by Gary Gibson
I looked between them and laughed, the sound edging towards hysteria. ‘Just to be clear – you’re telling me you’re the last man and woman on Earth, but from different Earths?’
‘It’s not quite that simple,’ said Yuichi, ‘but close enough.’
‘You’re here,’ said Nadia, ‘because we’re recruiting. There are about a dozen of us, and we all learned how to survive for very long periods of time in extremely hostile environments. In the eyes of the Authority, that makes us uniquely qualified for the kind of work they ask us to do.’
‘And the Authority are who, exactly?’
‘That’s where it gets complicated,’ said Nadia, folding her arms. ‘We don’t really know.’
I blinked, unsure at first I had heard her correctly. ‘You don’t know?’
‘We know they invented the transfer stage technology,’ she continued. ‘But they keep their cards close to their chest about anything else. What matters is that they rescued us from our various alternates and gave us a chance at a new life, when a lot of us had every reason to believe we would never set eyes on another living human being ever again.’ Her gaze fixed on mine. ‘I know just how hard it can be, Jerry, to be alone for so very long. It drives you mad, pushes you over the edge, until the day you wake up and realize you’d rather end it all than suffer one more day alone on a dead world. After that, it’s just a matter of time before you either lose your mind or take the easy way out.’ She stepped a little closer to me. ‘Does that sound familiar to you?’
‘A little,’ I said, unable to hide more than a hint of defensiveness. What she had said sounded so familiar, in fact, I wondered if she had spoken with Sykes, the psychiatrist who had interviewed me.
She smiled humourlessly. ‘When you get a chance at a new life like that, you don’t ask too many questions. You’re just overjoyed not to be on your own. I’ll be straight with you, Jerry – you’re here because we know all about you. We know from your diaries you went all across the globe looking for the people who murdered your alternate, and that you managed to kill some of the people responsible. Most people couldn’t manage a fraction of what you’ve done, and you did it knowing you might well be alone for the rest of your life. That,’ she said, ‘makes you an exceptional human being, and that is why the Authority want to recruit you to work for them.’
I looked between the both of them, unsure at first what to say. I was still struggling to absorb everything I had been told and learned in just the last few hours.
‘Do I get a choice in this?’ I asked at length.
‘Sure,’ said Yuichi. He looked at Nadia. ‘Tell him.’
‘The Authority can’t force you to work for them,’ she said. ‘But the alternative is just going back where you came from.’
‘Did anybody ever choose to go back?’ I asked.
She laughed as if I’d said the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ she said. ‘Of course they didn’t. Who the hell in their right mind would?’
‘It’s just a lot to take in,’ I said, massaging my temples with both hands. ‘I mean – Jesus, a few days ago I was staring at a gun in a drawer wondering if I could use it on myself, and now here I am, and you’re telling me all this, and . . .’
‘I know,’ said Nadia with apparently genuine sympathy. She put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I had to make the same choice myself. We all did.’
I realized I was crying; whether from joy, or grief, or sheer sensory shock, I couldn’t tell you. Most probably some combination of all of the above. These people had kidnapped me, locked me up, shot me with darts, taken me on a roller-coaster ride to places I hadn’t even imagined might exist, then asked me to work for an organization that revealed nothing about itself, in return for being rescued. There were plenty of things that didn’t quite add up, and I could sense there was a lot they still hadn’t told me.
Yet, despite all that, I was desperate to accept what they were offering, regardless of any conditions stated or as yet unstated, because of one single undeniable, irrefutable truth. What they were offering me was infinitely preferable to what I’d had before. I could see in their eyes that they knew this, and that they knew I knew it. It didn’t matter, and I didn’t care.
‘Then I’ll say yes,’ I replied. ‘Assuming somebody around here can tell me exactly what the hell it is you want me to do.’
FOUR
Barely a month later, and a few short hours before I found myself trapped in a subterranean cavern, in imminent danger of being swallowed up in a lake of fire, I found myself standing on the edge of a vast precipice.
Nadia was with me. At our feet, an enormous shaft at least a mile across had been dug deep into the Icelandic coast. The only light came from the stars above, and from Hekla, a volcano seventy miles distant that was undergoing one of its periodic eruptions. Its summit burned red, the fiery glow clearly visible on the horizon.
