The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

visually the size of a quarter held at arm’s length.
    A second star, the same color, hovered much further away—it shone as no more than a superbright point in the darkness. Travis knew these were the two suns that formed 61 Cygni, seen as a single dim speck from the desert in eastern Wyoming.
    He stared for probably twenty seconds, his thoughts nearly blank. He noticed that the entire view outside was sliding steadily in one direction, and knew what that meant. Then he bent his legs and drew them forward and got his feet ahead of him in a seated position, and slid out of the tunnel.
    Gravity exerted itself at once. A good standin for gravity, anyway—the centrifugal force of the rotating ship. He put his feet down on the metal and felt his weight transfer onto them—exactly as it would have on Earth.
    “Jesus, it worked,” a man said.
    Travis turned to see a doorway that’d been out of view from inside the tunnel. Standing in it was Richard Garner, looking about as old as a college kid.

Chapter Forty-Seven
    Travis stared at him, and then past him, suddenly wondering who else might step into the frame.
    Garner seemed to understand. “It’s probably best if you don’t meet yourself,” he said. “It’s not going to split the universe or anything, but I think it would be very distracting.”
    He had an accent—one Travis was sure he’d never heard before. Nor had anybody else in 2016, he knew.
    Garner stepped from the doorway and advanced. He smiled vaguely and shook his head. “I haven’t seen someone look this old in over a thousand years.”
    They stood at the center of the gigantic floor pane and spoke at length. Travis told Garner, in broad strokes, the story of the Breach as it’d played out on Earth. All that had resulted from that day in March of 1978. All that this version of Garner couldn’t know about—the aftermath of the plan he and the others had conceived and launched from this ship. The man looked disturbed, even remorseful, by the time Travis reached the end. He stared away into the starfield below—the planet and twin suns were no longer in view—and exhaled slowly.
    “We knew it would go bad in a lot of ways,” Garner said softly. “We debated whether to do it at all. But in the end the decision was unanimous. We had the chance to set things right. How could we pass it up?”
    He stood staring into the depths a moment longer, and then he drew a folded black card from his pocket and handed it to Travis. “Don’t open that until you’re ready. Inside is a long string of random letters, which your counterpart here has already thought. Once you return to your end of the tunnel, the Breach will revert to the form you’ve seen all these years. The plasma channel with entities coming through. It’ll stay that way until you unlock the tunnel once and for all.”
    “And to do that, I just think what’s on this card,” Travis said, more verifying than asking.
    Garner nodded. “It’ll work best if you read it aloud—that should keep your stream of thought on track. Other than that, there’s nothing to it. You can do it from anywhere on Earth, anytime after you go back. You read those letters, and the tunnel opens for us to come through. Easy as that.”
    Travis looked at the card. He thought of the disparity between its size and its power. Like a nuclear launch key. He slipped it into his pocket, then looked back up at Garner.
    Garner was gazing down through the window again. Watching the edge where stars were continually sliding into view. Travis realized he was waiting for something.
    At last the man pointed. “There.”
    Travis followed his downstretched arm and fingertip and saw a medium-bright yellow star that’d just crept into the frame. At a glance there was nothing special about it. It was all but lost amid the scatter of other stars.
    “Is that what I think it is?” Travis said.
    Garner nodded and spoke just above a breath. “There’s not a day I don’t come to this room and look at it. I stare at that little speck, and I wonder if there’s anything left of the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier in Chicago, or the Ko¯toku-in temple in Tokyo, or Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. And I’ll never know.”
    “Can you actually change things?” Travis said. “If all of you come through to 2016, do you really believe you can rewrite history? And if you can, how do you know you’ll make it better? Couldn’t the same kind of war still happen someday, for other