Extinction Game (24 page)

A loose crowd of people stood in the centre of the rooftop, none of whom I had ever seen before. Their attention was fixed on Kip Mayer, who was talking animatedly to them. I looked around until
I spotted Casey, Winifred and Haden, standing away from everyone else.

I took another look at the people gathered around Kip Mayer. They looked entirely ordinary. The majority were men in their middle age, and all wore expensive-looking suits that nonetheless had
that curiously old-fashioned look that marked them as citizens of the Authority. Some had the steel-grey hair and confident, upright posture I associated with seasoned politicians, or the CEOs of
multinational corporations.

A number of them, I noticed, were accompanied by women – either their wives or their mistresses, judging by how they were dressed, and the way they clung to the arms of the men. But what
really
took me aback was that there was also a small number of children among the group – some of them quite young. They were all well turned out in what looked to me like their
Sunday best.

Yuichi had been right. They looked like nothing so much as tourists, albeit expensively and conservatively dressed ones.

I looked around, wondering at the nature of the apocalypse they had come to witness. I glanced up at the sky, and got my answer.

‘What is that, an asteroid?’ I asked Yuichi, pointing upwards, and he nodded.

I looked back at Mayer’s audience. What kind of damn fools, I wondered, would actually bring their
children
to a place such as this? Or did the Authority have a surfeit of rich
and jaded billionaires who thought nothing of witnessing the deaths of billions just for kicks?

‘How long?’ I asked. The asteroid was clearly visible, even with the naked eye, as a dark smudge near the noonday sun.

He shook his head. ‘Not long. This is going to be short, sharp and sweet. It’s due for impact any minute now.’

I felt my skin prickle, and wondered how Mayer’s audience would feel if something went wrong with the transfer stage, leaving us stranded here.

‘Just how big is it?’

‘Twenty-five kilometres along its widest axis,’ Yuichi replied. ‘A real planet-buster.’

I shook my head, feeling fatigued from death and disasters, then followed Yuichi across the rooftop to join our fellow Pathfinders. I felt tense, wound-up; I’d hardly seen most of the
others since storming off in a jeep just days before, but I needn’t have worried. They all acted like nothing at all had happened – and for that I was grateful.

I nodded to them, exchanging greetings, then discreetly gestured towards the tourists. ‘Anybody have any idea exactly who they are?’

‘Vultures,’ Casey muttered. ‘That’s about all you need to know.’

Winifred laughed. ‘Maybe the Authority sent them here on a junket to find out where all their taxpayers’ money is going.’

‘But why the hell bring their
families
?’ I asked. ‘I mean, surely that’s a hell of a risk?’

‘Sure it is,’ said Casey. ‘But look at them. Why do you think they’re really here, except for the fucking thrill of it all?’

The children were clearly excited, pointing up at the mountain falling towards them from out of the sky. Why they weren’t pissing themselves with fear instead was beyond me. I
couldn’t hear what questions the adults were asking Mayer, but a few of them were taking turns peering upwards at the rock through a single pair of high-powered binoculars.

‘Until now, when you said they were tourists, I really thought you must be kidding,’ I said to Yuichi.

‘In fairness, sometimes we end up babysitting teams of scientists collecting observational data,’ said Yuichi. ‘Something like this doesn’t really happen so
often.’

‘You know what this is, right?’ chuckled Casey. ‘Bramnik’s got Kip Mayer over there, leading a charm offensive on his behalf. Bramnik’s so shit-scared he’s
going to lose his job to Greenbrooke, he’s making sure his bosses hear all about what a really fine job he’s been doing.’

I knew better now than just to ask outright what that job might actually be. That the Authority wanted to retrieve data related to transfer stage technology from an alternate Iceland made at
least some kind of sense, but the thing I couldn’t work out was what possible reason the Authority might have for wanting anything to do with how the bee-brain chimera had been developed.
Even though Yuichi and others had warned me not to get too hung-up trying to figure out the ultimate purpose of all the missions the Authority sent us on, I couldn’t let it go. Either I found
out at least part of the truth, or I descended into the same incipient or full-blown alcoholism already afflicting many of my fellow Pathfinders.