I was on yet another post-apocalyptic alternate. I had, as yet, seen no other kind of parallel, and yet I knew that by its very nature the multiverse must contain an enormous variety of timelines where there had been no extinction event within living memory. The Authority’s peculiar obsession with dying or dead worlds was something for which I still had no explanation.
Integrated circuitry in the visor of my spacesuit compensated for the lack of light, so that I could see where a road had been cut into the walls of the shaft. It spiralled down until it finally vanished into stygian depths, where not even my suit’s circuitry could compensate. On the far side of the shaft lay the war-ravaged ruins of Reykjavik, where the Icelanders had made their last stand against invading European and American forces.
According to the readout on my helmet’s display, it was a chilly 268 degrees below zero, cold enough that the snow lying all around us was composed not of crystallized water, but of frozen air. As their world spiralled out of its former orbit, moving farther and farther away from the life-giving sun, the atmosphere had grown sufficiently cold that it had frozen into a thin layer clinging to the ground. Beyond my visor lay only hard vacuum, and certain death were I to remove my helmet.
Without an atmosphere to scatter the light and make them twinkle, the stars were bright and unblinking. Nadia had earlier, for my benefit, pointed towards the horizon and indicated the rough location of the sun. I saw nothing except a star a little brighter than the rest, surrounded by unending darkness.
‘What is that?’ I asked, seeing a dot of red light flash in one corner of my visor. A faint beeping accompanied it. The air inside the suit tasted dry and rubbery, and my throat rasped every time I swallowed. There were other readouts, projected onto the interior curve of my spacesuit’s helmet, many of them as yet indecipherable to me. Part of the reason we had come to this alternate was so I could learn how to manoeuvre inside such suits as this.
‘Some kind of alert,’ said Nadia, her voice clipped. ‘I just hope it’s nothing to do with that tremor a minute ago.’
As it would soon turn out, it had everything to do with the tremor. As if in response, the ground shifted once again beneath our feet, just very slightly, and I automatically stepped back from the edge of the chasm.
I looked over at Nadia; her face was barely visible behind the visor of her spacesuit. My suit’s electronics painted her face in witchy green. ‘So what’s it about?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know,’ she replied. ‘The suit radio’s a piece of crap. Hasn’t got enough range even to contact our Forward Base directly.’ She gestured towards the Excursion Vehicle parked nearby that had brought us here. ‘Let’s head back inside.’
I nodded, and followed her back over to the vehicle, sweating and cursing as I tried to walk in the heavy suit. I felt fitter and in better shape than I had in a long time, thanks to the intensive programme of training the Authority were putting me through. They needed their Pathfinders fit and healthy, but trying to walk around in the suit felt as if I was trying to wade through rapidly hardening mud.
; The Excursion Vehicle – or EV for short – consisted of a pressurized steel cylinder with wheels like rugged balloons and a slit-like windscreen at the front. Once we had cycled through its airlock, Nadia barely paused to pull her helmet off before climbing into the driver’s seat and leaning over a microphone built into the dashboard. I stood listening, my own helmet under the crook of one arm, as she spoke rapidly.
‘Nadia Mirkowsky here, out on EV-6. I just received a priority alert and felt a couple of strong tremors. Can you give me any more information?’
She repeated this message twice more before a reply came. ‘Miss Mirkowsky?’ said a voice. ‘There’s a general evacuation alert being broadcast and your orders are to get back immediately.’
‘Evacuation?’ I echoed, more than a little alarmed, but Nadia abruptly put a hand up to quiet me.
‘Anything else?’ she asked. ‘Last I heard, there was a dig team down inside the Retreat.’
The Retreat was the name the Icelanders had given to the subterranean stronghold in which they had hoped to survive the death of their world. ‘I can’t tell you their status,’ came the reply, ‘but the evacuation order still stands. All I know is, the seismometers are going off the scale, and anyone who’s on excursion needs to get back here now. It looks like Hekla’s going to blow sooner than expected.’
‘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 o
f 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.
