Doomsday Game, page 14
Kip fought to control his emotions. ‘What have you done with her?’
A small greasy smile worked its way onto Greenbrooke’s face. ‘Nothing she won’t recover from.’
Kip took a step forward, and one of Greenbrooke’s men hauled him back by the elbow. ‘I assure you,’ Kip seethed, ‘that if you’ve harmed one hair on her head—!’
Greenbrooke put up a hand as if to mollify him. His manner was that of a man in complete control. ‘She was entirely cooperative, once she understood we weren’t willing to take “no” for an answer.’ He opened one of the folders and flicked through it, then looked back up at Kip, studying him at length. ‘You’re very protective of her, aren’t you? I admit to being a little surprised, given she spied on your people on behalf of a foreign power.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s safe.’
‘I’d like to see her.’
Greenbrooke didn’t reply. Instead he said: ‘I can’t tell you how amazed I was to discover not only that you weren’t lying, but that Orlova was the one who taught you how to build transfer stages!’ He chuckled with apparent incredulity. ‘It changes everything, of course.’
Kip’s heart sank. ‘It does?’
‘Originally, we planned to transfer over to Washington—your Washington, that is.’
‘Then why come here?’ asked Kip. ‘Why not transfer straight there?’
‘Because we knew the reception we’d get if we did.’
‘I see. Whereas here on this island, we’re comparatively easy pickings. Am I correct?’
‘I’m sure you understand the principle of establishing a beach-head. Plus, we had to acquire more supplies of the serum, and quickly.’
Kip nodded. ‘Then why the SADM?’
‘Our original plan was to use it to blackmail your Authority into cooperating with us. If they tried anything, I’d blow all of us to atoms, including anyone and everything in the vicinity.’
‘That sounds…’ Insane. ‘Risky.’
Greenbrooke favoured him with a fatalistic smile. ‘That was the plan.’ He dropped the folder he’d been holding back down on the desk. ‘But then I discovered this facility connects to another, far larger facility on your Authority’s alternate. That, Director Mayer, is our new destination.’
‘Why?’
‘There was an accident, was there not? It would explain why it’s almost entirely deserted. Luckily for my men, since they met with minimal resistance when they transferred over to that other facility in just the last few hours. They’ve taken the SADM with them and planted it in a vulnerable location. If we’re interfered with, we’ll detonate the device and all your evacuation plans will be blown to kingdom come.’
Kip fought to keep the shock from his face, but judging by Greenbrooke’s smirk it wasn’t working. ‘Who informed you about the accident? Katya?’
‘Eventually. And just to be clear, Director Mayer, that facility is now under our control.’
Kip bit back sour bile, and when he next spoke, he kept his voice calm and steady. ‘Remember I told you we can find you a safe alternate. Not some post-apocalyptic—someplace genuinely safe with no other people.’ He forced himself not to look around at the two guards with their strangely misshapen heads. ‘We can even send a few doctors with you to treat the worst cases.’
‘Some untouched Eden?’ asked Greenbrooke, his tone gently mocking.
Kip bristled. ‘It’s a serious offer, damn you!’
‘And you can transfer us there right now?’
Kip licked his lips. ‘Well, no…’
‘In fact, according to Orlova, the process of locating any such untrammelled paradise could take months, if not years. Am I correct?’
Kip’s shoulders slumped in defeat. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Even if what you were saying was true, the answer would still be no.’
Kip stared at him. ‘But why?’
Something flared in Greenbrooke’s eyes. He thumped the desk hard, sending some of the folders sliding onto the floor. ‘We want to go home, Director Mayer. Or at least to some version of the home we knew. One with medical facilities and labs that can reproduce the serum in the quantities we need. A place where we can live like civilised human beings and not animals grubbing in the dirt.’
Greenbrooke pushed himself out of his chair and moved past Kip, pulling the door open. ‘We’ll transfer him now,’ said Greenbrooke, and the two guards took Kip by his arms, yanking him around until he faced the door.
‘Svenson,’ said Greenbrooke, addressing one of the guards. ‘You’ve been treated?’