‘Maybe they’ll put Mayer in charge,’ Haden suggested. ‘He’s more or less running everything here as it is, Bramnik’s away so much.’

Yuichi was about to say something else when Mayer beckoned us over. We joined him and the tourists, and Mayer got Casey to answer some of their questions while the rest of us hung back.

The Australian grinned toothily, and began to speak.

‘I’ll give him this,’ I whispered to Yuichi. ‘He’s good. Maybe he should have been on TV.’

‘He was,’ Yuichi whispered back. ‘He used to make wildlife documentaries back on his alternate.’

I listened as Casey told his audience all about the work we did, and about two other non-Pathfinder teams currently on stand-by in other parts of this alternate, ready to take measurements once
the impact took place, following which they would escape via their own transfer stages. Casey was, indeed, an excellent raconteur, and I found even myself drawn in by his description of how we did
our work.

After a few minutes of this, a soldier stepped over to Mayer and spoke quietly in his ear. ‘That’s it,’ said Mayer, raising his hands until he had the undivided attention of
everyone in his audience. ‘Everyone get ready. Impact in just five minutes. If you’d care to follow me, I’ll run through the safety procedures one more time . . .’

I watched as the tourists followed Mayer over to where two other soldiers were busily setting out folding deckchairs. The tourists all sat, facing east in the direction of the impact zone. The
scene struck me as entirely surreal.

In the meantime, Casey had hauled a shoulder-mounted video camera out of a bag at his feet, before propping it on his shoulder. I watched as he fiddled with its controls, slowly sweeping the
lens from one horizon to the other and frowning and mumbling to himself before making yet more minute adjustments to the camera settings.

From somewhere on the streets below us came the rattle of automatic gunfire and the screech of numerous cars accelerating hard. Then I heard screaming, the sound raw and ragged and echoing from
the walls of the buildings around us.

This is wrong
, I thought to myself.

‘No,’ Casey said quietly, and I saw he had stepped up beside me. ‘This is life.’

I started, realizing with a shock that I must have spoken out loud. I glanced around at the other Pathfinders standing nearby, but none appeared to have overheard me. Or if they had, they
weren’t letting on.

‘All this,’ Casey continued, ‘is what happens when you fail to have any kind of contingency plan for a fucking great asteroid coming straight at you. The people living on this
alternate could have put the funding into watching the skies, to protecting themselves. But they didn’t.’

I felt a long-suppressed anger bubbling up inside me. ‘We should be helping these people, not treating their deaths like a sideshow.’

‘Helping them?’ Casey chuckled. ‘And what about the next alternate after this one – will you save the people there? Or maybe the next one? Or did you miss the bit where
someone explained to you that there’s an
infinity
of possible timelines? Tell me, Jerry, which one would you pick?’

‘Does that make it any less wrong?’

‘And how would you go about warning them?’ he continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. ‘By showing them a transfer stage? Maybe they’d confiscate it, or decide you
were crazy and lock you up to eventually die with the rest of them. Or maybe they’d believe you and still not do a damn thing to help themselves.’

‘We could at least save some of them—’

‘And put them where? And how would you pick who you save, even assuming you could persuade the Authority to consider the idea? I get it, Jerry. You’re the classic bleeding-heart
liberal, not a realist. And I already told you – they could have saved themselves, but they didn’t. Fucking idiots.’

I felt my face grow warm. ‘You talk as if they deserve this.’

‘Somewhere real close by this alternate, Jerry, I guarantee there are others just like it, except they actually exercised some forethought. I don’t need to visit those alternates to
tell you what they’d be doing right now – celebrating the fact they cheated death, instead of just waiting for it.’

‘Then why the hell don’t we go to those places instead? Doesn’t it strike as you insanely morbid, the way we keep pitching up on all these post-apocalyptic
realities?’

‘Who cares why?’ Casey grinned. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that getting to travel through the multiverse, to see all these different worlds, regardless of how they
pitch up, is an incredible adventure?’

‘You make me sick,’ I said, turning away.

I saw Casey from out of the corner of my eye, regarding me sourly. ‘Man, I’d forgotten what a pussy you were.’

