Survival Game

by Gary Gibson

  A distant boom rolled through the still air, and Jerry’s hand stiffened on my shoulder. We waited, but heard nothing more.

  Jerry shrugged. ‘See what I mean? Sooner we get started, the sooner we can get out of here.’

  We got down on hands and knees and began sifting through the dust with our gloves. After a while, we took turns holding the torch while the other sifted through the dirt. I was very nearly ready to give up when Jerry spotted something.

  ‘Hey, is that . . . ?’

  I held the torch higher as he squatted lower on his haunches. He pulled a glove off, then reached down, his fingers folding around something I couldn’t see.

  I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but it was too late. He became quite still, his face turned towards the ground in such a way that I couldn’t see his expression.

  ‘Jerry?’

  I moved closer to him.

  He took a sudden, sharp breath, falling back onto the dusty cobbles and blinking hard.

  ‘What?’ I asked in alarm as he scrabbled upright once more. ‘What did you see?’

  He pressed a wrist to his eyes. ‘I’m . . . I’m not sure. Look – there’s more of them.’

  I kneeled by his side, and saw nearly a dozen more beads scattered all around, dully reflecting the light of our torch. I took off a glove and used it to carefully sweep them all into the box.

  ‘My turn,’ I said, nodding at the bead Jerry still held in his hand.

  He dropped it into my hand, and I was somewhere else.

  His name (I knew somehow) was Lars Ulven, a Syllogikos scientist. He – I – was talking to a short, stocky man with thinning hair, and who wore heavy dark clothes of a type I had never seen before. They were standing together in some kind of vault. There was something terribly familiar about that vault, although I couldn’t yet quite put my finger on it.

  The two men were speaking, and I had the curious experience of seeing through another person’s eyes as they spoke in a language I only barely understood and had never heard spoken aloud. Lars beckoned to his companion, then led him across the vault.

  I suddenly realized with a deep thrill of shock just where they were: in the underground complex on Delta Twenty-Five. Lars was looking in the direction of the very same row of cradles I had seen on video shot by a drone – except this time, every one of the cradles was occupied by a Hypersphere.

  And Lars Ulven, I again somehow knew, was the man who had first discovered them – right there on Delta Twenty-Five.

  The memory faded at that point. I blinked and looked around until I saw Jerry.

  ‘Those things,’ he said. ‘They’re the same as the Beachball, right? The Hypersphere?’

  I nodded, and Jerry chuckled and shook his head. ‘You’ve made the find of the century, Katya. Of the goddam century!’

  We took turns holding the rest of the beads in turn, while the other kept watch. And together, we gradually realized, they told the separate pieces of a complete story.

  Every one of them contained recordings of the memories of a single individual – Lars Ulven. Beyond some basic biographical information, such as his name and the facts regarding certain of his discoveries, lay only a kind of fog that obscured any deeper memories. One bead showed several Hyperspheres being loaded onto the flying machine whose wreckage I had glimpsed at Site B.

  Another bead showed me a Hypersphere linked up to a transfer stage, on which Lars stood with half a dozen others, all of them talking animatedly. He reached out and touched the artefact, and there was a blaze of light as he and his companions were transported to some alternate it had selected for them. He was explaining to them that the civilization on Delta Twenty-Five had not in fact created the Hyperspheres – that they, in their own turn, had acquired the artefacts from elsewhere.

  But where, I wondered?

  I found my answer soon enough, as I handled more of the beads, and the story proved to be considerably darker and stranger than I could ever have suspected.

  One bead let me see through Lars’ eyes as he stood on a broad expanse of green grass. Kites flew overhead, enormous constructions of alabaster and gold that spun slowly at the ends of cables rooted to the ground. The kites were massive – the size of buildings. In fact, the bead by some means informed me, they were buildings. Higher still, I saw a vast moon, much closer to the Earth than on any alternate I had yet visited, and I was stunned to realize that cables extended towards it as well – a great tangled nest reaching up from somewhere beyond the horizon like an enormous umbilical.

