The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of mâché, though by volume it’s probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the mâché would weigh about 250,000 pounds—almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank.”
    Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach’s existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach’s chamber sealed off. That would’ve been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would’ve done very bad things to the world had they been left alone—even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?
    He saw in Paige’s expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.
    “So at some point,” Travis said, “probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?”
    Paige nodded. “It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds.”
    “But why the hell would someone do that?” Travis said.
    Paige was silent for a moment. “Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense,” she said. “Which is why I thought of it.”
    Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.
    “The fallback option,” Travis said.
    Paige nodded again. “The Heavy Rag mâché idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I’ve felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we’d do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?” She shrugged. “The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you’d do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can’t get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday.” She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. “I guess the end of the world would suffice.”
    The whine of another airliner filtered in from behind them. The sound rose to a scream and then a 747 slid overhead, big as the world, its jetwash ruffling the umbrellas over the tables.
    “That’s a hell of a thing to have learned,” Travis said. “That it actually works, I mean. That you can seal off the Breach, and that the seal would hold for several decades, at least. If we figure out what happens to the world a few months from now… if we learn how to prevent it… then you could choose to leave the Breach open, or go ahead and seal it anyway, just to get rid of it. It’s something to consider.”
    Paige nodded slowly, her eyes far away. No doubt she had considered it, and at length.
    “It would hold for decades,” she said. “That much we know for sure. But after that it’s still a guess. I imagine you could plug a small shield volcano, if you had enough concrete to dump