Free Extinction Game by Gary Gibson Page A

anything’s worth a try. I can see you too, through on the other side. You’re going to have to reverse
your EV first, so you can pull once the line’s attached.’
    The ground shook, and I glanced at the rear-view screen in time to see a building collapse into the spreading pool of fire behind us.
    Nadia tapped a button next to the microphone and leaned back.
    ‘Do we have enough time?’ I asked. ‘That lava’s not moving that fast, but it’ll still catch up with us before long.’
    ‘Well,’ said Nadia, ‘it’s either this or we all try and walk out of here.’
    Nadia reversed the EV until it was facing back the way it had come – and towards the approaching lava flow. The rear end, and the winch mounted there, she moved as close
to the collapsed rubble and girders as she could.
    There are, I think fewer sights more terrifying than what I saw, looking through that windscreen at the molten rock slowly oozing towards me. A thick dark crust was constantly forming on top of
the flow before breaking open, as hotter rock pushed its way out. The first vault was wide enough to contain a lot of lava. But, even considering its slow accumulation, I doubted we had more than
maybe ten or fifteen minutes before it swallowed our EV.
    In the meantime, the three from the other EV made their way through the connecting corridor to join us, moving ponderously in their pressure suits, and helped Nadia unspool the cable from our
rear-mounted winch. I followed them as they carried it back to their vehicle, and I gazed up at the concrete cap built into the roof of the connecting corridor.
    Above that cap, made of high-density concrete and steel girders, was a vertical shaft, now filled with a couple of thousand tons of rubble and sand. It was a defensive measure, or so I had
learned from flicking through Schultner’s mission-briefing pack. The Icelanders had been aware of the threat of invasion by those less prepared for survival on a hostile Earth and, like the
pharaohs of old, they’d filled their subterranean kingdom with booby traps. Explosive bolts in the concrete cap could blow it apart, and the steel girders that helped hold all that rock and
sand were designed to give way once the bolts blew. In this way a vault could be sealed off, either keeping invaders outside, or trapping them on the inside. I saw two sets of ladders bolted to the
wall on either side of the corridor, each leading up to one side of the cap. What a shame their front door hadn’t been strong enough to withstand a tactical nuke.
    The ground began to shake again. But instead of fading, the shaking grew stronger.
    I helped attach the cable from our EV to the rear axle of the ditched vehicle. The cable was slightly bent where it went around and between fallen girders. The stricken EV’s rear was
angled upwards, its wheels hanging uselessly above the ground. The front chassis was invisible where it had slid into a huge crack in the vault’s floor.
    ‘Jerry!’
    It was Nadia’s voice, but I couldn’t figure out which one of the suited figures around me was her. Then one of them came towards me and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘I need you
to drive forward while I operate the winch,’ said Nadia. ‘Think you can do it?’
    I nodded inside my helmet, beads of sweat forming on my head at the thought of what I was going to have to do. I followed her back through to the first vault regardless, and was deeply alarmed
to see the lava was now just metres away from the front of our own EV. The heat at such close proximity was astonishing.
    Nadia headed for the winch, while I got back inside the vehicle. I didn’t bother taking my helmet off, or cycling through the vehicle’s tiny airlock. There wasn’t the time.
Instead I used an emergency override to evacuate all the air from inside in a few seconds, then climbed on board. I’d already been taught how to drive an EV, and I had the engine up and
running in seconds.
    ‘Okay,’ said Nadia over