Survival Game

by Gary Gibson

  At last, the elevator clanged to a halt on the next lowest terrace. I was led across another courtyard and inside a sandstone building. It was one of several administrative blocks with unadorned whitewashed walls and concrete floors. The soldier unlocked a door and I stepped into an office just as spartan as the one in which I had first met Borodin: a desk, two chairs, and a window.

  And there I remained for some hours, rocking back and forth on one of those chairs while the guard waited outside the open door. I wondered how Jerry was coping, and felt a rush of guilt and shame. I was the reason he was here, after all.

  After a while, I dug around in a pocket until I found the single grey bead I had managed to rescue during our escape from Delta Twenty-Five. I had become strangely attached to it.

  I held the bead tightly, watching the little girl run laughing through tall grass, feeling as if I had found a secret window into Heaven.

  I don’t know how long I had to wait before Borodin appeared, but it felt like many hours.

  He entered in the company of one of the Crag’s guards, who carried in his hand an electronic bracelet of a type with which I was intimately familiar.

  ‘Put it on her,’ said Borodin.

  The guard nodded and bent on one knee next to where I sat. I watched, unmoving, as he locked the bracelet around my right ankle. After my escape, it had been my fervent hope never to see its like again.

  ‘I assume,’ said Borodin, ‘you want to see Josef.’ My father.

  ‘I’m guessing that’s conditional,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Conditional on you helping him calibrate the new Hypersphere, yes. A process I understand should take only days, given that it’s undamaged.’

  ‘In theory only,’ I said. ‘I already warned you, if we use the Hypersphere—’

  ‘Shut up about the damn beads!’ he shouted. ‘Did you hear nothing I said about the people they belonged to? Now give me your answer – will you cooperate?’

  ‘You must need me very badly,’ I mumbled, ‘to still be asking for my help.’

  His hands twitched at his sides, as if he were contemplating throttling me, and I knew it was true.

  ‘We have need of your expertise, yes,’ he said. ‘But even without your cooperation, the work will go on regardless. Do you understand me?’

  I swallowed. ‘And if I don’t cooperate?’

  ‘Then I will be forced to inform your father that you died while resisting arrest by Tsarist forces on the Twelfth Republic.’

  All through those long, lonely hours, sitting in that office, I had mulled over what Borodin told me about the people who had died in those caverns, of their religious fanaticism and their obsession with the end of the world. Perhaps that was true: but when I held those beads in my hands, as Borodin had not, I had sensed enough of Lars Ulven’s mind to know that he had not been one of them. He had sought evidence of a kind that had little to do with faith.

  If I failed to act – failed to find some way to prevent the Hypersphere from being activated – I would sentence billions back in the Novaya Empire to an uncertain fate. The only course of action left, then, was to find some way to destroy the Hypersphere.

  Unless I appeared willing to continue my work here, I would never get the chance to do that.

  ‘Katya, I’m waiting.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, choking the word out. I forced myself to meet his eyes. ‘I’ll cooperate.’

  He studied me closely. ‘Do you mean that, Katya? Will there be any more trouble from you?’

  ‘I want to see my father,’ I said, surprised at how much my voice trembled when I said it.

  I looked back down at the floor and waited. I could almost feel his gaze drilling into me, searching for the lie in my words.

  He took a step back towards the door. ‘You will be watched,’ he said, ‘more closely than ever before. Do you understand?’

  I nodded. ‘I do.’

  ‘Bring her,’ he said to the guard, and I let the soldier pull me up by my arm.

  It was dark by the time they led me back outside. The guard took the lead, Borodin following behind. We made our way down to the Crag’s lowest terraces, where the Artefact Retrieval Division’s exiled researchers lived and worked, and where I had spent the better part of ten years of my life. We exited an elevator and crossed a courtyard, passing enormous oak gates set into a crumbling and ancient defensive wall. Beyond lay a forest I had only occasionally glimpsed from the top of the Crag’s battlements, since none of us was ever allowed outside the fortress.

