Extinction Game (28 page)

‘He’s right,’ said Selwyn, getting up from his own seat. ‘We’re getting treated more and more like prisoners, Mr Mayer. For those that have been here the longest,
our retirement dates have been pushed back so much we’re starting to wonder if it’s ever going to come, and that’s not to mention the increased risks we’re facing on every
new mission. Asking us to submit to random interrogations and be happy about it is a step too far, I think.’

I watched as he left, somewhat less dramatically than Casey had. Yuichi soon followed suit, his expression sullen, although he clapped me on the shoulder as he passed me by.

Mayer looked around the rest of us. ‘It’s in your best interests to keep Casey in check while all this is going on,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’

He looked as if he was trying to think of something else to say, then simply shook his head and exited without another word.

I didn’t see any reason to leave until I’d finished my coffee, and the few others remaining didn’t look to be in a hurry to leave either. After a minute, people drifted outside
to the pool area, and I heard the low murmur of conversation.

Rozalia slid onto the stool next to mine. ‘So you’re still not going to tell them what we found,’ I asked her, ‘even after everything Mayer just said?’

‘I ran some tests,’ she said. ‘It’s just what I thought it was.’

‘You’re not telling me anything the both of us don’t already know.’

‘We could get accused of faking the evidence. It’s possible the SUV was scent-marked by a night patrol
after
the crash. And it’s like you said: we
don’t
have any explanation for how the drones and the communications could possibly have been screwed with. Who’d have the means to do all that, and somehow not get caught?’

‘If it was up to me,’ I said, ‘I’d tell someone anyway.’

‘Your predecessor had his reasons for not talking,’ she replied. ‘So did Nadia. Let’s try not to wind up the same way before I can figure out how to nail whichever
bastard turns out to be responsible for all this.’

‘Rozalia . . .’ I started to say.

She shook her head and put her hand on my arm. ‘First things first. Did you talk to Chloe yet?’

The question I’d been dreading. ‘I really,
really
don’t want to talk about that.’

She frowned. ‘It went that bad?’

‘You know, it might have been better if you’d just told me the truth about her and me, before I went over there and embarrassed myself.’

She shook her head. ‘Why? What did she say?’

I struggled to hold back my temper and stood. ‘Rozalia . . . good luck with finding out the truth about Nadia.’

She stared at me. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t want to be a part of this,’ I said.

‘What the hell?’ she hissed, glancing towards the pool in case anyone was watching. ‘You don’t have any choice. Christ, your life might be in danger!’

‘No, Rozalia, the
other
Jerry’s life was in danger. But I’m not him, and up until a couple of days ago, every last one of you were happy to lie to me about who and
what I was.’

Rozalia started to open her mouth, and I put up a hand to stop her. ‘I haven’t forgotten what I was told,’ I said. ‘I know that if you’d told me who I really was,
things could’ve gone bad for you. But, Jesus . . . every one of you survived a fucking
apocalypse
, and all it takes to make you roll on your collective backs are a couple of
suit-wearing nitwits with rulebooks wedged up their asses?’ I bared my teeth and laughed. ‘Tell me, Rozalia. If Oskar hadn’t lost his rag, would I even know the truth
yet?’

She stared at me in mute silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should have been more—’

‘But that’s not the worst of it,’ I interrupted. ‘Because you forgot to mention that my previous incarnation was a total fucking asshole.’

Confusion spread across her face. ‘What on Earth . . . ?’

‘He hurt Chloe,’ I said. ‘And don’t pretend you don’t know. He beat her, badly. Apparently, that’s the person I get to become after living here for a couple
of years, doing a job that makes no sense, for people who won’t tell me who they are. Well, fuck that.’ I picked up my coffee and drained the last of it. ‘Here’s
my
plan. Soon as I can find some way to escape to some place where the Authority can’t find me, I’m
gone
, do you understand? Even if it means risking a null sequence.’

My voice had risen. I backed away from her, ignoring the curious glances I was getting from out by the pool. ‘And, unless you’re crazy,’ I added before departing, ‘every
last one of you’ll find a way to do the exact same.’

Forty-eight hours later, I was back out on another mission, and still in a stinking foul mood.

