Extinction Game (7 page)

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you tell me the status of the dig team?’

‘Ma’am?’ When the reply came, whoever was speaking had lowered his voice a little, as if he was trying not to be overheard. ‘Comms Officer Levin here. From what I hear,
there are three people still down inside the Retreat.’

‘Who, exactly?’ Nadia demanded. ‘Are any of them Pathfinders?’

‘At least one,’ came the reply.

‘Did anyone radio them? Or—’

‘We did earlier, but they stopped responding to our calls. We don’t know why. Plus, the below-ground relay’s down,’ Levin replied. ‘Can’t tell you what their
status is, but the Commander’s adamant that anyone who can, should prioritize coming back to the base. As for anyone down below . . . I’m sorry.’

Nadia slapped the dashboard hard with one gloved hand, cutting the connection. ‘Fucking
asshole
,’ she said. ‘Commander Barnes, I mean.’

‘Who?’

‘The guy in charge of the Forward Base on this alternate,’ she said by way of explanation.

She was facing away from me, but I could see her face reflected in the narrow windscreen before her. She was staring off into the darkness outside, her face pale and drawn.

‘So what happens now?’ I asked.

She leaned back in her chair and drummed her fingers on the dashboard. ‘Can’t leave them down there, Jerry.’

I looked out at the blackness and saw my own reflection staring back as well. ‘You want to go down there,’ I said, my bowels feeling as if they had turned to water. ‘What do
you think happened?’

‘I have no idea,’ she replied, looking distracted. She started the EV’s engine and reached for the wheel, then paused and turned to look at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I . . . wasn’t thinking. There’s somebody down there who’s very dear to me, Jerry. I can’t leave them there, not if
they’re in some kind of trouble. I’d take you back first, but the moment I roll this EV back into the garage, no way is Barnes going to let me take it back out again.’

‘Would Barnes really stop you? Even if it meant abandoning those people down there?’

She nodded. ‘He probably thinks he’s being a pragmatist,’ she replied. ‘But I don’t leave our people behind, Jerry. You, me, and all the rest of the Pathfinders
– we watch out for each other.’

I came to a sudden decision. ‘Then let’s go find them,’ I said.

She turned her seat on its pivot until she was fully facing me. ‘You need to understand this isn’t something you have to do, Jerry. You have a right to ask me to keep you safe from
harm. And, just to be absolutely clear about this – I’m talking about disobeying a direct order. I don’t know what kind of consequences that’s going to have for either of
us.’

I licked my lips. ‘But if I ask you to take me back to the Forward Base and anything happens to those other people, it’d be my fault.’

‘And if I take you down there and anything happened to
you
. . .’

‘Then you’d know it was my decision to go,’ I said firmly. ‘We go down there.’

I couldn’t read her expression as she studied me. ‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘I know I’m asking a lot.’

I shook my head. ‘Just promise me this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time.’

She chuckled and shook her head. ‘It really, really doesn’t. I swear.’

‘In return,’ I said, ‘maybe you can tell me some things.’

‘Sure,’ she said guardedly. ‘Mind if I drive while we talk?’

I nodded, and strapped myself into the passenger seat as Nadia swung back around and reached for the controls. I hoped to hell I wasn’t about to get myself killed, barely a month after my
miraculous rescue, but by the time that thought crossed my mind we were already rolling across the barren landscape at speed, and it was much too late to change my mind.

‘Every time I ask Schultner who or what the Authority actually are, he just blanks me,’ I said after a minute. Ernest Schultner gave me daily one-on-one briefings on everything I
needed to know to survive as a Pathfinder. ‘And, yes, I do remember you warning me that’s what they’d do. But you or Yuichi or some of the others I’ve met so far must have
figured out at least some things.’

‘Nope.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry to disappoint you. The Authority come from some other alternate that figured out how to travel between parallel universes, and they’ve
ultimately got some kind of goal. But they’re anything but willing to tell us what it is.’

‘What about the stuff we’re supposed to retrieve?’ I asked. ‘Can you work anything out from all of that?’