‘Sir.’ Svenson nodded, his voice a bare croak. ‘Both me and Ethan.’
‘Good.’ Greenbrooke glared at Kip. ‘Bring him.’
Ethan and Svenson took hold of Kip by the shoulders, half-dragging him back outside the building. He was marched towards a steel and aluminium dome housing the first of Katya’s experimental transfer stages. Inside, Greenbrooke programmed the coordinates himself before joining Kip and the two other men as the light crescendoed.
* * *
They materialised in a transfer hall in the heart of the main EM facility on the Authority’s home alternate. It proved to be just as deserted as Greenbrooke had said. The last time Kip had been here, some weeks before, it had bustled with activity. This time, however, it had about it the air of a place abandoned for years rather than a few days.
Kip’s gaze alighted upon what at first appeared to be half a dozen people lying sleeping in a huddle in one corner of the hall. Then he saw the traces of blood on the walls and floor and guessed they must have been murdered by Greenbrooke and his men. Some of the bodies were clad in the brown and orange colour-coded uniforms of special response engineers, emergency workers whose job was to take control of the facility in just such a crisis. His heart plummeted to think of anyone dying so senselessly.
‘Sir?’ said the one called Svenson.
‘Put the Director with the others,’ said Greenbrooke, leading the way down the stage ramp. They moved towards a row of electric carts parked at the entrance to a corridor that stretched into the distance. ‘If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll be with Murchison in the control room.’
Greenbrooke boarded a cart and drove down the corridor and out of sight. Kip’s two guards pushed him into the back of another cart. He looked over at the bodies of the emergency workers and felt anger flow thick and dark in his veins. Hard as it was to believe, this Greenbrooke was an even nastier piece of work than the one he’d known.
They got under way, at first following in Greenbrooke’s wake, then taking a right turn. Svenson, in the front passenger seat, acted as navigator, consulting a pocket map designed for visitors.
‘Greenbrooke is insane,’ Kip said to the backs of the two men. His voice was loud over the soft electric hum of the cart. ‘All of you need expert medical attention as soon as possible. I can make sure you get it.’
Svenson twisted around in his seat to regard him with bloodshot eyes. Kip wondered how long he had been infected with the bee-brain virus, and just how much time the man had left before he turned. ‘I heard you say that before.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Not you,’ said Svenson. ‘Another you, but he said the exact same words. After that, they came for us with guns.’
Kip’s heart beat loud in his ears. ‘I swear I would never let that—’
‘Fifteen hundred miles,’ Svenson snarled, madness bubbling in the depths of his eyes. ‘That’s how far we had to drive when all this started. A thousand of us in a convoy across infected territory. Barely a hundred of us made it. We’d have given up after that if it hadn’t been for Agent Greenbrooke. And then most of us were slaughtered when we thought we’d found someplace safe.’
‘I understand,’ said Kip, struggling to keep his voice even. ‘But—’
‘But that’s just it,’ Svenson snapped. ‘You can’t understand. But those people—the Pathfinders?—they’d get it. Go ask them what they’d do if they were in our shoes.’
‘I swear to you I can help!’
The one called Ethan pulled the car to a sudden halt and dug around in a pocket before producing a handgun and pointing it at Kip’s face, his features twisted with hatred. The hand holding the gun shook, and Kip wondered if he might pull the trigger without even meaning to.
‘Shut up,’ Ethan snarled. ‘Shut up, or I will blow your fucking head off.’
‘Ethan,’ said Svenson. ‘We have orders.’
Ethan didn’t move or say anything at first, his eyes as wide and empty as a desert. ‘Then he’s your responsibility,’ he muttered, lowering his weapon. ‘Keep him quiet, or I’ll shoot him and tell Greenbrooke he made a run for it.’
Kip sat back and said nothing. Ethan stuffed the handgun back in his pocket and then they were underway again. Another minute passed before Kip remembered how to breathe.
They made two more turns before entering a cargo elevator that carried them down to a place of bare concrete and strip lights that drew parallel bars of shadow and light on a dusty floor. The cart soon arrived at a dead-end corridor with rows of steel doors all marked STORAGE.
