechanism inside the door thudded again, and when Travis tested the slab by shoving his shoulder against it, it felt as though he were pushing on the base of a cliff.

It crossed his mind that the guys upstairs probably knew the combination too—if not, their superiors could sure as hell give it to them—but almost before the thought had formed, he saw that it didn’t matter.

Waist high on this side of the door was a sliding bolt latch, similar in shape to the little ones you could get in a hardware store for three or four bucks. This one had probably cost more—its bolt was thicker than a baseball bat. Travis grabbed its handle, rotated it upward out of the notch it rested in, and rammed the bolt sideways into its seat in the frame.

For a few seconds none of them spoke or moved. Travis stood there with his hand still resting on the bolt, Paige and Bethany close by and staring at him, waiting for him to explain.

By the echoes of their breathing, Travis sensed they were in a much wider space than the corridor they’d just come from. The tiny light above this side of the door shone mostly straight down, casting a glow over the three of them, but leaving deep darkness everywhere else.

Travis turned from the latch and met their stares.

He described the dream in every detail he could recall. The strange little room swimming and warping, as if he’d been drugged even before the dream began. Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly. He himself bound in the same way. The old man asking what was behind the green door, and saying the combination aloud. The empty syringe on the tray. And right at the end, the drug’s harsher effects kicking in, spreading pain up to his heart and then everywhere else.

That was it. He couldn’t remember any more. He was pretty sure there hadn’t been any more.

As he finished telling the story, a series of indistinct thumps began to transmit through the steel door. Travis pictured men in gas masks on the other side, pounding and kicking the slab. After a moment he heard what might’ve been shouts, but they were so faint he could’ve been imagining them. He put it all out of his mind.

Paige turned and paced at the edge of the light pool, hands in her hair.

“Eliminate what it wasn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t an ordinary dream that happened to contain the code for this door. Not a chance.” She shut her eyes. “So what the hell was it?”

“I don’t think it was a dream at all,” Travis said. “I think what I saw and heard was really happening—to someone else. I think Richard Garner is still alive, tied up in that little room, wherever it is. And there’s somebody tied up there with him, being drugged and interrogated. I think I was seeing through that person’s eyes.”

He knew how that sounded to both Paige and Bethany. It sounded the same to him.

“The part about Garner being alive is plausible, anyway,” Bethany said. “I’ve heard from more than one person that there’s a mock-up of the Oval Office somewhere else in the White House—a mock-up of the part you see on TV, anyway. They say there’s even a defocused projection to simulate the background behind the windows. If Garner anticipated any threat last night, he could’ve broadcast from there; the missile would’ve probably still knocked out the TV signal.”

“I can accept that he survived,” Paige said. “I can even accept that there was some kind of internal action against him right after that, with Holt in charge of it. But the dream—”

“I don’t understand it either,” Travis said. “Is there a Breach entity that could account for it? Something that ties you into someone else’s senses for a little while?”

“I’ve never heard of one that could do that,” Paige said. “What are you thinking—that if something like that existed, someone could’ve used it on you? That someone wanted you to hear the combination?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t see how that would work, it’s just . . . it did work. Whatever it was, it worked. The door combination was right.”

“There are entities that interact with the brain across distances,” Bethany said. “Blue flares, for example.”

Paige nodded absently, but didn’t look swayed. Blue flares were a fairly common entity type; a couple hundred had emerged from the Breach since the beginning. As with nearly all entities, no one knew what their creators had used them for, but their defining characteristic was that you could make them heat up just by thinking about them—if you focused hard enough and consistently enough. In tests people had gotten them up to over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in less than a minute, from distances as great as one hundred feet, and with walls in the way. But heating up was all they did. They didn’t connect one person’s eyes and ears to someone else’s mind.

“If there were an entity like that,” Paige said, “how would someone outside Tangent have control of it? Why wouldn’t I have heard of it?”

Even as she asked the question, her expression changed. Travis saw her feeling the edges of the same possibility he’d begun to consider.

“Your father recruited a group of powerful people in 1987,” Travis said, “to act against what Ruben Ward set in motion. Would it be surprising to learn Peter supplied them with Breach technology, if he thought it would help them? Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town?”

Paige bit her lip. The idea didn’t sit well with her, but she couldn’t dismiss it either.

“I know I’m reaching,” Travis said. “I don’t know what else to do. I saw a five-digit number in a dream, and it opened a door in the real world. Something made that possible.”

Paige nodded, still looking uneasy. “I’m sure we’ll find out what it is. One way or another.”

For a while no one else spoke.

The vague thumps against the steel door had ceased.

Bethany frowned. “The dream itself—or whatever it was—doesn’t make sense to me. The old guy was asking what was behind the green door, but he already had the combination. Couldn’t he just come and see for himself? More to the point, wouldn’t he already know what was here? Wouldn’t these people know about the Stargazer? Holt sure as hell should know; he’s working with them —the ones who sent Ruben Ward here to create the damn thing.”