  I saw more of the black octahedral ships, falling through holes torn in that other sky. I could feel Lars’ anguish as he stared up at them.

  And then, through whatever uncanny means the beads employed, I knew that the strange black ships had come from the Deeps.

  The Deeps: both the name, and the concept, were familiar to me from fragments and pieces of records recovered from abandoned Syllogikos bases. If one were to program randomly generated coordinates into a transfer stage at a rate of one every second, an alternate capable of supporting human life might be found once every fifteen million years. As for all the failed coordinates, no one knew where they led – if anywhere – because no one who had stepped onto a stage and attempted to use them had ever returned.

  The assumption was that these failed coordinates led to universes with different physical constants, or with many more physical dimensions, or perhaps even universes not yet born. The only certainty was that they were places where human life – perhaps even physical matter as we knew it – simply could not exist. The Syllogikos had called these the Deeps, and thought of them as a bottomless and perhaps unknowable ocean, devoid of life or even the possibility of life, while the sum total of alternates that could support life amounted, by comparison, to little more than a cosmic tidal pool.

  But Lars (the bead showed me) knew better. He had studied the ruins of the civilization on Delta Twenty-Five and discovered it had somehow made contact with intelligent life that originated from within the Deeps. That life, strange and incomprehensible though it might be, used the Hyperspheres to navigate between parallel realities.

  Then, by some means, Delta Twenty-Five’s inhabitants had got hold of some of those Hyperspheres. Indeed, Lars believed they had stolen them, for the civilization had been wiped out, perhaps in retaliation, leaving no more evidence of their passing than the ruins Jerry and I had stumbled across.

  By now, my hands were trembling, but I managed to pick up another bead, afraid though I was of what I might learn.

  This time, Lars was standing on an enormous transfer stage, crowded with hundreds of people, all of them tired, dirty and scared-looking. He stood close to the stage’s ramp, a woman by his side – the same one that had been with him when he watched a little girl run across a field. The woman was older now, with flecks of grey in her hair.

  The stage was ringed by armed guards, struggling to keep at bay a great crowd of many thousands more. The air was full of their frightened baying.

  A section of the crowd surged forward, swarming past the armed men with ease. Lars reached out to take hold of the woman’s hand and tried to fight his way closer to the centre of the stage. A great surge of humanity came rushing up the ramp. Lars lost hold of the woman’s hand. Just before the memory faded, I saw her stumble and fall from the edge of the stage . . .

  I picked up another bead, and experienced Lars’ joy when he and a group of explorers first found the Hyperspheres, and his increasing excitement as they carried out their first, tentative experiments with the devices. He had subsequently returned to Delta Twenty-Five on numerous occasions to search for clues to what had caused that elder race to vanish, unaware that one day, his own people would meet the same fate.

  When Lars had recorded these more recent memories, he had been determined to impress one overriding fact onto the beads: his absolute certainty that using the Hyperspheres had somehow doomed the Syllogikos, much as it had doomed that earlier civilization. />
  But there was, I learned, a small ray of hope: so long as a Hypersphere remained uncalibrated and unused, it also remained dormant – undetectable to the creatures that created them. But once activated and used, the invaders could track it anywhere in the multiverse.

  I understood then that if Borodin took a Hypersphere back home to the Tsar, it would undoubtedly be used – and the Empire and all its Republics would be doomed.

  And somehow, I had to stop him before he did.

  I dropped the final bead into the box and sat back on my haunches, numb. Jerry stared in silence off into the darkness.

  ‘So,’ he asked eventually, ‘what do you make of all that?’

  I laughed bitterly. ‘What is there I could say that the beads haven’t said already?’

  ‘Did you see how some of those people had strings of these beads around their necks?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But do you think it’s really true?’ he asked. ‘That using the Hyperspheres is the reason the Stage-Builders disappeared?’