Svenson disembarked first, looking somehow even more ill than he had before they transferred over. He stood before one of the doors with his rifle pointed at it. Ethan took Kip by the shoulder and led him up to the door. He unlocked it and pushed Kip inside.
Jerry and Katya stared back at him with as much surprise as Kip felt seeing them. The door slammed shut behind him with a loud clang.
‘My God,’ said Kip, his voice shaking. ‘You have no idea what—’
‘Sssh,’ said Katya. She hobbled past him, one leg still heavily bandaged, and pressed an ear to the door. Kip listened, hearing Ethan and Svenson’s muffled voices. After a moment came the faint whine of the cart’s motor. It soon faded into the distance.
Katya stepped back. ‘I heard one of them say he’s going to the control room.’ She looked at Kip. ‘How many of them were there?’
‘Two.’
‘Then that leaves only one to guard us,’ said Jerry.
‘We shouldn’t talk too loudly,’ said Katya in a low voice. ‘If I can hear him, he can certainly hear us.’
‘Just so you know,’ said Kip, ‘Greenbrooke was with me when they brought me over to the facility. I know he’s headed for the control centre himself.’
Kip studied Katya as he spoke: he hadn’t seen her since the briefing for the Gamma Three expedition. It felt like a year had passed since then. Her face was bruised, her features pinched and angry, and there was something in her eyes almost frightening in its intensity. He couldn’t make up his mind if it was fury, or terror, or both. She held herself carefully, and he noticed that she no longer had her crutches. Even if they did find some way to escape, they’d have to carry her just about the whole way.
‘At least one of the two men who brought me here is very sick,’ Kip added. ‘I don’t think he’s got long to go.’
‘Long to go before what?’ asked Jerry.
‘It appears a number of them are infected with the neuro-alvarium virus,’ he explained.
Jerry’s eyes grew wide. ‘The bee-brain virus?’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Katya.
‘It’s a gene-engineered virus that wiped out an alternate we explored years ago,’ Kip explained. ‘It’s imperative we stop them infecting my own.’ He turned to Jerry. ‘How did you get here? Last I knew, you were still on Gamma Three with Yuichi and the others.’
Jerry grimaced. ‘The mission went badly snafu and I transferred home to get help.’ He nodded at the storage room door. ‘As soon as I showed up, I had a bunch of those guys sticking guns in my face. They tied me up and shoved me in a corner until a couple of hours ago. Then they brought both me and Katya here.’
‘What do you mean “something went wrong?”’
‘Nadia’s in trouble,’ Jerry explained. He quickly summarised everything he knew.
Kip took a moment to absorb the news. Bramnik, when he’d been Director, had seemed to take this kind of thing in his stride. ‘And you?’ he asked Katya. ‘Greenbrooke told me that he questioned you.’
‘He wanted to know everything about this facility. I…’ She swallowed hard. ‘He is not a pleasant man.’
‘Kip?’ asked Jerry, a pained look on his face. ‘She told me about this guy Greenbrooke. The name’s just a coincidence, right?’
Kip shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not.’
‘But that’s impossible!’
‘It’s not,’ Kip reminded him. ‘You should know that by now.’
That took some explaining too. Jerry seemed to curl in on himself as Kip relayed everything he, in turn, had learned.
‘Surely,’ Katya said once he had finished, ‘your government must have realised something is wrong by now?’
‘I assume so. I think Greenbrooke must know that too. From what I gather, he and his men want to find some hiding place right here on my own alternate.’
‘That’s nuts,’ said Jerry. ‘The infection would spread and you’d have a lot more to worry about than just an impending ice age.’
‘The things they’ve been through would drive anyone insane,’ Kip agreed. ‘Crazy or not, this version of Greenbrooke isn’t a fool, or he never would have got this far.’
‘All right,’ said Jerry, standing and pacing around the small, confined space. ‘We know what we’re up against. So what do we do about it?’
‘From inside a locked room with an armed guard outside?’ Kip shook his head. ‘Not a great deal.’
