Tim Lebbon - Coldbrook

The graveyard shift. Holly still smiled when the biologist called it that. After so long working at Coldbrook — and Melinda was the newest scientist here, having arrived eight years before — none of them had ever felt so alive.

Holly glanced at the younger woman now, watched her watching. Melinda was a natural beauty who paid little attention to what God had given her and, even though she rarely made much of an effort, she always exuded sexiness. It was partly her looks, but mainly the intelligence that resided behind her eyes. Some men would have found it threatening. But to most men working at Coldbrook, it was a draw. Oh yeah, Melinda’s my freebie , Vic Pearson used to say to Holly. Which made Holly wonder whether he’d once said the same about her, Holly, to his wife Lucy.

A blue light flowed from the breach, accompanied by a brief, low sizzling sound. A spread of lights on Holly’s control panel lit up, and she leaned forward and accessed a program on her laptop. A few keystrokes and the viewing screen to her left flickered into life. It was a focused view of the breach, fed from a camera set up inside the containment field, and she swept it slowly from left to right until she found what she was looking for.

Melinda was already standing and looked at Holly expectantly.

‘Small winged insect,’ Holly said. ‘I’ll file it as sample two-four-seven — you should be able to access it now.’

Melinda nodded and, without saying anything, turned to her own laptop, propped on a chair beside where she’d been sitting. Can’t we bring something through alive? she’d been asking Jonah ever since the stability of the breach had been established. But his response had always been the same. Until they’d run a full cycle of remote tests on the atmosphere beyond the breach, the eradicator would remain switched on.

Holly zoomed in on the dead insect and scanned for any signs of damage. There were none. It gave her a deep sense of satisfaction that her contribution to the experiment was working so well, though she could sense Melinda’s coolness growing day by day. For three years it had been Holly’s task to create a safety barrier that would prevent the ingress of anything living from another world into their own, whatever its size, phylum, composition, or chemical make-up. Her previous work in force-field engineering had seemed like child’s play compared with the task facing her, but she had relished the challenge. Upon detecting something penetrating the field, the programs she had devised took three millionths of a second to establish the nature of the incursion and deliver a delicately measured electromagnetic shock to halt its life. The device would kill anything from a microbe to an elephant, and way beyond, with minimal or no damage to the bodily tissues.

Within the breach, several robotic sample pods took turns collecting these samples, isolating them, then retreating to the extremes of the containment field. They were rapidly filling up.

‘Zapped another alien?’ Vic Pearson asked. He’d crept up on her again, as was his wont. Ninja Vic , she’d once called him, when she’d only become aware of his presence when his hands had reached around to cup her breasts. But that had been years ago.

‘Small fly of some kind,’ she said, pointing at the screen. ‘Four wings. See the colouring? It’s gorgeous.’

‘It’s a fly.’

‘From an alternate universe.’

‘Whoopie-fuckin’-do.’ He sat heavily in the chair beside her and sighed.

‘You been drinking?’ she asked. She kept her voice down; with some staff sleeping, Control was a quiet place, and without Satpal’s soft music the silence might have been unbearable. Even the air conditioning was all but silent.

‘Jonah asked me to his room,’ he said. ‘Raised a toast to old Bill Coldbrook.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the breach. ‘Night over there, too.’ His voice had dropped.

‘Jonah got you drunk?’

‘I’m not drunk!’ he protested too loudly. ‘And no, he didn’t. We chatted, I left.’ He waved a hand. ‘Had a few on my own in the canteen.’

‘You didn’t argue with him?’

‘No, no. We didn’t argue. Not this time. But he’s completely. .’ he smiled, grasping for the word ‘. . unaware, you know?’

‘As you keep saying. I think you’re unfair on him.’

Vic snorted, and Holly knew what was coming next. She didn’t like it when he drank and she never had. Alcohol didn’t suit him.

‘You say that, and you still balance your religion with what we’ve done here.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But my beliefs aren’t tested at all by this. If anything-’

‘Maybe,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Maybe.’ And that was what she hated most about Drunk Vic. With alcohol in him, he’d only listen to himself. He stood and skirted her station, descending two wide steps and standing halfway between her and Melinda. And he just stared at the breach for a while.

One day soon, someone would have to go through.

‘You know,’ he said, returning to lean on her desk and look her in the eye, ‘if your God’s on the other side as well-’

‘Of course He is. The other side is just another here.’

‘Right. Well, if He is, don’t you think He’ll do his best to stop us going through?’

‘Why?’

Vic held out his hands as if it was obvious. ‘We’re fucking with His stuff.’

‘What did you come down here for, Vic?’

He shrugged, touched her hand briefly — a surprisingly intimate gesture from someone she’d once loved — and left Control for his bed.

After Vic had gone and the guards had locked the doors behind him, Holly ran a diagnostic on the eradicator as she did every time it had been activated, checking systems and charges, running three virtual trials and then accessing its automatic log. All the while she tried to ignore what Vic had said. But it wasn’t so easy, because she’d been thinking much the same herself.

Diagnostics run, she went down the three wide steps onto the breach floor and stared. Contained within a large hexagonal frame was a window onto somewhere else, the thickness of the window itself mere steps away. Night over there, too , Vic had said, but the darkness of that other Earth seemed subtly, beautifully different. There was a glow to the sky that Satpal thought might be due to layers of dust or moisture in the atmosphere. It cast a faint red light across the night-time landscape, painting the triangle of visible sky with an arterial-blood smear. Below that, the hillside was the colour of good port, shadows hiding behind boulders and short, squat trees. They’d broken through ( Eased through , Jonah would have said, probed through, nothing’s broken ) into a small valley, and the hindered view they had of this place gave little away.

There were no signs of habitation. That had disturbed Holly to begin with, but the idea of the multiverse allowed for all possibilities. Just as there were other Earths that would be inhabited by people very much like them, so there would be worlds where life had never begun, or had evolved differently, or where the subtle leap to intelligence and consciousness had not been made. There are countless possibilities , Jonah had told them all weeks before. And we have no way to steer . What they had accomplished was the crowning achievement in humankind’s technical exploration of existence, but Jonah likened it to walking blindly onto a beach at night and plucking up a grain of sand at random. There was no way they could target a particular particle, especially as they had no idea which grains existed.

This grain, Gaia, might be paradise , she thought. Soon after making their first observations, Melinda had named the world Gaia and it had stuck. And for Holly, the idea that beyond the breach was just one possible Mother Earth out of a limitless number did not detract from its wonder. If anything, it was more wondrous, and it got her to thinking about why they had forged through to this particular possibility.