The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

I think he’d expect. Something he’d have to expect, for the sake of caution.”
    Travis thought about it, and understood. “He’d know there was at least a chance of Tangent finding a way around the bomb, using some Breach entity that showed up long after he left Border Town.”
    “Exactly. Something that could have emerged yesterday. Or any day. He’d never know what we might suddenly have at our disposal. Something that lets us look through walls. Or walk through walls. Or turn enriched uranium into tin. Who knows, right?”
    Travis didn’t bother asking if anything like that had actually come along. Obviously it hadn’t, but her point was still valid.
    “If Pilgrim was cautious enough to rig the building with pressure pads and a nuke,” Travis said, “you’re saying he’d also be cautious enough to have a backup defense in place.”
    “A spare hostage,” Paige said. “One he’s not afraid to pull the trigger on. And that’s what scares me. I think even if we were able to figure this place out, and make a move toward shutting it down, we’d run into that second defense, whatever it is.” She stared out over the fog. The river, visible only as a vague sheen against the lit backdrop of city streets, snaked away to the northwest. “But I guess we’re no closer to running into that problem than we ever have been.”
    She turned from the window. Stared at him. Her eyes, as beautiful as they were haunted, reflected the glow from the fog.
    In her hand, her PDA displayed typed copies of the five lines Travis had read from the boxes earlier. She’d spent most of the past ten minutes staring at them, willing them to mean something. Now she looked at them again.
    He watched her. Watched her try to contain the frustration and succeed only by degrees. She looked like she wanted to tear out the wires that hung around her.
    A question came to him. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but had a sense that it did.
    “If you guys got the Whisper back from Pilgrim four years ago, why was it on a 747 last week? Shouldn’t it have been locked up in Border Town?”
    The frustration behind her eyes stepped up a notch. “It was. And we spent the four years trying to get answers from it. Trying to make it tell us about this place.” She shook her head, just perceptibly, her jaw tightening. “It’s so goddamned aggravating. You just can’t force it to help you if it doesn’t think you need it. And you only get those few seconds to try, before the light changes and it tries to take over. A few people suggested letting someone else master it, like Pilgrim had done. You can probably guess how the vote went on that brainstorm.”
    Travis managed a smile.
    Somewhere out in the city, a bottle shattered on concrete. In the fog, it might have been one block away or five. Men laughed, their voices ricocheting from every building, clarified in the mist.
    “In Border Town we found an old pad of Pilgrim’s handwritten notes,” Paige said at last. “He’d taken care to destroy all his computer files, all his work on the Whisper, before he fled the place in 1995. But this notepad was one he must’ve left in the lab years earlier and lost track of. An attendant found it in a stack in the archives, in 1998. Most of the contents were useless. Lab tests that had failed, been crossed out, that kind of stuff. But one thing stood out. He’d made a note about a facility that was being built in Japan. Back then, in the nineties, it was only a proposal. Still ten, fifteen years from completion. The Large Hadron Accelerator. Keep in mind that particle accelerators are Aaron Pilgrim’s field of expertise. He stands with the best minds on Earth on the subject. Well, in that notepad he had five pages of math, written out longhand, supporting a conclusion he’d circled in red: when the LHA in Japan was completed, it’d be worth a try to set the Whisper right in its interacting point and hit it with a shot. His hunch was that it would act like the on/off key … but for the suicidal part of the Whisper, not the intelligence part. Meaning you could have all the good, and none of the bad.”
    The regret that pulled at the edges of her expression was almost hard to look at.
    “LHA went operational last month,” she said. “We had to try. If it worked, we’d have perfect knowledge of everything. How to cure every disease in the world. How to use all the Breach entities we’ve never been able to figure out. Most important: how to