‘So if they get away,’ said Jerry, thinking the options through, ‘they could infect this entire alternate. But if we stop them and Greenbrooke detonates that nuke you say he has, we lose this whole facility.’
‘In turn dooming tens of millions to starve and freeze to death with no way to get to Nova Terra.’ Kip shrugged, his voice fatalistic. ‘Whichever way you look at it, the outcome’s bleak.’
They all looked at each other for a long moment.
‘That might not be the case,’ said Katya, her voice tremulous.
Kip looked at her. ‘I don’t understand.’
She smoothed her hands on her thighs in a nervous gesture and swallowed visibly. ‘I…may have a confession to make.’
Kip shared a look with Jerry, then returned his attention to her. ‘What kind of confession?’
‘There’s…more than just this one facility, Director Mayer.’
‘You mean the original facility, back on the island?’
‘No.’ Kip could see she was having a hard time meeting the eyes of either of them. ‘I didn’t expect to tell you about this for some years, but it seems that circumstances dictate otherwise. There is a second facility, on the same scale and identical to this one.’
Kip regarded her numbly. ‘That’s not possible,’ he muttered. ‘I think we’d have noticed.’
‘Not if it had been constructed in Russia, you wouldn’t.’
‘What?’
‘I have been in charge of the facility in which we are currently imprisoned for two years now,’ Katya explained, her tone becoming defensive. ‘It has been…difficult. The more I see, the more I understand there are many amongst your people, Director Mayer, who would willingly abandon their citizens to their deaths even while they escape to an unblemished paradise.’
‘Am I hearing you right?’ asked Jerry. He was clearly working hard to suppress a grin. ‘The Russians built a whole other facility, just like this one? And we didn’t even know about it?’
Kip’s chest felt constricted, like he was having trouble breathing. ‘If that’s true,’ he rasped, ‘you’ve committed treason.’
‘Really?’ Katya’s tone shifted from defensive to defiant. ‘I am not a citizen of the Authority. Nor am I a citizen of the Soviet Union, as your government continues to insist. I have been given no guarantees of any kind regarding my welfare, once my usefulness is over. How, then, can I have committed treason?’
Kip fought for words. ‘You can’t just…hand state secrets over to other nations!’
‘This is an international, not a national matter,’ she said. ‘You told me that yourself. There is no reason not to share this technology with the Soviets, with the Chinese, with everybody else immediately. And since your government persisted in delaying any decision on that matter, I took matters into my own hands.’
‘Oh my God,’ Kip muttered weakly.
‘And there are others under construction right now,’ Katya added. ‘In Shengen, West Africa, and Brazil. Do you see? If we lose this facility, it would be a blow, yes—but there are many other nations able to take up the slack.’ When she next met Kip’s eyes, her gaze was steady. ‘So you see, there is a solution to our problem—if we can get out of here.’
Rozalia
Alternate Alpha Zero (non-local variant)
The transfer stage hangar faded from around Rozalia—and then reappeared around her.
She blinked in confusion. Was it possible the transfer hadn’t worked?
She looked again. While superficially identical, only one of the overhead lights was working, and it flickered spasmodically. Crates that hadn’t been there a moment before were stacked everywhere, with the majority situated close to the bottom of the stage on which she stood.
It dawned on her that the transfer had worked, and that, incredible as it seemed, she was on some other version of Alpha Zero’s Easter Island. The idea sent a chill through her. And judging by the numerous rolled-up sleeping bags and bits of camping gear that covered the floor, the hangar had until recently been doing double-time as someone’s home, although it now appeared to be deserted.
She stepped hesitantly down the ramp. Her nostrils picked up the overpowering stink of too many unwashed bodies crammed together for too long. The worst of it came from a curtained-off area in one corner she darkly suspected functioned as a latrine.
A number of the crates had been torn open, and when she investigated she found they contained field-rations and bottles of water. She opened one of the bottles and drank thirstily. Then she tore open a pack of field-rations and gorged herself on protein bars and strips of dehydrated beef before hurrying towards the rear entrance. She was eager to be out of sight before someone found her there.