  We came to a door set in a plain concrete block. Herr Frank stood waiting outside, along with two more guards and the Hypersphere on its trolley. Herr Frank snapped an order. A guard opened the door and the trolley was wheeled inside.

  We followed them down a short corridor to a service elevator that served as the main entrance to the Primary Experimental Transfer Laboratory, which lay beneath our feet inside a vast cellar.

  We boarded the elevator car, an iron cage contained within a shaft constructed from latticed girders. As we dropped, I looked down at the floor of the laboratory, which had changed little since I had last seen it.

  Much of the laboratory was taken up by a transfer stage stripped of most of its non-essential components. Tables, workstations, computers and other equipment surrounded it amidst a sea of cables. Arranged against the walls were industrial-sized lathes, machine-parts printers and magnetic containment systems.

  The original Hypersphere sat at one end of a metal platform next to the stage. It was barely visible beneath a mass of sensor arrays and cables that trailed down over the edge of the platform and across the floor.

  I looked around, seeing nearly all of the exiles – a dozen men and women – were present. None was younger than late middle age, and a few were considerably older. And, of course, they all wore electronic anklets that tracked their every move. Judging by the expressions on their upturned faces, our arrival was something of a surprise.

  Then, at last, I caught sight of my father, staring openmouthed, as the elevator clanged to a halt. A ring-binder slipped from his hand, and he pushed past a cluster of old men gathered by a lathe in his hurry to reach me.

  Herr Frank pushed the elevator door open and I stepped out. I was shocked at how much my father had aged, even in the relatively short time since I’d fled the Crag. There were white streaks in his hair that hadn’t been there before, and there was a certain stiffness in his movements I didn’t recall either.

  Sometime during my absence, my father had become an old man. Pierre Agerstrand came tottering up behind him, as always leaning heavily on his stick.

  But all this faded from my thoughts as my father folded me into his arms. I pressed my face to his shoulder, sobs ratcheting their way up my throat.

  A hand patted my shoulder, and I glanced to the side to see it belonged to Pierre. He, along with my father, had helped engineer my escape.

  ‘Katya, little Katya,’ my father crooned. I felt his tears dampen my shoulder. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ was all I managed to say through my own sobs. ‘There’s so much I have to tell you. I—’

  Somehow he pulled himself free. He held me at arm’s length and gave me a look I knew well: Be careful what you say.

  ‘And Tomas?’ Pierre asked querulously from beside us. ‘Where is he?’

  I tried to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. All I could do was shake my head.

  My father’s brow furrowed, and he darted an angry look at Herr Frank. His throat worked as if he were struggling to hold back words of anger.

  ‘You can tell me what happened later,’ he said, then squeezed my shoulders. ‘But I’m glad to see you, Katya, whatever the circumstances.’

  ‘I have something to show you,’ said Borodin. He motioned with one hand to the two guards, and they wheeled the trolley forward.

  Josef let go of me and watched as Herr Frank, holding a slip of blue paper in one hand, typed
a code into an electronic lock attached to the Hypersphere’s cage. It swung open with a faint hiss of hydraulics, revealing the artefact within.

  I heard a murmur of astonished voices, and the rest of the exiles crowded closer.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ Pierre demanded, leaning heavily on his stick.

  ‘That doesn’t concern you,’ said Borodin. ‘All that matters is that it’s entirely intact and quite undamaged.’

  My father stepped closer to the Hypersphere, pulling out a pair of spectacles and peering through them at it. A guard prevented him from getting too close.

  He looked around at Borodin. ‘I believe we haven’t been introduced?’

  ‘My name is Mikhail Borodin, Gospodin Orlov. It is an honour to meet you. From now on, I will be supervising the Hypersphere Project in conjunction with Herr Frank.’

  My father regarded him with suspicion, but I could see he was fighting not to give the Hypersphere his full attention. ‘Is this the only one?’ he asked guardedly, nodding at it.

  ‘So far,’ said Borodin. ‘Although there may well be others.’

