Extinction Game (12 page)

I looked at him, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

Nadia pressed a hand against her forehead. ‘Fuck. I was going to tell you, but then that whole thing with Rozalia . . .’

‘Ah.’ Selwyn nodded. ‘Perfectly understandable. The rest of the Pathfinders got back here while you were still in the clink, Jerry.’

‘I think I met one of them already,’ I said. ‘A woman called Chloe?’

Nadia’s expression froze in place. Selwyn folded one arm across his chest, and used his other hand to cover his mouth.

‘What?’ I demanded.

‘Nothing,’ said Nadia, suddenly smiling broadly. A look clearly passed between her and Selwyn. ‘Of course. I remember now. Chloe was leaving just when you got here. Did she say
anything to you?’

‘Not really. Look, what am I missing here?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Nadia. She turned to Selwyn. ‘Casey’s putting on some kind of show tonight, isn’t he? You’ll be
along?’

Selwyn looked pained. ‘You know I find the man morally repugnant at the best of times. Why on Earth give him yet another opportunity to be the centre of attention?’

‘
Fi-i-ine
,’ said Nadia, giving me a look. ‘Just asking.’

‘What kind of show?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ said Selwyn, airily, ‘but given my previous experience of such affairs, I expect it to be of highly dubious morals.’ He stood and bowed in the manner of
a Renaissance gentleman. ‘And with that, sir and good lady, I bid you a bloody good morning.’

I turned to Nadia once he was gone. ‘I’ve been here a month, Nadia. But I still keep feeling like people are keeping something from me. Including you.’

‘You’re the new kid on the block,’ she said, picking up her empty beer bottle and pretending to be engrossed in it. ‘The rest of them are still just sounding you out, is
all.’ Her eyes flicked up to meet mine. ‘You’ll be here tonight, of course.’

‘I don’t know. It’s been a hell of a day.’

She gave me a hard stare. ‘You know I’m not going to let you get out of this, don’t you?’ She put the bottle back down. ‘C’mon. You can walk me home.
We’re practically neighbours as it is.’

I woke later that evening with the smell of Alice’s shampoo lingering in my memory, so familiar and evocative in that first moment of consciousness that I reached out to
touch her hair. She wasn’t there, of course. I had dug her grave myself, many years before. I touched the half-coin around my neck, then got the hell up before I had a chance to become any
more morose.

I checked the time and saw it was about half six. I’d slept the entire afternoon away.

I’d just finished showering when I heard someone hammering at my front door. I went down and found Nadia standing there.

‘Get some clothes on, will you?’ she said, when I let her in. I still had a towel wrapped around my waist.

I gave her a disparaging look. ‘I wasn’t exactly expecting company at home.’

‘Thought I’d come check on you in case you forgot about tonight,’ she replied, squeezing past me and surveying the oriental wallpaper and gold-and-red striped furnishings of my
living room. ‘Nice,’ she said drily. ‘Doesn’t it hurt your eyes, seeing this every day?’

‘Surprisingly, you get used to it.’

Nadia shuddered. ‘Well, I’m here to rescue you. Time to meet the rest of your neighbours, Jerry-boy.’

I wandered back through to the bedroom, pulling on a fresh T-shirt and a pair of cargo trousers left behind by the previous owner. When I came back through, I found Nadia standing by the
bookshelf, flicking through one of my diaries.

‘Hey. That’s private.’

She looked at me in surprise as I swiped the notebook out of her hand and pushed it back into its place.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realize it was yours.’

I studied her. ‘Did you read any of it?’

‘Maybe a little.’ She bit her lower lip. ‘Sorry. Was I being intrusive?’

‘It’s . . .’ I swallowed my anger. There was no real reason for me to be upset, after all. ‘It’s personal. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I get it. No touchey. Now let’s go meet the rest of the crew.’

Someone had strung fairy lights around the entrance to the Hotel du Mauna Loa, and I could hear music mingling with the murmur of voices from the direction of the pool. The
scent of barbecuing meat triggered a sudden, ravenous hunger in me.

I followed Nadia inside and saw Kip Mayer chatting with Yuichi and Randall Pimms, another Pathfinder, although I noted Mort Bramnik himself was not present. But then, I’d gained the
distinct impression that he preferred to rule from a distance, so perhaps his presence was unlikely.

