The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

lines were carved back in savage arcs, like weeds falling to scythe sweeps. Paige tore off her goggles, overwhelmed by the detail she must have seen through them, and finally lost control. She turned toward Travis, put her arms around him and held on fiercely. He held her in return, his own eyes flooding against his will, and hoped to hell Aaron Pilgrim ended up in his gun sights at some point.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
    Paige kept her face against his chest for only a moment. Then she drew back, wiped at her eyes, and looked out into the night again, like it was her obligation to do so. Like it was her penance.
    “Maybe if we had tear gas …” she said. “Pepper grenades. Anything like that …”
    Travis watched the chaotic movement of the flashlights below, the crowd flooding forward at some surge point, being cut back, flooding through somewhere else, being cut back there. Over and over.
    “I doubt it would help,” he said.
    “There are entities that would’ve helped,” Paige said. “If I’d been smart enough to see this coming, I could’ve brought them. There’s one that’s exactly like the Ares, only it’s green, and it affects memory. We call it the Jump Cut. Everyone within its reach loses the last three days of their memory, instantly. From the target’s point of view it feels as if, whatever they were doing three days ago, they skip instantly from that to the present moment. Massively confusing, and there’s no way to think around it. Wears off later. It’d be a perfect crowd disperser. We could’ve set it up in the main entrance downstairs, and maybe—I don’t know …”
    She was reaching. Trying to take responsibility for things that couldn’t possibly be her fault. It was the mark of a good leader. It was also not helping anyone right now. Least of all herself.
    Travis set a hand on her shoulder and turned her away from the window.
    “Let’s go back up and see what we’re dealing with,” he said.
    She nodded, getting control again, pawing at her eyes one last time. He turned and led the way through the tunnel, toward the stairs.
    At the landing, he looked down and saw Miller and a few others operating the Doubler. In the darkness, lit by the strobing pulses of gunfire all around, he caught only glimpses of the thing in action. They’d piled about eighty ammo magazines in one spot, and Miller was holding the Doubler so that the cone of yellow light coming from one end fully enveloped the stack. The UV light from the other end of the tube was barely visible. It shone only where it touched the floor or the banister atop the stairs, turning flecks of dust bright white.
    Every few seconds, a perfect duplicate of the stack of eighty clips appeared in the UV light. Though the fractured glare from the muzzle bursts made it hard to really see the process, Travis didn’t think it would have looked any more normal to him even in clear sunlight. Each time a new stack of ammunition appeared, the operators around Miller would grab handfuls and disappear either into the tunnels beside her or down toward the lower levels.
    Travis moved on, climbed the stairs to the ninth floor, Paige just behind him. They emerged from the tangle of wires, and a few seconds later they were on the highest landing again, passing the nuke and entering the room at the top of the building.
    The room was as brightly lit as when they’d left it. The radiance from the Ares was so intense it was more or less white. Earlier, when they’d turned to run, there’d been no time to study the revealed details of this place. Now they did. At the center of the giant room was a cluster of wires and cables, all emerging from the floor at that spot, and tangled together to form something that looked like an eagle’s nest. All of the light was coming from the depression at its center, into which Travis couldn’t see until he was within ten feet of it, holding his hand up against the searing glare.
    Inside the nest were two objects. One was the Ares. The other was a jet-black cube, a foot in each dimension. The top and sides of the cube were smooth, without any wires feeding in. They must all connect into the underside. This cube was the active element of the amplifier. A shaft of silvery light, like a taut rope made out of plasma, stretched between the amplifier and the Ares, binding them.
    Woven delicately into the surrounding nest of wires were dozens of pressure pads, stuck to circuit boards and fat cable connectors. These