  ‘Others?’ Pierre Agerstrand hobbled closer. Advanced in years he might have been, but his eyes were bright and fiery. ‘Are you seriously saying there are more of these?’

  ‘The evidence suggests so, yes,’ said Borodin. ‘And with luck, we’ll find them soon enough.’

  I stared at Borodin. Did he mean he was going to go back to Delta Twenty-Five?

  My father looked around at his fellow exiles. ‘Well, let’s take a look at the damn thing,’ he called out. ‘Pierre, if you could supervise swapping the other Hypersphere out for this one?’

  Pierre nodded. Herr Frank again closed the cage, then ordered his men to wheel the artefact over to the platform. Up above, several guards watched from a walkway that ran around all four walls of the laboratory, just below the ceiling.

  ‘You understand what this means?’ Borodin said to my father. ‘You’ll be able to finish your work here sooner than expected. I think a week would be enough to carry out the necessary calibrations: after that, I expect to supervise the first test transfers.’ He looked around the rest of the exiles. ‘You’ll have earned your freedom. All of you.’

  ‘A week? I can’t make any such guarantees,’ said Josef. ‘All we’ve ever had to work with before was a damaged artefact. We’ve got no idea how this one might respond. For all we know, it’s structured completely differently.’

  ‘You’ve had the best part of a decade to familiarize yourself with the technology,’ Herr Frank berated him. ‘After all that time, I damn well think you’d know how to deal with one that works!’

  My father stared resolutely back. ‘We’ve had conversations like this before,’ he said, ‘and I haven’t been wrong yet.’

  Herr Frank met his gaze, his mouth set in a thin line.

  ‘Two weeks, then,’ said Borodin. ‘And no longer. You’ll be seeing a lot of me, Gospodin Orlov, until it’s operational.’

  Borodin didn’t wait for any further comment, turning and stalking back towards the elevator. Herr Frank stepped towards Pierre, watching as the old Hypersphere was replaced with the new.

  The rest of the exiles gathered around me then, asking me how I was and what I had seen during my brief sojourn in the outside world – but word must have got around already, because none of them mentioned Tomas. Joanne Bertillon, tiny and frail and wrinkled, took hold of me by the arms and told me how glad she was to see me alive and well.

  Finally my father managed to draw me away. ‘Help Pierre get the sensor arrays up and running,’ he said to a man named Vanya. ‘And then we can all take a good look at just what we have, eh? Right now, though, Katya and I have some catching up to do.’

  As he said this, he deliberately glanced up at one of the many security cameras dotted around the laboratory, then back at me.

  I nodded. ‘We do,’ I said. ‘A lot of catching up.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, leading me across the laboratory. ‘Let’s take a walk in the gardens.’

  EIGHTEEN

  I followed him down a narrow corridor, then out into the open. A few metres away stood a low wall, just visible in the moonlight, beyond which a cliff dropped several hundred metres to the forest below. We were standing on a wide ledge protruding from the side of the mountain and accessible only through the laboratory.

  Most of this ledge was taken up by a broad strip of cultivated land, filled with crops grown by the exiles to supplement our meagre rations. Carrots and small stunted apple trees grew in narrow, rectangular allotments, along with cabbages and turnips. More exotic-looking plants grew beneath plastic sheets stretched tight over wire and wood frames.

  ‘Look,’ said my father. ‘Sevigny’s finally managed to get his coffee beans growing.’ He took an edge of plastic sheeting that had blown loose and re-secured it as I followed behind.

  ‘It feels strange to be back here,’ I said. ‘I never thought . . .’

  He nodded surreptitiously at another camera, mounted above the door behind us, and angled in such a way that nearly the whole of the gardens could be captured in its lens. He kept his eyes on me as he reached inside a pocket and took out a tiny, crude-looking device which he kept cradled in the palm of one hand. I watched as he thumbed the device before putting it away again.

  I took a quick glance at the camera. ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘Twenty minutes. Maybe a little more. They still haven’t tracked down every last one of our network exploits, but we shouldn’t risk talking much longer than that or they might notice that one of their cameras keeps running the same footage over and over again.’