I saw more Pathfinders inside. Oskar Boche was propping up the bar, his enormous bull mastiff Lucky curled at his feet like Satan’s own lapdog. To my surprise Selwyn Rudd was there,
despite his earlier words. He was seated in a corner, deep in conversation with Winifred Quaker and Haden Brooks, who glanced my way with his strange, silver-flecked eyes. Lastly I saw Rozalia and
Nadia by the bar, their hands touching and their heads close together as they talked quietly.

All of the Pathfinders, like me, were stationed here on the island between missions. While they waited to find out where the Authority would next send them, they spent their time at the Hotel du
Mauna Loa. It wasn’t, after all, as if there was anywhere else to go.

I recalled what I had learned about those Pathfinders I had met so far: Selwyn Rudd had been a military engineer on his alternate, until orbital nukes that weren’t supposed to exist wiped
out the rest of humanity. Winifred Quaker’s parallel had, like my own, ended at the hands of a genocidal cult. I had heard rumours that Winifred had actually been a member of the cult
responsible, and had tried and failed to stop them once she realized what they were intending. Yuichi’s world had supposedly been razed clean by runaway nanotechnology.

Despite his appearance and the drawling, slightly stoned way he spoke, Yuichi had been a figure of some note in the field of molecular physics. He had confided in me that he feared his own work
had contributed significantly to the demise of his alternate. Randall Pimms I had barely spoken to yet, but he’d apparently survived a mass epidemic that compelled the infected to attack and
kill the uninfected. Oskar Boche’s home alternate suffered total environmental breakdown and mass starvation. Nadia and Rozalia had together survived a gamma-ray burst, a stellar detonation
of a type that might also have been responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs, tens of millions of years before.

Haden’s origin was by far the most inexplicable of our motley crew. He had been found on an alternate much like the one on which we made our home, in that there was no apparent or
reasonable explanation for why everyone might have vanished almost overnight. He could offer no explanation for his having been left unharmed, nor for the strange silver flecks in his eyes that
made his gaze subtly eerie.

As for me? I only survived the end of my world by doing a favour for an old college friend investigating an obscure cult.

Nadia waved me over. ‘Look,’ she said, nodding over at Selwyn, still chatting with Winifred. ‘What a hypocrite. Now come on,’ she added, standing and leading me away from
Rozalia. ‘I’ll introduce you to Casey and Wallace.’

We approached two men just as they were in the act of dumping a cardboard box full of assorted equipment directly beneath the movie projector. As they stood back up, their faces were momentarily
overlaid with images of B-movie actors in rubber costumes. The taller of the two wore a multi-pocketed vest over an open-necked shirt stretched tight over a muscular chest, grey hairs curling out
from beneath the stretched buttons. His chin and cheeks were lightly bearded, and he wore a battered cowboy hat perched on top of a thick mane of greying hair. He also, I couldn’t help but
notice, had a gun somewhat conspicuously holstered to his right thigh.

His companion – shorter by a foot – had, by contrast, a round babyish face partly hidden behind a thick scraggly beard, and a black T-shirt displaying some obscure hacker in-joke. He
said something briefly to his taller companion, then leaned down and began sorting through the box’s contents, pulling out pieces of rods and things that looked like coloured lenses.

The hacker-type dude turned towards us as we approached, and quietly said something to his friend. The latter’s shoulders tensed in the moment before he turned to greet us.

‘Casey,’ Nadia addressed the taller of the two. ‘I want you to meet Jerry, our new recruit.’

‘Mr Beche,’ said Vishnevsky, extending his hand. ‘I’ve been hearing about you.’

‘And this is Wallace Deans,’ Nadia continued, nodding to the shorter man, who wiped his hands on his trousers before taking his turn to shake my hand.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Wallace. I had the sense he was reluctant to speak to me, and he was clearly avoiding eye contact. His fleshy palm felt damp to the touch.

Wallace cleared his throat and turned to Nadia, at the same time reaching into one pocket and extracting an inhaler. He pressed it to his mouth and took a quick hit, then put it away again.
‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘we’re just a little busy at the moment.’

‘I hear you boys are putting on some kind of show,’ said Nadia, with forced levity.

‘You could say that,’ said Casey. He bent to lift out of the box some kind of spherical device, studded with numerous lenses of different sizes and colours, then he let go of it,
gritting his teeth in pain.

