Patrick Lee - The Breach

"Strikes me as a little inconsistent," Paige whispered.

"It was keeping up appearances," he said. "Playing the role a little longer. Every move it's made, from the moment it arrived in this world, has been to steer things to exactly where they are right now. Do you see the problem with that?"

"That twenty years is a long damn time for something that powerful to spend reaching its goal?"

"Exactly," he said. "If all it wants is control of Border Town and the Breach, it could've gotten it almost on day one. It could've just played nice, right from the beginning, won everybody over, and then as soon as the right person was holding it, someone with access to any of the really destructive shit locked away in this building, it could've used that person as a puppet to kill everyone here. Just like that. So what the hell is it really after? What's far enough out of its reach, that it's taken all these years, and all this elaborate planning?"

For a moment she didn't reply. Then her forehead furrowed against his skin.

"What if it's after something that wasn't available until now?" she said.

Travis thought about that. It sounded right. A hell of a lot better than what he had, which was nothing.

"Like a new entity?" he said. "Something that would've just arrived?"

"I don't know. None of the recent unique arrivals has been especially powerful or dangerous, as far as we know."

They fell silent again. Travis heard the building's air exchange system kick on with a sigh. His face was resting against the top of Paige's head. Every breath was rich with the scent of her hair.

After a moment he said, "There's something that bothers me more than all of this." He considered how to begin. "We agree that Pilgrim isn't really the enemy here, right? That's not to say he's blameless. The Whisper probably chose him because it knew the kind of things he was capable of. But whatever Pilgrim believes, the Whisper is the one calling the shots. So far, so good, right?"

"Right."

"But the Whisper is still a machine. It's a tool, and a tool doesn't choose its own purpose. Someone else would have done that."

Paige was silent a long while before speaking. "You mean someone on the other side of the Breach," she said.

"Yeah."

With his arm, he felt a shiver climb the muscles of her back.

"If that's the case," she said, "then we never had a prayer."

He tried to think of some reassuring reply to that, but came up empty. All he could do was pull her closer against himself. She responded, settling into him. He lay there listening to her breathing, feeling her limbs relax. Turning the questions over and over, and wondering who-or what-they were really up against, he faded out. Sometime later, he woke with the strangest feeling. Like he'd figured something out. Dreamed it, maybe. He tried to remember what it was, but could only push it away, like a child trying to palm a basketball. He relaxed and let it come back. For a moment, it seemed that it might. An impression of it swam into view: the video footage of the high-powered pump station at Cook's house on Grand Cayman. It had something to do with that. Something about Cook's need for it, in the first place. But that was all he could get. A moment later it was gone.

Paige murmured, rising halfway out of sleep beside him. He kissed her forehead and she rolled into him, softly kissing his neck before drifting away in his arms. Feeling her heartbeat against him, he closed his eyes and followed her down.

A phone began to ring. Somewhere in the dark. Travis felt Paige stir. She rolled toward the nightstand-the clock read just past four in the morning-switched on the light, and pressed a button for the speakerphone. Even as she answered with her name, she slipped under the covers again and hugged her body to his.

The voice that issued from the phone sounded scared. "Paige, it's Crawford. I'm at Secure Storage on B31. The attendants on duty called me down. There's something going on. Maybe you should come down here."

Her eyes locked on Travis's.

"Paige?" Crawford said.

"I'm here." She let go of Travis, sat up and swung her feet to the floor, hunting for her clothes. "Describe what's happening."

"We're not really sure. It has to do with the object you brought back from Zurich. The black cube."

"The amplifier," Paige said. She looked at Travis again.

In the background over the speakerphone, they could hear some kind of droning sound. Like someone humming, from deep in the diaphragm. It was the sound they'd heard on the ninth floor of 7 Theaterstrasse, just before everything went to hell.

"It's locked inside one of the vaults," Crawford said. "Where we put it yesterday morning. But it's making the sound you're probably hearing behind me. We haven't opened the vault yet. Not sure we should."

At that moment they heard a quick gap of silence over the phone, and Crawford said, "Paige, hold on, I've got a call from Defense Control. I'll put it on conference so I don't lose you." He clicked out for a second, and then they heard him say, "Defense go ahead."

A woman spoke. "Mr. Crawford, we have a situation up top. We're not sure how this is happening, but there's a radar contact directly above us, about forty thousand feet up, and falling. Computer says it's human bodies."

"Divers?" Paige said.

"We think so. They're dropping at around two hundred miles per hour, consistent with terminal velocity for humans tucked into a bullet fall. Radar didn't see a plane, so it was either an ultra-high-altitude bail-out from something like a U2, or a stealth, if that's possible."

Travis saw Paige's eyes narrow at that, but only slightly. Pilgrim had the Whisper; of course it was possible.

"The diver formation went into a sparse pattern right after the first contact, and the radar lost them, but with the thermal cams on the chain guns, we should be able to track them manually when they get low enough. With your permission, sir, we'll just kill everyone up there."

"Do it," Crawford said. The bass-range hum continued on his end of the call.

Sufficiently rattled by whatever the hell was going on down there, Paige stood, her clothes still balled up in her hand.

"Did anything trigger the amplifier?" Paige said. "Any experiment going on nearby, anything like that?"

"Nothing," Crawford said. "It just came on. Like it was on a timer."

A thought hit Travis. Hit him hard enough to make him sit up and put his feet to the floor. Paige turned, seeing his expression.

"Crawford, this is Travis Chase," he said. "What entities are in the vaults closest to the amplifier?"

There was a pause as Crawford processed the fact that Travis was speaking over Paige's phone at four in the morning. Then he answered. "I don't have that information in front of me. Hold on." They heard him talking to one of the attendants in the background.

But Travis already knew the answer. He stood from the bed and crossed to Paige's desk, looking for a pencil and something to write on. Paige followed, dropping her clothes behind her.

"What is it?" she said.

Before he could answer, the woman at Defense Control spoke up again. "I see them on the thermals now. Barely. Initializing ground cannons for manual targeting."

"We need to write ourselves a message," Travis said, "so we'll know what happened."

He pulled open a drawer, found a dull pencil, and grabbed a printout of some kind, turning it over to write on the back.

"What do you mean?" Paige said.

Crawford spoke up over the phone. "Got the list. The vault nearest the amplifier contains Entity 0436, Jump Cut."

Just what Travis had expected. The thing Paige had told him about in Zurich. The thing that was exactly like the Ares, except for its effect. Which was that it killed the past three days' memory, and left you feeling like you'd just blinked and missed that time.