The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

in terms of technology, whoever’s on the other side is as far ahead of us as we are ahead of Java man.”
    She let go of the crystal, shoulder height above the floor. It plummeted. Then, in the last foot of its fall, it slowed and came to a stop a quarter inch above the concrete. Sharp little beams of light shot from it, projecting onto the floor. The object seemed to be measuring its own position and rotation. After a second the beams switched off, and the thing set down with a ting that reverberated through the room.
    “Everything that comes through is baffling to us,” Paige said. She nodded at the green rags. “The best materials scientists in the world have studied that fabric using our most advanced tools, scanning-tunneling microscopes that can isolate atoms. They’ve learned nothing. Not a single thing, in over thirty years of study. They tell us the material doesn’t even seem to be made of atoms. They nicknamed it a quark-lattice, but that’s a wild guess, not a testable theory, and it’s almost certainly wrong.”
    Travis found his eyes drawn back to the Breach.
    “Once or twice a month,” Paige said, “things come through that are either rare or unique. Things like the Whisper. We never understand how they work, but we can usually get a sense of their purpose. Not always, but usually. Some of them have good applications, like the medical tools that were used on me over the past several hours. Others are so dangerous, we just focus on keeping them safe, keeping them dormant and locked away. And that’s more or less what Tangent was created for. To shepherd what comes out of the Breach. To distinguish the good from the bad, find uses for the former, and contain the latter.”
    She paused and turned to him. He looked at her and saw in her eyes the same vague trance effect he felt in his own. In the Breach’s presence there was no avoiding it.
    “In the first year after March 7, 1978,” she said, “when the government was trying to figure out what to do with this place, there were proposals to fill the elevator shaft with concrete and leave this chamber sealed forever. Whatever showed up could just stay down here, however helpful or dangerous, and we could simply not tinker with any of it. At the time, those proposals were thought to be the most prudent. My father didn’t think so. He argued that eventually something might come out of the Breach that was effectively a ticking bomb. Something that if left alone would be so destructive that five hundred feet of dirt wouldn’t protect the world from it. He was right. In the time since then, at least three entities have arrived that fulfilled that criteria. The point is obvious enough. It takes the smartest and best people in the world, working as hard as they can, just to prevent the Breach from triggering a nightmare. Imagine what the worst people could do with it, and you understand what’s on the line here.” Her eyes went back to the Breach. “This building is the most secure site on Earth. It protects the Breach and all that’s ever come out of it. All that ever will come out of it too. And right now, it’s all in play. The security isn’t enough. The people who tortured me and killed my father, the people who now have the Whisper in their arsenal, want control of this place, and if things go wrong for us in the next day or so, they’ll have it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
    On the surface—literally—Border Town was not an impressive place. It was a faded red pole barn with a pile of rusted automobile parts drifted against its back wall, the property bounded at the perimeter by a few cracked and leaning posts that had once been a split-rail fence. Just visible against the flatlands that planed to the horizon on all sides, a gravel track wandered southwest across fifty miles of nothing.
    Nothing that could be seen, at least. The barren landscape probably concealed enough firepower to repel a military assault. Even American military.
    Travis stood at an open bay door of the barn, alongside Paige and fifteen others who made up a larger version of the teams he’d met in Alaska. He’d heard the proper terms for them now: the units were called detachments, and their members were known as operators. At the moment, each of the fifteen was dressed casually, weapons and armor stowed in green plastic carrying cases, though their bodies and expressions marked them as hardened, well trained. Paige had the same look. No doubt she’d come up through