Patrick Lee - The Breach

On the inside, the place looked like the home of an obsessive-compulsive who couldn't pass a used computer store without buying out its entire stock, and had done so on a few hundred occasions. Travis wasn't up on computers-hadn't owned one in the year since he'd rejoined the free world, and the last time he'd seen one before that, the term e-mail hadn't yet made it into popular culture. He'd seen his brother's impressive setup for the home business, and he'd gone online a few times at the library in Fairbanks in recent months. His experience ended there. But even a glance at the interior of 7 Theaterstrasse made it clear that no amount of familiarity would've helped. Supercomputer designers would've been stumped. Probably had been. No doubt Tangent had brought in the best people.

Beginning at the main-floor foyer, where six members of another Berlin detachment stood guard, the building's space, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was filled with wires, and computer boards, and cables, and pieces of equipment Travis didn't recognize at all. A rain-forest overgrowth of circuitry, lit from within by its own galaxy of tiny LED indicator lights. Here and there, window fans were bolted to walls or the ceiling, aimed at particularly dense clusters of wiring and spinning at full speed, as they must have been for years and years. Elsewhere, air-conditioning units whirred softly, the radiant heat of their motors vented away through metal ductwork toward exterior walls.

"Power's never been shut off since you took over the place?" Travis asked Paige.

"Oh no." She said it like he'd asked if she'd ever juggled straight razors. There was more behind her answer than she was letting on. He had an idea he'd find out what it was soon enough, and didn't ask.

"The building runs off the city grid, but there's an uninterruptible backup, powerful enough for the whole place. It's kicked on twice in these past four years, during outages. Thankfully."

They moved through the foyer toward the stairs. In the recessed space beneath them, Travis saw something that was at odds with the rest of the place. It looked like a little painter's studio: an easel tucked against the wall, a few spare canvases, and a scattering of oil-paint tubes covered in dust in the corner.

"What's that about?" Travis said.

"Nothing, as far as we know," Paige said. "Maybe a remnant from whoever owned the place before Pilgrim."

They went past it to the foot of the stairs. The circuit-board jungle flowed up the marble steps, woven through the spindles of the railing. The passage through it all was only wide enough for single-file movement. Paige took the lead, Travis just behind her.

On every floor, half a dozen more of the single-file rabbit tunnels branched out from the one that wound up the stairs. Whatever purpose these runs had served Pilgrim, they served Tangent now. Travis saw that most of the pathways led to the outer walls and then ran along them, allowing access to the windows, several of which had Tangent snipers and spotters in place.

On the third floor, Paige led the group away from the stairs. Down one of the tunnels. Past three sniper teams. The path turned back in toward the interior, the wilderness of cables and silicon and flickering LEDs. It ended at something like a clearing, a circular space twelve feet across. At its center was a steel box the size of a footlocker. A thick trunk of bound wires descended from the canopy above and fed into the box through a hole in its lid. The lid itself was welded shut.

Paige stepped aside at the mouth of the clearing, but only enough to let him see past her. She was still blocking him from actually moving out of the tunnel and approaching the steel box.

"We never go much closer than this," she said. "Our first inspection of the place showed us the need for caution. There are five boxes like this in the building. We've never tried to open them."

"Just ran out of curiosity, right?" Travis said.

Paige smiled dryly. "Yeah. Also, they're resting on pressure pads that are sensitive enough to react to any change of weight distribution. Putting a hand on top of one of these boxes, or against its side, would result in something bad. The same something bad that would happen if the building's power were cut."

Again, Travis didn't ask. His eyes picked out the thin black wafers of the pressure pads under the box's corners, their fine wires snaking across the floor to join the tangle.

"Follow my lead," Paige said. "Move like I move. Don't get any closer to the box than I do."

With that, she stepped into the clearing and began to circle it along its outer wall. A wall of wires. Travis followed. Twice Paige pointed to indicate the wires for the pressure pads. Travis didn't need them pointed out, but he understood her need to do it.

A moment later they were on the far side of the box, and Travis saw what he'd expected to see. Covering the back side of the box, and the floor around it, just discernible in the shifting LED light, was a vast sprawl of the same writing he'd seen in the enlargement on Paige's wall. In real life, the writing was newsprint-sized, and at a glance he thought it must be half an hour's worth of reading material.

Within seconds he saw that he was wrong.

It was only a single phrase, written over and over, almost maniacally. There had to be a thousand variants of it, in all directions, but the words were the same everywhere. They read simply,

GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.

He translated it for Paige and told her about the repetition. She reacted with a mixture of confusion and disquiet, the look of someone surprised and shoved off balance in the worst possible direction. For another moment she only stared at him.

"That's it?" she said.

"That's it."

She looked from him to the others, still standing in the tunnel. One of the Tangent operatives, Haslett-probably the oldest of the unit at close to fifty-was already typing it into a PDA.

Travis watched Paige's eyes as she pondered the line's meaning. For four years Tangent had probably worked with the world's best cryptanalysts, cycling fragments of this jumble through a million hours of computer time, in the hope of decoding a thousand-page text file of useful data. Instead they'd gotten four words. And nobody knew what the hell they meant.

"Four more of these boxes," Paige said. "Let's get to them." If there was any hope in her voice, Travis missed it.

The other clearings were on Levels Four, Five, Six, and Eight. Same-sized boxes, same-sized clearings, and the same-sized sprawls of repetitive text. To the extent that it mattered-not a hell of a lot, apparently-the messages were different in each place.

They read, respectively:

OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR. BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC. SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION. FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.

Long before they'd reached the last one, Travis could see the group's reaction to the messages as a whole. And Paige's. More despair and anxiety than he'd ever seen gathered in one place.

"You might as well see the last thing," Paige said, and led him back to the stairway.

Halfway up the stairs to the ninth floor, the jumble of wires ended. The last steps were open and clear. At the top of the staircase was a ten-by-ten-foot landing, bound by walls on the left and right, with a set of double doors at the end providing the only access to the rest of the ninth floor. The doors were closed, and a big, unsightly thing stood before them like a sentry on duty.

From the floor beneath it, through tiny holes, emerged the fine wires Travis had seen connected to the pressure pads throughout the building. They all fed into the thing on the landing. Now Travis saw more pressure pads tucked into the seams around the double doors. These too were wired into the thing that stood before them.