by Gary Gibson
I tried to open it, but it was stuck.
‘Jesus Christ!’ I screamed. ‘I’m stuck in here! Nadia, get me out!’
‘I’m trying!’ she yelled back. ‘Goddam son of a bitch . . .’
The airlock opened suddenly, and I fell out and on the ground. I looked around and saw a wall of lava come rolling towards me, barely metres away.
A pair of gloved hands grabbed hold of me and I stumbled to my feet. ‘Run, you idiot!’ she screamed. ‘Just fucking run!’
I ran. We both did, regardless of how hard it was in the suits we wore. I glanced back in time to see the EV sinking into the lava, surrounded by great gouts of flame that rose towards the vault ceiling. When I heard – no, felt – the ground shudder beneath my feet with extraordinary violence, I at first thought something on board the EV had exploded.
Except that didn’t make sense, I realized, as we ran towards the forest of girders between us and the next vault. There was nothing inside the EV that could possibly have triggered a ground shock of that nature.
I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder a second time as we made our way through the maze of girders blocking the tunnel. One entire wall of the first vault had come crumbling down, a veritable ocean of white-hot magma spilling through the rent and swamping almost the entire vault in seconds.
‘Get on board!’ I heard Rozalia yell. ‘Nadia, are you there, sweetheart?’
The second EV was out of its hole, and waiting ready to carry us away. The others had had the same thought, depressurizing the interior of their EV so they didn’t need to waste too much time cycling everyone through one at a time. Gloved hands reached down and hauled us up and inside as the airlock door swung open, and by the time I was fully inside the vehicle it was already moving at a fair clip.
‘What just happened back there?’ a voice asked from up front. I looked over at the driver, a thin, dark-skinned woman, her helmet propped up on the dashboard before her, and recognized her voice as Rozalia’s. ‘That’s the biggest tremor yet.’
‘Just drive,’ gasped Nadia. ‘As fast as you can, and don’t stop.’
I heard a hiss as the vehicle repressurized, the sound growing louder at first before quickly fading away. I pulled my helmet off, and the rest followed suit. The two Authority scientists, a man and woman, sat close together on the floor of the EV, clearly frightened out of their wits.
The EV bounced over the uneven floor of the vault with such force that I had to steady myself against one side. Nadia had made her way up front to take a seat next to Rozalia, who stared fixedly ahead as she steered. Nadia murmured something to her that I couldn’t make out, then reached over to touch the other woman’s hair in a way that implied a great deal of intimacy.
I got a look at the rear-view monitor on the dashboard and saw a veritable ocean of white-hot lava, pouring through the connecting tunnel and into the second vault behind us.
This time, the lava was moving much, much faster.
‘If you’re going to stay here,’ said Rozalia, ‘sit the hell down.’
I sat down against the wall just behind Nadia’s seat. I could hear someone hyperventilating, letting out little panicked gasps. It took a moment to realize it was me.
Rozalia drove like a demon, but when I took another quick look at the rear-view monitor, I was far from sure we were going to escape alive. Not only was lava still spewing through from the first vault in a seemingly unending tide, but the vault around us was showing every sign of collapsing. I saw chunks of rock and dust come tumbling downwards from the roof.
We passed through a mercifully unblocked connecting tunnel into a third vault. The headlights picked out signs in Icelandic. A fountain of dust erupted somewhere to our right, signalling, I assumed, the collapse of some building or other.
‘Straight ahead,’ said Nadia. Her fingers stroked Rozalia’s cheek. ‘We’re nearly there.’
‘I can see it,’ Rozalia muttered through gritted teeth. ‘Almost there.’
I struggled upright again, so I could see what was happening. Rozalia had aimed for the mouth of another tunnel, wider and taller than the ones connecting the vaults together. We reached it after a few more minutes of driving, during which the shaking had still not shown any signs of abating. As we got closer I saw there was a slope, leading upwards, and I felt almost giddy with joy. We passed beneath an archway, the EV bouncing hard as it hit a sudden, sharp incline.
