Doomsday Game, page 12
They were being invaded, she thought, by dead men.
* * *
Over the next couple of hours, Rozalia learned enough to confirm for herself that things were just about as bad as they could be. All of the raggedy-men were well-armed, and it was starting to look like they’d taken complete control of the island. They were mostly concentrated in a couple of places. About a dozen of them remained in the compound. That made sense, because that was where the transfer hangar was located. A few others stood guard outside the hotel-bar that was Yuichi’s domain. From a hidden vantage point, she watched as prisoners were either led inside the hotel, or taken back out of it.
She began to get a sense of what was happening. They were picking up people from all across town and putting some of them in the Mauna Loa hotel. Then other raggedy-men would transport these prisoners to the compound in twos and threes.
In the distance, the transfer hangar flashed with light at regular intervals for several hours. Clearly they were sending people somewhere, but where—and why? There was no way she could get to the people inside the Mauna Loa that she could see: there were at least four raggedy-men there at all times, two standing guard out front, with one inside and the fourth stationed around the back of the building as well. All of them appeared to be well-armed.
After a while, it grew dark and the hangar ceased to flash with light. The more she saw, the more sure she was that she remained the only one as yet uncaptured, and the more convinced she felt that her first priority should be to discover the identity of these invaders and what they wanted.
She needed to find out exactly where these people had come from, and if they were using the transfer hangar so much, there was a good chance they were travelling back to their own alternate as well.
She made her way across the deserted runway that lay roughly halfway between the compound and the town. She kept away from the roads, and when she approached Katya’s old research facility, she heard the sounds of activity from within. One of the raggedy men stood outside one of its buildings, a rifle over one shoulder.
She ducked her head lower and moved quickly away from the facility. The facility contained its own, separate transfer stage, and she’d thought she might be able to use it. By the looks of it, that wasn’t going to be possible.
Once she was within sight of the compound she ducked across the road and made her way down to the shore. She hurried along the pebbled beach, seeing the dark bulk of the transfer hangar rising above her to her left. The moon came out from behind clouds and she ducked low, although it was unlikely any of the raggedy-men would have seen her coming this way.
Once she was around the back of the transfer hangar, she pulled herself back up a low embankment and crept to one corner of the building. For the first time in hours, the compound was quiet and still.
It was clear that Greenbrooke and his men came from some parallel version of the Pathfinder Project, but some part of her, even after all these years of exploring exotic parallel universes, rebelled against the idea. It had been hard enough accepting that the multiverse was big enough to contain more than one Rozalia Ludke. That it might also contain a multitude of Easter Islands and an equal plethora of Pathfinders—possibly an infinite number of them—just made her want to curl into a ball and take a long, long nap.
She crept towards the rear entrance to the hangar and edged it open, peering inside. There was no sign of movement.
She slipped inside, taking cover behind a canvas-covered truck that had been parked next to one of the transfer stages until she was sure she was alone. Then she stepped past the truck and headed for the nearest set of stage controls.
She called up the most recent coordinates that had been programmed into the stage. Each set of numbers and letters, sometimes hundreds of characters long, specified the n-spatial coordinates for a different alternate universe. Rozalia had been a Pathfinder long enough she could, by now, recognise the most frequently used coordinates by their first dozen or so characters.
The most recently used set of coordinates, however, were unfamiliar to her, yet they had been used more than a dozen times over the past twelve hours—often enough that someone, presumably one of the raggedy-men, had made it the default destination.
Either the raggedy-men were sending a lot of prisoners to that address—or it was where they had come from. If she knew where that was, maybe she could figure out what they wanted.
Then again, her first duty should be to get to the Authority and warn them. She stood there undecided, then heard voices from somewhere outside.
That decided it: reprogramming the stage to take her to the Authority would take too long, and put her at risk of being caught. It would be quicker and easier simply to visit whatever alternate had been set as the default.
Rozalia touched a button on the console, then ran up and onto the stage. She had just reached the top of the ramp when light filled the hangar and carried her away to an unknowable destination.
III
The Other Selwyn
Nadia
Alternate Gamma Three
Most likely, thought Nadia, there were a lot worse ways to die than falling into a bottomless pit and waiting for the air in your suit to slowly run out. But at that precise moment, balancing precariously on a steel girder with nothing beneath her but a drop into eternity, almost any other way of meeting her maker seemed preferable.
‘So I got to thinking,’ Yuichi continued, his voice crackling over the radio as he shoved rubble out of the way, ‘about collective nouns. Like, what’s the collective noun for a bunch of people who’re all the last man and woman on Earth?’
‘Surely if by definition you’re the only one of something, you can’t have a collective noun, can you?’ asked Chloe, breathing hard as she worked.
‘Just hurry up,’ said Nadia, her voice trembling. They were both trying to keep her mind off things by acting like this was just a regular working day. She wanted to scream at them that it wasn’t helping.
Yuichi muttered a profanity under his breath. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Ankle hurts like hell.’