‘Christ, no. There are machines, computers and a bunch of stuff that I can’t make head or tail of. Sometimes we’re sent to retrieve data – computer disks, hard drives,
that kind of thing.’

‘And always,’ I noted, ‘from parallels that underwent an extinction event. Have you ever been somewhere that
wasn’t
like that? That hasn’t been blown to
smithereens, or had its atmosphere sucked away, or whatever?’

‘Nope,’ she replied.

‘So none of you really knows anything?’

She chuckled, then reached to one side, patting my thigh with one hand. ‘It’s good to have you back, Jerry.’

I frowned. ‘“Back”?’

She blinked rapidly, then shook her head, smiling brightly. ‘Jesus, listen to me. I’ve got cobwebs in the brain. Good to have you
here
, I meant.’

This is what I had learned from Ernest Schultner during my most recent mission briefing, when he sketched out the broad details by which this particular alternate had met its
end.

Some years before, a brown dwarf star had entered this world’s solar system. Over a period of several years, that ball of cold inert gas, not much smaller than Neptune, had crossed the
ecliptic plane at a steep angle before becoming caught in the sun’s gravity well. It had looped around the sun once and was then thrown back towards the outer reaches of the solar system.

On its way back out, this dwarf star – named Shiva by the astronomers tracking its progress – had passed close enough to Earth to yank it out of its normal orbit and send it slowly
spiralling outwards, into a new orbit that lay much, much farther from the sun. They’d known almost from the moment Shiva showed up in their lenses just what was coming to them. And once it
became public knowledge, anyone with a rudimentary grasp of orbital mechanics was able to come to the same conclusion: their world was coming to a terrible end.

When it finally happened, being literally dragged out of its regular orbit triggered unprecedented earthquakes right across the globe. Schultner had shown me recovered footage of vast tsunamis
sweeping across continents, of terrible storms ravaging cities all over the planet. The few who lived through it got to enjoy the slow freeze that followed as the sun grew dimmer and more distant
with every passing day.

Amongst these people were a few who had been preparing for survival almost as soon as Shiva was first detected on the extreme edge of the solar system. The Icelandic government in particular had
thrown its every resource into digging deep subterranean shafts and caverns to shelter its populace indefinitely.

Once you knew a few salient facts about the geography and underlying topography of Iceland, the actions of that country’s citizens made perfect sense. Their island home had certain
properties that made it ideal for surviving even such a catastrophe: it straddled two continental plates and was dotted with a spectacular number of volcanoes, many of them active.

Like the Iceland of my own alternate, it had long since capitalized on this source of free geothermal energy to heat and power its homes. By the time Shiva loomed in their skies like the
harbinger of death it was named after, most of the island’s citizenry had already relocated into the deep artificial caverns – heated and powered by that same geothermal energy.

Unfortunately for them, however, survivors in other parts of the world – mostly military, and mostly in command either of deep underground bunkers or nuclear submarines – decided
they wanted those caverns for themselves. Whatever it took. They sailed for Iceland even as the temperatures plummeted, armed with weapons of inconceivable destructive power.

The Icelanders had never stood a chance.

Nadia took us around the edge of the abyssal shaft, and before long we were rolling down the steep-angled road that looped around the edges of the shaft. Some of the mountains
on the outskirts of Reykjavik’s ruins were, in fact, nothing more than mounds of excavated dirt. On the way down we passed numerous abandoned vehicles that had been used during the
excavation.

It took a full twenty minutes before we finally reached the bottom of the shaft and the first enormous door, designed to seal the city within from the harsh environment without. Someone had used
nukes to blow through those doors – the Americans, perhaps, or the Russians, or possibly even some other faction within the multilateral navy whose ships were still moored in the frozen sea
off the coast.

This hadn’t worked out well for the invaders, or the people they were invading. From the presence of their tanks, armoured cars and other weapons of war, it was clear that this army of
nations had succeeded in taking the caverns from the native Icelanders, killing a substantial portion of their population in the process. Then, so far as anyone could tell, they had set about
killing each other. In the process, they had done sufficient damage to the Retreat to ensure that no one was going to survive the big freeze.