The incline got steeper, and I started to wonder if the tunnel would never end. Then I caught sight of a circle of stars directly ahead, and growing nearer by the second. Dust and debris fell all around us, small boulders and rocks falling from the rough-hewn ceiling and rolling down the steep incline towards us. Rozalia swerved around them with remarkable expertise. Then the circle of stars expanded, and we were back out on the surface, just a few miles from where I had first entered the Icelandic Retreat with Nadia.
I stared at the landscape around us, which had become completely transformed in just a few hours. In the distance, Hekla spewed dust and flames high into the airless sky, while rivers of fire, stark against the unending black night, spread all around us.
‘Tell me again it won’t be like this every time,’ I said, gripping the back of the passenger seat.
‘Oh, honey,’ said Rozalia with a savage grin. ‘Don’t listen to her. That was just for starters.’
Thirty minutes later, we were back in the Reykjavik Forward Base for the first time since that morning. The base consisted of a single, large pressurized dome with a drive-in airlock garage, located in the centre of what had once been a park on the outskirts of Reykjavik.
Most of the interior of the dome was taken up by a single transfer stage. The rest of the place had already been stripped of all its equipment and supplies. By the time the five of us emerged from the garage, there were a few soldiers left, hurriedly wheeling the last remaining crates of equipment onto the stage. The rest of the staff had all gone.
‘You’re alive?’ one of the soldiers exclaimed in shock.
‘Don’t look so surprised,’ said Nadia, pulling off her helmet. ‘What’s happening? Has everyone else transferred back across?’
The soldier nodded. ‘They have. We’re the last to go. I . . . ought to give you a heads up. The Commander’s pretty pissed at you people.’
‘Barnes?’ asked Nadia, and the man nodded. ‘Why?’
‘You disobeyed his orders,’ the soldier replied.
‘Who gives a shit?’ Nadia barked. ‘We saved a whole EV full of people, didn’t we?’
Rozalia came up beside Nadia and took the woman’s hand in her own. ‘Now’s not the time, Nads,’ she said softly.
Nadia looked at her uncertainly.
A fresh tremor rolled under our feet, and I heard a bang from somewhere on the far side of the dome as something rolled off a shelf.
‘We’d better get moving,’ said the other of the two soldiers. ‘Get up on the stage.’
We all hurried up the ramp and onto the stage. One of them remained behind just long enough to program the control rig before hurriedly scurrying back up to join us. When the air twisted around us and I felt an increasingly familiar momentary sense of weightlessness, I nearly wept.
FIVE
Back on the island, we found ourselves surrounded by chaos.
There were men – wearing civilian clothes, technician’s jumpsuits and military fatigues – moving, sorting, cataloguing and loading what looked like hundreds of crates of every size and shape onto trucks parked haphazardly just outside the hangar doors. There was barely any room for myself and the others to squeeze past them all as we climbed back down from the transfer stage. We were all still wearing our spacesuits, helmets clutched in gloved hands.
Rozalia took Nadia and me by the arms and shouted over the din something I couldn’t quite make out. The other two who had been with Rozalia, along with the two soldiers from the Forward Base, had disappeared into the throng. I had never even caught the names of the
two scientists.
‘You!’ a voice shouted, loud enough to carry over even the tremendous noise. ‘Stay right where you are!’
I looked around until I saw a red-faced man in uniform come storming towards us. He had a tag on his chest that read BARNES.
Here comes trouble, I thought, and steeled myself.
Barnes made straight for Nadia. ‘You had a direct order to come back to base. What the hell were you—’
‘I’m the Pathfinders’ elected head,’ Nadia interrupted him. ‘Did you seriously think I was going to just abandon one of my own people down there? And I didn’t just get her out – I got two of your people out as well.’
Barnes turned to stare at me, and in that moment I smelled his breath and knew he was drunk. He whipped back round to stare at Nadia, pointing his finger at her chest. ‘Don’t bullshit me,’ he snarled. ‘It was so you could rescue your girlfriend, wasn’t it?’
Nadia stared back at him, having overcome her initial shock. ‘I disobeyed your order,’ she said, ‘because you’re an asshole and everyone knows it.’