‘You okay?’ I asked, as Casey reached around to clamp one hand against his lower spine.

‘Sometimes I get a bad back,’ he muttered. ‘Wallace, hand me that thing, would you?’

Wallace picked the device back up and passed it to Casey. ‘Back in a minute,’ Wallace muttered, then disappeared in the direction of the bar.

‘What is that?’ I asked, nodding at the device in Casey’s hand.

‘This?’ said Casey. ‘Wait and see.’ He grinned, though he was clearly still in pain.

Wallace returned moments later with an entire bottle of Yuichi’s home-brewed whisky and a glass, both of which he set on a neighbouring table before pouring what struck me as a remarkably
generous measure.

Nadia eyed the bottle. ‘Didn’t you get a warning about drinking too much, Wallace?’

‘I won’t keep it all to myself,’ Wallace replied, draining the glass in one swift motion before as quickly refreshing it.

‘Listen to the lady,’ grunted Casey. Despite his evident discomfort, he was busy slotting together a number of metal brackets and rods until they formed a tripod. He reached up to
the movie projector, slipping it out of the bracket holding it to the ceiling, and placed it on the floor beneath a table. He next fitted the multi-lensed device onto the apex of the tripod. He
poked at it with a few stubby, calloused fingers, then frowned. ‘Damn thing isn’t working.’

‘Jeez,’ said Wallace. ‘Just get out of the way before you break the thing again.’

I saw Wallace had already finished his second whisky. After seeing Nadia knocking back a beer first thing that morning, I was starting to wonder if I’d landed on the Island of Functional
Alcoholics.

Wallace stepped forwards and expertly pressed different parts of the sphere until it glowed softly from somewhere deep inside. He stepped back, and made a number of curious gestures, in the
manner of a medieval sorcerer in his laboratory summoning forth a demon.

I’d already guessed the device must itself be some kind of projector, but I found myself taking a startled step back when apparently solid spheres, rendered in primary colours,
materialized in the air around us. They hung there in apparent defiance of gravity.

‘One second,’ said Wallace, making more gestures. The spheres suddenly shifted and morphed into a console floating weightlessly in the air before him.

I realized my mouth was hanging open and quickly closed it.

Wallace glanced our way. ‘If I let Casey try and set all this up, he’d break it. Guaranteed.’ He shook his head at Casey. ‘Some people just shouldn’t be allowed
near anything remotely technical.’

Casey just shrugged, apparently unperturbed. ‘So who’s assigned to train Jerry, Nadia?’

‘Me.’ She grinned lopsidedly at me. ‘Not that he needs any more training. Your baby wheels are coming off, kiddo. Officially, your next mission is your first real
mission.’

‘In what way does what I just went through not qualify as a “real” mission?’

She laughed. ‘A point well made.’

‘They training you hard?’ asked Casey.

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘Because sometimes it helps in this job to be able to run really, really fast.’

‘That does not,’ I said, ‘reassure me.’

‘It wasn’t meant to.’ He nodded at the contraption mounted on its tripod. ‘Hope you stick around for the show, Jerry. It’s going to be a blast.’

He turned back to Wallace and they fell into conversation, as various colourful yet immaterial shapes bobbed in the air around us.

Nadia led me a little way away. ‘Just so you know, your first official reconnaissance mission is a follow-up to a mapping expedition. Other Pathfinders spent a couple of months exploring
and studying the alternate we’ll be going to. Believe me, none of us would set foot in the place if we weren’t sure it was perfectly safe.’

‘That last time was—’

‘A fluke,’ she said. ‘Understand?’

I nodded.

Selwyn came towards us, looking a little unsteady on his feet. ‘Goddam you, Vishnevsky,’ he roared at Casey. ‘What you’re doing is in bad taste, even by your usual
standards. Don’t you understand that?’

‘Maybe you should relax,’ said Casey, apparently unflustered. He seemed to have recovered from his back pain. ‘Besides, I don’t give a damn what you think.’ He
glanced around the bar. ‘And I’m pretty sure no one else here does, either.’

Behind him, Wallace made some alteration to his virtual console, and a hyper-realistic, three-dimensional image of the Earth – looking solid enough to reach out and touch –
materialized in the air above our heads. As Wallace made tiny adjustments, the globe first grew larger, then smaller. It was so sharp and clear, I could hardly imagine that gazing down at the real
thing from orbit could have given me a better view.