Coldbrook (Hammer)(7)

‘Jonah asked me to his room,’ he said. ‘Raised a toast to old Bill Coldbrook.’ He drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the breach. ‘Night over there, too.’ His voice had dropped.

‘Jonah got you drunk?’

‘I’m not drunk!’ he protested too loudly. ‘And no, he didn’t. We chatted, I left.’ He waved a hand. ‘Had a few on my own in the canteen.’

‘You didn’t argue with him?’

‘No, no. We didn’t argue. Not this time. But he’s completely . . .’ he smiled, grasping for the word ‘. . . unaware, you know?’

‘As you keep saying. I think you’re unfair on him.’

Vic snorted, and Holly knew what was coming next. She didn’t like it when he drank and she never had. Alcohol didn’t suit him.

‘You say that, and you still balance your religion with what we’ve done here.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But my beliefs aren’t tested at all by this. If anything—’

‘Maybe,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Maybe.’ And that was what she hated most about Drunk Vic. With alcohol in him, he’d only listen to himself. He stood and skirted her station, descending two wide steps and standing halfway between her and Melinda. And he just stared at the breach for a while.

One day soon, someone would have to go through.

‘You know,’ he said, returning to lean on her desk and look her in the eye, ‘if your God’s on the other side as well—’

‘Of course He is. The other side is just another here.’

‘Right. Well, if He is, don’t you think He’ll do his best to stop us going through?’

‘Why?’

Vic held out his hands as if it was obvious. ‘We’re f*cking with His stuff.’

‘What did you come down here for, Vic?’

He shrugged, touched her hand briefly – a surprisingly intimate gesture from someone she’d once loved – and left Control for his bed.

After Vic had gone and the guards had locked the doors behind him, Holly ran a diagnostic on the eradicator as she did every time it had been activated, checking systems and charges, running three virtual trials and then accessing its automatic log. All the while she tried to ignore what Vic had said. But it wasn’t so easy, because she’d been thinking much the same herself.

Diagnostics run, she went down the three wide steps onto the breach floor and stared. Contained within a large hexagonal frame was a window onto somewhere else, the thickness of the window itself mere steps away. Night over there, too, Vic had said, but the darkness of that other Earth seemed subtly, beautifully different. There was a glow to the sky that Satpal thought might be due to layers of dust or moisture in the atmosphere. It cast a faint red light across the night-time landscape, painting the triangle of visible sky with an arterial-blood smear. Below that, the hillside was the colour of good port, shadows hiding behind boulders and short, squat trees. They’d broken through (Eased through, Jonah would have said, probed through, nothing’s broken) into a small valley, and the hindered view they had of this place gave little away.

There were no signs of habitation. That had disturbed Holly to begin with, but the idea of the multiverse allowed for all possibilities. Just as there were other Earths that would be inhabited by people very much like them, so there would be worlds where life had never begun, or had evolved differently, or where the subtle leap to intelligence and consciousness had not been made. There are countless possibilities, Jonah had told them all weeks before. And we have no way to steer. What they had accomplished was the crowning achievement in humankind’s technical exploration of existence, but Jonah likened it to walking blindly onto a beach at night and plucking up a grain of sand at random. There was no way they could target a particular particle, especially as they had no idea which grains existed.

This grain, Gaia, might be paradise, she thought. Soon after making their first observations, Melinda had named the world Gaia and it had stuck. And for Holly, the idea that beyond the breach was just one possible Mother Earth out of a limitless number did not detract from its wonder. If anything, it was more wondrous, and it got her to thinking about why they had forged through to this particular possibility.

During the day the distant hillside was a flower-speckled wonderland, with swathes of purple and pink blooms huddled low among the larger bramble and wild rose bushes and the graceful curls of tall ferns. Birds fluttered from tree to tree, and higher up they’d seen larger, more obscure shapes gliding on thermals, barely flapping their wings. Small rodents rooted around in the vegetation. A stream flowed through the shallow valley, turning left a hundred feet from the breach and continuing out of sight. It was beautiful, and though no one had seen anything shockingly alien or unknown all of them could sense a difference about the place. This was somewhere further away than anyone could imagine or even conceive, brought close enough to touch. When Vic had shown a smuggled-out photograph of the place to his six-year-old daughter Olivia, he said she’d called it ‘all wrong’, broken out in goose bumps, and started crying.