‘Where I come from,’ said Barnes, ‘we have laws about people like you. Do you hear—’
He never got to finish the sentence because Nadia had hauled back and landed a punch right on Barnes’ nose. He stumbled backwards, one hand covering his nose and with a perplexed look on his face.
That was when I began to be really afraid of what kind of people the Authority might be. Most of the Authority types I had so far encountered, such as Ernest Schultner, were professional but distant. I felt that Barnes’ stumbling, drunken behaviour had ripped the veneer away from that quietly professional surface, revealing something altogether more unpleasant.
Nobody, I noticed, made a move to help Barnes or to apprehend Nadia, even though the incident had been far from unnoticed.
Rozalia stepped up beside Nadia and grabbed her by the shoulder, quickly guiding her out through the open hangar doors. Nadia was still trembling with fury, but she let the other woman pull her along regardless.
I looked around, and then down at Barnes, who was struggling to stand. He fixed me with a look of psychotic anger, and I decided not to stick around. Besides, there were some things I really, really wanted to ask Nadia and Rozalia.
When I stepped out into the sunlight, it occurred to me there was nothing so beautiful as blue skies and clouds. The grass beneath my feet seemed like some kind of miracle after the hellish vistas I had just returned from. I looked around until I saw Nadia leaning against the outside wall of the hangar with a contrite look on her face while Rozalia lectured her.
‘You’re in a heap of trouble, you know that?’ I heard Rozalia say as I approached. ‘I mean, did you even think before you punched that son of a bitch?’
‘I don’t give a shit,’ said Nadia tonelessly, as she stepped out of her spacesuit. Rozalia’s already lay discarded to one side on the bright green grass. ‘But did you ever doubt I’d come looking for you?’
Rozalia looked as if she was about to respond sharply, but then her features softened and she shook her head. ‘Not for one moment, baby. Not for one single second.’
I cleared my throat and they looked around. ‘I, uh, don’t mean to interrupt . . .’
Rozalia grinned broadly and waved at me to come closer. Now that I wasn’t either running for my life or trying to escape being burned or frozen alive, I had an opportunity to study her a little more closely. She had close-cropped hair with a touch of grey at the temples, and I could see a long, dimpled scar on one cheek. She also, I noted, walked with a very slight limp.
To my surprise, she pulled me into a hug. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for your help back there. Nadia’s had a lot of good things to say about you, Jerry.’ She leaned back again and extended a hand in a gesture of mock formality. ‘And while we’re at it, I’m Rozalia Ludke. Pleased to meet you.’
‘You too,’ I said, a little dazed. ‘Exactly how much trouble are we in now?’
‘A lot,’ said Nadia, gloomily, then tipped her head forward.
‘What the hell kind of people are running things around here?’ I demanded. ‘That man was stinking drunk. I wouldn’t put him in charge of a fucking merry-go-round.’
‘Believe me,’ said Rozalia, ‘he’s not the worst I’ve encountered.’
I shook my head and began to climb out of my own suit. ‘But doesn’t it make you angry that you were sent all that way down there to retrieve data left by someone trying to build a transfer stage? Why, when the Authority already have the technology? It doesn’t make any sense!’
‘Jerry.’ Rozalia said my name with a degree of firmness that shut me up. ‘There isn’t one of us that hasn’t asked the same kind of question, time and time again, and none of us got any closer to an answer. If the Authority don’t want to share information with us, there’s not much we can do.’
I shook my head, feeling helpless. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Of course it isn’t. Seeing everything you’ve ever known and loved die and fall apart isn’t fair either. Or the fact that we survived while billions of others went to undeserved graves – and I’m betting you spent a lot of time wondering why it was you that got to live, when there were surely so many more deserving of life. But there’s not a damn thing you can do to change it, same as any of us.’
‘But if we could find out . . .’ I dropped my unzipped suit next to Nadia and Rozalia’s.
‘There isn’t,’ she said, even more firmly. ‘Don’t do anything that’d give the Authority an excuse to put you the hell right back where you came from.’
