Extinction Game by Gary Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

outskirts of Istanbul – although not, of course,
my
Istanbul.
    To step outside, I was told, was to die. We were on an Earth that had suffered what Yuichi called a ‘slow apocalypse’. It seemed that decades before, some as-yet-unidentified
environmental catastrophe caused the birth rate amongst higher mammalian species first to dwindle, then drop to zero, guaranteeing extinction. Humanity soon suffered the same fate. Then it got
worse: everyone under the age of thirty started to die, until the only remaining witnesses to this particular tragedy were a few doddering geriatrics.
    The next world proved to be coated in ice to a depth of some miles. After that, we travelled to yet another, with a swollen sun that blazed down on desiccated ruins and oceans reduced to dusty,
lifeless bowls.
    When finally we returned to the hangar and the island on which it stood, it appeared infinitely more welcoming than it had that same morning.
    ‘And this place?’ I asked, following Yuichi and Nadia back out through the hangar doors. The sun had crossed the sky, and now dipped towards the ocean. ‘Where does this island
fit into your categories?’
    ‘This alternate is a TEA,’ said Yuichi. ‘Category 1.’
    ‘That doesn’t tell me anything,’ I said, not quite able to hide my exasperation.
    ‘It means that exactly what happened here is still a mystery. We don’t know where the people went, or why, or how. There are no corpses, nothing but a few smoking holes in the ground
in the middle of nowhere where somebody dropped nukes. But there’s nothing remotely communicable in the air or the water or the food chain, or anywhere else we can identify. Whatever did for
the people here is, we hope, long gone. Besides, we’ve been here a good couple of years, and nothing’s happened to
us
.’
    ‘There must be records here somewhere on this alternate,’ I said. ‘Something that would make sense of where all the people went.
Somebody
must have written something,
left some kind of clue.’
    ‘Sure. Maybe they did, and we just haven’t found it yet. But from what we can tell, it happened fast, Jerry – real fast.’
    I looked at Nadia. ‘You said this is Easter Island. That’s the one with all the statues?’
    Nadia nodded. ‘They’re called
moai
,’ she said. I knew the island’s original inhabitants had left monolithic carved stone figures of revered ancestors scattered
all across their land. ‘It’s worth taking a drive out to see them.’
    But why are we here, I wondered, on this remote island of all places? A thousand more questions crowded my lips, but I felt sure that for every one of them that might be answered, a hundred more
were waiting to be born.
    Even so, there was one in particular that overrode all the rest.
    ‘Why me?’ I asked. The wind blew across the island’s slopes, singing through the wire fence surrounding the compound. ‘Why go to all the effort of finding me and bringing
me here? You told Tony I was the “new Pathfinder”. What the hell does that mean?’
    ‘The Pathfinders are advance scouts,’ Yuichi explained. ‘We’re Pathfinders – people like you, me and Nadia. We’re the first people to go in and explore new
alternates and assess their dangers on behalf of the Authority. When we’re not carrying out research and reconnaissance, we search for technology and data, most often from alternates more
advanced than the Authority’s own.’
    ‘What if there isn’t a transfer stage on the other side?’ I asked.
    ‘Depends,’ said Yuichi. ‘We either take a portable stage through and set that up as soon as we arrive, or we can bring someone back at a prearranged time so long as they make
sure they’re on the exact same spot where they arrived. That last one’s a little tricky, though, so we prefer not to do it too often.’
    ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And “people like us” – what did you mean by that?’
    ‘If there’s one overriding thing we all have in common,’