Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

“Why are they doing this at all?” Paige said. “The crew of that ship. Does the message say why they’re opening the tunnel in the first place?”

Garner nodded slowly, looking down at his hands again. “That part it explains in simple terms.” He grew quiet for a few seconds, then continued. “There was a war. It happened on Earth around 3100, right around the time the Deep Sky arrived at what turned out to be its last destination—61 Cygni. That star is just over eleven light-years from here, which means the ship’s crew, once they were on-site, got all their updates from home with more than a decade’s delay. Correspondence from loved ones, news stories, everything. When the war started, they had to watch their world come apart on that same delay, knowing that whatever they were seeing was already eleven years gone. The crew considered returning, trying to intervene somehow, but gave up the idea without much debate: the Deep Sky doesn’t exactly have a hyperdrive button on its bridge. Its top speed is around twenty percent of the speed of light. It’d taken fifty-five years to get out to that star system, and it would take fifty-five to get back. In any case, it wasn’t long before they saw the final headlines, announcing the all-but-certain deployment of weapon systems more or less guaranteed to end the world. The message doesn’t clarify what exactly those weapons were—only that they worked. All transmissions from Earth ended right after that, and never started up again.”

Garner shut his eyes. “They opened the Breach so they could come through and have a second chance at history. If you think about that, you might begin to appreciate our paranoia in keeping this secret. Think of the power structures in this world. All the horrible things people do just to keep control of their few bars of the jungle gym. Now imagine some of them learning that one day soon a door is going to open, and people will come through it who know the next thousand-plus years of our history. Everything we’re going to invent and discover. Everything we’re going to get right and wrong. People who, just by their arrival, will render all current political power on Earth obsolete. You know who’d be most threatened by that? All the people best positioned to stop it from happening in the first place.” His hands had become fists in his lap. He looked down, noticed, and slowly relaxed them. “To hell with all of them,” he said. “It is going to happen. For better or worse.”

Paige seemed to react to Garner’s final sentence. She turned to Travis, her expression haunted by a fear she didn’t need to voice.

Travis took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. The night was cool for early June, the breeze coming in from the Rockies fifty miles away. It was close to midnight, and the stars stood out in vivid contrast on the black sky.

He ran six miles in a loop and then slowed to a walk one mile shy of the elevator housing. He was barely winded. Not bad for forty-eight.

He’d covered half the remaining distance back when he stopped altogether. He turned to face north and tilted his head up and found the familiar shape of Cygnus, the swan, seemingly frozen in its slow rotation around the pole star. His eyes went automatically to the faint speck—nearly invisible to naked eyes—of 61 Cygni.

He stared at it until long after his neck had begun to cramp.

The bedroom was pitch-black except for the soft blue light from the nightstand clock. It showed 3:06 A.M. Travis lay on his side, his chest against Paige’s back. They were both staring at the digital display.

It switched to 3:07.

“Twelve hours,” Paige whispered.

Travis heard the edge of fear she couldn’t quite hide. He held her tighter and kissed the top of her head.

“Save tomorrow for tomorrow,” he said.

“This is tomorrow.”

He insisted on being alone in front of the Breach when it happened. There was no reason to expect any danger to bystanders, but no reason not to expect it either.

There was no formality to the event. No grand send-off before Travis stepped into the elevator to head for B51. The group that gathered to see him go consisted of Paige, Bethany, and Garner. They stood together in the corridor on B18, not far from the residence Travis and Paige had moved into when the complex re-opened. To a passerby—of which there weren’t many in Border Town these days—it would’ve looked like four friends standing 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 only hallway down here at the bottom, its far end open to the vast chamber that held the Breach’s protective dome. Travis walked the corridor’s length. He passed the heavy door to the bunker where, more than thirty-eight years earlier, Ruben Ward had lain in his half sleep, listening to the Breach Voices and understanding them.

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.

Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace .

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.