I moved away from him, sick of the sound of his voice. ‘You’ll get used to stuff like this, Jerry,’ he called softly from behind me. ‘We all did. Even the old you
managed, in the end.’

I needed to put some space between us, but there wasn’t really anywhere to go on that rooftop, particularly given how crowded it was.

‘Here it comes,’ I heard someone shout.

It was as if the sun had dropped from out of the sky, trailing flames. The asteroid was now much too bright to see directly, and I instinctively averted my gaze. I looked instead over towards
Mayer and his entourage, all of whom had put on dark glasses, so they could follow the asteroid’s plummeting descent with relative ease.

I looked down at the concrete beneath my feet, seeing my shadow sweep in an arc as the asteroid roared through the atmosphere at tens of thousands of kilometres an hour. We were close enough to
the impact zone that I could actually feel the heat on my face, even at a distance of a few hundred kilometres. The land directly beneath its path must surely be in flames.

And then, almost as soon as it had appeared, the asteroid was gone from sight. It was, I knew, busy burying itself deep in the Earth’s crust, somewhere just off the East Coast of the USA.
A wall of burning air would soon come rushing towards us at thousands of kilometres an hour, flattening everything in its path, and right behind that would be earthquakes of a kind never
experienced by human beings in this alternate.

And then, finally, the ocean would come sweeping inland in a series of kilometre-high tsunamis, drowning the entire continent and delivering the final blow to anything left standing by the first
wave of destruction.

I looked up again in time to see a black wall rising from beyond the horizon, rushing towards us at phenomenal speed. I felt a kind of primal terror I had never experienced, even when confronted
by the night patrol. A gust swept across the roof, catching at people’s hair; one of the children giggled nervously, and the building beneath our feet began to sway, gently.

My ears popped in the same instant that windows shattered all across Philadelphia. The building’s swaying grew in intensity, and I heard a stifled scream.

‘Everybody in place,’ Mayer shouted, ushering the tourists back towards the stairwell. ‘We’ve got a couple of minutes, tops, before the shockwave reaches
Philly.’

They’re cutting it too close
, I thought.
Much too close.

We followed after them, crowding down the narrow stairs to the lower floor, all of us clustering together at the centre of the transfer stage. There was barely enough room to fit all of us
inside.

Most of the huge feature windows had been reduced to glittering rubble, but Casey was still filming, his teeth gritted in what was either a snarl or a happy grin as he swung the lens to and fro.
I couldn’t help but notice that a very few of our guests had a hungry, eager look about them, as if whatever appetite had brought them to this alternate had been insufficiently satisfied.

The rig technician made one final adjustment before joining the rest of us inside the circle of field-pillars. The wind had become much stronger, howling down Philly’s broad avenues. I saw
a deckchair go tumbling past a window as the air around us twisted.

I still had a clear view between two neighbouring buildings of the great black wall rushing towards us from over the horizon. In the very last moment before transition, I saw a distant tower
shiver into dust just before it was swallowed up by the maelstrom. And then we were back in the hangar, back on Easter Island.

Someone laughed with clear relief, and I resisted the urge to fall to my knees and hug the floor of the stage.

‘Did you
see
that?’ I heard a woman’s voice say, excited and urgent. ‘When I saw that thing rushing towards us . . . ! I thought we were goners for
sure!’

I followed the rest of the Pathfinders down the ramp. None of us said anything at first.

‘That,’ Winifred said finally, as we stepped outside the hangar, ‘was fucking nightmare fuel.’

‘It’s reassuring to hear you feel the same way,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t meant to be reassuring,’ she said, and I watched her stalk off into the sunshine.

Somehow, the idea of reading my predecessor’s last diary hardly seemed such a big deal any more, after everything I had just witnessed. So I followed the other
Pathfinders to the Hotel du Mauna Loa for what I now understood to be a constant ritual: a drink to success and, most importantly, to survival. There was a toast to Nadia, and discussions
concerning a much-delayed memorial service of some kind. Before long, a date was settled on, although all agreed to consult on the matter with Rozalia in case she had her own ideas.