‘Sure,’ I said, and looked back at the hangar entrance. I had thought soldiers might come storming out and arrest Nadia, but all I could see was the same hustle and bustle as when we had arrived. Perhaps Barnes was as ineffectual as he was drunk.
‘About the transfer stages,’ I said. ‘Did any of you ever try to . . . ?’
‘To what?’ said Rozalia. ‘Sneak in during the middle of the night and light off for some homely little alternate where they’ll never find you?’
I reddened with embarrassment. ‘That wasn’t exactly what I was going to say.’
Rozalia gave me a knowing look. ‘Wasn’t it?’
‘All right, fine,’ I said, nettled. ‘What’s stopping you?’
‘Well,’ said Rozalia, ‘disregarding the fact all the stages are guarded, you need to punch the right coordinates into the control rig, and the Authority keep those coordinates very much to themselves.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but what if you punched a random set of coordinates into the rig? Surely it would take you somewhere?’
‘Don’t ever do that,’ Nadia warned.
‘Why not?’
‘Because the overwhelming probability is that you’d end up with a null sequence.’
‘A what?’
‘By its nature, the multiverse is full of parallel universes where the Earth never formed out of the cosmic dust, or where the universe itself evolved to have different laws of physics in its first moments of existence. Or maybe if you program a null sequence, you just wind up in some void between realities. The main thing is, the chances of winding up anywhere remotely hospitable to human life are infinitesimally small.’
‘But maybe that’s just what the Authority tell you. Maybe . . .’
‘Hey.’ Nadia waved a hand towards the hangar entrance. ‘You want to test it out, be my guest. But nobody’s volunteered yet.’
About then, I could sense the adrenalin start to fade, and it was obvious the other two were feeling the same way. Since it didn’t look as if there were going to be any immediate repercussions for Nadia, the three of us piled into a jeep outside the barracks and drove back into town. I made my way inside my allotted home and fell asleep within seconds of putting my head down on the bed, still fully dressed. I dreamed of finding myself lost on frozen tundra and struggling to breathe as smoke choked my lungs.
I woke at dawn, when two men wearing neatly pre
ssed dark suits broke into my bedroom and hauled me into the back of a jeep parked outside on the street. Nadia was already in the back of the jeep, looking tired and puffy eyed, and from the way she was leaning forward in her seat, I guessed she was wearing handcuffs. I was still trying to blink away the fatigue when they twisted my own arms behind my back and slapped the cuffs on before pushing me in next to her.
Before long, the jeep was bumping along the cracked and weed-infested road back to the base compound on the edge of town. Our route took us past the island’s single, disused airstrip, and I saw the conning tower up ahead, the great dark bulk of the Rano Kau headland in the other direction.
‘Nadia . . .’
She hadn’t even looked at me since I had been pushed in next to her. ‘Don’t say it,’ she muttered tonelessly under her breath. ‘Don’t say “I told you so” or, I swear, I’ll knock your goddam lights out.’
‘I just want to know what’s going on,’ I replied sotto voce. ‘What about Rozalia? Have they . . . ?’
She finally wrenched her eyes around to look at me, and I saw she had been crying. ‘Yeah, they got her and took her away on her own in another jeep.’
‘But who are these guys?’ I whispered. ‘They don’t look like soldiers . . .’
‘They’re not soldiers,’ she whispered back. ‘They’re Patriot agents.’
‘What the hell is a—’
One of the two men in front turned to stare at us. I closed my mouth again, and Nadia gave me a tiny shake of the head: Not now.
I gave up talking and fixed my gaze ahead. To my surprise, rather than heading straight on towards the base, our driver made a left and soon pulled up before a single-storey brick-and-wood building that looked like some kind of hunting lodge. It wasn’t until I saw the multilingual sign outside that I realized it was, in fact, the island’s former police station.
It didn’t look like anything connected with law enforcement, at least from the outside. Overgrown grass and weeds partly hid the entrance, while overhanging palm trees swayed in the breeze. There was a second jeep parked outside, which I guessed must have been used to bring Rozalia.