I looked out and down, seeing rocky coastline half a kilometre below our plane, bordered by a beach that had been turned to fused glass by a thermonuclear detonation. The sun was invisible
behind a dense layer of ash in the upper atmosphere that was still decades away from fully precipitating back into the soil.

When I had emerged from the transfer stage just outside this alternate’s version of Phoenix, I had immediately been handed a heavy Arctic-style jacket, and been glad for it. It was
freezing cold and would remain so, I was told, for many years yet.

Haden Brooks was in the pilot’s seat, not that he seemed to be doing much piloting. In fact, I had the distinct impression that our aircraft was capable of taking off and landing at its
destination without any human intervention whatsoever, although that didn’t prevent him from summoning virtual controls that shimmered into existence around his hands. The plane also lacked
anything that looked like an engine and could, he informed me, fly for up to a decade without once refuelling.

Even among as strange and disparate a group as the Pathfinders, Haden Brooks stood out. Apart from his silvered eyes, he was pale enough that he bordered on albino, although his thinning hair
was dark and streaked with grey.

‘You ever hear of the Toba eruption?’ asked Haden.

I shook my head. ‘Nope.’

‘It happened about seventy thousand years ago, in all our shared histories,’ he explained. We’d run out of things to say a while back, but clearly Haden was determined to make
conversation. ‘It was a hundred times more powerful than Krakatoa, and it nearly wiped out the human race at the time. All that were left were a few thousand survivors, from whom we’re
all descended.’

The aircraft bucked slightly as it hit turbulence and I gripped the side of my seat. I wasn’t exactly afraid of flying, but from the outside the aircraft looked about as sturdy as a paper
kite.

‘So it was the same as the eruption that did for this alternate?’

‘Pretty much.’

Our debriefing that morning had described how the magma chamber beneath this alternate’s Yellowstone Park had erupted with enormous force, sending thousands of cubic kilometres of ash and
sulphur into the atmosphere – much as it had on the alternate on which the Nuyakpuk cousins and their many Inuit relations had managed to survive.

On this alternate, however, a second blow had been dealt by nuclear missiles launched in the immediate aftermath of the eruption. Why they had been launched, and by whom, remained a mystery, but
the added radioactive ash in the atmosphere had helped to extend and deepen the global winter to the point where we were pretty sure there were, indeed, no survivors, Inuit or otherwise.

I shook my head. ‘The thing that gets me,’ I said, ‘is all those bunkers filled with bodies.’ Several unearthed by previous exploration teams had found nothing but
corpses dead from starvation, disease, radiation poisoning, suicide, or some combination of all of the above. This, I had learned, was typical, here or on any other alternate. ‘What’s
the point of building a bunch of damn bunkers if everybody using them still winds up dead?’

‘Bunkers, in my experience,’ said Haden with a grin, ‘are
hugely
overrated.’

‘You’re on a mission with Haden?’ Yuichi had chuckled the day before, when I ran into him outside the commissary. ‘Now
there’s
a weird
one.’

‘Everybody’s been saying that ever since I came out of quarantine, but nobody’s bothered to explain it to me yet.’

‘Really?’ He looked surprised. ‘Well, for one thing, nobody knows just what happened to the alternate they found him on. It’s intact. There’s no sign or evidence of
violence, of unrest, of anything at all, really. It’s like everyone just got up one day and disappeared.’

It occurred to me that much the same could be said for the island in whose empty homes we lived, but decided not to mention that. ‘So what does he say happened?’

Yuichi shrugged. ‘He ain’t got much of an explanation himself, either,’ he replied. ‘Claims to have total amnesia. They worked him over with truth drugs, hypnosis,
everything, so I hear.’ He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t find nothing out. And then there’s the . . . you know.’ He glanced around before gesturing at his eyes.

‘Are you sure he’s not maybe just wearing contacts of some kind?’

‘
Very
sure. He got worked over by the doctors at the base compound.’

I shook my head and chuckled. ‘So maybe he’s an alien.’

Yuichi looked alarmed. ‘
Don’t
ever say that around Casey or Wallace. The pair of them are total conspiracy nuts. They love all that shit.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘what’s your opinion of him?’