‘Take it easy,’ Chloe told him over the radio. He’d sprained his ankle during the collapse, but he’d insisted on doing his part to try and dig down to her. ‘And conserve your energy, Nadia,’ Chloe added. ‘We’re almost there.’
Liar. She didn’t see how a dozen people could dig through a whole building turned to rubble before her air ran out. Even so, Nadia focused on her breathing, holding the air in her lungs for long seconds before letting it out. After a minute or two, the thumping of her heart grew a little less frenetic.
She lifted her head and peered up through her suit’s visor at the ceiling of the basement—or what was left of it—several metres above where she crouched on the girder. The broken edge of the basement floor was just out of reach. She’d looked around for some way to climb back up, but there were no foot or handholds to be had. A tangle of cables that emerged from a pipe embedded in the concrete floor, and which she might have been able to grasp in order to pull herself back up, remained tantalisingly out of reach.
A slight vibration rolled through the girder, and Nadia stiffened. Then it faded, and she remembered how to breathe.
She looked down without meaning to. That was bad: looking down meant thinking about what it might be like to fall for ever and ever…
She decided to put her mind to the question of the bootprints instead. And who might have made them.
‘The bootprints,’ she announced. ‘We have to figure them out.’
Yuichi chuckled nervously under his breath. ‘Once again, Nadia, there’s no one else here but us.’
‘I wasn’t seeing things!’ she snapped. ‘We took the containment units from the storage room on the right side of the basement. None of us went into the storage room on the left. Or is one of you lying?’
Chloe groaned. ‘Oh, come on.’
‘How about you, Yuichi?’ Nadia demanded.
‘I think I’d have remembered if I had,’ he replied somewhat tersely.
‘Well, neither did I,’ said Nadia. ‘Which begs the question, who did make those prints?’
‘This is crazy talk, Nads,’ said Chloe.
‘No crazier than us being here,’ Nadia snapped.
There was a short pause before Chloe replied. ‘Let’s just focus on getting you out of this fix,’ she said. ‘You’ll be back drinking gut-rot in the Mauna Loa in no time at all.’
‘Hey guys?’ It was Jerry, calling over the radio on the general channel, his voice choppy with static. ‘I think we, uh, have a problem.’
Something in Nadia’s chest became icy cold.
‘What kind of problem?’ asked Yuichi, sounding weary.
‘I can’t get back home.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Chloe demanded over the same shared link. ‘You mean the transfer stage won’t work?’
Jerry had volunteered to make his way back to the transfer stage, using one of a pair of lightweight electric scooters mounted on the EV truck’s rear rack. The plan was for him to transfer back to the island so he could rustle up the equipment and volunteers to rescue Nadia.
‘The stage works fine,’ said Jerry. ‘But something’s blocking the transfer from the other side. It just powers down after a couple of seconds. All the diagnostics tell me there’s nothing wrong with it.’
‘I seem to recall the stages having inbuilt locking systems to take them offline in emergencies,’ said Nadia. ‘Could be something like that.’
‘Sure, maybe,’ said Yuichi, ‘but what could possibly constitute such an emergency?’
‘Is there any way to trigger an override if something is blocking the transfer from back home?’
‘Not from this side, no,’ said Yuichi.
‘Then we have a serious problem,’ said Chloe. ‘Our air isn’t going to last forever. And as far as I know, you need high-level authorisation codes before you can trigger an emergency shutdown. The only people with those codes are Kip and Major Howes.’
The girder vibrated gently beneath Nadia and she froze until it had passed. A few fragments of rubble and plaster went sailing past her on their own long journey into infinity. She cautiously adjusted her crouching position to try and relieve the growing ache in her muscles. It seemed the tremors were coming more frequently.
The others had gone silent. She guessed they had all switched over to a shared private channel so they could discuss things they’d rather she didn’t hear—such as the increasingly slim likelihood of her being rescued.
She was quite certain that she was going to die, and the longer she clung to her girder, the more she felt she was putting the lives of the others at risk. Really, the best thing she could do was to let herself fall so they could retrieve some other Nadia from the multiverse to take her place.
Instead she clung on, hating herself for it. When it came to heights, she had no greater fear.
How she wanted to be with Rozalia in that moment.
Click, click. ‘So, uh, Nadia,’ said Yuichi, ‘we’ve been doing some thinking. Jerry just figured out he can still connect with the transfer stage inside Katya’s old research facility back on the island. He’s going to transfer back there to get help for you and maybe find out what’s gone wrong with the main stages while he’s at it.’
‘Probably some trainee stage operator screwed up the settings,’ Jerry chipped in.
‘Or maybe you screwed up,’ said Chloe, her voice bitter. ‘Ever consider that?’
‘Christ,’ Jerry snapped. ‘Now you’re ragging on me? You know what, to hell with it. You want to quit on the relationship? Fine. I’ll go first, how about that?’
‘Jerry—’ Chloe started to say.