  ‘Lars Ulven certainly seemed to believe so.’ I pictured those same monstrous black ships, falling through the skies above my home in First Republic Moscow, and shuddered.

  ‘So.’ Jerry stood on unsteady legs. ‘At least now we know never to go near the damn things. But how on Earth could just using them cause those . . . things to appear?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said, also standing.

  But I was already thinking about the possible reasons even as we headed back to continue our original plan.

  We were halfway back to the transfer stage when the lights went out.

  ‘Well, shit,’ said Jerry, coming to a halt. ‘Damn generator’s always acting up.’ He flicked on his torch and shone it around, until it showed the nearest arc light on its pole. ‘Ah, fuck.’

  ‘What is it?’

  He swung his torch around, and I saw its beam was slowly fading. ‘Now this damn thing’s running out of juice as well.’

  ‘Then let’s not waste any time,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not try and find our way back in the dark.’

  ‘Yeah, agreed,’ he muttered, and we started to move faster. ‘But it’s mostly a straight line back from here.’

  Even so, we picked up our pace again, enough so that despite the freezing temperatures, I began to grow warm inside my heavy parka.

  After several minutes the torch stuttered, faded, and finally went out entirely. We came to a halt again, both of us panting hard. We had been walking as fast as we could without breaking into a run.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he gasped. I felt his hand touch my arm. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’ he asked with forced levity.

  ‘How in God’s name do you intend to program the stage, if you can’t even see it?’ I demanded.

  ‘There’ll be another torch in one of those supplies crates,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t take too—’

  The ground shook beneath our feet, gently at first, and then with increasing violence. I heard a crack like distant thunder, and then another, and another, following one after the other like gunshots. I coughed as dust swirled up around us.

  A distant rumble began to grow in volume.

  ‘That,’ said Jerry, ‘does not sound good.’

  I looked back over my shoulder, to where I could see faint patches of glowing bacteria clinging to the roof of the cavern above the lake. As I watched, I saw some of these patches dissolve, as if the cavern roof was coming apart.

  Great, shuddering shocks ran through the ground beneath our feet, followed by even greater booms and crashes that made my heart falter.

  ‘I don’t know which way to go,’ Jerry shouted.

  We had become disoriented. I looked around wildly, then realized I could just make out the outline of the statue, thanks to the bioluminescent bacteria that also clung to the cavern roof above it.

  ‘This way,’ I yelled, grabbing hold of him. ‘We need to get to the bridge.’

  It started to rain dust and grit, and we broke into a panicked run. The air soon became so choked with dust I could hardly draw breath. Somehow, I managed to keep the silhouette of the statue in sight.

  I stumbled as the ground slid out from beneath me without warning. I screamed, and would have fallen if Jerry hadn’t taken a tight hold of my arm. I kicked my legs and felt a rush of terror when they touched nothing but air. To one side I felt a rough stone wall.

  ‘It’s the chasm,’ Jerry grunted. I couldn’t see his face, even though it must have been right next to mine. ‘We missed the bridge in the dark.’

  I reached up with my free hand until I found him. ‘Can you take my weight?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, sounding as if he was under immense strain. ‘Just let’s try and get you back up.’

  I pressed the toes of my boots against the chasm wall until I found some small purchase. Jerry wrapped both arms around my shoulders in an embrace, hauling me the rest of the way upwards. His breath hissed between his teeth as he lifted.

  I crawled back onto flat ground, my lungs working like pistons.

  ‘Let’s take it a little more carefully now,’ he said. ‘I think the worst of the tremors have passed.’

  My heart was still thudding hard as I pushed myself upright. ‘What about the bridge? Is it still there?’

  ‘Yeah. I think so. I can see a little better now. I think we missed it by just a couple of metres.’

  We held on to each other as we stumbled along the edge of the invisible precipice until we reached the Bailey bridge. It was still intact, and we quickly made our way across. Before long we had rounded the statue and were approaching the camp.

