The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

side of the station, had been sheltered from the blast wave and remained intact.
    After all the strange things he’d experienced in recent days, he’d just set the bar a few clicks higher. Somehow the word replica didn’t quite capture the feeling of looking down at a perfect copy of your own body. Because, in a real sense, it hadn’t been a replica. It’d been him. Him, to the last atom.
    Only dead.
    There was a vague silver lining: once you’d stomached the surreality of looking into your own corpse’s glassy eyes, it didn’t take much more grit to shove it over the edge of an elevator shaft.
    He put the Doubler back into the backpack, then set the pack aside and opened the black plastic case. He felt for the suit and found it.
    He smiled.
    This was going to be fun. Forget whoever Paige had wanted him to call for help. He had all the help he needed, right here in his hands. Just put on the suit, head back down the ladder, and kill Pilgrim and every last one of his people.
    He had the suit halfway onto his shoulders when a thought stopped him.
    Was this the Whisper’s intention?
    Was this the plan?
    Was he still on the horse, heading for Samarra?
    For five seconds he stood there, the cadence of night insects filtering in from the desert.
    This move made sense.
    But maybe that was the problem. Maybe that made it predictable. Fuck, everything was predictable to the Whisper. Like Paige had said, even trying to be unpredictable was probably predictable, to that thing. The zigzag logic made his head hurt. He dropped the suit’s upper half back into the case and cursed quietly.
    Who had Paige wanted him to call?
    He crouched over the backpack and took out her phone. The ninth number on the speed-dial list had no name beside it. Just the number. He selected it and pressed send.
    A man answered on the first ring. “Go ahead, Miss Campbell.”
    “I’m calling on Miss Campbell’s behalf,” Travis said. “My name is Travis Chase. She instructed me to call this number.”
    The man on the other end hesitated. Then Travis heard someone talking in the background, and a sound like the phone changing hands.
    Another man spoke. Travis recognized his voice. “Mr. Chase. This is Richard Garner. What’s going on there?”
    Richard Garner. The president of the United States.

CHAPTER FORTY
    Garner had been briefed on all events surrounding Tangent in recent days. Travis filled in the last half hour. When he’d finished, a silence drew out on the line.
    The darkness blanketing the desert had begun to lift. Far away to the southwest, sunlight touched the tips of the Rockies.
    “You say the defenses are currently down?” Garner said.
    “Yes,” Travis said, “but how much longer is a guess. No more than twenty minutes, I’d say.”
    “It’s not enough time to get troops on-site. Not enough by half. That option’s off the table …”
    Something in his tone gave Travis a bad feeling about what was on the table. If it was what he expected, he understood why Paige had really sent him up here to make this call.
    Garner told him the option. Travis had been right.
    “Mr. President,” he said, “there are survivors inside this building.”
    “I realize that. We have to think about the world’s interests right now.”
    “What about the entities inside? The dangerous ones? Do we know how those will react? How the Breach itself will react?”
    “No,” Garner said. “We don’t. But scenarios like this one have long been considered from every angle, by people who understand the factors in play better than your or I. This is the only choice we have. The missile will come from a silo about two hundred miles away, which means it’ll reach Border Town in less than five minutes from the time I give the order. I’m sure your own safety is not on your mind right now, but if you have access to a vehicle, you could probably get outside the kill radius during that time.”
    Travis was silent. No, he hadn’t been thinking of his own safety. Still wasn’t.
    Instead, another thought had come to him. Or almost come to him. He remembered grappling for it during the night, when he’d woken with Paige in his arms. Some connection he’d made, some insight at the edge of sleep. It was close to the surface again.
    “Mr. Chase?” the President said.
    Travis didn’t answer. If he spoke now, if he did anything but feel for this idea, he would lose it.
    “Mr. Chase?”
    Another several seconds passed. Close. Right at the boundary