‘Who cares? The universe is full of mysteries. I like it that way. Makes life more interesting, don’t you think?’

‘There we go,’ said Haden, after some hours of flight. ‘Destination in sight.’

I woke with a start, unaware I had fallen asleep. Brightly coloured controls hovered beneath Haden’s fingertips, spun out of light. The aircraft had begun to angle downwards on its final
approach.

I mumbled something and blinked sleep out of my eyes before looking out and down at Salt Lake City’s empty streets. Our destination was the University of Utah’s seismic research lab,
from which we were required to retrieve data regarding the Yellowstone eruption.

‘Don’t you ever wonder what the point of all this is?’ I asked. The plane dipped down more, and Haden leaned back, dismissing the controls. I tried not to show how nervous that
made me.

He grinned. ‘You sure are persistent, I’ll give you that. Most of the rest of us gave up asking questions like that long ago.’

‘Why do the Authority care about what happened here? Why do they even need to
know
any of this stuff?’

‘Maybe they just want to avoid making the same mistakes these people did,’ he said.

And yet, from the way he looked at me, I felt sure he felt the same dissatisfaction.

A day or so later I was back home, the useless data retrieved and our entirely pointless mission accomplished. I had kept waiting throughout for something to go wrong. It
didn’t, and I was again reminded just how much of an anomaly my first couple of missions had been, compared to most.

As soon as I got back, I walked into the Hotel du Mauna Loa to get something to eat and found the Godzilla movie had been changed for
No Blade of Grass
, directed by Cornel Wilde. I
watched Nigel Davenport fleeing a motorbike gang across a desolate wasteland as I ate. Winifred and Selwyn were playing Go at a table, and I sipped at a tumbler of grapefruit juice, having lost my
taste for alcohol.

Randall Pimms came stomping into the bar just as the film finished. He wore heavy boots, camouflage gear and a fur-trimmed parka, his face streaked with dirt.

‘Jerry!’ Randall cried, clapping me on the shoulder. Winifred flashed him a dirty look from across the room, annoyed to lose her concentration. ‘I swear to God, I’ve been
dreaming about beer for the last couple days. Fancy getting me one?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and filled a glass from one of the bottles of home-brew, while Randall hauled himself onto a stool beside my own. I handed the drink to him and watched him swallow
most of it down in one go.

‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked, studying the parka. ‘Somewhere cold?’

‘Somewhere hot!’ he exclaimed.

‘Doesn’t that make you a little overdressed?’

He shook his head. ‘Nope. Most of the time we were down in subterranean caverns.
Damned
cold down there.’

He went on to tell me – and, soon enough, Winifred and Selwyn – about the alternate he had just returned from. Its sun had expanded, starting some time in the Middle Ages in our
respective alternates. Much of the surface had been reduced to a lifeless desert beneath the parching heat, but a few tens of millions, despite having to rely on essentially medieval technology,
had nonetheless dug deep into the Earth. He described cathedrals and palaces carved into the deep rock over long centuries, and entire cities on a scale to dwarf the Pyramids of Giza, dug deep
beneath the earth – much as the Icelanders had done with their Retreat. But then, it seemed, the oceans had themselves turned to desert, and the people had all died, leaving only their cities
as monuments to their struggle.

‘It sounds utterly amazing,’ I said, meaning it. I wondered if I might ever get to visit there. ‘Who were you there with?’

‘Oskar, Chloe, Wallace.’

Chloe
. ‘Did she come back at the same time as you?’

‘Well, sure. I . . .’

‘I have to go,’ I said, standing and heading for the door.

I thought I heard Selwyn call after me, but I didn’t stop.

I had to find her, and hope she was willing to tell me the truth about my predecessor.

Chloe was in front of her house when I got there just ten minutes later, a rucksack by the door. Like Randall, her clothes were caked with dirt, and she was in the process of
pulling off a heavy parka. She did a literal double-take when she saw me, and I could see her mentally weighing the pros and cons of engaging with me. I was still breathing hard from running all
the way across town.

I put up a hand. ‘I’m not here to cause any trouble,’ I said. ‘But I need to talk to you about the diaries.’