  ‘Shit. Did you hear that?’ whispered Jerry.

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘Jesus. Almost thought I heard voices.’ He laughed nervously. ‘I’m letting the damn place get to me, is all.’

  I heard something move to one side of me.

  ‘Hey, Nadia – is that y—?’

  His sentence ended in a grunt.

  ‘Jerry?’ I asked in a panic.

  No answer came.

  ‘Jerry?’ I called out. ‘Jerry!’

  A hand gripped my shoulder from behind, while another clamped itself over my mouth, bending my head backwards.

  ‘Hello Katya,’ said Borodin, his voice a harsh whisper in my ear.

  SIXTEEN

  He kept his hold on me, but took his hand away from my mouth. Several torches came on, nearly blinding me. Voices called to each other in Russian.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I gasped.

  ‘Looking for you, of course,’ he said. ‘After you and Beche rowed out to that rock, I followed and checked the controls to see where you’d gone.’

  The generator suddenly roared back into life, and the arc lights flickered on. Jerry was kneeling on the ground, looking dazed, while two Novaya soldiers with night-vision goggles pushed up on top of their heads stood guard over him. Jerry had a free-flowing cut on his forehead where one of them must have struck him.

  ‘You were following us?’

  One of the soldiers handed Jerry’s notebook to Borodin. Borodin grinned with evident satisfaction.

  ‘On the contrary, I was watching Mr Beche’s house, and waiting for an opportunity to take his notebook.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I was listening from just outside his window, Katya, the whole time you were talking with him and that other woman. I heard everything you said.’

  I stared at him. ‘Then you know they were looking for you too.’

  ‘And not very successfully, I might add.’

  He barked an order, and one of the soldiers removed a gun from his holster and passed it to Borodin. He pressed it against my ribs and marched me next to the transfer stage.

  How long had we been hunting through the shadows for beads? Long enough, it seemed, for Borodin to make use of the Pathfinder’s secret stage to travel back to the Crag to round up some of Herr Frank’s men, all without fear of interference.

  ‘Borodin,’ I said, ‘there’
s something very important I have to tell you. I—’

  He swung the pistol back and slammed it, hard, across the side of my face. I felt my teeth click together, and tasted blood.

  ‘Shut up and be grateful you’re still alive!’ he bellowed. ‘You’re going to help me retrieve the Hypersphere or, God help me, I will not be responsible for the consequences!’

  He gestured to one of the soldiers, then pointed at Jerry. ‘Take this prisoner back to the Crag now and place him in the interrogation block. Is that understood?’

  The soldier nodded and helped Jerry to stand before putting a pair of cuffs over his wrists. I watched as he was marched up and onto the stage.

  ‘He doesn’t know anything of use to you!’ I said.

  Borodin merely smiled enigmatically, then turned to face Jerry.

  ‘Mr Beche,’ he said, while Jerry stared back at him with a stunned expression, ‘you are now a prisoner of the Novo-Rossiyskaya Imperiya. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other.’

  I watched as the stage filled with light. A moment later, both the soldier and Jerry had vanished.

  Then I did something that surprised me just as much as it did Borodin: I pressed one hand against his chest in a gesture that was almost intimate.

  ‘You have to listen to me,’ I said, with as much earnestness as I could muster, ‘and listen very carefully. If we take the Hypersphere back to the Crag with us – worse, back to the Empire – it’s going to destroy us.’

  Borodin, looking more befuddled than angry at my behaviour, batted my hand away. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I came here to find the rest of those beads. We handled them, Borodin: they’re a warning, left by a Syllogikos scientist, not to use the Hypersphere. It’s the reason they all vanished. Here . . .’ I slid my rucksack off my shoulder and reached inside for the box, but Borodin snatched the rucksack out of my hands and pushed it at one of his men.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ he snarled at me. ‘I have access to Syllogikos records you do not. The people who died in these caverns were religious fanatics. They were outsiders, largely spurned by their civilization.’