The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

to someone on her end of the call.
    “Karen, tell me what you’re seeing,” Paige said.
    “We don’t know. They’re not aircraft. The thermals are reading them at body temperature; they could be divers, but … are they hostiles, or—”
    “Kill them,” Paige said. Travis could see in her eyes that she’d jettisoned the confusion for the moment. “Get everyone at the controls and start shooting, right now. And someone hit the dead switch for all the containment levels. Lock everything down and then smash the control boards.”
    If the people on the other end of the call were confused, her direct tone got them past it. Travis heard alarms begin blaring, and then what sounded like someone following her orders about smashing things. He heard computer cases breaking open, fragile components inside being shattered by some blunt, heavy thing. A chair, maybe.
    “Are you shooting yet?” Paige said.
    “We’re targeting,” Karen said. “Ready in five, four, three—”
    Suddenly Travis felt a jolt pass through the floor, and then the building shook from the bass wave of an explosion, somewhere high above.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
    The speakerphone went to static. Paige stared at it for less than a second, and then grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and threw them at Travis. By the time he caught them, she was reaching for her own clothes.
    “You seem to know more than I do,” he said. “Mind sharing?”
    “I have a guess,” she said. “With gaps.”
    “More than I have.” He stepped into the jeans and pulled them up.
    Paige buttoned her own pair, then slipped her shirt over her head and grabbed the rifle again.
    “Do the words Tangent or Breach mean anything to you?” she said.
    “No.”
    “Then I couldn’t explain it if we had an hour—” The hum of an automatic weapon sounded through the nearest air vent. “And we don’t have an hour.”
    She opened the cabinet front of her nightstand and took out a .45, along with two spare magazines.
    “Do you know how to shoot a gun?” she said.
    He nodded. She took a step toward him, then stopped, sizing him up one last time. More gunfire, and a small popping explosion, transmitted through the ductwork. She came forward and handed him the pistol and ammo. Already she was on her way out of the room, grabbing the backpack and shouldering it as she went.
    He followed, as his most obvious question finally surfaced. “How the hell did I get here?”
    Paige checked the hallway outside her bedroom, and looked satisfied that it was clear. “I’m pretty damn curious about that myself,” she said, and moved out of the room.
    With the rifle shouldered, Paige made her way toward the living room, ready to kill anything that appeared in front of her. She wasn’t crazy about turning her back on the man with her—she realized she hadn’t even asked him his name—but the situation demanded a few risks. Whoever he was, her own choice of attire a few moments earlier—none—seemed to imply that she trusted him.
    The living room was clear. Beyond the door, shouts echoed along the primary corridor.
    How could she have possibly made it back to Border Town alive? She’d been strapped down on a makeshift torture table, probably halfway dead, surrounded by enemies in the most remote place she’d ever seen. How had three days taken her from that place to her bedroom, standing around in the buff with some guy she’d never met before, who hadn’t heard of Tangent?
    Had her father survived, too?
    Hope and fear pulled her concentration in opposite directions, neither useful right now. Facing the door, she blocked off both feelings, then glanced over her shoulder at the stranger.
    “Don’t shoot anything I’m not already shooting at,” she said, then added, “unless it shoots at you first.”
    The guy shrugged, not even trying to hide his disorientation.
    She found herself staring at him a second longer. He wasn’t bad-looking. Then she turned and crossed to the door, and with a steadying breath, pulled it open and stepped through.
    People were running in the corridor, all of them Tangent personnel. They were confused, partly by the explosions but more so, Paige thought, by their own fractured memory. Only a few—those who belonged to the detachments—carried weapons, but even these were looking to others for direction, and finding no help.
    If her guess—her guess with gaps—was right, every one of them had just skipped over three days of memory in an instant.