The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

the bound menu again and test the edge of the hole with it. Instead he lowered his hand another inch, slowly, ready to retract it.
    His fingers settled onto a smooth, rounded edge. Like the tubing of a hula hoop. It was cool and rigid as steel. Travis applied a few pounds of force to it. It didn’t budge. Strange—the cylinder’s movement on the couch a few minutes earlier had made the opening bob up and down easily, but the opening itself couldn’t be moved by direct force against it. It was as fixed as a hole cut into an iron wall.
    Travis ducked and leaned his upper body through the hole, into the night on the other side.
    At once he saw what’d been impossible to see from inside the suite: a sky shot full of stars, sharp and clear in the unhindered darkness. The hazy band of the Milky Way defined a long arc from one horizon to the other. A crescent moon hung like a blade, an hour from setting or having risen—Travis wasn’t sure which. But it was definitely the same moon he’d grown up under. He was staring at a nightscape somewhere on Earth, at least.
    His eyes were already adjusting to the dark, much deeper on this side of the opening than in the suite, even with the drapes closed.
    As the seconds drew out he began to discern details in the night around him, both near and distant. He saw the canopy of a forest, the treetops maybe twenty feet below his viewpoint. Spires of pine trees and the rough curves of hardwoods, all of them pale in the faint light of the moon.
    There were other shapes, but he couldn’t make sense of them. Strange geometric forms, like huge scaffolding assemblies or bamboo towers, jutted up from the forest here and there. The light was too poor to offer any detail about them. Even their distances were hard to gauge. Travis looked down and saw the footings of one of the structures right below. Its complex form rose into the darkness just behind his position.
    The only other shape he could resolve was something very tall and narrow, and solid in appearance, standing on the horizon at least a mile away. Its height was imposing even at that distance: it towered above the trees, easily five times their height. He focused on it but could perceive no detail beyond its bulk and rough size. He thought of an enormous smokestack rising from a factory complex. The problem was that there was no smoke, and no factory, either, unless all its lights were shut off.
    He saw movement in his peripheral vision and then Bethany was there, leaning into the darkness beside him. He edged over a few inches to give her room.
    For a moment they just stood there in silence, side by side. They listened to the night. Travis looked at the moon again and judged that it was higher than when he’d first seen it. The crescent was very narrow, which meant the sun couldn’t be far below the horizon. Dawn was no more than an hour away, though there was no hint of it yet.
    “I’ve never seen any place this dark,” Bethany said. “There’s not the least bit of light pollution on the horizon. We’d have to be over a hundred miles from even a mid-sized town for it to look like this. But at the same time it’s a place where people have built large structures, whatever these are. And whatever that is.” She waved a hand to indicate the towering form in the distance. “It has to be forty stories tall. Maybe taller.” She was quiet for a moment and then she turned to him. “Where the hell are we?”
    Travis had no answer. He had a vague notion that it could be a military installation, built in remote wilderness out of concern for public safety or—more likely—secrecy. But why would an alien-made device just happen to show them a place like that? Why would it show them any place in particular, as opposed to some random location? Even if the place on the other side were some fixed distance and direction from here, it should still be someplace purely random. Simple probability said they should be looking out at the ocean right now, or a wide-open prairie, or an arctic tundra, or a city street with a McDonalds and a Starbucks and half a dozen stoplights.
    “I don’t know,” Travis said.
    Bethany started to speak, but before she could, a high-pitched cry rose from the trees right below them. Bethany flinched hard and grabbed onto his arm. Travis was glad for that: it masked the fact that his own muscles had tensed pretty damn hard.
    He grew calm at once, recognizing the sound: a wolf’s howl. As it died away