The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

quickly then. Those left standing would reach cover. If even two of them found safe positions from which to return fire, he’d be in trouble. Most likely he’d be dead.
    Surprise wouldn’t be enough. He needed misdirection. He needed them looking exactly away from where he’d be firing from. He needed them looking at the place where he lay right now.
    The idea came to him quickly, probably because he had so little material to work with.
    He leaned one of the M16s against a waist-high fallen rock, and took from his backpack one of the nylon bags that held a single change of his clothes. He dumped the clothes back into the pack, and hung the empty bag—nearly weightless now—by its drawstrings from the M16’s trigger.
    Then he set a full water pouch atop the rock, and made a pinprick hole in it with his knife. What came out wasn’t even a fine stream, but just a ceaseless drip, which he positioned to fall directly into the nylon bag. Designed to keep water out, the bag would keep it in just as well. When it held enough, and weighed enough, this gun would fire its entire clip into the sky.
    Peter Campbell was going to break.
    He kept his eyes locked on Paige’s as she cried, while the stringy little shit with the whiskers continued probing inside her arm with the nerve actuator. From time to time she would narrow her eyes and manage the slightest shake of her head within the strap, her message unmistakable: don’t.
    But he would. Had to. He’d been in denial about it for hours, though he’d only just now begun to recognize it.
    These people had simply won. Help was not coming—would not be coming for days and days, if even then. Drummond had seen to that.
    Drummond. He’d broken, hadn’t he? And under what pressure? Nothing like what these past three days had been. As Peter understood it, the man had gotten a call from his wife, crying somewhere with a gun to her head. Almost anyone in the world would have caved to that, but Tangent operators were supposed to be stronger. That was one of the key attributes they were selected for, and Peter would have bet his life on Stuart Drummond’s integrity. In fact, he had. And he’d lost.
    It was little solace that everyone else had trusted Drummond too—trusted him supremely. Who else would have been tapped to fly a plane carrying some of Tangent’s highest-ranking people, along with the most dangerous object ever to come out of the Breach? But the flight—coming from Tokyo and bound for Wind Creek, in Wyoming, where the object would have been secured forever—had made an unscheduled course change somewhere over the Aleutians. Drummond had murdered the rest of the flight crew, then depressurized the plane without releasing the oxygen masks. Finally he’d taken the jumbo jet down to pelican height—somewhere in there, overriding the damn safeties to keep the interior pressure equivalent to high altitude—and gone north into Alaska below radar.
    Peter and the others had revived to the metal screams of the aircraft coming to rest God knew where, rejuvenating air at last flooding the plane through the broken fuselage.
    Even as they’d heard the ATV engines closing in from outside, Drummond’s voice had come over the comm, so hysterical he could barely speak. Peter had made out fragments of the apology and the story of Drummond’s abducted wife, and then he’d caught one final phrase before the man killed himself.
    The final phrase—Ink Burst—had unnerved him more than the gunshot that ended the transmission.
    Just like that, he’d understood that hope was lost. Ink Burst—a technology derived from another Breach object, albeit a relatively benign and manageable one—was a defensive measure designed to hide a crashed aircraft from satellites. Even visual satellites. It pulled a variety of clever tricks to fool them; one involved broadcasting an omnidirectional signal that caused spy birds to ignore the live crash site and substitute their own archived shots. The effective radius was something like five miles from the crash site, to cover any possible debris field. Currently every satellite platform in the world was vulnerable to it, though DARPA had a system ready to launch in November that was immune—after all, you never knew when your own toys would be used against you.
    That precaution would come a few months late, as it turned out.
    The whiskered man made a sudden adjustment to the nerve actuator’s power, and Paige’s body convulsed, a new