Patrick Lee - The Breach

He took her point.

"If there's any way whatsoever to achieve a given result-and there always is-then the Whisper will know how," she said. "Think of it as a game of rock, paper, scissors, and the Whisper is a diamond-blade rock cutter. It just beats everything. If Pilgrim wants to return to Seven Theaterstrasse and trigger the weapon-and let's go out on a limb and assume that's exactly what the fuck he wants-then he will. Unless we destroy it before then."

Travis discovers immediately that he's gotten a lucky break. His car, which has come to rest against the entertainment center at the back wall of the living room, has pinned the couch and its occupant against the big-screen TV. Manny Wright, six-foot-five and maybe four hundred pounds. The homeowners' bodyguard, and the only one who lives in the house with them. His back is broken. He's trying to move, trying to reach the.44 holstered at his waist. But he can't.

Travis wonders if Manny was the one who actually carried out Emily's murder, on orders from above. Then, because the answer is obvious, he stops wondering. He raises the.32 to Manny's face.

Manny can't get enough breath to say please, or no, but his eyes say both. Intensely. And in vain.

Travis puts the gun next to Manny's right eye, pointed sidelong across his face, and fires. The hollowpoint shreds both eyes and the bridge of the nose, leaving a ragged, bloody crater, and to Travis's deep satisfaction, Manny gets enough breath to make some noise after all. The man's scream is plaintive, full of self-pity, with the same stresses and tones he might use to scream "Why?" over and over. Travis wishes he could stand here for an hour and listen to it.

Instead he stoops, takes the.44 and leaves Manny to die like that, blind and screaming.

Manny isn't the reason Travis has come here tonight. The house's owners, the people who made the choice to kill Emily, are the primary targets.

Travis goes to the broad, stone-clad hallway that leads to the master bedroom, where his own mother and father are waiting.

The day slipped by in a few hours over Canada and the North Atlantic, sped up by the plane's eastbound transit across the time zones.

Paige gave Travis two thin reports, one for each of the entities that they'd brought along on the trip. The objects in the black carrying cases.

BREACH EGRESS: 1981 July 15-07:31 UTC

PHYSICAL: Medic has a mass of 1.31 kg. Long dimension is 11.5 cm, height 8.1 cm, width 3.0 cm. It bears a strong superficial resemblance to a handgun. Its structure is simple: tube, grip, and trigger with guard. Black in color.

FUNCTION: Localized, massively accelerated healing of biological damage. Sends a surge of radiation from its barrel, covering an area 30 cm wide at a distance of approx. 15 cm. Radiation is a complex mixture of various particles, most not identifiable or known to present science. Result is instant death of most deleterious microorganisms, as well as clotting of all air-exposed blood within less than one second. Extremely useful for combating infections and treating serious wounds, to a degree.

Has been shown to work on humans, all tested mammals, and vertebrates in general. Has never worked on any tested invertebrate.

THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.

LIMITATIONS OF USE: Many wounds are too severe for Medic's effect to be of use in time to prevent mortality.

BREACH EGRESS: 1991 January 24-14:50 UTC

PHYSICAL: Doubler has a mass of 7.85 kg. Long dimension is 18.2 cm, height 5.1 cm, width 5.1 cm. It is black and yellow and resembles a large, square-shafted flashlight with two lenses, one on each end.

FUNCTION: When switched on, Doubler projects a discrete cone of light from each end. Yellow light from the yellow end, UV light from the black end. Each light cone flares outward from the lens and terminates sharply at a distance of just over 1.5 m.

Anything contained within the yellow light beam for more than 3.44 seconds is physically cloned, with the copy appearing inside the UV light beam. Creation of the copy is almost instantaneous, with time from start to finish not exceeding two frames of digital video, less than.066 seconds.

The fidelity of the clone to its master is physically perfect, presumably to atomic detail. This was demonstrated by the doubling of a laptop computer, the clone of which functioned properly and contained all the same code as its master. Chemical compounds and processes may also be copied. Cloned bullets fire as normal. Cloned food ingested by test animals produced no ill effect. A lit "Zippo" lighter was reproduced with its flame still burning.

THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.

LIMITATIONS OF USE: (1) Does not work on most Breach entities. As of [November 16, 2008-latest update] only [5] entity types have been successfully doubled: Entity 0001 (Heavy Rag), Entity 0004 (Shard), Entity 0012 (Bottle Cap), Entity 0028 (Drift Wire), Entity 0051 (Inertia Plank).

(2) Living bodies may be cloned, but in all experiments so far, the clone has arrived dead. Autopsies have failed to reveal any specific cause of death. The master specimens (for ethical reasons, only mice and rats have been used) appear to suffer no harm. There is universal agreement within Tangent that no doubling of a human will ever be sanctioned.

When Travis finished reading the reports, he saw that Paige had opened a laptop. She turned it to face him.

"This is test footage of the last entity Pilgrim has," she said. "It's not quite unique. Four of them have come through over the years. He only has one. It's no Whisper, but it's powerful, in its way."

She opened a video frame on the screen and clicked PLAY. The video showed a stark white room containing a metal cage, no larger than a single-occupant drunk tank in some backwater police station. A man in his forties, balding, entered the frame holding an orange cube maybe four inches wide. There were markings on it, symbols etched in black, but they were too far from the camera to be discernible. It didn't matter: Travis could see that the writing was different from the strange jumble he'd read on Paige's wall. And it sure as hell wasn't English.

"October 4, 1986," the balding man said. "Video demonstration of Entity Zero Two Zero Five: Ares."

He entered the cage with the cube, closed the door and locked it from inside. Then he manipulated something on the cube, moving the symbols on its surface, arranging them. Here the camera reframed to a wider field of view, revealing a dozen people seated in chairs outside the cage, the nearest maybe ten feet away. Men and women, twenties to forties. Dressed casually. Nothing strange about them, except their anxiety. Something was about to happen, and they knew it.

The man in the cage finished whatever he was doing with the cube: the thing suddenly flared bright, throwing off the camera's white balance and making the room appear darker. In the same instant, all but three of the seated people turned sharply, regarding the man in the cage with something like surprise.

Then, as one, they came up out of their chairs and rushed him, like baseball players charging from the dugout to beat the shit out of some opposing player. They hit the cage en masse, trying with all their force to get at the man inside. Arms reached in through the bars. Hands gripped the steel and shook it. A few of the attackers stepped back and aimed heavy kicks at the cage door's latch. Had they reached the balding man, they would have torn his limbs from his body. There was no question of it.

By their moves, it was clear that they weren't seeking the orange cube itself. They weren't looking to destroy it, or even take it away; they were only reacting to the man who held it. They crouched and reached for his legs. Climbed atop the cage and plunged their arms into it, going for his head. They wanted to kill him. It was that simple.