The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

business, and there was no helping these people. That was it, then. Time to go. Time to head back to Coldfoot and tell the good folks at the burger shop he’d had a nice, uneventful hike.
    He returned to the tear in the outer wall, glancing forward as he went, his now adjusted eyes taking in the space beyond the door in the forward bulkhead. A corridor lay there, stretching a hundred feet toward the nose of the plane, windows on one side and doors on the other.
    He’d already slipped his head and one shoulder out of the plane by the time his mind processed what he’d just seen in the hallway.
    He shut his eyes hard, though not because of the glare from the snowfield. For maybe ten seconds he hesitated, willing his body to keep moving, to put the corpses and the plane and the whole fucking valley behind him. One quick drop to the snow would seal the decision. His legs would take over from there.
    Instead he withdrew his head into the plane again, and turned to face the corridor.
    A punctuated blood trail, nearly invisible on the black floor of the equipment room, led onto the beige hallway carpet and stretched fifty feet farther to a doorway on the right, where it turned in. Bloody handprints flanked a heavier trail in the middle. Not drag marks. Crawl marks.
    Travis went to the threshold of the corridor. Four doors opened off the right wall, facing the Plexiglas-covered windows on the other side. The blood trail went in at the third. A fifth door capped the far end of the hall, probably leading to the stairwell, then the upper deck and the cockpit.
    The bloodstains in the carpet were brown, long since dried; the pooled blood in the room behind him had only remained viscous because there were gallons of it. If the attack had followed on the heels of the crash, then the wounded survivor had been dying in that room up the hall for three long days. No chance of survival.
    But it would take only a minute to be sure. Travis stepped into the corridor.
    The first doorway was haloed by a constellation of bullet holes, which seemed to have been made from both inside and outside the room, at chest and head level.
    Travis came abreast of the open doorway. Two dead men lay against the far wall, downed behind an executive desk they’d upended for cover. Wearing crew cuts, black suits and ties, they looked like Secret Service agents—or, Travis thought, just about any high-level security personnel. They’d been dropped with shots to the chest and neck, then executed for good measure like the victims in the aft section.
    Unlike the aft victims, however, these two had been armed. And still were.
    It’d been a very long time since Travis had held a gun, and he’d been well out of the loop on modern firearms during his extended stay with the Minnesota Corrections Department, but he easily recognized the M16 variants that lay beside the dead men.
    He crossed to the nearest of the weapons and lifted it. The translucent magazine still held about half of what Travis guessed was a thirty-round capacity. Leaning the rifle against the desk, he inspected the second weapon’s clip, found it nearly full, and ejected it. In the coat pockets of the two dead men he found another full magazine each. They had nothing else on them, including identification. Pocketing the ammunition, he took the rifle in hand and proceeded to the next room along the hall.
    What he found there gave him a longer pause than the bodies had.
    Centered in the space was a three-foot-wide cube of solid steel, cut in half across its waist and hinged. At the moment it lay open; two heavy-duty chainfalls hanging from I-beam rails on the ceiling had been needed to get it that way. Carved into the exposed inner face of each half of the cube, right in the middle, was a square depression perhaps four by four inches across and two deep. If the cube were closed, those twin spaces would form a single cavity at its core, large enough to hold a softball, and surrounded in every direction by more than a foot of steel.
    Whatever had required this much protection was gone.
    On the side of the cube was a metal plate with simple black lettering:
     
    BREACH ENTITY 0247—“WHISPER”
     
    CLASS-A PROTOCOLS APPLY
     
    SPECIAL INSTRUCTION FOR THIS ENTITY—NO PERSON SHALL
     
    REMAIN WITHIN FIVE (5) FEET
     
    OF EXPOSED ENTITY FOR LONGER THAN
     
    TWO (2) CONSECUTIVE MINUTES.
    Something about the steel around the core space of the cube caught Travis’s eye. He stepped in for a closer