The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Paige’s eyes, like it was obvious what he was thinking. Maybe it was. Maybe that idea struck everyone the same way, the first time they heard it.
    “It’s not likely to work,” she said. “Even Fagan accepts that. If you could get past the initial barrier, the math would still be stacked against you. It gets into really strange stuff—Einstein, general relativity, time dilation—things we can calculate but not actually understand. Anyway, it all points to the same conclusion: whatever you sent through the Breach would just come back before it reached the far end. It might return months or years later, or—and this is more of a guess—it could actually come back before you sent it. Maybe long before.”
    She watched Travis’s expression, then added, “Like I said, lots of maybes in Border Town.”
    Travis nodded, then stared out at the country falling farther and farther below. A freeway crept by, running east to west, all but devoid of traffic.
    “So, what exactly is at Seven Theaterstrasse?” he said at last.
    Paige was quiet a moment before replying. “It’s not so much what’s there, as what the building itself is.”
    “Which is?”
    Another silence. Then: “A weapon.”
    He turned from the window and looked at her. Waited for her to go on.
    “Seven Theaterstrasse is where it’s all going to be decided,” she said. “It’s the choke point at the center of everything our enemy is planning. If we win there, everyone wins. And if we lose there—” She cut herself off, unwilling to say the rest, or maybe even think it.
    After a moment she said, “None of this will make sense unless I start with the beginning. The essentials, at least.”
    She thought about how best to get into it, and then began the story.
    Two strange things happened in the spring of 1978: the first occurred five hundred feet beneath Wyoming, the second, five hundred feet south of Pennsylvania Avenue. The most powerful bureaucracy in the world, presented with the most important asset in history, chose to limit its own influence.
    Over the weeks following the catastrophic failure of the Very Large Ion Collider facility at Wind Creek, the president of the United States and most of his cabinet were briefed on the details as they came in from inspectors on site. The trapped DOE personnel had all been hospitalized and released; along with thick nondisclosure agreements, they’d been provided with trauma counseling, some of which would probably be long-term. Ruben Ward remained in a coma; he’d been flown to Johns Hopkins, where so far there’d been no change in his condition.
    On April 3, the first scientific inspection team entered the VLIC site. They found that more than ninety objects had accumulated beneath the Breach—that term was well cemented even by then. If it hadn’t already been clear to everyone involved that this situation would call for delicate handling, the team’s findings brought the picture into razor-edged focus. In the eighty-seven-page report they filed after that first object survey, the word dangerous appeared more than two hundred times.
    Upon receipt of the report, the president’s most senior advisors settled into discussion along predictable lines. How tight a stranglehold should be kept on this project? How limited should Congress’s awareness be? Which defense contractors should be brought on board, and how central a role should they play in making use of this strange new resource? Obviously those that had been the most generous during the election would have to be first in line, but how far back did the line go? Two companies? Maybe three?
    Several hours into the first such meeting, the president turned to a man who’d said almost nothing so far: Peter Campbell, an MIT professor and, at thirty-three, the youngest member of the Science Council.
    “You don’t appear to agree,” the president said.
    “I don’t.”
    “Then say what you’re thinking.”
    Campbell chose his words carefully before he began.
    “Does anyone in this room really believe we can keep this secret?” He allowed a few seconds of silence for an answer. None came. “Consider the spec data on the Manhattan Project. If there was ever a secret we needed to keep, that was it. How long did we manage? Two years. The Russian bomb program was under way within two years, at the latest. Think of the amount of knowledge they had to obtain from us to make their project work, and then consider that they need only learn two