Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

He watched the hallway most of the time, poised to move to one of the study’s corners if someone wandered in.

Other times, when he was sure no one was coming, he took stock of the room. He knelt and studied Garner’s restraints: heavy-duty plastic zip ties binding his wrists together behind him. Way too thick to be broken by just straining at them—they were probably rated for a thousand pounds. More of them held Garner’s shoulders and ankles to the dolly’s steel-tube frame.

Travis looked at the hole punched in the wall higher up, allowing the dolly to be zip-tied to the support strut behind it. The break revealed the wall’s surface to be standard plasterboard—strange for an airplane, but this one was obviously something of an exception. The strut the zip tie encircled was metal—probably aluminum—with crisp, machined edges. The material was strong as hell, of course. The plane was made of it.

“When you need to cut me loose, there are nail clippers in that desk,” Garner said. He nodded at it. “Tray drawer, top right. Ton of clutter, but they’re in there.”

From outside came the sound of the choppers’ turbines powering up, first one and then the other. A minute later their rotors began slapping the air in heavy thuds, and then they throttled to full power and lifted off.

For the next two hours nothing happened. The plane’s interior had gone dead silent, though Holt, at least, was probably still aboard. Probably Porter, too. Travis expected them to come back and have another go at Garner with the interrogation drug, but they didn’t. Maybe they really had written off their chances of learning more.

The rotors faded back in and then rose to a machine-gun rattle. The choppers landed outside and powered down. Soon afterward voices picked up again somewhere forward in the cabin. Two minutes after that, a series of hydraulic rumbles reverberated through the 747, and its engines began to whine. Travis drew the survival knife from its sheath, and hid it behind the suit’s top.

Holt and Porter were sitting in the conference room as the plane taxied. Outside the windows, hazy twilight had settled over the terminals and runways. Porter was reading the simple handwritten notes for the Tap—the Tap itself remained on the counter along the back wall. Travis moved past the room and into the seating area ahead. The other eight men were there, like any regular airline passengers about to accelerate to two hundred miles per hour in a big metal tube. They weren’t buckled in, but they sat face forward with their heads against the padding behind them.

Five had taken window seats, all on the port side. The other three had sat along the aisle, also to port. Each was in his own lateral row. Each could see only the men ahead of him, unless he turned around. The plane nosed to the starting line of its takeoff run and its massive engines built to a scream, rendering sound within the cabin pretty much meaningless for the next thirty seconds.

By the end of those thirty, before the plane had even tilted upward and begun to climb, all eight men were dead.

Travis didn’t bother wiping the blade clean or hiding the knife under the suit again.

He strode back to the conference room as the plane banked and climbed. He held the weapon out to his side, letting it drip. He went right through the doorway, making for Porter first. The man saw the hovering knife in his peripheral vision and turned fast to look at it. Confusion broke over his face and then fear, and then the blade went tip-first into his trachea all the way to the spine, and Travis twisted and flicked it sideways on the way out.

Holt looked up in time to see the man spasm and collapse. In time to see the knife withdraw and remain bobbing in the air, then circle the end of the table to his side and come floating toward him. He jerked backward, almost tipping his chair over, and scrambled out of it. He ended up in a kind of defensive crouch in the corner, his neck hunched behind a tight barrier he’d made with his hands.

Travis came on slowly. Patiently.

“What is this?” Holt said, getting barely above a whisper. “ What is this? ”

“I came to ID the other two victims in the Humvee,” Travis said.

Holt’s eyes left the knife and tried to pinpoint the location of Travis’s voice.

“Their names were Paige Campbell and Bethany Stewart. They were two of the best people I ever met. They passed up normal lives to make the world better, or at least to keep it from getting worse. They gave up a lot to do that. For the most part they even gave up sunlight.”

“Whatever you want, I can get it for you,” Holt said. “I’m the most powerful person in the world.”

“All appearances to the contrary,” Travis said.

“You need to think about this,” Holt said. His voice cracked. “You really do.”

“I really don’t,” Travis said, and he shoved the discarded chair aside, stepping past it toward where the man crouched.

Before he got there, his vision began to flash green and blue.

Travis stopped mid-step. He swayed forward until he caught his balance. He looked around fast, as if his eyes could outrun the effect. They couldn’t.

Green. Blue. Green. Blue. The flashing saturated everything in his field of view, like intense stage lighting at a rock concert.

Green. Blue.

He knew what it meant—but it was impossible. How could he be catching up to the present from within a Tap memory if he hadn’t used the Tap?

Green. Blue.

The knife fell from his hand, bounced and spun on the carpet. Holt looked confused.

Travis staggered backward, stumbled against one of the chairs, turned and leaned down and steadied himself on the table.

Green. Blue.

He was about to be drawn out of this memory against his will. Any second. But drawn out to what ? And to when ? When and where had he put the Tap into his head?

Green. Blue.

Black.

He flinched and opened his eyes. He was back in the study, at the plane’s tail. Holt and Porter were standing in front of him, Richard Garner just beyond them and off to the side, still bound to the dolly. Travis looked down and saw that he himself was bound to a dolly now, right where he’d been in the dream.

Which hadn’t been a dream.

Neither had it been a projection sent to him by somebody else.

It hadn’t been either of those things.

He had less than a second to think about it, and then his memory simply wiped itself away. Vanished like a sand picture in the blast of a leaf blower.

Where was he?

How had he gotten here?

What the hell was he tied to?

An old man who looked like Wilford Brimley leaned into his viewpoint, scrutinizing his face.

“Can you understand me?” the old man said.

But before Travis could reply, his memory blew away again, no more than a second after it’d begun to form.

Where was he?

How had he gotten here?

Garner watched Travis struggle against the drug. As strange as it was to experience the effect yourself, it was almost more so to see someone else endure it.

He watched Travis’s eyes keep losing the room and finding it again. Rediscovering his surroundings every second or so as his memory fractured.

Porter was leaning in with his nose six inches from Travis’s.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach,” he said—framing it as a command, not a question.

Travis blinked, no doubt having lost the statement already. He stared at Porter and said nothing.

Porter repeated the instruction. And again. And again. Carefully and patiently. Working it into Travis’s subconscious like a dog trainer setting a patterned response. He’d been doing this for years.