I licked my lips. ‘But if I ask you to take me back to the Forward Base and anything happens to those other people, it’d be my fault.’

‘And if I take you down there and anything happened to you . . .’

‘Then you’d know it was my decision to go,’ I said firmly. ‘We go down there.’

I couldn’t read her expression as she studied me. ‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘I know I’m asking a lot.’

I shook my head. ‘Just promise me this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time.’

She chuckled and shook her head. ‘It really, really doesn’t. I swear.’

‘In return,’ I said, ‘maybe you can tell me some things.’

‘Sure,’ she said guardedly. ‘Mind if I drive while we talk?’

I nodded, and strapped myself into the passenger seat as Nadia swung back around and reached for the controls. I hoped to hell I wasn’t about to get myself killed, barely a month after my miraculous rescue, but by the time that thought crossed my mind we were already rolling across the barren landscape at speed, and it was much too late to change my mind.

‘Every time I ask Schultner who or what the Authority actually are, he just blanks me,’ I said after a minute. Ernest Schultner gave me daily one-on-one briefings on everything I needed to know to survive as a Pathfinder. ‘And, yes, I do remember you warning me that’s what they’d do. But you or Yuichi or some of the others I’ve met so far must have figured out at least some things.’

‘Nope.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry to disappoint you. The Authority come from some other alternate that figured out how to travel between parallel universes, and they’ve ultimately got some kind of goal. But they’re anything but willing to tell us what it is.’

‘What about the stuff we’re supposed to retrieve?’ I asked. ‘Can you work anything out from all of that?’

‘Christ, no. There are machines, computers and a bunch of stuff that I can’t make head or tail of. Sometimes we’re sent to retrieve data – computer disks, hard drives, that kind of thing.’

‘And always,’ I noted, ‘from parallels that underwent an extinction event. Have you ever been somewhere that wasn’t like that? That hasn’t been blown to smithereens, or had its atmosphere sucked away, or whatever?’

‘Nope,’ she replied.

‘So none of you really knows anything?’

She chuckled, then reached to one side, patting my thigh with one hand. ‘It’s good to have you back, Jerry.’

I frowned. ‘“Back”?’

She blinked rapidly, then shook her head, smiling brightly. ‘Jesus, listen to me. I’ve got cobwebs in the brain. Good to have you here, I meant.’