“Yes.” Julie was beginning to sound just slightly impatient with her. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“But … hang on. I’ve been to time line four.” The safe room in the clinic had been located in that time line. So was Camp Graceland. “Isn’t it uninhabited?”
“Yes! At least, it’s uninhabited now. We’re going to Camp Singularity, in the Valley.”
“But if they’re—are there ruins?”
“You bet,” said Julie, her voice rising slightly to match her fervor. “It’s every archaeologist’s dream, and more besides. You won’t believe your eyes!”
CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020
Camp Singularity was another DHS installation, a grim little cluster of prefab buildings huddled behind fences and surveillance cams that straddled the ridgeline of a forest valley. The trees were mostly conifers, dark green and spiny, and the weather was chill. A New England autumn transplanted to the latitude of Baltimore in early summer.
By early afternoon, Rita had been checked in and assigned sleeping quarters, and had caught a late lunch with Julie—not a terribly sociable affair, despite the latter’s attempts at conversation. As Rita deposited her tray at the collection point, Julie was checking her glasses. “Come on,” she said. “Time for the tour.”
There was a compact SUV waiting outside. Julie swung up into the driver’s seat; Rita took the passenger side. They bumped off toward the edge of the asphalt apron, then onto a dirt track that meandered toward the radar dishes and guard tower at the gatehouse. Rita finally cracked. “Is it far?”
“Just a couple of miles, but it’s a bumpy ride.”
“Why not put the camp on top of, of whatever it is we’re going to?”
“You’ll see.”
They bumped and jounced down a narrow trail between trees. Once Julie had to back up, then pull over to let a returning pickup truck swagger past, its load bed tarped down and bulging with something or other. The driver, Rita noted, was wearing battle dress and body armor. She suddenly felt underdressed, unprepared. She’d surreptitiously bookmarked the knotspace coordinates of the para-time transport facility back in Maryland, but this chilly, heavily wooded valley worried her. There was no telling whether she’d be able to jaunt back to Earth prime from this place if … if anything went wrong, God forbid.
Finally the track widened and turned out into a clear-cut dirt vehicle park. A low-loader bearing a huge generator squatted at one side, suckling on a fat pipe. “Okay, end of the road. We walk from here.” Julie parked beside a row of other cars. Rita climbed out and followed her to the checkpoint. The guards here were armored up, their helmet visors mirroring her approach. “Dr. Straker and Rita Douglas for Colonel Smith,” Julie called, holding up her ID badge. After a second, Rita followed suit.
“Approach and ID, ma’am.” The guard was politely impersonal, but kept his rifle ready and didn’t blink until Rita and Julie lit up green on the inside of his network terminal. “Okay, you can go right in.” He waved them past the barrier. “Ms. Douglas hasn’t been here before, have you? You’ll need to take her through the robing room, Dr. Straker.”
“I’ll do that,” Julie promised.
“Dr. Straker?” Rita asked, looking at her askance.
“Yes: archaeological science. Camp Singularity is my main posting. It’s where I did my PhD. Unfortunately my thesis is classified, otherwise I’d give you a copy…”
It was too much to absorb: bubbleheaded blonde to DHS agent to scientist in one hour flat. “What was that about a robing room?” Rita asked, trailing after her.
“We need protective gear before we enter the dome—”
“The dome?”
Julie grinned at her. “I said there were ruins, didn’t I? I just didn’t say what kind of ruins.”
“But—a dome?” Confused visions of cathedrals and igloos spun in her mind.
“Yes: a high-tech one. Ancient high-tech, and still contaminated with long half-life fallout. It’s okay—we just use disposable overshoes and bunny suits. But you don’t want to eat or drink anything in here.”
“It’s radioactive?”
“Yeah, but it’s not as bad as the sarcophagus at Chernobyl…”
The path wandered between trees and came to an abrupt terminus in the shape of a three-story stack of prefab container offices, behind which loomed a white concrete dome the size of a football stadium. “What the f—hell?”
“Welcome to the dome!” Julie was annoyingly smug. “Let’s hit the robing room and get you set up. Then I can show you around.”
CAMP SINGULARITY, TIME LINE FOUR, JULY 2020
As Julie and the Colonel had intimated, the dome was a headfuck. Worse: as it all sank in, Rita found it raised more questions than it answered.
“Who built it?” she asked Julie.
A shrug. “Nobody knows. Not us, not anyone from our time line. Sure as hell wasn’t the Clan world-walkers, though. We call them the forerunners, because they were building nuclear reactors back when the Romans were building water wheels.”
“Are there any”—she swallowed, staring at the carefully gridded-out archaeological excavations around the trashed buildings that lined the northern quadrant of the dome—“people?” Remains, she nearly said.
“Yes.” Julie’s expression through her faceplate was somber. “There were. They were all moved to the forensic lab years ago, though. This is just about a museum-quality preservation site now. The real action is behind the curtain wall over there.”
The curtain wall looked recent, illuminated in merciless shadow-free detail by the huge floodlights the excavation team had suspended from the roof. The Camp Singularity archaeologists had installed it to surround something within. Julie referred to it obliquely as the capital-G Gate while they were robing up in their antiradiation suits. The suits were white plastic, with canned air supplies to protect them from any dust that might have been kicked up by human activities here. “What’s it there to contain?”
“It’s the security cordon around the Gate airlocks. Which are there to hold in the air.” Julie lumbered round to face Rita. “When they first found this place, the entire valley was full of mist. I mean, clear blue sky above and freaky thick fog down below, like something out of a Stephen King movie. The first crew into the valley found the air pressure dropping. When they got to the dome, there was a gale blowing through the crack in its side”—the dome had been breached by some long-ago catastrophe—“and the air pressure was well below half a bar. The first job they had was to figure out how to plug the Gate before it sucked the entire atmosphere away.”
“Wait—a gate? What kind of gate?”
“You’ll see for yourself,” Julie said. “But anyway, that was twelve years ago.”
“They found this place twelve years ago?”
Julie nodded clumsily, emphatically. “C’mon. It’s really quite something.” She led Rita forward, delivering a running commentary all the way.