Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

He didn’t need to finish the point aloud: the three of them would have to deal with it directly too.

“When we see it,” Paige said, “do you think it’ll be obvious what we’re supposed to do? Do you think we’ll just know?”

“Only one way to find out,” Bethany said.

But they didn’t go that minute. They did three things first, none of them difficult.

They searched the chamber for any kind of paperwork that might help. Maybe, by a long shot, the cheat sheet would turn up.

It didn’t. They checked the kitchen cabinets, the desk drawers, the space beneath the mattress, the vanity, even the couch cushions. Nothing.

Next they switched on the computer and Bethany scoured Raines’s files. There were hundreds of songs and audiobooks and movies and television shows that’d been downloaded from iTunes. The web browser’s history showed lots of visits to mainstream news sites, YouTube, and a scattering of blogs. There were very few document files on the computer—just instructions for various programs that’d probably come with the system. There was nothing about Tangent or Scalar or the Stargazer. Nothing useful at all.

The third thing they tried came to Travis as Bethany was reaching to shut off the computer.

“Hold up,” he said.

He followed the data cable with his eyes, up to where it punched through the ceiling.

“How does the system get online?” he said. “Cell transceiver, right?”

Bethany nodded. “It must be hidden up in the trees, like the surveillance cameras.”

Travis took his phone from his pocket and switched it on. As expected, there was no signal at all.

“Jeannie called me right before we came in off the slope,” he said. “She must’ve found out who lived downstairs in 1978.” He indicated the data line. “Is there any way to plug that into my phone? She might’ve left a voicemail.”

Bethany thought about it. She slid the computer’s case out from under the desk, pulled two thumb tabs and removed its side panel. She leaned close and scrutinized a card attached to the motherboard.

“No problem,” she said.

While she rigged the connection, Travis gazed at the wall of monitors. The contractors were still gathered near the squared tunnel that led into the hillside. Still pissed. One of them was on a phone, yelling at someone.

Travis noticed a few angles he’d overlooked before. They were interior shots of the tunnel right outside the green door, just resolvable through the gas cloud from the canisters. Other images showed an identical door that must be built into the second access—it was clear of gas, and no one stood outside it yet. Now as he watched, two men in ventilator masks made their way to the first door. Each had something in his hand, but through the haze the objects were impossible to identify at first. Then the men used them. The first held a tape measure. He pressed its tab into the gap on the hinged side, and walked the tape sideways until it stretched across the width of the door. The second man turned out to have a hammer, a standard-sized claw type. He rested an ear against the door and used the hammer to tap very lightly on the steel. Travis heard the tapping on this side, but only faintly. A few seconds later both men retreated back toward the stairs.

“We’re in business,” Bethany said.

She held his phone out to him, the computer’s cable attached to an exposed board within it.

Jeannie had left a voice mail. In 1978 only one person had lived in either of the apartments beneath the Third Notch. A woman named Loraine Cotton. She’d moved in during the fall of the previous year and stayed through all of 1978.

Bethany patched the data line into her tablet computer and quickly pulled up Loraine Cotton’s history. She seemed, by every measure, to be an actual person. She’d been born in 1955, which made her 23 when she lived beneath the restaurant. At that time she’d just gotten a biology degree from Oregon State, specializing in forest ecosystems, and had apparently come to Rum Lake on a grant to study the redwoods. Her choice of such a dismal apartment made more sense in that light; she’d probably only gone inside the place to sleep, if even then—maybe she’d tented in the woods part of the time.

Loraine’s career path had changed pretty dramatically in March of the following year, 1979. She’d moved up to Bellevue, Washington, and taken an entry-level job at a small company that’d just moved its operations there: Microsoft. By the turn of the millennium she’d been worth over half a billion dollars.

“She’s on Twitter,” Bethany said. She pulled up the site and navigated to Loraine’s profile. “Doesn’t tweet much. Once every few days. Last one’s the day before yesterday: says she’s on vacation—Kings Canyon in the Australian Outback.”

Travis paced, rubbing his forehead.

“A passageway beneath the Third Notch,” he said. “Look for Loraine Cotton in apartment whichever. The message from the Breach sent Ruben Ward to meet her. It’s like she was intended to be another pawn. One that was going to last a lot longer than three months.”

“And have massive financial resources at her disposal after a while,” Paige said. “If whoever’s on the other side of the Breach had a presence on our side by that time, maybe they recognized the potential of a company like Microsoft—even back then.”

“Plenty of regular humans recognized it,” Travis said. “They all own islands now.”

He stopped pacing. He stared at the floor for a second, thinking hard. Something in what they’d just learned about Loraine Cotton had set off a ping , but he couldn’t get his mind around it. He gave it another ten seconds’ thought but got nowhere. He let it fade. Maybe it would come to him on its own.

He looked at a clock above Raines’s refrigerator. Twelve thirty. Six hours and fifteen minutes left before Peter Campbell’s estimated deadline. All at once it seemed like all the time in the world, but Travis took no relief from that fact. If things went well down in the shaft—if they saw what they had to do, and were able to do it—then he imagined it would all unfold pretty quickly. And if things didn’t go well—if they went bad in ways he couldn’t guess at the moment—then that would probably unfold pretty damn quickly, too.

They went.

The going was easy on the stairs. They were well constructed and solid and the mercury lamps put out plenty of light. Travis led the way. Every few flights he leaned over the handrail as he descended, and got a slightly closer look at the deep floor of the pit. Still no details. Just the slowly pulsing red-and-pink light.

They were some two hundred feet down when Travis noticed a break in the pattern of stairs far below—maybe two hundred feet lower still. It was as if the squared spiral had been compressed by ten feet at a single point. Like an accordion held open vertically, with just one pleat of its bellows pinched shut in the middle. He stopped for a moment and stared at it, and realized what it was: a horizontal walkway where a flight of stairs would’ve otherwise been. A single stretch that went sideways instead of down. From this high angle he couldn’t see the shaft wall at that spot—the flights above it blocked it from view—but he knew what was there.

The three of them stopped again when they were only fifty feet above the level walkway, facing it from the opposite wall. From this vantage they could easily see the opening there, where a side tunnel branched off the shaft into pitch darkness.

They stared at it a few seconds and then continued downward, but Travis kept his eyes fixed on it as they made their way around. He couldn’t admit it out loud, but something about the opening unnerved him. Some ancient fear coded right into his DNA was setting off an internal klaxon, telling him it was a bad idea to walk past a dark cavity in a rock face. He had his MP5 slung on its shoulder strap, the same as Paige and Bethany, and was on the verge of taking hold of its grip as they came down the last flight before the tunnel. Only logic kept him from doing so. This was an abandoned mine in the present, not Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. Nothing with claws was going to erupt from the darkness and try to have them for lunch. That’s what he was thinking when he was two treads above the walkway, and then a man’s voice out of the blackness said, “Stop right there.”