The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

prints; he’d been arrested at a couple war protests in college. Everything about the scene was straightforward. He checked in alone, killed himself, no sign of foul play. No sign of the notebook, either—not that anyone was even thinking about it by then. And my understanding of the story goes blank at that point, until June of 1981, when Nora remarried. Some of the wedding guests were old friends who’d known both her and Ruben, including former VLIC people who now belonged to Tangent. Peter Campbell was there too. He and Nora talked about Ruben—about how it wasn’t his fault what’d happened to him. He just wasn’t himself at the end. Nora reinforced that point by mentioning the notebook—all the sci-fi things he’d said in his stupor. Peter asked her to elaborate. What kind of sci-fi things, specifically? Nora rattled off what little she remembered, and as I’m told, Peter had to set down his drink to keep from spilling it. I suppose, technically, the investigation began at that moment, right there in that reception hall. Peter asked Nora if she could set aside a few hours the next morning, before leaving for her honeymoon, and speak to him at length about the notebook. I doubt she was thrilled at that idea, but she did it, and in those hours she managed to recall a little more, including a visual description of the notebook, for what it was worth: black cover, with the word Scalar in the bottom corner. The company that made it, I’m sure. Nora remembered that easily enough. It was the stuff inside the book she had trouble with. All she could summon by then were bits and pieces, which I’m sure were maddening for Peter to try to make sense of. In the end, though, those scraps were enough to give him a rough sketch of what had happened. Enough to scare the hell out of him.”
    Far out across the open ground on either side of the highway, the yard lights of ranch houses glided past. Steep foothills rose beyond them, just discernible against the near-black sky.
    “It all reduces to something like this,” Carrie said. “In the days after the accident at VLIC, when Ward was still in the bunker, he wasn’t entirely unconscious. He was aware of conversations around him—the fear and the tension down there. But there was something else he was aware of. Something he referred to as ‘tunnel voices.’ ”
    “Breach Voices?” Paige said.
    Carrie nodded. “Ward could hear them from inside the bunker, just like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he could understand them.”
    Paige had been staring forward at the snowfall in the headlights. Now she turned in her seat. Her eyes went back and forth between Carrie and Travis.
    “Understand them?” Paige said.
    Carrie nodded again. “They really are voices. And they’re saying something. A message that repeats every few minutes, endlessly.”
    Paige shook her head. “We’ve analyzed the Breach Voices to death. Not with human ears, obviously, but microphones and every kind of pattern-recognition software. From the very beginning there were people who hoped those sounds contained a message, but the computers never turned up a thing.”
    “Computers can’t decipher whale song either,” Carrie said, “but biologists are convinced it has meaning. In principle that meaning could be expressed in a human language if we had a translator.”
    “You’re saying Ward was our translator for the Breach Voices?” Travis said. “That whatever knocked him unconscious gave him that ability? Wouldn’t that imply that someone on the other side wanted him to understand?”
    “Peter believed that very thing after talking to Nora.”
    Travis considered the idea. At a glance it seemed impossible: the Breach had been created by an accident of human origin, the VLIC’s first shot. A prepared message from the other side—bundled with some effect to grant a witness the means to understand it—didn’t fit that scenario at all. Had it been an accident? Or had the Breach always been intended to open? Had it been waiting for the human race—or any race out there in the great black yonder—to build the right kind of ion collider and switch it on? Why would someone on the other side have set things up that way? There would have to be a purpose for it—but what?
    “How do we know Ward wasn’t just crazy?” Paige said. “Like everyone originally assumed?”
    “There were things he said that craziness couldn’t account for. Rough descriptions of entities that