The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

never tried to open them.”
    “Just ran out of curiosity, right?” Travis said.
    Paige smiled dryly. “Yeah. Also, they’re resting on pressure pads that are sensitive enough to react to any change of weight distribution. Putting a hand on top of one of these boxes, or against its side, would result in something bad. The same something bad that would happen if the building’s power were cut.”
    Again, Travis didn’t ask. His eyes picked out the thin black wafers of the pressure pads under the box’s corners, their fine wires snaking across the floor to join the tangle.
    “Follow my lead,” Paige said. “Move like I move. Don’t get any closer to the box than I do.”
    With that, she stepped into the clearing and began to circle it along its outer wall. A wall of wires. Travis followed. Twice Paige pointed to indicate the wires for the pressure pads. Travis didn’t need them pointed out, but he understood her need to do it.
    A moment later they were on the far side of the box, and Travis saw what he’d expected to see. Covering the back side of the box, and the floor around it, just discernible in the shifting LED light, was a vast sprawl of the same writing he’d seen in the enlargement on Paige’s wall. In real life, the writing was newsprint-sized, and at a glance he thought it must be half an hour’s worth of reading material.
    Within seconds he saw that he was wrong.
    It was only a single phrase, written over and over, almost maniacally. There had to be a thousand variants of it, in all directions, but the words were the same everywhere. They read simply,
    GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.
    He translated it for Paige and told her about the repetition. She reacted with a mixture of confusion and disquiet, the look of someone surprised and shoved off balance in the worst possible direction. For another moment she only stared at him.
    “That’s it?” she said.
    “That’s it.”
    She looked from him to the others, still standing in the tunnel. One of the Tangent operatives, Haslett—probably the oldest of the unit at close to fifty—was already typing it into a PDA.
    Travis watched Paige’s eyes as she pondered the line’s meaning. For four years Tangent had probably worked with the world’s best cryptanalysts, cycling fragments of this jumble through a million hours of computer time, in the hope of decoding a thousand-page text file of useful data. Instead they’d gotten four words. And nobody knew what the hell they meant.
    “Four more of these boxes,” Paige said. “Let’s get to them.” If there was any hope in her voice, Travis missed it.
    The other clearings were on Levels Four, Five, Six, and Eight. Same-sized boxes, same-sized clearings, and the same-sized sprawls of repetitive text. To the extent that it mattered—not a hell of a lot, apparently—the messages were different in each place.
    They read, respectively:
    OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR.
    BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC.
    SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.
    FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.
    Long before they’d reached the last one, Travis could see the group’s reaction to the messages as a whole. And Paige’s. More despair and anxiety than he’d ever seen gathered in one place.
    “You might as well see the last thing,” Paige said, and led him back to the stairway.
    Halfway up the stairs to the ninth floor, the jumble of wires ended. The last steps were open and clear. At the top of the staircase was a ten-by-ten-foot landing, bound by walls on the left and right, with a set of double doors at the end providing the only access to the rest of the ninth floor. The doors were closed, and a big, unsightly thing stood before them like a sentry on duty.
    From the floor beneath it, through tiny holes, emerged the fine wires Travis had seen connected to the pressure pads throughout the building. They all fed into the thing on the landing. Now Travis saw more pressure pads tucked into the seams around the double doors. These too were wired into the thing that stood before them.
    Travis knew what the thing was, though he’d never seen one in person before, and didn’t suppose the ones he’d seen in movies were very authentic. They hadn’t been, but he knew it by sight anyway. It was cone-shaped, the height of a washing machine, drab green with a dark red star painted on it. One side