  ‘Borodin warned me I would be under particular surveillance until the project is completed,’ I said. ‘We need to assume they’re watching my every move.’

  He leaned towards me. ‘What went wrong, Katya? Pierre and I planned everything so carefully, I had hoped . . .’

  ‘We badly underestimated Herr Frank,’ I said. ‘It only took him a few days to track us down. I was afraid they might have found out that you helped us.’

  Josef grinned ruefully. ‘Well, they couldn’t find or prove anything. In some ways, we did our job almost too well.’ He reached out and touched my hand. ‘Now tell me – where did they take you to all this time? And what do you have to do with that other Hypersphere, and that man Borodin?’

  I explained as briefly as I could about the Authority, and how Borodin had planned to steal the Hypersphere from them. We made our way past rows of broccoli, their broad leaves touched with frost.

  ‘I see,’ he said at last, looking grim. ‘And what happened to Tomas, exactly?’

  ‘He . . .’ I fought to find the words. ‘That man Borodin shot him right before me.’

  He sighed heavily. ‘And what is this man Borodin’s background, exactly? What do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s close to the Tsar, or so I’ve managed to gather. He’s well-connected within the state security services – and high up, I suspect, given the way he orders Herr Frank around.’

  ‘Really?’

  I nodded. ‘Trust me when I say Borodin’s the one in charge, not Herr Frank. But they’re both terrified of Prince Dmitri. They’re convinced that if the Tsar dies, Dmitri will have both their heads the moment he takes the throne.’

  Josef chuckled and looked at me with respect. ‘How did you find all this out?’

  ‘I overheard them arguing. They’re on their own, Papa – just the two of them. But that’s not all.’ I explained about the memory beads.

  ‘And you still have these beads?’

  I pulled my sleeve around my fingers and gingerly lifted the single bead I still had from my pocket. ‘This is the only one I was able to save. Hold it in your open palm for just a few seconds.’

  He sat on a wooden bench at the end of a row of crops while I squatted down next to him, peering towards the camera as I dropped the bead into his hand. He sat quite still for several seconds, then
shook himself, letting out a gasp.

  ‘This is . . . incredible,’ he exclaimed.

  I nodded. ‘It feels like you’re actually there, seeing through someone else’s eyes, doesn’t it?’

  He nodded, looking dazed. I took the bead back from him in a wad of tissue. ‘There were a lot more of these back where I came from – and believe me when I say they change everything. The memories belong to the Syllogikos scientist who first discovered the Hyperspheres. But he also discovered that even that culture didn’t create them: they come from somewhere in the Deeps.’

  He blinked. ‘But that’s inconceivable! No life can exist in such alternates – the differing physical constants would make it impossible.’

  ‘Not impossible,’ I said. ‘Nobody really knows that life couldn’t find some way to evolve, even in universes with radically different laws of physics – maybe even intelligent life.’

  ‘And you’re saying that something living in the Deeps actually created the Hyperspheres? You saw this, in these beads?’

  I nodded, quickly summarizing the rest of Lars Ulven’s discoveries.

  Josef’s jaw dropped open. ‘You can’t be serious. Are you saying all this really happened?’

  ‘Lars Ulven discovered the truth too late to save his own people, but it’s not too late for us: the Hypersphere is safe so long as it’s dormant, but once it’s been activated and used, the invaders will know where it is – and come looking for it.’

  He squinted at me. ‘And you’re absolutely certain of all this?’

  I nodded. ‘I swear, as crazy as it sounds, it’s all there in the other beads. If the Tsar takes that thing back to the Empire and uses it, that’s it. It’s the end of everything.’

  Josef stood, looking appalled. ‘And what about Borodin – did he use these beads? Or Herr Frank?’

  ‘I tried to get Borodin to use them, but he would only use the first two I found, not all the others. He wouldn’t even listen when I tried to tell him what they showed.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s madness. Why would he do such a thing?’