‘No, you listen,’ he said, clearly on a roll. ‘I am sick and tired of this constant bickering. I swear to God, there are days I’d rather stick my head in the mouth of one of those goddamn Chimeras than risk waking up to another morning of being told I’m a useless, good for nothing—’
‘I can’t keep doing this,’ said Chloe, something in her voice cutting him off. Both seemed unaware that the others were still listening in appalled silence. ‘This…life. How could you bring up a child knowing this is all there is for them?’
Nadia felt her eyes grow wide even as she clung to her girder. There was a long pause, Chloe’s words hanging in the air like a sheet of glass in the instant before it shatters on concrete.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Jerry, his voice thick with uncertainty.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Chloe wailed over the shared comms.
‘Wow,’ Nadia said into the silence that followed. ‘Guys. Let me be the first to congratulate you on your excellent timing. Maybe we can throw a baby shower on top of a volcano next time, maybe?’
Neither Chloe nor Jerry answered. They had gone silent, having presumably switched over to their own private channel in order to bicker further.
‘Okay,’ Yuichi said heavily. ‘That’s going to take me a minute or two to process.’
There was a click after another minute, and Jerry came back online. ‘Yeah, um. Sorry about that, guys, from both of us.’
‘Yeah,’ said Chloe, her voice small, like a child’s. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’m going to transfer across now,’ said Jerry. ‘Uh, good luck, Nadia. By the time I get back here with the others, I figure you’ll be long out of that hole in the ground.’
The truth was, they would never pull Nadia out of the pit. And Jerry would never again return to that alternate.
Randall
Alternate Delta Twenty-Five
‘Well,’ said Major Howes, after the ground had stopped rocking underfoot, ‘if that doesn’t make the place secure, nothing will.’
Randall stepped back from the building that housed one of the tunnels leading into the deep caverns as dust billowed up from its depths. The ground rumbled and shifted once again as another set of charges blew somewhere far below where they stood. Strange animals darted around the branches of the seaweed trees past the building entrance, frightened by all the noise and shaking. The moonlight gave the forest around them a sinister appearance, as if the trees were hulking beasts watching them silently.
‘Good riddance,’ said Fred Danks with a shiver. ‘Those damn caverns gave me the creeps.’
While they’d been laying charges all through the underground vaults, Danks had looked about ready to jump out of his own skin. It wasn’t just the darkness that made him nervous, Randall knew: it was the weird, alien quality of the silent machinery surrounding them, and the soft, otherworldly glow of the bacteria clinging to the roof of the caverns.
Randall waited until Danks looked his way, then tipped his torch up until it shone directly under his chin, turning his eyes into twin pools of black above an evil grin. ‘Just imagine all the ghoulies and beasties that’ll come crawling oot of the darkness now,’ he said, ‘just looking for a snack in a uniform.’
‘Just so you know,’ said Danks, his voice sour, ‘I am not above giving a man a busted lip for trying to put the wind up me.’
Randall grinned. ‘You know that’s a man-eating tree you’re standing under, right?’
Danks jerked violently away from the tree he’d been standing next to.
‘Stop harassing my men,’ Howes told Randall. ‘I think we can count this expedition a success. Nobody’s going back down into those caverns any time soon.’
‘I’ll just be glad never to see this alternate again,’ said Randall, turning towards the EV truck parked close by.
* * *
There were six of them: Randall, Major Howes, three soldiers and a Lieutenant. They’d transferred over to Delta Twenty-Five at midday island-time and made their way to the caverns where Oskar had got himself killed, spending most of the day laying charges at various points. As soon as they’d boarded the truck, Randall had stretched out on one of the truck’s rear seats and gone to sleep with his chin tucked into his chest.
‘We’re there,’ Lieutenant Satsura called from up front, waking Randall. ‘Homeward bound, boys.’
Randall rubbed his hands across his face then went up front to peer out through the windscreen at Delta Twenty-Five’s endlessly weird flora. Satsura guided the truck along a rutty path that led to a flat expanse of concrete on which stood several warehouses and a small hangar containing a single transfer stage.
The lieutenant guided the truck inside the hangar and up a ramp leading onto the transfer stage before finally hitting the brakes. Satsura then disembarked and walked back down the ramp in order to program the stage controls. Light surrounded the truck just as Satsura got back behind the wheel, and Randall experienced a fleeting yet very familiar sense of weightlessness. The light faded to reveal the transfer hangar back on Easter Island.
‘Hey,’ said Satsura, peering out through the windscreen. ‘I’ve never seen that guy bef—’
The windscreen shattered before he could finish speaking. Satsura jerked hard, red blossoming on one of his arms. He made a sound like he’d been punched in the belly.
A second shot came through the windscreen, angled higher this time and punching a hole in the roof of the front cabin. ‘Out!’ bellowed a voice. ‘All of you, hands in the air! Now!’
There were two of them outside, Randall saw: gaunt-looking men in dark, filthy-looking rags. From out of the corner of his eye he saw Howes reaching for his holstered pistol.
‘Don’t,’ said Randall, putting a hand on the Major’s arm. ‘We don’t know how many of them there are.’
Howes looked at him like he was insane. ‘I only see two.’
