The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

missed something. Which she had; they’d never told her anything about this. Travis caught her glance and said, “I’ll tell you later.”
    She nodded, but the confusion stayed in her expression.
    “The filter was the one thing Ruben Ward chose to leave out of the written message,” Garner said. “He never dictated it to Nora during his stay at Johns Hopkins, and only spoke briefly of it to the nine of us, later that summer. He was afraid to share the details, he said. He worried that if we knew about that part, we’d back out. He said it was something absolutely necessary, but also terrible, and that it was best if no one but you, Travis, ever learned about it.”
    “Do you think it’s something that happens to me when I go through the Breach?” Travis said. “Something that changes me? Am I what gets filtered?”
    Again Garner looked surprised, but only mildly so this time. “That’s more or less what I’ve imagined all these years. But it’s no more than a guess—mine is as bad as yours.”
    Travis nodded. As he had in the mine shaft, he let the subject slip from his thoughts. There were only so many ways he could hold it up to the light. He looked at Garner again.
    “The nine of you were supposed to get me into Tangent,” Travis said. “Get me in and then, as you said, tell me everything at the last possible moment.”
    Garner nodded.
    “So what did you think,” Travis said, “when I ended up in Tangent without your help, in the summer of 2009?”
    “That very strange things happen in connection with the Breach. And that it couldn’t be a coincidence.”
    “It wasn’t. I’ll explain that later too.”
    “I’d appreciate it.”
    Travis considered something else. “You were prepared to hit Border Town with a nuke, back then, when Aaron Pilgrim took control of the place.”
    “The Breach would’ve survived. You can’t imagine the forces that stabilize it. All that stopped me was that you wouldn’t leave the place. I had no choice but to go along with the approach you suggested.”
    For a while after that, nobody spoke. The heavy engines droned and the lit-up nightscape slid by, far below.
    “Why are they doing this at all?” Paige said. “The crew of that ship. Does the message say why they’re opening the tunnel in the first place?”
    Garner nodded slowly, looking down at his hands again. “That part it explains in simple terms.” He grew quiet for a few seconds, then continued. “There was a war. It happened on Earth around 3100, right around the time the Deep Sky arrived at what turned out to be its last destination—61 Cygni. That star is just over eleven light-years from here, which means the ship’s crew, once they were on-site, got all their updates from home with more than a decade’s delay. Correspondence from loved ones, news stories, everything. When the war started, they had to watch their world come apart on that same delay, knowing that whatever they were seeing was already eleven years gone. The crew considered returning, trying to intervene somehow, but gave up the idea without much debate: the Deep Sky doesn’t exactly have a hyperdrive button on its bridge. Its top speed is around twenty percent of the speed of light. It’d taken fifty-five years to get out to that star system, and it would take fifty-five to get back. In any case, it wasn’t long before they saw the final headlines, announcing the all-but-certain deployment of weapon systems more or less guaranteed to end the world. The message doesn’t clarify what exactly those weapons were—only that they worked. All transmissions from Earth ended right after that, and never started up again.”
    Garner shut his eyes. “They opened the Breach so they could come through and have a second chance at history. If you think about that, you might begin to appreciate our paranoia in keeping this secret. Think of the power structures in this world. All the horrible things people do just to keep control of their few bars of the jungle gym. Now imagine some of them learning that one day soon a door is going to open, and people will come through it who know the next thousand-plus years of our history. Everything we’re going to invent and discover. Everything we’re going to get right and wrong. People who, just by their arrival, will render all current political power on Earth obsolete. You know who’d be most threatened by that? All the people best positioned to stop it from happening in the first