We trundled on down the sloping floor of a long tunnel. The twin cones of light from our headlights were sharp edged in the vacuum. Soon the tunnel widened into an enormous cavern, its walls and
roof invisible beyond the beams of light. I knew that the buildings and living spaces all through the vaults were filled with frozen corpses in their tens of thousands, and the thought of so many
dead – and so many ghosts – made my skin prickle with horror.

I peered nervously into the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights. ‘So what is it particularly the Authority were looking for on this alternate?’ I asked. ‘Did they tell
you?’

‘Officially,’ she said, ‘all I know is that they’re looking for scientific data of some kind.’

I looked at her. ‘“Officially”?’

She gave me a sly grin. ‘I’ll get to that. See, back when they started building their underground Retreat, the Icelanders on this alternate had the bright idea of inviting a bunch of
really smart people from other parts of the world to come live in it with them. After Shiva showed up in their telescopes, a lot of people around the world decided to blame the scientists, as if
they’d somehow caused it. Most of the very people who just might have been able to figure some way out of the mess they were all in wound up being hanged or burned alive on the grounds of
universities.’

‘Delightful.’

‘Anyway, among these scientist refugees was a guy by name of Hilbert Lake, who had led a research team involved in some kind of really cutting-edge physics research. He and his team all
upped and came to Iceland when they got the invite, except they ended up getting killed during the invasion.’

‘Ernest Schultner never told me any of this during my last briefing,’ I said.

‘That’s because I’m not supposed to know any of this.’

‘So how . . . ?’

‘Well,’ she said in a faux-conspiratorial whisper, ‘I heard something from Winnie, who heard it from a guy called Wallace.’

‘Winnie? You mean Winifred Quaker?’ Winifred was one of the Pathfinders I had met, although I was still to meet a few who were off on various long-term missions. They had been absent
from the island base since before my arrival.

Nadia nodded, and it occurred to me that the headlights were now doing a better job of illuminating the cavern than they had just moments before. ‘Wallace is another Pathfinder. It seems
he was in the base compound back on Easter Island, helping them sort out some computer network problem. He overheard your man Ernest Schultner talking to Kip Mayer . . .’

‘And Mayer is . . . ?’

‘Second-in-Command to Mort Bramnik. Bramnik’s the man in charge of the whole Easter Island Forward Base.’ Another I hadn’t yet encountered. ‘Anyway,’ she
continued, ‘from what Wallace overheard, it sounded like Lake and his team had been working on a prototype transfer stage.’

‘You mean they were building something they could use to escape to a parallel universe?’

‘Yep.’

I frowned. ‘That’s incredible,’ I said. ‘But the Authority already have transfer stages. They can already travel to parallel realities. Why would they need someone
else’s research?’

She shrugged. ‘Just do me a favour and don’t ask Schultner, or we’re all in big trouble.’

‘But—’

‘Just remember what Yuichi and I explained back at the start – play your part, don’t complain too much, and
especially
don’t ask too many questions and one day
we all get to retire to somewhere nice and safe.’ She frowned. ‘Is it just me, or is it getting brighter in here?’

After taking me on their grand tour of the multiverse, Nadia and Yuichi had ushered me into the Hotel du Mauna Loa, back on Easter Island – the place from which Yuichi
had shot me with a tranquillizer dart a second time as I tried to evade capture. Here, they explained to me what retirement was.

The Hotel du Mauna Loa was a dilapidated hotel bar that functioned as a gathering point for the Pathfinders. It also catered to a few other survivors whom the Authority had contacted on other
alternates, such as Tony Nuyakpuk. The Authority staff, by contrast, tended to keep clear of the place. I had a feeling, based on what I’d heard and seen, that they were under orders not to
fraternize with us. Maybe their bosses were afraid they’d let something slip about the Authority after a couple of drinks.

On that particular day, however, the bar had been deserted, apart from one man who turned out to be Tony Nuyakpuk’s cousin. Jim Nuyakpuk’s job, it seemed, was to cook and clean as
well as tend the bar – although it was clear from his conversation with the other two that he sometimes went on missions himself.